Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [147]
Dear Ray,
We’ll have to talk about it. If I was unjust to Barbra, that could be because I wasn’t pinning enough responsibility on you. Mainly I think we see the film so differently because of our opposing views of Streisand: I think she has it in her to be a great artist and I gather that you don’t. If she doesn’t, then what she does in Funny Lady hardly matters. But if she does, then it’s a terrible, self-destructive waste.
But we also disagree about movies: you really believe in the forties—you still want directors to be employees. Ray, you’re too smart not to know that the directors you call the good ones are second-rate. And you’re too rich not to take a gamble sometimes on the first-rate.
From this point on, Pauline often saw herself as more than a critic. Her reviews became more urgent, more emotional, more haranguing. She seemed to feel that mere criticism wasn’t sufficient, that she might be the only thing standing between some of Hollywood’s biggest talents and some form of creative bankruptcy.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Nashville went into general release in the summer of 1975, and Pauline’s description of it as “the funniest epic vision of America ever to reach the screen” was trumpeted in the print ads. As usual, when the film opened in New York, Altman, accompanied by Joan Tewkesbury, beat a path to the theater where it was playing, checking the movie lines at each showing. Nashville wound up costing only a little over $2 million, and with Pauline’s news-making advance rave, and the other, mostly positive reviews that came in over the summer, it was expected that the movie would have little trouble becoming a hit, as she had predicted.
Many of her fellow critics, however, were incensed that she had published the early review. They chose to view her action less as a case of passionate advocacy for a deserving picture than as an example of galloping arrogance and opportunism. They had all waited until the distributor had set up official press screenings—why couldn’t she? Those who had never trusted her trusted her even less now.
Some were quite vocal in their disapproval. A week after her review appeared in The New Yorker, Vincent Canby wrote a lengthy piece in The New York Times that opened with an assertion that Pauline hadn’t seen the “real” Nashville—that there had been no finished soundtrack, that it had been edited since she had viewed it, and might well have further cuts prior to general release. His tone was snide: “If one can review a film on the basis of an approximately three-hour rough cut, why not review it on the basis of a five-hour rough cut? A ten-hour one? On the basis of a screenplay? The original material if first printed as a book? On the basis of a press release? Gossip items?” He then launched into a merciless parody of her prose style, using an imaginary review of Elia Kazan’s forthcoming The Last Tycoon: “The Last Tycoon bombs like a paper bag full of water. It goes splat all over you and you wait there, like an idiot, hoping that someone will wipe you off.” (Perhaps not coincidentally, Canby had dedicated his new novel, Living Quarters, to Penelope Gilliatt.) In June, just after the film’s release, Rex Reed ridiculed Pauline on The Merv Griffin Show. He called Altman “really not very talented” and used Pauline’s Nashville review as evidence that she was “always foaming at the mouth about something.”
While it was much discussed among serious film-lovers, the huge potential country-and-western audience didn’t take to Nashville, and the movie suffered in those circles from poor word of mouth. The film proved to be too long, full of too many characters, its point of view a little too sophisticated for much of rural America. Nashville didn’t speak to the country as a whole in the way that Altman had hoped and Pauline had imagined