Pauline Kael (28 page)

Too many of the new pictures, she argued, weren’t giving the audience
anything
. For key evidence she pointed to the mass of youth pictures, such as
Getting Straight
, one of the year’s big hits with college audiences. It starred Elliott Gould as Harry Bailey, a candidate for a master’s degree in English who had a past as a civil rights activist. There were a few sequences calculated to bring forth cheers from the audience—the police moving in on the campus demonstration; Harry having an emotional meltdown while being grilled in his oral exams by a pompous English professor. Gould was at his most appealing—the archetypal, sexy, brainy, questioning college man of the early 1970s. But Pauline felt that
Getting Straight
was a shameful waste, since “no contemporary American subject provided a better test of the new movie freedom than student unrest. It should have been a great subject: the students becoming idealists and trying to put their feelings about justice into practice.... Instead, we’ve been getting glib ‘statements’ and cheap sex jokes, the zoomy shooting and shock cutting of TV commercials; plus a lot of screaming and ketchup on the lenses.” She was horrified by these movies, which she believed took “the recently developed political consciousness of American students, which was still tentative and searching and (necessarily) confused, and reduced it to simplicities, overstatements, and lies.”

Two of the biggest hits of the summer of 1970 were John G. Avildsen’s
Joe
and Bob Rafelson’s
Five Easy Pieces
. The critical and commercial success of
Joe
came as a surprise: it was a crudely written and acted, modestly budgeted look at the pent-up rage and resentment of the hardworking, play-by-the-rules parents of the hippie generation—Richard Nixon’s silent majority.
Joe
was really an old-fashioned melodrama that got a tight grip on its audience by depicting the violence and destructiveness that the older generation was capable of inflicting on the young, and Pauline saw it for what it was—a film “slanted to feed the paranoia of youth.” At the picture’s violent climax, “members of the audience responded on cue with cries of ‘Next time we’ll have guns!’ and ‘We’ll get you first, Joe!’ ” Pauline thought that
Joe
’s “manipulation of the audience is so shrewdly, single-mindedly commercial that it’s rather terrifying to sit there and observe how susceptible the young audience is.”

She continued to worry that young audiences didn’t think deeply enough, didn’t read enough. They didn’t even, she claimed—though she didn’t quote any relevant statistics—go to the movies that often; they simply went to a handful of films over and over again. It also bothered her that audiences cheered the end of
Five Easy Pieces
, in which the social dropout Robert Eroica Dupea (Jack Nicholson) abandons his girlfriend (Karen Black) at a gas station, bums a ride off a trucker, and goes cruising down the freeway, in search of nothing and heading nowhere in particular.

After the Kent State shootings in May 1970, some 4 million American students participated in campus strikes. Pauline thought that American youth was actually in a superb position to work for positive social change, but she was surprisingly conservative on the subject of outright rebellion. In the ’60s she had chastised her nephew Bret Wallach for demonstrating against the Berkeley chancellor Edward W. Strong, assuring Bret that Strong was really a good man. She sensed that in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy in 1968, the ongoing mess of Vietnam, and the Manson Family murders, young people weren’t as interested in working for the good of something as they were in withdrawing from everything. Anger was transmuting itself not into action but into apathy. Too many young people, Pauline worried, were “not caring, and not believing anything. They go numb, like the young girl in
Joe
, looking vaguely for some communal Eden where those without hope can cling to each other, and they accept and
prefer
the loser self-image, not wanting to believe that anything good can happen to them.”

It was an observation that revealed Pauline’s allegiance—whether or not she cared to admit it—to the period in which she had grown up. For all her unconventional thinking and her strong identification with many in the younger generation of directors and actors, she held to the solidly old-fashioned view that real happiness came through hard work and testing yourself, through identifying a goal and going after it with everything you had. The numbing of the audience that she wrote about in October 1970 was alien to her temperament: She believed that youth should be encouraged to move forward. Instead, the movies were encouraging them to drop out.

