Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [112]
She had reservations about the way movies were used in the picture-show sequences. Bogdanovich had used Father of the Bride, starring the ravishing young Elizabeth Taylor, for an early sequence that showed Sonny’s dissatisfaction with his ill-tempered girlfriend (marvelously played by Sharon Taggart). For the end, when the picture show closes, Bogdanovich chose a clip from a film by one of his idols, Howard Hawks—Red River. It was the final “yee-haw” cattle-drive sequence, and he selected it to contrast the mythic lives of the cowboys with the small, aimless lives of those few in the audience on the picture show’s closing night.
Pauline found the contrast too obvious and broad. She could remember the endless run-of-the-mill product ground out by the studios in the late ’40s and early ’50s—films barely more satisfying than a cheap TV episode—and pointed out that even these dismal movies provided bored people with a form of escapism. “For several decades,” she wrote, “the generally tawdry films we saw week after week contributed to our national identity—such as it was.” Seeing bad movies week in and week out and “still feeling that they represented something preferable to your own existence” was “part of the truth of American experience.” She had a point: It wasn’t first-class films such as Father of the Bride and Red River that were representative of the weekly moviegoing experience as much as it was forgettable B pictures.
Bogdanovich, however, felt that Pauline’s idea couldn’t possibly work in cinematic terms. “Pauline misses the point,” he said nearly forty years after her review of The Last Picture Show appeared. “We used Red River because of the cattle drive—it shows you that the days of that kind of adventure and exuberance and excitement are gone—compared to what we’ve been seeing from the movie.” (It’s worth noting that in McMurtry’s novel, the movie was The Kid from Texas, a B picture with Audie Murphy and Gale Storm. Sonny and Duane, remembering all their date nights at the picture show, are bored with it and walk out on it. McMurtry wrote, “It would have taken Winchester ’73 or Red River or some big movie to have crowded out the memories the boys kept having.”)
In the same column in which she reviewed The Last Picture Show, Pauline covered Dennis Hopper’s new work with a perilously similar title: The Last Movie, which investigated the impact of a film crew on a band of natives in the Peruvian Andes. She admitted it was a sloppy mess, but she couldn’t help observing, “If Bogdanovich replaces Hopper as the hero of the industry—if, to the industry, he becomes the new hot director that everyone should imitate—the most talented moviemakers may be in trouble. Even Nixon could like The Last Picture Show.” (Sometime later, when Bogdanovich met Richard Nixon, “I told him that Pauline had said it was a picture that even Richard Nixon would like. He slapped his thigh and said, ‘I don’t know if that’s a compliment or not.’ Then he said, ‘The Last Picture Show? Black-and-white? Texas? I did like that!’”)
Although Pauline was careful not to reveal too much of herself directly in her reviews, it had become possible for those who read her closely to get a sense of her position on various political issues—as was the case with her quip about Nixon’s liking The Last Picture Show. At around this time she also commented that she couldn’t understand how Nixon had gotten elected, because she didn’t know a single person who voted for him. The remark circulated widely in conservative circles, something that delighted Pauline no end.
It was also possible from reading some of her reviews to discern where she stood in relation to the women’s movement—namely, that she kept