Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  In December 1974, when The Godfather, Part II was released, Pauline changed her mind about De Niro. The second Godfather film, once again directed masterfully by Francis Ford Coppola, was both a prequel and a sequel, picking up the story of Vito Corleone from his Sicilian childhood, and jumping ahead in time to the 1950s, when the new don, the cold-blooded Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), is establishing the family’s base of operations in Nevada. The Godfather, Part II was that rarest of all sequels: Unfolding at three hours and twenty minutes, it had much greater depth and breadth than the first film. Pauline found that she came close to not having “the emotional resources to deal with the experience of this film. Twice, I almost cried out at acts of violence that De Niro’s Vito committed. I didn’t look away from the images, as I sometimes do at routine action pictures. I wanted to see the worst; there is a powerful need to see it. You need these moments as you need the terrible climaxes in a Tolstoy novel. A great novelist does not spare our feelings (as the historical romancer does); he intensifies them, and so does Coppola.” She admitted that she found The Godfather, Part II so overwhelming that “about midway, I began to feel that the film was expanding in my head like a soft bullet.” Her review was a fine example of something she always sought to do—let the reader in on her thought processes. She thought that Michael’s closed-off self—his inability to have a single moment of happiness—came through brilliantly in Al Pacino’s performance. “Is it our imagination, or is Michael’s face starting to rot?” Pauline wondered of the film’s early scenes. She thought that De Niro, as young Vito, had “the physical audacity, the grace, and the instinct to become a great actor—perhaps as great as Brando.” Most of all, she expressed great admiration for Coppola, whose approach she found “openhanded: he doesn’t force the situations. He puts the material up there, and we read the screen for ourselves.” She found that “the sensibility at work in this film is that of a major artist. We’re not used to it: how many screen artists get the chance to work in the epic form, and who has been able to seize the power to compose a modern American epic? And who else, when he got the chance and the power, would have proceeded with the absolute conviction that he’d make the film the way it should be made? In movies, that’s the inner voice of the authentic hero.” It was one of her most deeply felt pieces of the period, and it elicited a note of praise from Penelope Gilliatt, who called it “a magnificent piece.”

  It was Francis Ford Coppola’s year: He had released another, almost equally remarkable film a few months earlier—The Conversation, a harrowingly intimate story of a professional electronics surveillance expert whose life’s work has created a sick obsession with his own privacy. With its minimal dialogue and music, The Conversation had much in common with Blow-Up, but it was a far more vital and less pretentious film. Because it was released in the summer of 1974, Pauline missed reviewing it for The New Yorker, but she did manage to get comments on it into a special essay she wrote for the magazine in August, “On the Future of Movies.”

  That The Conversation had not done well in general release, she wrote, was classic proof of the corruption of the studio heads, who couldn’t accept that Coppola was “in a position (after directing The Godfather) to do what he wanted to do; they’re hurt that he flouts their authority, working out of San Francisco instead of Los Angeles. And they don’t really have any respect for The Conversation, because it’s an idea film.” Paramount, she claimed “didn’t plan on The Conversation being a success, and nothing now is going to make them help it become one.” Pauline identified what she saw as a steadily encroaching trend: Young audiences were no longer quite so willing to take a chance on an unusual, quiet, complicated picture as they might have been a few years ago. She was right that the atmosphere was changing—possibly because the spirit of organized protest had seriously faded and the disillusionment in the wake of Watergate was having a numbing effect on so much of American social and cultural life. It was becoming apparent that “audiences like movies that do all the work for them.... They don’t mind being banged over the head—the louder the better.” While she didn’t state it explicitly, “On the Future of Movies” clearly conveyed her concern that the Altmans and Scorseses and Coppolas were going to face difficulties in the years to come. Cutesy comedies like The Sting and slam-bang thrillers like The Exorcist were what audiences seemed to crave, and they were benefiting from all of the studios’ backing, while smaller films like Thieves Like Us and The Conversation vanished. She overstated her case, however, when she claimed, “The movie companies used to give all their pictures a chance, but now they’ll put two or three million, or even five, into selling something they consider surefire, and a token—a pittance—into the others.” Although blockbuster marketing was steadily on the rise, and the audience numbers were giving it validation, she neglected to mention that old Hollywood had frequently trashed some of its finest work by not releasing it properly—Fred Zinnemann’s The Member of the Wedding, Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter, and Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil being but three examples from the 1950s.

