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By Root 2288 0

American popularity contest. Godard was trying to achieve a synthesis of documentary and fiction and personal essay in the early sixties, but Godard’s Calvinist temperament was too cerebral. Altman, from a Catholic background, has what Joyce had: a love of the supreme juices of everyday life. He can put unhappy characters on the screen . . . and you don’t wish you didn’t have to watch them; you accept their unhappiness as a piece of the day, as you do in Ulysses.” Despite her antagonistic feelings toward the Catholic Church, this was a further expression of her belief that the Catholic upbringings of Coppola, Scorsese, and Altman was key to their success: Simply put, she believed that the Catholic fixation on guilt and sin and mystery had triumphed, in artistic terms, over the traditional Protestant obsessions with repression, self-denial, and an iron work ethic. Kathryn Altman, the director’s wife, would dismiss this idea years later, but Joan Tewkesbury somewhat agreed with Pauline, feeling that Altman, like many Catholics who have rejected their faith, was fascinated by “all of those things that are forbidden when you’re a kid. But it wasn’t conscious, and if you had said that to Bob, he would have told you you were full of shit.”

For Pauline, Nashville was the greatest example yet of Altman’s ability to characterize Americans in a way that had the flavor of satire, yet was so affectionate and complex and true that it went far beyond satire. The movie’s comment on America in one of its pivotal moments in history—post-Watergate—was rich and flavorful but never ungenerous, never a cheat, never an easy exposé, in the way that so many films such as Midnight Cowboy had been for years. Nashville was a brilliant success, in large part, because Altman included the audience in the experience of telling his story as much as he had included his actors. “Altman wants you to be part of the life he shows you,” Pauline wrote, “and to feel the exhilaration of being alive.... For the viewer, Nashville is a constant discovery of overlapping connections. The picture says, This is what America is, and I’m part of it. Nashville arrives at a time when America is congratulating itself for having got rid of the bad guys who were pulling the wool over people’s eyes. The movie says that it isn’t only the politicians who live the big lie—the big lie is something we’re all capable of trying for.” She ended with a great, crashing, symphonic chord: She called Nashville “the funniest epic vision of America ever to reach the screen.”

Pauline remained on a high about Nashville for weeks afterward, and it helped to sustain her through her disappointment in Barbra Streisand’s latest vehicle, a sequel to her Oscar-winning Fanny Brice story, Funny Lady. Streisand had been reluctant to do the film, but she had acquiesced to the producer, Ray Stark, to whom she was under contract. Funny Lady was leaden and stale and charmless, but what shattered Pauline was that her favorite female star had taken on those same qualities. She found that what Streisand did in the film was “no longer singing, it’s something else—that strident overdramatiza-tion that turns a song into a big number. The audience’s attention is directed away from the music and onto the star’s feat in charging it with false energy. Streisand is out to knock you cold, and you get cold, all right.” At the end of her review, she admitted to her readers, “The main problem I had with Funny Lady is that I fell out of like with Barbra Streisand.” She observed that Streisand’s “volatility is gone; something rigid and overbearing and heavy seems to be settling into her manner. She may have gone past the time when she could play a character; maybe that’s why she turns Fanny Brice into a sacred monster. Has Streisand lost sight of the actress she could be?”

The review provided a kind of vindication for Streisand, who was not so stung by Pauline’s barbs that she couldn’t see she had been right not to want to do the film in the first place. Pauline was delighted when Streisand phoned her to tell her she thought