Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [135]
Pauline thought that Allen’s new picture, Sleeper, a comedy set in 2173, was the most stable and most sustained of his films, “without the lapses that had found their way into his earlier work.” In it, Allen starred as the thirty-five-year-old owner of the Happy Carrot health food restaurant in Greenwich Village, who is admitted to the hospital for a peptic ulcer and wakes up two hundred years later. Allen had written to Pauline late in 1972 that Sleeper was a Buster Keaton–type comedy, though not in the pure Keaton spirit because of the intrusion of sound. Allen and Pauline had a friendly, long-running argument about the impact of sound on comedy, with Allen taking the position that sound prevented the great comics from achieving total reality. While Pauline found Sleeper consistently funny, something was missing: She felt that “Allen’s new sense of control over the medium and over his own material seems to level out the abrasive energy. You can be with it all the way, and yet it doesn’t impose itself on your imagination—it dissolves when it’s finished.”
Pauline saw deeply into the appeal Allen had for the 1970s movie audience: He was the brainy, nerdy kid who had always been beaten up on the school grounds but had managed to triumph because of his brains and wit, which, despite layers of insecurity and paranoia, he always believed in. Allen was the smart, irreverent observer of the social revolution that had been shaking up America since the ’60s, but although this brand of comedy was popular with young people—his script for Sleeper took gentle jabs at the NRA and the Nixon administration—he was anything but subversive. Quite the opposite: He was too much of a misfit to be a genuine hero of the youth movement, and he was a nostalgist with a deep love for traditional pop culture. Pauline was probably right when she judged that Allen had a misguided attraction to healthy conformity: “The battered adolescent,” she wrote, “still thinks that that’s the secret of happiness.”
Over a period of several years, Allen saw Pauline socially and frequently wrote to her when he happened to be out in California filming. He enjoyed having discourse with someone he considered to be such a superb critic, and the subjects of his letters varied widely. He wrote to her praising her advocacy of films such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller. He sent her the script for his comedy Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, asking her to read it and make any suggestions for changes. He wasn’t afraid to disagree with her: He didn’t like Sounder at all, and he thought that Straw Dogs was nothing remotely approaching a work of art, fascist or otherwise. Certainly, however, Allen cultivated her strenuously, going so far as to take her side after Peter Bogdanovich’s rebuttal to “Raising Kane” appeared in Esquire, assuring her that it would fail to get any serious attention at all. He also knew that he always had a sympathetic ear whenever he complained to her about the indignities suffered by talented directors in Hollywood, writing to her in the summer of 1973 about the creative bankruptcy that he found so stifling.
During Christmas week, a film opened that exploded box-office records around the country: William Friedkin’s The Exorcist—a thriller based on William Peter Blatty’s bestselling novel about the demonic possession of a twelve-year-old girl. Pauline was offended by the movie’s grotesqueries, but she was even more outraged by its attempts