Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [110]
Those who believed that criticism should maintain a coolly objective tone were bothered by the emotional tenor of Pauline’s support for the film, and her review confirmed many suspicions that she was incapable of staying within “correct” critical boundaries. It gave her, however, the growing confidence that her impact on readers and audiences was even greater than she had imagined.
When Pauline returned to her New Yorker duties in the fall of 1971, she led off with one of the most misleading statements of her career. Her season-opening review was of John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday, a movie that posed a particular challenge for her: The screenplay was written by Penelope Gilliatt.
“Seeing Sunday Bloody Sunday was for me like reading a novel that was very far from my life and my temperament, and that yet when finished it had me thinking,” she wrote in the opening of her review. Sunday Bloody Sunday concerned a ménage a trois involving a middle-aged Jewish doctor, an uptight female employment officer, and the casually amoral younger man whom they both love. The film’s central theme was how people learn to give up their dreams and settle for less than they had once imagined having. The seminal scene took place between Alex (Glenda Jackson) and her mother (Peggy Ashcroft). At the end of a cheerless dinner, Mrs. Grenville tries to tell Alex why she has stayed with her work-obsessed, neglectful husband:
MRS. GRENVILLE: Darling, you keep throwing in your hand because you haven’t got the whole thing. There is no whole thing. One has to make it work.
What you don’t know is that there was a time when I left him. We had different opinions about everything. Everything seemed impossible.
ALEX: When?
MRS. GRENVILLE: You were three. He left me alone. It was good of him (pause). But I was mad not to know how much I was going to miss him.
You think it’s nothing, but it’s not nothing.
Pauline’s comment about the film’s being alien to her own temperament was correct in one sense: She was and always had been intractable with respect to any form of compromise. But its central situation—the sharing of a man with another man—was reminiscent of her own past, with Robert Horan or James Broughton in the role of Sunday Bloody Sunday’s central character. She found that “Peter Finch’s Dr. Daniel Hirsh is possibly a movie first—a homosexual character who isn’t fey or pathetic or grotesque.” She loved the fact that Sunday Bloody Sunday didn’t portray its protagonists as wallowing around in despair—as an American film might have done. Instead “the characters here all are coping; they’re not falling apart,” and she felt that the movie’s sophisticated approach to a delicate emotional situation made it “instantly recognizable as a classic.” She pointed out that the director, John Schlesinger, had “lost his stridency”—the quality that had made her dislike Midnight Cowboy. But she saved her highest praise for Penelope Gilliatt, who, she felt, had done “what few people who write for the screen think to do: she has kept her self-respect as a writer, and written not down but up. She has trusted the audience. Miss Gilliatt and I are ships that pass each other in the night every six months. It is a pleasure to salute her on this crossing.”
Like many other critics, Pauline had ascribed much of the film’s artistic success to Gilliatt, a fact that infuriated John Schlesinger. It may well have been an example of her tendency, as William Friedkin described it, to “mistake the