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instead of the rice-papery whispers that kept everybody’s tongues on tiptoe. Some hall mates resented having their quiet concentration broken, even though it was quiet concentration that had them in a cement headlock. There were offices occupied almost every weekday by staff writers whose typewriter keys almost never clacked. I once asked Pauline about a staff reporter with an elegant byline who always seemed to be posing in profile, even in the elevator, and whose output was pristinely small. She always seemed to be in her office with the scenic view, pensively, decorously not writing—what does she do all day? “She thinks beautiful thoughts,” Pauline said.

Pauline didn’t have the luxury of Wordsworthian contemplation, not with her pressure-cooker schedule, a vicious cycle of deadlines that had her meeting herself coming and going. She did her writing on the second floor of her house in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, bent over at a drawing table facing light-flooding windows looking out on her long, descending lawn to the road below. She wrote in pencil with a rubber thimble on her thumb, her phenomenal concentration pouring from the point of her pencil across the page as she followed the line of argument wherever it led, keeping every circuit open. In his memoir-meditation Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me, Craig Seligman recalls sitting on the veranda of Pauline’s house, staring vacantly, when Pauline asked him what he was doing. “Thinking,” he replied. “I only think with a pencil in my hand,” Pauline said, a bit of overstatement, but what it was overstating had a core validity; the pencil point was the drill bit that drove through surface resistance, releasing unconscious energies and correspondences. She scorned reviewers who outlined their pieces in advance, executing a blueprint, saying of one such practitioner, “That’s why his pieces read like term papers.” She wanted the writing to read like one long exhalation that would seize the reader from the opening gunshot and then drop him off at the curb after a dizzy ride. The first draft was given to her daughter, Gina, for typing, and then corrections were made on the typescript. Pauline would then be driven to the city, where by day the piece would go through The New Yorker’s fanatically fly-eyed round of copyediting and fact-checking while at night she would catch screenings of the movies she would review for the next column, returning to Great Barrington to write over the weekend and then back again to the city, a rapid turnaround that could have devolved into a repetitive grind for someone simply filing copy. But Pauline was still riding the crest of the crescendo that was Deeper into Movies (1973), the collection of reviews that stamped her name as the most important and embattled film critic in America, her championing of The Godfather, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Cabaret, Steven Spielberg’s Sugarland Express (when most critics preferred Terrence Malick’s Badlands) helping augur the seventies resurgence of American cinema that left us such beautiful scars and drizzly haze. It was the feudal age of film criticism too, when criticism retained the ability to make readers mad in both senses of the word, angry-mad and crazy-mad, with popular opinionists such as Judith Crist and Rex Reed and deep-dish ponderers such as Vernon Young (the Hudson Review), William S. Pechter (Commentary), and Charles Thomas Samuels (an academic freelancer whose mentor was John Simon, then at the unpopular height of his Dracula impersonation) making every major studio release or prestige European import a debatable proposition, the basic terminology setting a dividing line. “[John] Simon’s brief for insisting on ‘films’ instead of ‘movies’ reminds one of two monks chaffering over the word ‘consubstantiation’—no mean issue in its day,” wrote the novelist and critic Wilfrid Sheed from his own shaky vantage point as an unallied observer. “Movies means popcorn, double features, and coming in the middle: democracy. Film means, well, at least chewing quietly, no talking (a rule Mr. Simon has