Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [142]
In October 1974, Pauline wrote a review of Karel Reisz’s The Gambler, the story of a New York City English professor (James Caan) with a gambling addiction. She judged it as “strikingly well-edited and . . . dramatically supercharged and compelling.” But it was one of Pauline’s least favorite kinds of picture, one that was too worked out and schematic. Speaking, as she loved to do, directly to the audience, she wrote that it was “complete without us, and there’s nothing for us to do except receive it, feel wiped out, and genuflect.”
The screenplay for The Gambler was written by the young James Toback, who was not at all pleased when he read Pauline’s review. She felt that the movie tried to tell the audience that “the secret of gambling is that gamblers are self-destructive people who want to lose.” She thought compulsive gambling had a much simpler source: “The poor bastard who buys a two-dollar ticket he can’t afford is hoping to change his life with the two dollars. How else can he change it?”
Not long afterward Toback met Pauline, who was attending a screening in New York with Gina, and quickly confronted her. “I always enjoy reading you,” Toback said, “so I was really disturbed to find that the one critic I enjoy reading totally missed the boat on my movie. I’m not talking about whether you liked it or didn’t—you just got it wrong. You were so blind with your own personal fury that you didn’t actually get what’s right on the screen for someone who’s listening to hear.” Pauline, curious, wanted him to explain. Toback continued, “The whole point in the review was that the movie says gamblers gamble to lose. And that is an idiotic statement. The opposite is in the movie.”
As they were getting into the elevator, Pauline suggested that they go out to dinner, so that Toback could explicate further on what he felt she had missed. Over a lengthy meal at O’Neal’s he and Pauline talked into the night, while Gina remained silent. “For a while I just felt awkward and tried to direct some of my comments toward her,” he recalled, “but I saw after a while that this was probably not unusual.”
There was another point in Pauline’s review of The Gambler that stung Toback. She had commented that the picture featured “a lot of characters, but there is really only one, and he is the author’s surrogate, the brilliant young Jewish prince, professor of literature to ghetto blacks, potential great novelist, and gambler.” After their dinner, he and Pauline became fast friends, and over time, he thought he understood the source of her comment about his being a Jewish prince. Toback had in fact come from a well-to-do New York family, while Pauline had come from working-class stock. “She never liked to talk about being Jewish,” Toback observed. “It was never anything she really identified with. At the same time, she had a real social and cultural antagonism for Jews she felt were sort of pretenders to society. She felt the character in The Gambler was that, and therefore I must be.” To Toback, Pauline’s conflicts about being Jewish were securely