Pauline Kael (37 page)

By now Pauline was hearing frequently from stars and directors whose work she had reviewed. She regarded Carol Burnett as “probably the most gifted comedienne this country has ever produced,” but she thought her new film, Martin Ritt’s
Pete ’n’ Tillie
, about a mismatched husband and wife, was a waste of her talents. Pauline thought Burnett’s work in
Pete ’n’ Tillie
was “grimly controlled” and “an unnecessarily confined and schoolmarmish performance.” Her review brought her a letter of gratitude from Burnett, in which the actress admitted that she had known something was wrong during the filming but had been unable to figure out what it was.

Pauline also received a letter from Sydney Pollack, director of Robert Redford’s new film
Jeremiah Johnson
, but it wasn’t one of thanks. Pauline disliked the movie partly because she had thought that Redford would evolve into “a new kind of hip and casually smart screen actor, and he’s already jumped into mythic-man roles in which tired, aging stars can vegetate profitably.” For much of the film, mountain man Jeremiah Johnson wages a war against the Crow Indians who have killed his wife and child; at the end comes a scene in which the Crows’ chief, signaling an end to hostilities, gives Johnson a sign of peace. Pauline wrote, “Jeremiah signals him back, giving him the finger.” Pollack wrote her a lengthy response, saying that she had misinterpreted the gesture, and that he could

Pauline was disappointed when at the end of the year the New York Film Critics Circle awarded Ingmar Bergman’s
Cries and Whispers
the year’s Best Picture prize over
The Godfather
. She was equally displeased when Laurence Olivier (for
Sleuth
) triumphed over Marlon Brando—the result of an unusual and precedent-setting circumstance. She was also disappointed that Liv Ullmann (
Cries and Whispers
,
The Emigrants
) won Best Actress over her favorites, Cicely Tyson and Liza Minnelli.

Pauline had recently begun exchanging letters with a young screenwriter named Robert Getchell, who had asked his agent to send along his new script “to save me the buck twenty.” Getchell’s screenplay concerned a Southwestern housewife named Alice who suddenly finds herself widowed and takes to the road with her young boy, in pursuit of the singing career she long ago abandoned. Getchell had written it with Shirley MacLaine in mind, and MacLaine had been eager to do it and had planned to try to get Peter Bogdanovich to direct; then she had gone to work on the presidential campaign of George McGovern, “never to be heard from again,” Getchell wrote.

Pauline read the script with fascination, and while she found it sharp and witty and tough and beautifully observed, she suggested a few improvements. “The idea should be for them to keep going with lots of engagement,” she wrote to Getchell, “to get something out of life along the way—not to look for a happy end.” She added that she thought it should be directed by Altman, choosing not to think about the dilemma that might lie ahead if Getchell’s script were to be filmed and she were to review it for
The New Yorker
.

The run of good films that appeared in late 1972 did not carry over to the new year: Most of the movies Pauline reviewed from January to March were disappointments. The major event of the winter months was the publication of her latest volume of criticism,
Deeper into Movies
, once again by Little, Brown. In her author’s note Pauline stated that this collection was “a record of the interaction of movies and our national life during a frantic time when three decades seem to have been compressed into three years and I wrote happily—like a maniac—to keep up with what I thought was going on in movies—which is to say, our national theater.” She added, “Right now, movie critics have an advantage over critics in most other fields: responsive readers. And it can help you to concentrate your energies if you know that the subject is fresh and that your review may make a difference to some people.”

It was a sentiment that was picked up in the opening paragraph of the front-page notice in
The New York Times Book Review
on February 18, 1973. The reviewer was the eminent literary critic Irving Howe, who opened with the observation, “Right now, movie criticism in America seems livelier, more pungent than literary criticism.... Movies have recently carried a sharper air of excitement than have books; and some people have begun to develop, or fumble toward, a film esthetic.” Howe admired Pauline’s “crisp sentences,” “aggressive wit,” and the fact that “she brings to her movies a grounding in literary culture such as some movie reviewers take to be merely ‘linear’ and others don’t even know they need.” He admired the fact that “her approach to a new film is empiric and careful, not too different from that which a good critic of drama or fiction would employ.” There was a caveat, however. “Sometimes she drops into a sort of brawling, Marie Dressler–like posture to assault the position of high-brow seriousness from which, in the main, she works.” He questioned her “excessive praise for movies like
M*A*S*H
and
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
” and picked apart her taste in advocating for films such as
Fiddler on the Roof
,
The Conformist
, and
The Last Picture Show
: “I suspect either that, as a result of seeing too many movies, her standards are slipping or she is kidding. And it doesn’t look as if she’s kidding.” Howe took an academic’s viewpoint of what he considered her principal weakness—that she did not “work out of a secure critical tradition. Its absence allows her a pleasing freedom of improvisation, but makes very hard the achievement of reflective depth and delicate judgment.” The other reviews were excellent, and, for the fourth consecutive time, a Kael collection enjoyed brisk sales.

In the summer of 1973 Pauline took time out from her lecture appearances to accept an offer from
The New York Times Book Review
to write about the latest project by Norman Mailer: a coffee-table-sized illustrated biography of Marilyn Monroe, titled simply
Marilyn
. Pauline had never been a fan of Mailer; in 1968 she had panned his film
Wild ’90
, calling it “the worst movie that I’ve stayed to see all the way through.” While she certainly recognized Mailer’s literary gifts (just as she recognized Joan Didion’s), she didn’t particularly respond to them; these representatives of New Journalism were mostly showing off too self-consciously for her taste, and she recoiled from Mailer’s brand of literary machismo.