  Near the end of “On the Future of Movies,” she made another pitch for the artist in Hollywood:

  Perhaps no work of art is possible without belief in the audience—the kind of belief that has nothing to do with facts and figures about what people actually buy or enjoy but comes out of the individual artist’s absolute conviction that only the best he can do is fit to be offered to others.... An artist’s sense of honor is founded on the honor due others. Honor in the arts—and in show business, too—is giving of one’s utmost, even if the audience does not appear to know the difference, even if the audience shows every sign of preferring something easy, cheap, and synthetic. The audience one must believe in is the great audience: the audience one was part of as a child, when one first began to respond to great work—the audience one is still part of.

  It was a compelling argument, but Fred Goldberg, vice president of United Artists, wrote Pauline a sharp letter objecting to her claim that Paramount hadn’t properly supported The Conversation. Goldberg claimed that the studio had spent $95,000 on advertising for the film’s pre-opening and first week, including two full-page ads in The New York Times, one of them quoting the film’s many laudatory reviews. Goldberg pointed out that $95,000 was an impressive budget for a theater containing 589 seats. The effort had paid off for one week, because the New York gross was excellent—$30,000—but despite big ads throughout the New York run, the gross began to dip quickly. Goldberg added that if Pauline thought that after that kind of backing, Paramount still did not want The Conversation to be a success, it was a sign that she was playing to her prejudices and didn’t “really care about the business end of motion pictures.” He accused her of underestimating the real power of selling a film—word of mouth in the audience—which no one could ever predict. In closing, he added that he still considered her “a hell of a writer.”

  In October 1974, Pauline wrote a review of Karel Reisz’s The Gambler, the story of a New York City English professor (James Caan) with a gambling addiction. She judged it as “strikingly well-edited and . . . dramatically supercharged and compelling.” But it was one of Pauline’s least favorite kinds of picture, one that was too worked out and schematic. Speaking, as she loved to do, directly to the audience, she wrote that it was “complete without us, and there’s nothing for us to do except receive it, feel wiped out, and genuflect.”

  The screenplay for The Gambler was written by the young James Toback, who was not at all pleased when he read Pauline’s review. She felt that the movie tried to tell the audience that “the secret of gambling is that gamblers are self-destructive people who want to lose.” She thought compulsive gambling had a much simpler source: “The poor bastard who buys a two-dollar ticket he can’t afford is hoping to change his life with the two dollars. How else can he change it?”

  Not long afterward Toback met Pauline, who was attending a screening in New York with Gina, and quickly confronted her. “I al
ways enjoy reading you,” Toback said, “so I was really disturbed to find that the one critic I enjoy reading totally missed the boat on my movie. I’m not talking about whether you liked it or didn’t—you just got it wrong. You were so blind with your own personal fury that you didn’t actually get what’s right on the screen for someone who’s listening to hear.” Pauline, curious, wanted him to explain. Toback continued, “The whole point in the review was that the movie says gamblers gamble to lose. And that is an idiotic statement. The opposite is in the movie.”

  As they were getting into the elevator, Pauline suggested that they go out to dinner, so that Toback could explicate further on what he felt she had missed. Over a lengthy meal at O’Neal’s he and Pauline talked into the night, while Gina remained silent. “For a while I just felt awkward and tried to direct some of my comments toward her,” he recalled, “but I saw after a while that this was probably not unusual.”

