Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [131]
The first movie she reviewed that fall picked up on this theme: The Last American Hero, directed by Lamont Johnson, and based on an Esquire article by Tom Wolfe from nearly a decade earlier, told the story of Junior Johnson (rechristened Junior Jackson for the film), a backwoods boy who starts out trafficking his father’s moonshine and winds up a star on the stock-car racing circuit. The script concerned the idea that “corruption seems to be inescapable: if you want to win, you learn to take orders even from people whose idea of winning you don’t understand.... The film says that to win you give up everything you care about except winning.”
Pauline loved the film, which turned out to be another underdog for her to champion. She reported that Twentieth Century–Fox had cut the picture badly, losing some of its most important scenes, and then given it a pitifully limited opening in the South, pushing it as an action film when it was really a thoughtful character study. When it didn’t do well, the studio decided it had a loser on its hands, one that couldn’t possibly go over in urban areas, and gave it a limp one-week engagement in New York. Despite the fact that the studio didn’t bother about setting up any press screenings, Pauline sought out the film—it was Pretty Poison all over again. In her review, she suggested that if the movie could manage to find some kind of audience—several of the other reviews were also good—“perhaps someone in the head office at Fox could do the sane, decent thing and restore the cuts?”
Johnson thought that he had gotten “a screwing” by the studio when the film was released, so when he read Pauline’s favorable review, he dropped her a note thanking her. “I invited her to lunch, and we got drunk and had a marvelous time,” he remembered. “She was a marvelous character. Marvelous gestures. She reminded me of Zasu Pitts. She would tear at her bosom and roll her eyes in disgust or dismay or delight about something. Extremities were her big suit. The fact that she was as enthusiastic about me as she was spread happily through the industry.”
Pauline’s first column that season highlighted a characteristic of hers that would come increasingly under fire as the decade wore on. Her opening comments on the state of films during Watergate America, combined with her review of The Last American Hero—a film that did not warrant the in-depth analysis of one by Bertolucci or Coppola or Altman—made for a long article. Several of her colleagues had begun to snipe about the length of her pieces. “I am sorry to say that I think The New Yorker did her in by giving her unlimited space,” said Judith Crist. “And I think the older readers didn’t have the patience, whereas the younger readers were the devotees.”
At the New York Film Festival in the fall of 1973, Pauline saw another movie that seduced her completely: Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets. It was the thirty-year-old director’s fourth feature, and its subject returned him to his early days, growing up in Little Italy on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
Mean Streets, shot for around $500,000, is the story of Charlie Capp, Jr. (Harvey Keitel), who has grown up in Little Italy and now is trying to make his way to a more respectable life uptown, running a restaurant and nightclub. Charlie possesses a fatal flaw: