Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [149]
The film opened on June 20, just nine days after Nashville, in a wide-release pattern—no starting in a few theaters and waiting for word of mouth to build. With a major television ad campaign paving the way, Jaws became one of the biggest moneymakers in history in a remarkably short time, eventually grossing a staggering $458 million—dwarfing The Exorcist’s earnings of two years earlier. It established an overnight marketing revolution in Hollywood; the summer blockbuster had been born. Because Pauline admired the film and its director, she failed to perceive where its astonishing success might lead, and how it might ultimately make life more difficult for many of the artists she had spent years championing.
Pauline had a better time than usual at that year’s New York Film Festival; she believed that the great artistic explosion that had ignited films in the late’60s might really endure for a time. There were several American movies she liked, one of which was Michael Ritchie’s Smile, a comedy set in small-town America about the fictional Young American Miss teenage beauty pageant. It was, in a way, a cousin of Nashville, making its comments through the filter of an established American pop institution. Also like Nashville, Smile had a definite post-Watergate feel about it: the characters of Big Bob (Bruce Dern) and Brenda (Barbara Feldon), the principal organizers of the pageant, were determined to hold on to their sunny, superficial views of the world despite the fact that America had changed for good.
Ritchie had gotten the idea for Smile when he had been a judge at Santa Rosa’s Junior Miss pageant; several of the acts for the film’s talent competitions, including the packing of a suitcase and Annette O’Toole’s “Sincerity Strip,” were lifted from real-life beauty contests. Even the long sequence of the Jaycees Exhausted Rooster ceremony, which involved inductees kissing a raw chicken’s behind, was taken from life. “Michael Ritchie really had the pulse of America in the most loving way,” recalled Barbara Feldon. “He had both the sharpest satirical eye and the most loving touch. At the time we were shooting in Santa Rosa, and when I saw it put together, I was stunned that it wasn’t mean. It was very sweet, actually.”
Pauline thought Ritchie’s direction was a bit uneven, but still she couldn’t help admiring Smile. “There hasn’t been a small-town comedy in so long,” she wrote, “that this fresh, mussy [sic] film seems to be rediscovering America.”
She was especially delighted by the festival’s final showing: François Truffaut’s The Story of Adèle H. The director had been on a self-imposed sabbatical for a few years, writing and studying and searching for inspiration for a new film. Pauline felt his exile had been worthwhile, for his new film affected her as none of his movies had in years. The Story of Adèle H. was an unusual choice of subject matter for Truffaut: Adèle (Isabelle Adjani), the younger daughter of Victor Hugo, who has grown up on the isle of Guernsey, where her famous father lives in exile, falls in love with a British lieutenant. They have an affair in England, but the lieutenant wearies of her, and is happy to leave her behind when he is transferred with his regiment to Nova Scotia. But she is determined to repossess him and, defying convention, follows him, hounding him, humiliating him—doing anything to make sure he becomes hers. She manages to sabotage his engagement to another woman of wealth and position, all the while growing more and more desperate and finally going insane.
Pauline was temperamentally drawn to stories such as Adèle H.—stories in which women were portrayed acting out their darkest passions, throwing off societal expectations of them, displaying a willingness to go as far as their romantic obsessions could take them.