  There was another point in Pauline’s review of The Gambler that stung Toback. She had commented that the picture featured “a lot of characters, but there is really only one, and he is the author’s surrogate, the brilliant young Jewish prince, professor of literature to ghetto blacks, potential great novelist, and gambler.” After their dinner, he and Pauline became fast friends, and over time, he thought he understood the source of her comment about his being a Jewish prince. Toback had in fact come from a well-to-do New York family, while Pauline had come from working-class stock. “She never liked to talk about being Jewish,” Toback observed. “It was never anything she really identified with. At the same time, she had a real social and cultural antagonism for Jews she felt were sort of pretenders to society. She felt the character in The Gambler was that, and therefore I must be.” To Toback, Pauline’s conflicts about being Jewish were securely rooted in her relationship with her father, a working-class man who was looked down on by certain strata of society—in particular, by other, wealthier Jews. Toback believed that Pauline had grown up eager to establish herself as a personal force, but that it was important to her that she do this without betraying her father and what he was. She would not look down on him. “She thought, ‘I’m just what he was. I just happen to be writing interestingly about a popular art. And you don’t have to know what John Simon knows to be the best at it.”

  At year’s end she saw another movie that enabled her to dig into a film the way she liked to do—Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Pauline’s suggestion to Robert Getchell that it would be perfect for Robert Altman hadn’t come to fruition, although the finished film, with its evocative portrayal of the world of dive bars baking in the Arizona sunshine, had an Altman feel. Ellen Burstyn, who had been cast in the lead, had seen Mean Streets and eventually decided that Martin Scorsese would be able to bring to the story the grit she felt it needed.

  Alice was a movie that the critics were bound to embrace; dozens of reviews mentioned that the movie had come along at just the right point, given the paucity of good women’s roles onscreen. Pauline, too, liked Alice very much, and what she came up with for The New Yorker was one of her most complex—and baffling—reviews of the ’70s.

  She wrote that it was “one of the rare films that genuinely deserve to be called controversial . . . Alice is thoroughly enjoyable: funny, absorbing, intelligent even when you don’t believe in what’s going on—when the issues it raises get all fouled up.”

  She referred to Alice as “the first angry-young-woman movie”—as portrayed by Ellen Burstyn, Alice had a sharp edge, and her temper was quick to rise to the surface. But she liked the way Scorsese handled the scenes with Alice and her fresh-mouthed son (Alfred Sutter), as well as his avoidance of phony Hollywood warmth. Pauline’s difficulty in getting her mind around Alice was most likely due to her uneasiness with what she took to be the movie’s feminist agenda. And in taking this position, she jumped to conclusions about Burstyn’s performance for which she could not possibly have had the least foundation:

  Burstyn appears to be so determined not to play a teasing, fake-tender woman that she flings women’s-movement into her work before she’s absorbed it as an actress and discovered what she can use and what she can’t. And so instead of seeing Alice we’re seeing the collision of Alice with Ellen Burstyn’s consciousness as of this moment in history. I think we’d connect more fully with Alice if Burstyn weren’t trying to turn the role into a statement. On the other hand, there’s a stimulation and excitement in what Burstyn is attempting. I don’t really like most of her acting here—her rhythm seems a beat off—yet I’m held by what she’s trying to do, and by her need to play against stereotypes. Without her ferocious attack, Alice might seem no more than a slight, charming comedy.

  By writing “The trouble with Ellen Burstyn’s performance is that she’s playing against something instead of playing a character,” Pauline was speculating on the private thought processes of the actress—something she could have had no idea about. She accused Burstyn of striking “so many of those discordant notes that she must think it’s a sign of liberation for Alice to be defiantly short-tempered.” It was crystal-ball gazing, pure and simple—and quite out of critical bounds.

  Despite the fact that her review of Alice was essentially a positive one, her comments about Ellen Burstyn wounded the actress. Only four years earlier Burstyn had written Pauline a warm thank-you letter for a positive review of her performance in Paul Mazursky’s Alex in Wonderland. After the Alice review appeared, however, Pauline was not a topic Burstyn was fond of discussing.

  Later in February Pauline wrote a review that would, indirectly, come to have enormous impact on her career. Hal Ashby’s Shampoo was one of the most lavishly praised films of the ’70s—a thoughtfully observed and well-acted film about George (Warren Beatty, who also produced and coscripted it), a sexually rapacious Beverly Hills hairdresser who jumps from bed to bed on the eve of the presidential election of 1968. It was designed as a contemporary comedy of manners, and the screenplay, coauthored by Robert Towne, had a subtle, knowing humor and a great sense of structure: It was a little like a Congreve play for the pre-Nixon era.

