by Brian Kellow
Pauline was temperamentally drawn to stories such as Adèle H.—stories in which women were portrayed acting out their darkest passions, throwing off societal expectations of them, displaying a willingness to go as far as their romantic obsessions could take them. It was for the same reason that she loved the novels of Edna O’Brien, with their fearless confrontation of “the shocking messiness of love”; she prized O’Brien for her “perceptions of what I thought no one else knew—and I wasn’t telling.”
Pauline considered Adèle H. the first genuinely great movie to emerge from Europe since Last Tango in Paris. What she admired most was the way that Truffaut managed to tell his story in a way that was both “romantic and ironic: he understands that maybe the only way we can take great romantic love now is as craziness, and that the craziness doesn’t cancel out the romanticism—it completes it. Adèle’s love isn’t corrupted by sanity; she’s a great crazy. She carries her love to the point where it consumes everything else in her life, and when she goes mad, it doesn’t represent the disintegration of her personality; it is, rather, the final integration.”
The big American movie of 1975—the movie that captured the hearts of the public in the way that Pauline had hoped Nashville would—was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Milos Forman’s adaptation of the 1962 novel by Ken Kesey. Its story of Randle McMurphy, who leads a rebellion among the inmates of an Oregon state mental hospital, was closely tied to the political turmoil of the ’60s, with the inmates standing in for America’s free-spirited, searching youth, and the maddeningly calm and manipulative Nurse Ratched being viewed as a reflection of Nixon’s silent majority. These associations were inevitable, and because Kesey’s novel had been so popular, particularly with college students, an even reasonably faithful film version of it was probably destined to be a hit.
But One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest received mixed reviews when it opened in November, with several critics complaining that the novel had been oversimplified. Howard Kissel felt that a few years earlier, the good guys vs. bad guys scheme would have “led to a victory for the good guys. Now it is the bad guys who triumph—for no apparent reason other than to intensify the emotional blow to the audience.”
In her New Yorker review, Pauline took issue with the “long literary tradition behind this man’s-man view of women as the castrater-lobotomizers,” but she thought the film deserved credit for making Kesey’s comic-strip fantasy about freedom and repression human and more realistic. She found it “a powerful, smashingly effective movie” and praised Milos Forman for grasping “how crude the poet-paranoid system of the book would look on the screen now that the sixties’ paranoia has lost its nightmarish buoyancy.... Forman could have exploited the Watergate hangover and retained the paranoid simplicities that helped make hits of Easy Rider and Joe, but instead he . . . has taken a less romantic, more suggestive approach.” She thought that McMurphy was a great role for Jack Nicholson, with his “half smile—the calculated insult that alerts audiences to how close to the surface his hostility is.” She thought McMurphy was “so much of a Nicholson role that the actor may not seem to be getting a chance to do much new in it. But Nicholson doesn’t use the glinting, funny-malign eyes this time; he has a different look—McMurphy’s eyes are farther away, muggy, veiled even from himself. You’re not sure what’s going on behind them.”
The opening of a new Stanley Kubrick film had become an occasion for Pauline to dread. In the wake of 2001 and A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick had been all but deified by the media; the combination of his reputation as one of filmland’s true intellectuals and his attention-getting ways of making movies had many critics and reporters poised to salute his every effort as a Great Cultural Landmark. The new project was Barry Lyndon, based on Thackeray’s novel about a penniless Irish rogue who rises to dizzying wealth and social position in the mid–eighteenth century. Kubrick’s film moved at a perfect adagio tempo that was nevertheless surprisingly novel and hardly ever dull.
