Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [127]
The pace of moviegoing that Pauline maintained at this time was extraordinary: As always, she saw many films that she didn’t care to cover, and in her December 23, 1972, column for The New Yorker, she contributed substantial essays on five films, including Robert Altman’s latest, Images. The study of the world of a schizophrenic woman who can no longer sort out reality from fantasy, it was a good representative of the kind of modestly budgeted film with a highly personal point of view that was being made regularly in the early 1970s. Altman had written the script several years before in Los Angeles and claimed not to have altered one word of it. Like all of his films of this period, Images didn’t cost much. Altman admitted that the story was probably influenced mostly by Bergman’s Persona, but he always stressed that he hadn’t meant it to be a precise study in schizophrenia; “I trust instinct more than any study of logical conclusions,” he later said.
Pauline thought Images didn’t work, but she went easy on it in her review because of her respect for Altman’s gifts, which she found “almost frighteningly non-repetitive.” Altman showed every sign of continuing to expand as an artist—even in this “empty, trashy chic film,” a “psychological thriller with no psychological content, so there’s no suspense and the climax has no power.” Her review ended in something of a defensive mode: “It’s possible that this formidably complicated man has as many facets as this gadgety movie’s tiresome prisms, and that in reaching out instinctively and restlessly he’s learning techniques that he hasn’t yet found a use for. My bet is that he will; when he’s bad he’s very bad, but when he’s good he’s extraordinary.”
The message in that final paragraph seemed to be that the end result might be all-important in the work of other directors, but it was less so in Altman: In his films, the intention was given greater weight. For the most revered and influential film critic in America to take this position with a director did not necessarily do the director great favors in Hollywood. Pauline’s reviews may have made it a bit easier for Altman to get funding, but it also made him the object of many other directors’ resentment. Altman himself liked to tell people that he admired Pauline for never being in anyone’s pocket, but there is plenty of evidence that he spent considerable time wooing her. He loved having lengthy meals with her, at which the liquor flowed freely. Even more than most directors, Altman took an intense interest in the fate of his films; his wife, Kathryn, recalled him obsessively telephoning the management of the New York theaters where his pictures had opened and asking them how many receipts had been tallied for each showing. He felt that the critics could make or break him, and he wasn’t at all above courting the most important ones.
Rene Auberjonois, who acted in Images, lived in Manhattan, on West Ninety-third Street, just around the corner from Pauline and Gina. He frequently ran into Pauline while waiting for a bus, and they would chat about whichever film he was doing. In Ireland, on the set of Images, Altman asked Auberjonois to do him a favor, which made the actor deeply ill at ease. “He made me sit down and write a postcard to Pauline Kael about being in Ireland and making the film. I felt incredibly awkward about it, because I didn’t really know her at all, but he assumed that because I lived around the corner from her, it would be all right for me to write a personal