The very idea of Mailer on Monroe was bound to make her a little dubious from the outset. To Pauline, Monroe was at best an overripe, teasing blond comedienne who became adept at a kind of “self-satire,” and Pauline thought that Monroe’s “slow reaction time made her seem daffy, and she tricked it up into a comedy style.” Pauline had found Monroe amusing in her one all-out carnal temptress role, as Rose Loomis in the 1953 Henry Hathaway thriller
Niagara
. But by 1973, the Monroe cult, campaigning to have the star considered a potentially great actress consistently deprived of the right material, had built to fever pitch. The woods were full of actors who claimed to have been present at the famous Actors Studio class in which Monroe played a scene from Eugene O’Neill’s
Anna Christie
with Maureen Stapleton, reportedly to revelatory effect. (Her performance as Roslyn in
The Misfits
, written by her husband Arthur Miller, makes a persuasive argument that she was not everything that was being said of her. Miller may have had the best intentions of giving her something meaty to dig into as an actress, but she simply could not pull it off: her interminable pauses between lines are a heavy-handed cue to us that she’s being “emotional” and derail any chance she has of getting a real performance tempo going.)

Part of the problem Pauline had with Mailer’s take on Monroe was that he was trying to mine the legend for more than it was worth. “Who knows what to think about Marilyn Monroe or about those who turn her sickness to metaphor?” Pauline wondered. “I wish they’d let her die.” She found that Mailer inflated Monroe’s career “to cosmic proportions. She becomes ‘a proud, inviolate artist,’ and he suggests that ‘one might literally have to invent the idea of a soul in order to approach her.’ He pumps so much wind into his subject that he’s trying to make Marilyn Monroe worthy of him, a subject to compare with the Pentagon and the moon.”

Yet she found some of his insights impressively acute. He was especially good on Monroe’s early years in an orphanage and how they may have been the foundation of her constant lying and a need to compartmentalize her life. “His strength—when he gets rolling—isn’t in Freudian guesses but in his fusing his knowledge of how people behave with his worst suspicions of where they really live,” wrote Pauline. She also admired his description of the Hollywood machine and “the psychological and sexual rewards the studio system offered executives.”

The book was a case of split personality, as Pauline saw it: “a rip-off all right but a rip-off with genius.” She admitted that Mailer came up with “a runaway string of perceptions and you have to recognize that, though it’s a bumpy ride, the book still goes like a streak.” Ultimately, however,
Marilyn
suffered from the author’s need to inflate its subject and wallow in his own theorizing; in the end, it became “Mailer’s way to perform character assassination with the freedom of a novelist who has created fictional characters.” The book finally was undone for her by “malevolence that needs to be recognized . . . Neither the world nor Marilyn Monroe’s life should be seen in Norman Mailer’s image.”

Pauline’s review of
Marilyn
became one of the most widely discussed pieces of criticism of the year, and, as she had predicted, it did nothing to prevent the book from being one of the year’s most popular releases. Her appearance in the
New York Times Book Review
did, however, lead to a baffling encounter with William Shawn. When she dropped by
The New Yorker
offices over the summer, she ran into him, and he asked her why she hadn’t let him have the review for the magazine. “What for?” Pauline replied. “You wouldn’t have printed it.”

“That’s right,” Shawn sighed.

I
n the summer of 1973 Pauline was, like so many other Americans, riveted by the television coverage of the Watergate hearings. She knew that “The Current Cinema” was not the place for political grandstanding, but she made her feelings about the Nixon administration known while appearing on a symposium in Manhattan in early 1973. As
Newsweek
quoted her: “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are, I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”

When she returned to her
New Yorker
post in the fall of 1973, she offered her observations on the dominant mood in the country: “The Watergate hearings have overshadowed the movies this summer, yet the corruption that Watergate has come to stand for can be seen as the culmination of what American movies have been saying for almost a decade.” The country was sinking deeper into a state of hopelessness. “The Vietnam War has barely been mentioned on the screen,” Pauline wrote, but she rightly felt that you could sense its presence in many of the era’s most intriguing films, from
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
to
Midnight Cowboy
to action films such as
The French Connection
, in which “there was no virtuous side to identify with and nobody you really felt very good about cheering for.” It worried her that films now embraced such “a depressive uncertainty,” a trend she didn’t see as representing artistic growth, but rather as an easy response to world events. “When Vietnam finished off the American hero as righter of wrongs, the movie industry embraced corruption greedily,” she wrote; “formula movies could be energized by infusions of brutality, cynicism, and Naked Apism, which could all be explained by Vietnam and called realism. Moviemakers could celebrate violence and pretend, even to themselves, that they were doing the public a service.”

The first movie she reviewed that fall picked up on this theme:
The Last American Hero
, directed by Lamont Johnson, and based on an
Esquire
article by Tom Wolfe from nearly a decade earlier, told the story of Junior Johnson (rechristened Junior Jackson for the film), a backwoods boy who starts out trafficking his father’s moonshine and winds up a star on the stock-car racing circuit. The script concerned the idea that “corruption seems to be inescapable: if you want to win, you learn to take orders even from people whose idea of winning you don’t understand.... The film says that to win you give up everything you care about except winning.”

Pauline loved the film, which turned out to be another underdog for her to champion. She reported that Twentieth Century–Fox had cut the picture badly, losing some of its most important scenes, and then given it a pitifully limited opening in the South, pushing it as an action film when it was really a thoughtful character study. When it didn’t do well, the studio decided it had a loser on its hands, one that couldn’t possibly go over in urban areas, and gave it a limp one-week engagement in New York. Despite the fact that the studio didn’t bother about setting up any press screenings, Pauline sought out the film—it was
Pretty Poison
all over again. In her review, she suggested that if the movie could manage to find some kind of audience—several of the other reviews were also good—“perhaps someone in the head office at Fox could do the sane, decent thing and restore the cuts?”