Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [122]
One might have expected many critics to embrace Sounder, but Pauline’s was one of the most laudatory reviews the movie received. In The New York Times, Roger Greenspun found that Ritt seemed “to strive for classical plainness, but to succeed only in being ordinary.” Lindsay Patterson, also in the Times, boasted that he grew up in a small Louisiana town among black and white sharecroppers, and wrote that Sounder bore “no resemblance whatsoever to reality as I observed it, and sometimes lived it, among black sharecroppers.” Even Richard Schickel, who admired the film, worried about the reaction of the black audience: “Are they available only for fantasies about machismo-bound private eyes? Can they respond to the story of a black man of another generation for whom rage and militancy were simply not available as responses to injustice?” Despite a soft opening, Sounder was a hit, building slowly and steadily and proving especially popular in the new marketing technique of group sales; by January 1973, it would gross $3,251,000 on 115 engagements.
Another smart and important film for the black audience appeared that fall—Sidney J. Furie’s Lady Sings the Blues, a biography of the great Billie Holiday, starring Diana Ross. Pauline, the inveterate jazz-lover, was riveted, even if she found that the film fell far short of its subject in musical terms: Much as she liked Ross’s acting, she thought her shallow pop singing was a pale echo of Holiday’s emotionally naked performances. Yet Lady Sings the Blues pleased her because it wasn’t “heavy and glazed,” as so many other singer biographies in the past had been. “Factually it’s a fraud, but emotionally it delivers. It has what makes movies work for a mass audience: easy pleasure, tawdry electricity, personality—great quantities of personality.” It held her, despite its inability to show what drove Holiday musically—what made singing the most important thing in her life. Pauline felt that the entire project was inflected with a pop sensibility, rather than a jazz one. “Pop music provides immediate emotional gratifications that the subtler and deeper and more lasting pleasures of jazz can’t prevail against,” she wrote. “Pop drives jazz back underground. And that’s what this pop movie does to the career of a great jazz singer.” She admitted that she had loved Lady Sings the Blues, yet she stressed that she didn’t “want Billie Holiday’s hard, melancholic sound buried under this avalanche of pop. When you get home, you have to retrieve her at the phonograph; you have to do restoration work on your own past.”
As much as Pauline had praised several films of the past two years, as much as she obviously felt they were pointing in a new and intoxicating direction for the cinema, close readers of her column may well have had the sense that these pictures were simply preparation for some ultimate, as yet unknown event in her moviegoing life. Her reviews had began to pulsate with an almost palpable sense of anticipation and vulnerability, as if she were preparing herself for an experience so overpowering that she had never fully been able to imagine it. Having proclaimed that the last year had represented a legendary time for the movies, she now seemed poised for the supreme seduction. And it took place on October 14, 1972, the closing night of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, when she experienced Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris.
Bertolucci’s film had arrived at the festival accompanied by tremendous word-of-mouth excitement. There had not been the usual special screening for the critics, and the top reviewers in New York were vying for a seat at the final night of the festival. They already knew that Last Tango in Paris took on extremely adult and difficult subject matter—the MPAA had given it an X rating—and there was considerable talk that the movie was bound to run into difficulty with the notoriously difficult Italian censors.