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By Root 2182 0

In an essay published in The New Yorker in January 1971 called “Notes on Heart and Mind,” Pauline made it clear that she didn’t want her concerns in this area to be misinterpreted as being reactionary. “I don’t trust critics who say they care only for the highest and the best,” she wrote. “It’s an inhuman position, and I don’t believe them. I think it’s simply their method of exalting themselves.” But she saw the dangers in new films that were so freewheeling and “free-spirited” that they lacked any real center or settled for being modish studies in alienation. She was afraid the new pop sensibility wasn’t balanced with enough of an artistic, musical, or literary background of genuine substance; she was wary of the new breed of arts-loving intellectuals who had sprung up on college campuses across the country, who rejected much of traditional literature and filled their shelves with “head” reading that combined a pose of depth and meaning with a jazzy, pop sensibility, books such as Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, Tolkien’s Ring books, and Richard Brau-tigan’s Trout Fishing in America. She felt that the children of the 1960s “have been so sold on Pop and so saturated with it that they appear to have lost their bearings in the arts.”

This led to a number of traps, both for the critic and those reading him. First, it led reviewers to praise rotten movies simply because they were considered in tune with the times. This worked to the critic’s advantage, of course: It made him seem an ally of the moviegoing public and also earned him greater name recognition, since his reviews were constantly being quoted in the movie’s ads. Much of this, Pauline was sure, smacked of collusion: “In most cases, the conglomerates that make the movies partly own the magazines and radio stations and TV channels, or if they don’t own them, advertise in them or have some interlocking connection with them. That accounts for a lot of the praise that is showered on movies.” Cover stories on big films always helped magazines boost their newsstand sales, and Pauline knew of many cases in which critics at major newsmagazines were pressured by their editors to write favorable notices of a new release so they could justify placing it on the cover. She found many of the television critics particularly insidious because “they understand that their job is dependent on keeping everybody happy.”

Yet, in the end, the tension between the true creative talents in the film industry and the sellouts was an enormous part of what revved Pauline up, made her eager to sit down at her drafting table each week and begin scribbling on her yellow legal pads. She might strongly disagree with John Simon that part of the function of a film critic was to raise the standard of what got made—she wasn’t comfortable with the notion of identifying what that standard might be—but believed, as Judith Crist did, that it was imperative to call attention to the best work being done. “I don’t have any doubts about movies’ being a great art form,” she wrote, “and what makes film criticism so peculiarly absorbing is observing—and becoming involved in—the ongoing battle of art and commerce. But movies alone are not enough: a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation. Most movies are shaped by calculation about what will sell: the question they’re asking about new projects in Hollywood is ‘In what way is it like Love Story?’”

The winter season ground on with a run of mostly indifferent films. Pauline admired Eric Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee, but despite her liking of its gently witty script and the “summery richness” of Nestor Almendros’s cinematography, it was ultimately too civilized—too tame—for her to embrace fully. She regretted that this story of sexual obsession had “no emotional head of steam when it gets to the subject of sensuality and compulsive attraction.” It wasn’t until the very end of her six-month reviewing stint that she found a movie she responded to with great enthusiasm: Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, which had been shown at the New York Film Festival in September