There was one person, however, whom she did not encourage to move forward. For a number of years Gina had shown a marked interest in modern dance. Pauline was happy to help fund her studies but stopped short of urging her to explore a career as a dancer. It remained important to her to keep Gina close by, as her typist, first reader, editor. The pattern had long ago been established: The household dynamic centered on Pauline’s career. The fact that her fame continued to grow did not mean that she was any more secure in terms of considering living a life on her own. To many of her friends her relationship with Gina, while clearly affectionate, rippled with an evident tension. Gina continued to make world-weary, half hearted complaints about being enslaved by her mother, but she seemed less able than ever to strike out on her own. To Charles Simmons, an editor at
The New York Times Book Review
who became a good friend of Pauline’s in the early 1970s, people missed the point when they criticized Pauline for being overprotective. “She
owned
Gina,” stated Simmons.

Pauline could never quite find it within herself to encourage Gina to enter into the mainstream of life. Dana Salisbury felt that Pauline’s obliviousness to what might be best for Gina was part of a much larger family emotional blueprint. Salisbury claimed that all three of the Kael sisters were “tone deaf about the effects of things on people. In the case of my mom, I know that it was not deliberate. In the case of Rose, she was unwilling even to consider it. In the case of Pauline, she was above considering it.”

 

The pictures that opened in the fall of 1970 were mostly poor, and Pauline had little good to say about any of them. In November, however, she was delighted to discover Barbra Streisand’s latest vehicle,
The Owl and the Pussycat
, based on Bill Manhoff’s hit Broadway comedy of 1967. Streisand played her first completely contemporary screen role—a New York prostitute who starts a bumpy romance with a neurotic, failed writer, played by one of Pauline’s favorites, George Segal. “I think George lifted Barbra, in a way,” recalled Buck Henry, who wrote the screenplay. “I was trying to capture Barbra’s New York accent and use it in the tawdriest way possible. I begged her to say ‘Fuck off’—I wanted her to say it so badly, and she did it wonderfully.” The teaming worked beautifully as far as Pauline was concerned. “Were Hepburn and Tracy this good together, even at their best, as in
Pat and Mike
?” she wondered. “Maybe, but they weren’t better.” Most of all, she thought it was bracing “to see Streisand get out from under the archaic production values of large-scale movies” such as
Hello, Dolly!
She found her “like thousands of girls one sees in the subway, but more so—she is both the archetype and an original, and that’s what makes a star.”

In addition to the New York Film Critics Circle, Pauline belonged to another prominent critics’ group, the National Society of Film Critics. The society tended to be looked on as the bastard cousin of the NYFCC, although it had been founded for valid reasons. Since the city’s major newspaper strike in 1962, the NYFCC had accepted magazine critics as members, but it was still perceived as an organization dominated by daily newspaper reviewers. With the demise of
The New York Herald-Tribune
in 1967, only four daily newspapers were still operating, and it was decided that the handful of members of the NYFCC did not really constitute a proper sampling of critical thought in New York. Among the founders of the National Society of Film Critics were Hollis Alpert, Andrew Sarris, Joe Morgenstern, and Pauline. Partly because it was seriously underfunded, the NSFC never developed the cachet of the NYFCC; during some years, the society couldn’t afford even a no-frills awards dinner, so honorees were simply notified by mail. The organization, however, had other objectives, one of which was to establish a series of dialogues between critics and some of the most acclaimed film directors of the day. Richard Schickel, who served as chairman of the NSFC in 1970, termed the project “a good idea in theory, a bad one in practice,” a point of view that was borne out when David Lean was invited to appear before the group following a special screening of his new film, MGM’s
Ryan’s Daughter
, at the Ziegfeld Theater on West Fifty-fourth Street in Manhattan.

