Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [155]
In the fall of 1976 Pauline saw a movie at the New York Film Festival that she admired very much—the Swiss director Alain Tanner’s Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, the story of a group of left-leaning men and women who are attempting to adjust to the fact that the social revolution they anticipated in the ’60s has not come to pass. It was a witty and quietly provocative talkfest, austerely but beautifully photographed, and while some critics objected to its odd structure—John Simon found the people in it “as uncomfortable to watch as a backless chair is to sit in”—Pauline thought it “a marvelous toy, weightless, yet precise and controlled.” She was indulgent of what would become the year’s smash hit, Rocky, saying that the picture was “shameless, and that’s why—on a certain level—it works. What holds it together is innocence.” She was won over by Sylvester Stallone’s performance in the title role, as a down-and-out debt collector who gets a chance at the world heavyweight boxing title. “Stallone has the gift of direct communication with the audience,” Pauline wrote. “Rocky’s naïve observations come from so deep inside him that they have Lewis Carroll enchantment.”
The young writer Carrie Rickey, a former student of Pauline’s old friend Manny Farber, accompanied Pauline the night she saw Rocky (which happened to be Election Night, 1976) and would remember the evening for reasons apart from the movie. After the screening, Pauline and Rickey went to her room at the Royalton and watched the election returns. Pauline, who supported Jimmy Carter, was incensed when Rickey admitted that she had cast an absentee ballot in her native California for Eugene McCarthy. “She screamed at me for doing that,” recalled Rickey. “She lectured me on why I needed to be for Carter. We also had a very interesting conversation about whether Nashville predicted Carter—this weird populist governor from a Southern state augured for a Carter win.”
Rickey also remembered Pauline’s lack of interest in the feminist movement. Rickey was quite intrigued by the contrast between the female and male aesthetics in film. “I had proposed back then that the women who directed movies—and there weren’t a lot of them—used longer takes and not a lot of cuts. I thought their rhythm was inimical to mainstream cinema, which was more quick cuts and actions. Pauline said, ‘Stay away from that feministic stuff’—her word—‘it’s going to kill your career.’”
The picture that excited Pauline most in late 1976 was an unexpected one: Brian De Palma’s Carrie. Based on a novel by Stephen King, Carrie was a horror tale about the drab, unpopular high school girl (Sissy Spacek) dominated by her crazed, fundamentalist mother but gifted with powers of telekinesis. The film climaxed at the senior prom, where, after her sadistic high school classmates humiliate her by rigging the election so that she is voted prom queen and then dumping a bucket of pig’s blood on her, she exacts a horrifying revenge on all of them. In Carrie, De Palma went far beyond the parameters of the typical horror film, infusing it with a great deal of warmth and humor, and a rather astute point of view about growing up in 1970s America. It had a nasty, funny, subversive feel, and was perhaps the ideal horror film for the post-Watergate era. Pauline had admired aspects of De Palma’s low-budget efforts in the 1960s, but with Carrie, she felt he had arrived onscreen as a major talent. And the acclaim she heaped on him caused a great deal of eye-rolling among her colleagues, who felt that the director had turned out nothing more than a well-crafted