Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [152]
Some people gossiped that Pauline was sleeping with Peckinpah, and still others thought there was a romantic connection between her and her good friend Richard Albarino, a handsome, energetic New York writer whose company Pauline enjoyed because his intellectual tempo was similar to hers. But those closer to her knew better. The fact was that Pauline had been finished with men for some time. “She was done completely,” said James Toback. “One hundred percent. And if you wanted to misinterpret her life about the ones who were sort of escorting her, the one that you could have misinterpreted was Dick Albarino. It had the appearance of that, but that was not true.”
Having missed the opportunity to write about Paul Mazursky’s Blume in Love, Pauline was delighted to celebrate his next movie, Next Stop Greenwich Village, an autobiographical account of his days as a young actor in New York. She parted company with her fellow critics, however, when she reviewed Lina Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties in the winter of 1976, a film that was acclaimed in The New York Times as “Miss Wertmuller’s King Kong, her Nashville, her 8½, her Navigator, her City Lights.” “If Seven Beauties is all these things, what is it?” Pauline wondered. This film about the misadventures of a Neapolitan man during World War II who runs afoul of the Nazis and is sent to a concentration camp where he pathetically tries to win favor with a female commandant was, Pauline thought, “beyond annoyance . . . it’s extremely ambitious, and I think it’s a gloppy mess.” She disliked Wertmuller’s films—she hadn’t responded to the much-acclaimed Swept Away, either, complaining that “the characters never shut up”—and noted that it was futile to discuss “the stated ideas in a Wertmuller film because they can’t be sorted out . . . The way Lina Wertmuller makes movies, she has to believe that disorder is creative. She plunks in whatever comes to mind, and rips through the scenes. It’s all bravura highs and bravura lows, without any tonal variation,” all the while believing that she was “raising the consciousness of the masses.”
She also strayed from the herd with her review of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Pauline, of course, had a long history with the project, and the end result was just as unnerving as she had imagined it would be that night two years earlier, when she had read the script in bed and then been afraid to have it in the room with her. Perhaps no mainstream film—not even Midnight Cowboy—had so fully explored the seamy side of New York, which in 1976 was still a grim, crime-ridden city in which old-time residents bemoaned the ugly decline of neighborhoods such as Times Square, where much of the movie’s action took place. The character of Iris, the twelve-year-old hooker played by Jodie Foster—the focal point of Travis’s reformer’s zeal—was a movie first, and genuinely disturbing. There is an unnerving sequence in which Travis attempts to date Betsy, the campaign worker portrayed by Cybill Shepherd, by taking her to a porn film in Times Square. And there is the depiction of Travis’s insane assassination plot aimed at the political candidate Palan-tine. Like Nashville, Taxi Driver considered the violence that marginalized outsiders could inflict on those who occupied center stage.
In time, Taxi Driver would be held up as one of the richest examples of the bold new directorial sensibility that had sprung up in American films of the 1970s. So it is surprising to read the reviews it received on its initial release. Many, like Vincent