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She thought the novel had probably intrigued Kubrick because of its “externalized approach,” which he had devised a way of matching in stately pictorial terms. But she felt he had missed Thackeray’s lighthearted, satirical tone. For her, the movie wore out its welcome fairly soon. “As it becomes apparent that we are to sit and admire the lingering tableaux,” she wrote, “we feel trapped. It’s not merely that Kubrick isn’t releasing the actors’ energies or the story’s exuberance but that he’s deliberately holding the energy level down.” She couldn’t help jabbing Kubrick in a rather personal way when she wrote of her disappointment in seeing the picture’s “slack-faced and phlegmatic” star, Ryan O’Neal, “his face straining with the effort to be what the Master wants—and all that Kubrick wants is to use him as a puppet.” Every frame of it was a reflection of the director’s self-importance. “Kubrick isn’t taking pictures in order to make movies, he’s making movies in order to take pictures,” she wrote. She also expressed her desire that Kubrick “would come home to this country to make movies again, working fast on modern subjects” such as his early, expert noir thriller The Killing.

Barry Lyndon divided the New York critics, ten of whom, led by Time’s Richard Schickel and The New York Times’s Vincent Canby, wrote favorably of it, with eight writing unfavorably. There was further divisiveness at that year’s voting for the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, which Rex Reed reported in his column in the Daily News. “I think it is important to remind everyone that Barry Lyndon was the head-on favorite of many of the voters,” he complained, “losing out in the third ballot only because the absentee critics lost their rights to proxies. I was voting for Barry Lyndon all the way.” Reed, like many others, was incensed that Nashville took the Best Picture prize both from the NYFCC and the National Society of Film Critics.

When Sam Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite was released that winter, Pauline wrote an odd essay for “The Current Cinema” titled “Notes on the Nihilist Poetry of Sam Peckinpah.” Less a review than a lengthy mash note, it offered an enormous amount of ammunition to her critics; Andrew Sarris could hardly be blamed if he felt that Pauline was becoming more of an auteurist than he had ever been. She liked The Killer Elite, which she found “intensely, claustrophobically exciting.” But the essay was most concerned with her admiration for her maverick friend, who continued to spit in the faces of the movie executives who thought they knew how to handle artists:

As the losing battles with the moneymen have gone on, year after year, Peckinpah has—only partly sardonically, I think, begun to see the world in terms of the bad guys (the studio executives who have betrayed him or chickened out on him) and the people he likes (generally actors), who are the ones smart enough to see what the process is all about, the ones who haven’t betrayed him yet. Hatred of the bad guys—the total mercenaries—has become practically the only sustaining emotion in his work, and his movies have become fables about striking back.

And later:

Peckinpah has become so nihilistic that filmmaking itself seems to be the only thing he believes in. He’s crowing in The Killer Elite, saying, “No matter what you do to me, look at the way I can make a movie.” The bedeviled bastard’s got a right to crow.

All of this was unquestionably sincere. But it was too much—Pauline was all but turning Peckinpah into a Christlike figure in the pages of The New Yorker. If Pauline admired the “craziness” in artists, Peckinpah gave it to her in spades. She failed to see that her idolatry of him was a kind of romanticism, that perhaps the executives who tried to keep him on track during the course of making a film might possibly have a legitimate point of view as well.

Pauline and Peckinpah continued to keep up a close correspondence. In 1976, he wrote to her from England, where he was filming Cross of Iron and coping with a trying sabbatical from alcohol:

If God had not meant