Pauline acknowledged the film’s visually arresting quality and found its first segments mesmerizing. She thought the novel had probably intrigued Kubrick because of its “externalized approach,” which he had devised a way of matching in stately pictorial terms. But she felt he had missed Thackeray’s lighthearted, satirical tone. For her, the movie wore out its welcome fairly soon. “As it becomes apparent that we are to sit and admire the lingering tableaux,” she wrote, “we feel trapped. It’s not merely that Kubrick isn’t releasing the actors’ energies or the story’s exuberance but that he’s deliberately holding the energy level down.” She couldn’t help jabbing Kubrick in a rather personal way when she wrote of her disappointment in seeing the picture’s “slack-faced and phlegmatic” star, Ryan O’Neal, “his face straining with the effort to be what the Master wants—and all that Kubrick wants is to use him as a puppet.” Every frame of it was a reflection of the director’s self-importance. “Kubrick isn’t taking pictures in order to make movies, he’s making movies in order to take pictures,” she wrote. She also expressed her desire that Kubrick “would come home to this country to make movies again, working fast on modern subjects” such as his early, expert noir thriller The Killing.
Barry Lyndon divided the New York critics, ten of whom, led by Time’s Richard Schickel and The New York Times’s Vincent Canby, wrote favorably of it, with eight writing unfavorably. There was further divisiveness at that year’s voting for the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, which Rex Reed reported in his column in the Daily News. “I think it is important to remind everyone that Barry Lyndon was the head-on favorite of many of the voters,” he complained, “losing out in the third ballot only because the absentee critics lost their rights to proxies. I was voting for Barry Lyndon all the way.” Reed, like many others, was incensed that Nashville took the Best Picture prize both from the NYFCC and the National Society of Film Critics.
When Sam Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite was released that winter, Pauline wrote an odd essay for “The Current Cinema” titled “Notes on the Nihilist Poetry of Sam Peckinpah.” Less a review than a lengthy mash note, it offered an enormous amount of ammunition to her critics; Andrew Sarris could hardly be blamed if he felt that Pauline was becoming more of an auteurist than he had ever been. She liked The Killer Elite, which she found “intensely, claustrophobically exciting.” But the essay was most concerned with her admiration for her maverick friend, who continued to spit in the faces of the movie executives who thought they knew how to handle artists:
As the losing battles with the moneymen have gone on, year after year, Peckinpah has—only partly sardonically, I think, begun to see the world in terms of the bad guys (the studio executives who have betrayed him or chickened out on him) and the people he likes (generally actors), who are the ones smart enough to see what the process is all about, the ones who haven’t betrayed him yet. Hatred of the bad guys—the total mercenaries—has become practically the only sustaining emotion in his work, and his movies have become fables about striking back.
And later:
Peckinpah has become so nihilistic that filmmaking itself seems to be the only thing he believes in. He’s crowing in The Killer Elite, saying, “No matter what you do to me, look at the way I can make a movie.” The bedeviled bastard’s got a right to crow.
All of this was unquestionably sincere. But it was too much—Pauline was all but turning Peckinpah into a Christlike figure in the pages of The New Yorker. If Pauline admired the “craziness” in artists, Peckinpah gave it to her in spades. She failed to see that her idolatry of him was a kind of romanticism, that perhaps the executives who tried to keep him on track during the course of making a film might possibly have a legitimate point of view as well.
Pauline and Peckinpah continued to keep up a close correspondence. In 1976, he wrote to her from England, where he was filming Cross of Iron and coping with a trying sabbatical from alcohol:
If God had not meant man to drink he would not have invented the grape or the pro
cess known as distillation.... I enjoy living a life of sobriety and piety and do not look forward to the 17th of this month when my liver will give me the okay to begin again my needed ways of self-destruction. But I have found that being sober constantly is somewhat of a letdown, as I have been waking up without a hangover (the one I have been nursing so carefully for some 20 odd years). I feel like I have lost an old friend, but he is just one of many that I have lost on this film.
Some people gossiped that Pauline was sleeping with Peckinpah, and still others thought there was a romantic connection between her and her good friend Richard Albarino, a handsome, energetic New York writer whose company Pauline enjoyed because his intellectual tempo was similar to hers. But those closer to her knew better. The fact was that Pauline had been finished with men for some time. “She was done completely,” said James Toback. “One hundred percent. And if you wanted to misinterpret her life about the ones who were sort of escorting her, the one that you could have misinterpreted was Dick Albarino. It had the appearance of that, but that was not true.”