In the 1960s few directors were as esteemed as David Lean. Both
Lawrence of Arabia
and
Doctor Zhivago
had been enormous worldwide successes and had generally received good press, although some critics understandably preferred his earlier, small-scale work in pictures such as
Brief Encounter
and
Oliver Twist
.
Ryan’s Daughter
was a love story, set following the Easter Rising in Ireland, about a country lass (Sarah Miles) who escapes the disappointment of her marriage to a much older schoolteacher (Robert Mitchum) by having an affair with a British soldier (Christopher Jones). Lean gave this essentially simple story his customary grand-scale production, filming in the West of Ireland for more than a year. It was an arduous shoot; rather than use an actual village, Lean sought to construct one of his own, on County Kerry’s Dingle peninsula. Initially budgeted at $9 million,
Ryan’s Daughter
far exceeded that, while MGM’s new president and CEO, James Aubrey, fumed back in Hollywood. This was the era of small films, such as
Joe
and
Five Easy Pieces
, both of which had brought in enormous returns on minimal investments. To Aubrey and the other bosses at MGM, Lean was out of touch with the times. Lean, who had always been a revered prestige director, suddenly found his new picture annihilated by the critics, chief among them Pauline. She had never liked his fussy, meticulous brand of epic filmmaking, which she regarded as all polish and no surprises. His films, she wrote, had “no driving emotional energy, no passionate vision to conceal the heavy labor.”
Ryan’s Daughter
was nothing more than “gush made respectable by millions of dollars ‘tastefully’ wasted.”

Exactly who led the charge at the NSFC’s evening with Lean is open to question; what is certain is that Pauline was one of several critics who subjected the director to some tough questioning. She asked Lean if he really felt he could get away with portraying Robert Mitchum, of all actors, as “a lousy lay.” Several members of the group had had a few cocktails and joined in the fray, calling
Ryan’s Daughter
unworthy of inclusion in the Lean canon. All of this was devastating to the famously retiring director, who had a long history of shrinking from even the mildest form of criticism. Finally, toward the end of the evening, Lean managed to stammer that Pauline probably wouldn’t be satisfied until he turned out a 16 mm picture in black and white. Pauline laughed. “We’ll give you color.”

The evening, and the torrent of bad reviews that greeted
Ryan’s Daughter
’s release, led to a creative paralysis in Lean that lasted until 1984, when he made what turned out to be his final picture,
A Passage to India
.

During the same time, Pauline covered one of the year’s biggest hits,
Love Story
, directed by Arthur Hiller. It was based on the runaway success by Erich Segal, which made publishing history in a lowbrow way by becoming the first novelization of a screenplay to climb to the top of
The New York Times
Best Seller List. The paperback, whose cover became one of the iconic images of the early ’70s, sold over 4 million copies. Pauline wrote, “The book has been promoted from the start as an antidote to dirty books and movies, as if America were being poisoned by them.” The film, she noted, played to both the new and old audience by portraying generation-gap tensions between the hero (Ryan O’Neal) and his stuffy Boston Brahmin father (Ray Milland). In the New York
Daily News
, Kathleen Carroll though that
Love Story
“should bring joy to millions of moviegoers sickened by the overdose of sex and drugs in the movies.” Pauline agreed, writing, “It deals in private passion at a time when we are exhausted from public defeats, and it deals with the mutual sacrifice of a hard-working, clean-cut pair of lovers, and with love beyond death.”

 

Although Gina often observed to Pauline’s friends that the best way to get along with her was to agree with her, the truth was more complicated than that. Pauline had both a distaste for sycophancy and a need for a certain degree of obeisance, and many of her protégés were often unsure about how much or how little of either to offer. The rules for being in Pauline’s good graces were fluid, and if she felt that someone she had supported or believed in had disappointed her, or was on the wrong track critically, she could suddenly become cold and distant. Certainly it was true that if you were a fellow critic, her approval came fastest if you shared her views on movies. She loved to debate, and she was not easily won over by even a persuasive argument; she seldom conceded that the person arguing against her had illuminated a point she hadn’t previously considered. She was already fond of saying that she never changed her mind about a movie, a position many other critics found all but impossible to accept. Seeing a movie for a second time years later, at a different point in their lives and with more filmgoing experience behind them, they might have a completely different response. Pauline considered such shifts of opinion a sign of basic critical weakness, an indication that the person hadn’t known what he was talking about in the first place.