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By Root 831 0

after a double feature you might hobble out like Walter Matthau with back trouble, but that was the price of admission to movie-queen heaven, where the name Norma Shearer could prompt militant debate and Ruby Keeler’s tap-dancing glee was categorized as a genial species of dementia. At the time the double bills at Theatre 80 St. Marks seemed lighter, fluffier, less canonical than the Euro classics at other houses, but those crackling relics of the Hollywood studio system have retained a vigor, rigor, elegance, ivory spine, and starglow that (for me) have proven to be hardier, more sustaining than the signature originalities of Godard, Truffaut, and Bresson or the surly realism of Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Look Back in Anger, and similar English indictments of the class system’s rotting carcass and the ghastly fucking wallpaper put up to seal in the gloom. Each year the mystery appeal of Eleanor Powell’s horsy clumping deepens, the piquancy of Myrna Loy’s uptipped nose romantically beguiles, while Godard’s La Chinoise seems like a set of fancy card tricks and the lyricism of Truffaut’s films looks ever more wispy and attenuated. I went to old movies alone, my occasional dates preferring to see something new in venues that didn’t seem haunted. Apart from Peckinpah films and the occasional high mass such as Jean Eustache’s black-and-white three-and-a-half-hour The Mother and the Whore (the first masterpiece of miserabilism whose spellbinding power owes nothing to anything except its own bleak recalcitrance), I was reading reviews of new movies more than I was actually attending them, keeping just pseudo-informed enough to hold up my weak end in any conversation. That was about to change. I was about to receive my draft notice.

One day I was puttering around the apartment, trying to unstick one of the drawers in my captain’s bed, washing a fork, who knows, when the phone rang. I picked it up and heard a voice that carried a ripple of laughter even as it said hello.

“Hi, you’re a hard person to get ahold of. It’s Pauline Kael.”

PART II:

Like Civilized People …

We hadn’t met, though there had been a near encounter.

In 1974, the Voice winched me into a coveted screening of Lenny, the director Bob Fosse’s fancy switchblade farrago on the life, career, and fury of the comedian Lenny Bruce—an existential X-ray shot in high-contrast black and white where the nightclub spotlight blasted Dustin Hoffman like a prison searchlight as he did his sardonic thing. I had arrived at the screening room early, knowing it would be a packed house, and, having snagged an aisle seat, swung my legs to the side as a couple slid into my row. “Excuse me,” a young woman apologized in a cool-mint voice, her elbow apparently having grazed my arm as she settled, and I nodded no problem before glancing sideways and recognizing her as the actress Cornelia Sharpe, whose piquant nose, high-end-model cheekbones, and creamy surface rendered questions of acting ability incidental, irrelevant, almost rude. No problem indeed. Sharpe had appeared in Serpico, riding on the back of Al Pacino’s motorcycle and wrapping her adorning arms around him as his reward for rejecting police graft and embracing a free-spirited lifestyle that won him entrée into the grooviest loft parties. But since the most recent film I had seen her in was a loutish buddy-cop number called Busting, where she splayed her legs wide in a dentist’s chair as a call girl who made office calls, I decided not to risk saying anything gauche and so said nothing at all, hoping that my courteous follow-up nod conveyed the mark of a young gentleman, despite my cruddy sneakers.

A few minutes before the lights were due to darken, I heard a minor bustle behind me. The last row, which appeared to have been kept unofficially empty, filled. This arrival seemed to slide a tray of quiet import under the ongoing chatter, and the chatter became self-conscious, inorganic, as if everyone’s awareness had split and doubled and effort was being made not to crane one’s head in reverse.