Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [126]
Not surprisingly, given the difference in their literary temperaments, Pauline pounced with her review of the film version of Play It as It Lays, released in the fall of 1972. The story of Maria’s plight struck her as “the ultimate princess fantasy”—that is, a study of a woman “too sensitive for this world—you see the truth, and so you suffer more than ordinary people, and can’t function.” It wasn’t only the sensibility of the novel that annoyed her, it was Didion’s celebrated style, which Pauline found “ridiculously swank.” She found Play It as It Lays absurdly self-conscious, “a writer’s performance, with every word screwed tight, and a designer’s feat, the sparse words placed in the spiritual emptiness of white pages.” Her review included a rather personal swipe at Didion, who, she reported, “wanted Frank Perry to direct—possibly because he had already glorified the suffering little-girl-woman in Diary of a Mad Housewife . . . The adaptation is a novelist’s wish fulfillment: narration that retains the most ‘eloquent’ passages in the book, dialogue virtually intact, and a transfer to the screen of the shattered-sensibility style by means of quick scenes that form a mosaic.”
It was a review that brought a civil retort from Didion’s husband John Gregory Dunne, who took Pauline to task for getting her facts wrong. Sometime earlier, at an evening they had spent together at an Academy Awards party at the home of the literary agent Lynn Nesbit, Dunne and Didion had mentioned to Pauline that Frank Perry would be directing Play It as It Lays. Pauline regarded Perry as one of the most humorless and flatfooted of directors and asked—incredulously, Dunne remembered—why they wanted him. “I replied that actually we wanted Sam Peckinpah to do the picture, and that Sam wanted to do it,” Dunne wrote. “The studios reacted to Sam’s doing a picture about a woman as if it were suggested that Hitler do a film about the Jewish question. With Sam out, it became academic who directed.” Mike Nichols was interested, but negotiations with him broke down, and Perry had put up his own money to finance the script, making his assignment “a simple matter of economics.”
A few weeks later Dunne wrote to her again, to tell her that he was reviewing her forthcoming collection, called Deeper into Movies, for the Los Angeles Times. “I confess a certain ambivalence about the book,” he wrote. “I think you’re the best movie critic in America, but I’m not altogether sure that’s a compliment.”
At year’s end, she was completely let down by Sam Peckinpah’s latest, The Getaway, a violent picture about a bank robbery, which she described as “the most completely commercial film Peckinpah has made, and his self-parasitism gives one forebodings of emptiness. When a director repeats his successful effects, it can mean that he is getting locked in and has stopped responding to new experience. (Hitchcock is the most glaring example.) The Getaway is long and dull and has no reverberations except of other movies, mostly by Peckinpah.”
Peckinpah wrote to Pauline from Durango, Mexico, where he had been living ever since the filming of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Illness had plagued the shoot, and he told her that he had at one point been forced to work with a fever of 104 degrees. But his tone in the letter was again apologetic, as it had been when she reviewed Straw Dogs: “Sorry you didn’t get my crude attempt at satire with Getaway,” he wrote. “It was a put on but few people realised [sic] it. . . . You said a great thing in your Getaway review about a director repeating himself. I am afraid I will be doing that for quite a while, until I get enough money to do the kind of scripts I believe in. But I suppose I will always be