Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [137]
Thieves Like Us was a beautifully sustained piece of work, and because it was more plot-driven than Altman’s earlier films, it had the potential to capture a wider audience. For Pauline, it was yet another Altman triumph; it had “the pensive, delicate romanticism of McCabe, but it isn’t hesitant or precarious . . . It’s the closest to flawless of Altman’s films—a masterpiece.” She had long loved to describe the dry, cautious writing of some of her fellow critics as “saphead objectivity”; there was none of that in her review of Thieves Like Us:
Robert Altman spoils other directors’ films for me; Hollywood’s paste-up, slammed-together jobs come off a faulty conveyor belt and are half chewed up in the process. I think I know where just about all the elements come from in most American movies (and in most foreign movies, too) and how the mechanisms work, but I don’t understand how Robert Altman gets his effects, any more than I understand how Renoir did (or, for that matter, how Godard did from Breathless through Weekend , or how Bertolucci does). When an artist works right on the edge of his unconscious, like Altman, not asking himself why he’s doing what he’s doing but trusting to instinct (which in Altman’s case is the same as taste), a movie is a special kind of gamble.
In both New York and Los Angeles, her colleagues began to grumble: Pauline was not keeping a healthy distance from her pet director. At the San Francisco Film Festival in the fall of 1973, Altman spoke at a retrospective of his own work, telling audiences that “Pauline Kael saved McCabe & Mrs. Miller when the studio and the distributors were going to junk it, and she did the same for The Long Goodbye. Naturally I agree with everything she said.” Pauline’s detractors predicted that, sooner or later, it all had to end badly. One thing that delighted them: Her rapturous support failed to keep Thieves Like Us from being a box-office disappointment.
Pauline’s 1973–74 season at The New Yorker ended with a pair of “road” pictures about criminals on the lam: Steven Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express and Terrence Malick’s Badlands. In The Sugarland Express a daffy blonde named Lou Jean goads her husband to escape from a Texas prerelease prison so they can kidnap their child, whom the welfare department has taken from them and placed in foster care. Pauline rightly thought that she sensed the influence of Robert Altman in the film’s clear-eyed and perceptive, but never condescending, view of America. She recognized immediately Spielberg’s gift for camera technique and jazzy visual storytelling: “In terms of the pleasure that technical assurance gives an audience, this film is one of the most phenomenal debut films in the history of movies.” She loved that Spielberg had managed to get a naturalistic performance out of Goldie Hawn as the blissfully oblivious Lou Jean, who revels in her newfound celebrity and never stops believing that everything is going to work out just fine. Most important, Spielberg loved the art form and knew how to use it: “If there is such a thing as a movie sense—and I think there is (I know fruit vendors and cabdrivers who have it and some movie critics who don’t)—Spielberg really has it.”
She was bored, however, by Badlands, which she judged to be yet another oppressively