  Pauline, in synch with her colleagues, felt that Shampoo “might have been no more than a saucy romp . . . But the way it has been done, the joke expands the more you think about it. Shampoo is light and impudent, yet like the comedies that live on, it’s a bigger picture in retrospect.” What she loved most about it, perhaps, was its honest, dead-on portrayal of how people in a privileged society such as Beverly Hills viewed sex, and its perception of the L.A. experience that no other movie had ever quite captured: It expressed “the emotional climate of the time and place. Los Angeles has become what it is because of the bright heat, which turns people into narcissists and sensuous provocateurs. The atmosphere seems to infantilize sex: sexual desire is despir-itualized; it becomes a demand for immediate gratification.”

  For Warren Beatty, Shampoo represented a personal triumph. Since McCabe & Mrs. Miller, he had worked fairly steadily in a string of disappointing pictures, but nothing he had done since Bonnie and Clyde had had much impact. Pauline found his performance as George in Shampoo genuinely impressive; she knew that George wasn’t “an easy role; I don’t know anyone else who could have played it.” In the review she included a line that sounded a bit close to the kind of review that seemed designed to be easily excerpted in movie advertising: She called Shampoo “the most virtuoso example of sophisticated kaleidoscopic farce that American moviemakers have ever come up with.” It was an early sign of the “absolutist” streak in her reviewing, a tendency that had been fairly latent up until recent years. From this point on, however, she would often describe films and performances in terms of extremes—the best or the worst examples in history.

  Directly on the heels of Shampoo she undertook what was the boldest move of her career to date. Robert Altman’s new picture, Nashville, had begun filming in the summer of 1974, and it was the director’s most ambitious project yet—an attempt to catch the spirit and puls
e of mid-’70s America by way of a story set in the country music capital. Although the tone of Nashville was intimate, the film unfolded on a broad canvas: There were twenty-four principal characters in all, several of them played by major stars. Among them were the stud country singer Tom Frank (Keith Carradine), Opal (Geraldine Chaplin), a sycophantic groupie posing as a BBC reporter, the strung-out country star Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley), the adulterous gospel singer Linnea (Lily Tomlin), and third-party presidential candidate Hal Phillip Walker (Thomas Hal Phillips).

  Pauline made a brief visit to the set of Nashville to tape an interview with Altman to be broadcast on European television. As she had when she showed up for the filming of Thieves Like Us, she saw enough to give her a good idea of what the director was after—and of course, his choice of a pop-culture subject like Nashville was already to her liking. “She was very entertaining and interesting and funny about herself—self-deprecating,” Michael Murphy, who was in the cast, remembered. “Bob was one of the guys who, if you crossed him, he’d let you know about it. He yelled at her a couple of times, and she’d say, ‘Oh, Bob . . .’ And then she would come back with a good review or a not-so-good review, and they’d be friends again. He didn’t court her in the same way a lot of people would. He courted her, but he was himself, and he wasn’t paying homage, really. He was very happy that she understood him and what he was trying to do.”

  Murphy also sensed something else beneath Pauline’s convivial surface: “I always had a feeling about Pauline—that there was a certain kind of disdain, from the beginning—that I was not really worthy of being in these movies, that there were a lot of people who were better than I was. She would give me a shot in some review, but I would see her someplace, and I liked her, and she liked me. And eventually, I got a good review from her!”

  Sue Barton, director of publicity for Altman’s production company, Lion’s Gate Pictures, remembered Pauline’s visit to the Nashville set and her fascination as she sat with the director, watching the dailies. “Bob was very flattered by how wonderful she thought he was,” recalled Barton. “I would say she was slightly star-struck. She was so important to the filmmakers, and she had so much power. Being able to quote Pauline Kael was probably the best thing you could ever wish for. She was this little person with her little glasses and her little bowl haircut. She was far from beautiful, and this aspect of her personality allowed her to be with beautiful and interesting people and have a lot of clout. And everybody wanted her to be their friend. Bob was a genuine talent and a genuine eccentric, and that was her love for him.”