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1970 and was now going into general release. Set in Mussolini’s Italy, it cast Jean-Louis Trintignant as Marcello Clerici, a former liberal who has become a quintessentially faceless member of the Fascist machine. Bertolucci loved the look of’ 30s films, and with his cinematographer, the peerless Vittorio Storaro, he came up with a remarkable look for the movie. Like some of the other reviewers, Pauline was not entirely comfortable with the psychosexual explanation for Marcello’s conformity (an attempted seduction, when he was thirteen, by a chauffeur), nor was she at ease with the way Bertolucci equated lavish opulence with decadence, an old movie trope of which she was fast tiring. “Our desire for grace and seductive opulence is innocent, I think, except to prigs, so when it’s satisfied by movies about Fascism or decadence we get uncomfortable, because our own enjoyment is turned against us. One wants modern directors to be able to use the extravagant emotional possibilities of the screen without falling into the DeMille-Fellini moralistic bag.”

On March 27, in a ceremony held at the Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan, Pauline received the George Polk Memorial Award for Criticism, conferred by the Department of Journalism of Long Island University. She was in good company: Other honorees were Otto Friedrich (for his book Decline and Fall) and Walter Cronkite.

With her review of The Conformist, Pauline wrapped up her fourth season at The New Yorker. That winter also saw the appearance of “Raising Kane,” a major essay she had worked on for several years—a revisionist look at the creation of one of the landmark films of the old studio system, Citizen Kane. Part critical analysis, part polemic, part outward-spiraling cultural history, Pauline’s article would cement her reputation among her admirers and convince many of her detractors that she was what they had always accused her of being—an irresponsible bully.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

What was the impetus for Pauline to write “Raising Kane”? Bantam Books had wanted to bring out a paperback edition of the script, with an introductory essay by her. She passed on the offer initially—then, when another writer assigned to the project didn’t work out, she agreed to do it. In September 1968, Pauline received $375, half of the total advance from Bantam, and set to work. Her contract included the right to publish the essay separately in a magazine.

More than anything, “Raising Kane” was her call to arms to defend Hollywood’s perennial underdog—the screenwriter. As her own fame as a critic had grown and she had gotten to know more and more writers, she had become increasingly aware of how dismissively the writer was treated by the film business. For decades directors, producers, and stars had wrested writers’ scripts away from them and changed them wholesale. “You have no say at all,” Arthur Laurents complained to his interviewer Patrick McGilligan in the late ’80s. “Don’t you understand? No writer has any say at all about a movie! You can argue, but you can’t say. They have the say. That’s why they don’t like writers. Because they wish they [themselves] could write. That really is why. They think, now they’ll really fix you . . . now we’ll fix you . . . we’ll make it ours.”

Pauline knew better than most that there were few more ego-driven animals on the face of the earth than film directors—and Orson Welles, the young, blazing genius who had come to Hollywood in the early 1940s, commandeered a major studio, and called most of the shots on what became one of the industry’s groundbreaking films, was the embodiment of directorial ego. By the early 1970s Welles had directed only one commercially successful picture—1946’s The Stranger—but with the rapidly growing number of film studies programs and campus film societies, more and more young people were discovering his work, particularly his two early masterpieces, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. Much had been written about the fate of both pictures—how, caught in a net of studio and national political chicanery, they