Having missed the opportunity to write about Paul Mazursky’s Blume in Love, Pauline was delighted to celebrate his next movie, Next Stop Greenwich Village, an autobiographical account of his days as a young actor in New York. She parted company with her fellow critics, however, when she reviewed Lina Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties in the winter of 1976, a film that was acclaimed in The New York Times as “Miss Wertmuller’s King Kong, her Nashville, her 8½, her Navigator, her City Lights.” “If Seven Beauties is all these things, what is it?” Pauline wondered. This film about the misadventures of a Neapolitan man during World War II who runs afoul of the Nazis and is sent to a concentration camp where he pathetically tries to win favor with a female commandant was, Pauline thought, “beyond annoyance . . . it’s extremely ambitious, and I think it’s a gloppy mess.” She disliked Wertmuller’s films—she hadn’t responded to the much-acclaimed Swept Away, either, complaining that “the characters never shut up”—and noted that it was futile to discuss “the stated ideas in a Wertmuller film because they can’t be sorted out . . . The way Lina Wertmuller makes movies, she has to believe that disorder is creative. She plunks in whatever comes to mind, and rips through the scenes. It’s all bravura highs and bravura lows, without any tonal variation,” all the while believing that she was “raising the consciousness of the masses.”
She also strayed from the herd with her review of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Pauline, of course, had a long history with the project, and the end result was just as unnerving as she had imagined it would be that night two years earlier, when she had read the script in bed and then been afraid to have it in the room with her. Perhaps no mainstream film—not even Midnight Cowboy—had so fully explored the seamy side of New York, which in 1976 was still a grim, crime-ridden city in which old-time residents bemoaned the ugly decline of neighborhoods such as Times Square, where much of the movie’s action took place. The character of Iris, the twelve-year-old hooker played by Jodie Foster—the focal point of Travis’s reformer’s zeal—was a movie first, and genuinely disturbing. There is an unnerving sequence in which Travis attempts to date Betsy, the campaign worker portrayed by Cybill Shepherd, by taking her to a porn film in Times Square. And there is the depiction of Travis’s insane assassination plot aimed at the political candidate Palan-tine. Like Nashville, Taxi Driver considered the violence that marginalized outsiders could inflict on those who occupied center stage.
In time, Taxi Driver would be held up as one of the richest examples of the bold new directorial sensibility that had sprung up in American films of the 1970s. So it is surprising to read the reviews it received on its initial release. Many, like Vincent Canby’s, were positive. But there was plenty of negative press, too. Andrew Sarris disliked “its life-denying spirit, its complete lack of curiosity about the possibilities of people. Between Scorsese’s celebrated Catholic guilt and Schrader’s celebrated Protestant guilt even a Checker cab would groan under such a burden of self-hatred.”
It must have been difficult for Pauline to write about the film, given her history with Schrader, and in the review she pointedly did not go into any detail about Schrader’s contribution; she simply mentioned that he wrote the script. All the credit was given to Martin Scorsese, whom she thought “may just naturally be an Expressionist . . . Scorsese’s Expressionism isn’t anything like the exaggerated sets of the German directors; he uses documentary locations, but he pushes discordant elements to their limits, and the cinematographer, Michael Chapman, gives the street life a seamy, rich pulpiness.” Although she initially told Schrader that De Niro wouldn’t be up to playing Travis, she thought that he had given a wondrous performance: He had “used his own emptiness—he’s reached down into his own anomie. Only Brando has done this kind of plunging, and De Niro’s performance had something of the undistanced intensity that Brando’s had in Last Tango.” She wrote, “No other film has ever dramatized urban indifference so powerfully; at first, here, it’s horrifyingly funny, and then just horrifying.”
