Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [132]
As a slice of Italian-American New York life, Mean Streets was less concerned with a well-structured story line than with making the brutal circumstances of the characters’ lives practically come through the skin of the actors. In the opening sentence of her New Yorker review, Pauline dubbed Mean Streets “a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking.” She loved the way the picture portrayed the mercurial nature of violence, which “breaks out so unexpectedly that you can’t believe it, and is over before you’ve been able to take it in. The whole movie has this effect; it psyches you up to accept everything it shows you.” Pauline felt that the true novelty of Mean Streets was the way in which it delved into “the psychological connections between Italian Catholicism and crime, between sin and crime.” She thought that The Godfather, and now Mean Streets, had tapped into some previously unexplored connection between the characters’ lawless, hedonistic lives and the powerful sense of guilt they had absorbed from their Catholic education and family life.
The most surprising review Pauline wrote during this period was of The Way We Were, a nostalgic romantic drama directed by Sydney Pollack and written by Arthur Laurents. The Way We Were was one of the hit films of the time that connected with the nostalgia craze that had arisen in the early 1970s. But the adoration for the past also implied a decided ambivalence about the present—a topic Pauline had been writing about in “The Current Cinema” for years. The student protest movement had begun to run out of steam by 1972, and by 1973, with the cessation of American military action in Vietnam, young rebels seemed tired, confused, unsure of how to channel their energies. “We were easily discouraged,” wrote essayist Joyce Maynard, “quick to abandon hope for change and to lose interest.” Pauline may have been a tremendous advocate of the movies that grew out of the atmosphere of unrest in the late’60s and early ’70s, but she had always been curiously unpredictable on the question of open rebellion. Organized activism and protest were not anything she cared to involve herself with, given their group mentality, and she tended to counsel her young friends, caught up in campus rebellion, to channel their energies into what they dreamed of doing for a living—particularly if they wanted to write. As attuned to the times as she may have been, she had hung on to her old-school, Greatest Generation approach to work, and any trace of sentimentality about the ennobling virtue of organized activism had long since vanished.
The nostalgia movement had been slower to come into mainstream movies than it had to fashion and the theater, but The Way We Were was a sure sign of its arrival, and of the general shift in public tastes that would evolve over the next several years. A sentimental love story about a smart, committed girl who falls in love with a man who can’t take a stand on anything, it wasn’t at all Pauline’s kind of movie. But her unexpected approval of the picture probably could be boiled down to a single factor—Barbra Streisand.
The Way We Were traced the unlikely and uneasy love that develops between Katie Morosky, an outspoken Jewish political