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By Root 2401 0

with its “distinctive, acrid flavor—a taste of death on the tongue.” And she loved the fact that the songs didn’t spring “organically” from the story: Nearly all of the musical numbers in Cabaret took place where they made most sense to take place—on the stage of the cabaret itself. Fosse had given the audience a bracing view of a society desperately trying to maintain a party atmosphere while ignoring what was happening around them. Not only did he never relax his vision; more surprisingly, he never let it get away from him—never allowed it to become labored and heavy-handed or moralistic. “The grotesque amorality in Cabaret is frightening,” Pauline wrote, “not because it’s weak but because it’s intensely, obscenely alive.” Most of all, she saw Cabaret as glorious evidence of the courage of its filmmaker’s convictions, proving that “you can create a new organic whole by style and imagination—if you have enough faith in the audience to do it right.”

Only a few weeks after Cabaret’s release, The Godfather opened and overshadowed all of the year’s other outstanding films. It changed the fortunes of everyone connected with it: most of all, those of its director and co-screenwriter, Francis Ford Coppola; its star, Marlon Brando; and its dynamic young cast members James Caan, Al Pacino, and Robert Duvall. Based on the bestselling novel by Mario Puzo, its depiction of the dark side of New York Italian–American life took the world by storm. More important, as far as Hollywood was concerned, it launched the careers of a prodigiously gifted group of Italian–American directors and actors.

In recent years most of the pictures that had taken on organized crime as a subject hadn’t done well, and The Godfather’s producer, Robert Evans, felt it was because too many of the characters had come off as walking Italian movie clichés: The audience simply couldn’t believe in them. He wanted the brand of realism that he felt only an Italian American could bring to the project, and he engaged Francis Ford Coppola, a gifted young filmmaker who had yet to come up with a hit, to direct. It was Coppola who believed that The Godfather should be less of a standard organized crime thriller than an incisive look at the inner workings and dynamics of the Corleone family.

No critic delighted more in its success than Pauline. The list of all-time box-office grosses had never been a badge of honor where she was concerned, but in her review, she celebrated her theory that “the best popular movies come out of a merger of commerce and art.” She admired the fact that Coppola had “stayed very close to the book’s greased-lightning sensationalism and yet has made a movie with the spaciousness and strength that popular novels such as Dickens’s used to have.” Pauline found Coppola’s work “tenaciously intelligent . . . It’s amazing how encompassing the view seems to be—what a sense you get of a broad historical perspective, considering that the span is only from 1945 to the mid-fifties.” As for Brando, she considered that his acting had “mellowed in recent years; it is less immediately exciting than it used to be, because there’s not the sudden, violent discharge of emotion.” To convey fully the impact of his performance, she displayed her own imaginative powers, writing like a fiction writer: Brando reminded her of one of “those old men who carry never-ending grudges and ancient hatreds inside a frail frame, those monsters who remember minute details of old business deals when they can no longer tie their shoelaces.”

Best of all, Coppola had been true to his fictional story while adeptly catching the current mood of the country: He had done what so many other heavy-handed directors had been attempting to do and failing. “Organized crime is not a rejection of Americanism,” Pauline wrote, “it’s what we fear Americanism to be. It’s our nightmare of the American system. When ‘Americanism’ was a form of cheerful, bland official optimism, the gangster used to be destroyed at the end of the movie and our feelings resolved. Now the mood of the whole country has darkened,