Ultimately, Pauline saw Taxi Driver as a brilliant expression of her own fears about New York. In the screening room where she first viewed the film—Bernard Herrmann’s score had not yet been added—she sat in stunned silence at the ending, in which Travis winds up being acclaimed as a hero and resumes his restless night-driving search, which will surely explode in violence once again. Her friend Joseph Hurley recalled that when the movie was over, she leaned back in her seat and cried, “He’s still out there!”
In the spring of 1976 Pauline’s fifth collection appeared, covering the period of her New Yorker reviews from September 1972 to March 1975. The working title had been the jokey All the Way with Movies, but when she had tested it on her friends and none of them liked it, she switched it to Reeling. This time she paid a price for the wildly passionate enthusiasm she expressed in her reviews.
Once again coverage of her book occupied the prestigious front page of The New York Times Book Review. Once again, it was no longer enough to hail it as an important volume of criticism; by now, Pauline occupied such a significant place in the literary as well as popular culture that some deeper perspective was needed. The illustration the Times chose was a constellation of star shapes filled with the head shots of various artists, including Robert Altman, Barbra Streisand, Marlon Brando, and Martin Scorsese. Pauline’s face dominated—the biggest star of all.
The assigned reviewer was Robert Brustein, the erudite theater critic. His essay opened on a positive note with a generous mention of Pauline’s “animation and charm as a movie reviewer.” Brustein felt that “at a time when many critics are expressing feelings of dejection, even a sense of apocalypse about their subjects, Miss Kael continues to write about movies with the breathless delirium of one smitten with young love.”
Brustein expressed his concern, however, that she had become too much of a clucking mother hen concerning the fates of the movies and directors she loved, and that her writing was “becoming larded with hyperbole.”
I don’t mean to quarrel with Miss Kael’s opinions. I enjoyed most of these movies myself.... No, what disturbs me about these quotes is the promotional quality of the language and the way her enthusiasm is just beginning to fade over into press agentry. Like most influential critics, Miss Kael must be aware that she is writing not only for the reader but for the advertising agency—movie ads now reprint her reviews sometimes in their entirety—but in her wholly laudable efforts to bring good movies to the attention of as many people as possible, she has, willy-nilly, become a cog in the marketing mechanism of the very system she deplores.
Brustein went on to say that her energetic style was best digested by reading only a few reviews at a time. “It is always an entertaining book,” he wrote, “and piece by piece a brilliant one, but taking it in large doses, you may get frazzled by all the feverish energy, flashing like St. Elmo’s fire, around so many ephemeral works.”
She was lik
ewise criticized for her hyperbole in The Village Voice’s review, written by Richard Gilman—and illustrated with a doctored photo of Pauline wearing star-shaped sunglasses. While acknowledging her formidable gifts as a writer, Gilman wrote, “What she so often practices now, setting the lead for her fellows, is an amalgam of idiosyncratic opinion, star gazing, myth-mongering, politics, sociological punditry, and intervention as a kind of co-worker in the medium. It may be in tune with the times, may be much more satisfying to many readers than the tradition (her popularity of course suggests that it is), but it’s surely different from criticism as we’ve known it.”
Gilman’s most damning words came in characterizing her involvement with directors, writers, and other people in the industry, which he interpreted as a “desire to relieve the lonely detachment of the commentator by an active role, a direct hand in it all. I mean by this her notorious abandonment of critical neutrality, the scandalous apotheosis of Nashville before it was finished; the trafficking with certain directors and screenwriters as evangelist and would-be colleague.”
Pauline was incensed by many of the carping reviews that Reeling received, but at least one of them led to an enduring friendship. Greil Marcus, the rock critic and books columnist for Rolling Stone, published a review of Reeling that also accused her of lapsing into hyperbole. “Everything had to be the greatest, the best, the newest,” he recalled. “And it seemed to be out of control, and I didn’t know what this was about.” When Marcus’s review appeared, Pauline telephoned him at his home in Berkeley. “Did you really mean all that stuff that you wrote about me?” she asked. Marcus said that he did. “Well,” said Pauline, “my daughter agrees with you, but I don’t. I’m coming to Berkeley and would like to meet you.”