Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [156]
Pauline thought Carrie had “a beautiful plot,” and she laid another of her superlatives on De Palma, who, in her judgment, had “the wickedest baroque sensibility at large in American movies.” She loved the teasing sense of humor and pulp sensibility that he brought to the horror movie. To Pauline, Carrie seemed to be taking off from a number of other movies, including Psycho, The Way We Were, and one of her favorite classic bad films, 1935’s She, with Helen Gahagan. In his 1960s films, she pointed out, De Palma had used mostly stationary camera setups, but here his camera swirled dizzingly in scene after scene, particularly the romantic moment with Carrie and her dream date (William Katt) at the senior prom, in which the audience has the sensation of dancing along with the couple and getting completely drawn into the most gloriously romantic night of poor Carrie’s wretched life. She celebrated De Palma’s emergence as a stylish, tongue-in-cheek director. “He’s uncommitted to anything except successful manipulation,” she wrote, “when his camera conveys the motion of dreams, it’s a lovely trick. He can’t treat a subject straight, but that’s all right; neither could Hitchcock. . . . Everything in his films is distanced by his persistent adolescent kinkiness; he’s gleefully impersonal.”
If her elevation of De Palma’s “persistent adolescent kinkiness” into some kind of major achievement baffled many of Pauline’s friends as well as her enemies, it was her review, in the end, that carried the day for De Palma and his cast. Nancy Allen, who played the movie’s chief villainess, remembered vividly the day that Pauline’s review appeared. “I think that Brian was just thrilled,” she said. “And disgusted at the same time, because the studio wasn’t treating it like it was anything better than a slasher picture.” De Palma quickly became one of the directors Pauline felt compelled to promote. Allen remembered that she had the reputation for being a bit chilly toward her pet directors’ wives and girlfriends, but she found Pauline warm and friendly. “She liked Brian a lot and there I was, the girlfriend. I didn’t know if I would be accepted or not. She was very pleasant and said hello and smiled sweetly. I remember thinking, Okay, that was all right. She was possessive. They were her guys.”
But if Pauline led the critical chorus in praise of Carrie, she was in the front row of the booing section for one of the most extravagantly praised and talked-about movies of the year, Sidney Lumet’s satire on the television industry, Network. Lumet was not the real creative force behind the picture—that distinction belonged to the screenwriter, Paddy Chayevsky, who had long since established himself as the satirist for the masses. Network appealed to a wide audience, partly because everyone could grasp its shrill, loud message, and also because it presented itself as a movie that was really about something important. Perhaps it was the film’s combination of intellectual posturing and outrageous satire that seduced the critics, many of whom gave it excellent reviews. The television newsmen themselves took a much dimmer view of the picture. CBS’s Walter Cronkite called it “a fantasy burlesque that might be considered an interesting, amusing divertissement, but nothing more,” and NBC’s Edwin Newman denounced it as “incompetent.”
Pauline loathed the movie, observing that Chayefsky had become “like a Village crazy, bellowing at you: blacks are taking over, revolutionaries are taking over, women are taking over. He’s got the New York City hatreds, and ranting makes him feel alive.” She felt that Chayefsky’s thesis that television “is turning us into morons and humanoids” was insupportable. “TV may have altered family life and social intercourse; it may have turned children at school into entertainment seekers. But it hasn’t taken our souls, any more than movies did, or the theatre and novels before them.” The movie was unremitting in its assault on the audience. She complained that Chayefsky had failed to provide audiences with a good,