Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [160]
In mid-1977 another blockbuster was released and became so successful, with such a sharp eye on the youth audience, that it made Jaws seem like a faint ripple. George Lucas’s Star Wars was the mammoth hit of the era, and it penetrated the public consciousness in a way that was almost alarming. Children and teenagers went back to see it again and again. The Star Wars merchandising machine—action figures, lunch boxes, posters—swept through the world. It was not a movie Pauline was temperamentally disposed to admire: She found Lucas’s preoccupation with childhood thrills faintly depressing. “There’s no breather in the picture, no lyricism,” she wrote. She objected to it because it was a big toy with “no emotional grip . . . It’s an epic without a dream.” And yet audiences were deliriously eager to follow Lucas on his journey back to childhood. Pauline’s two-paragraph commentary on Star Wars in the fall of 1977 was more than a dismissal: It was an indication that her audience, the great audience she believed in, had begun to lose its way.
“I told her from the beginning that Spielberg was going to be responsible for a huge shift in money toward kids and movies,” recalled James Toback. “I told her, this is something you’re missing the boat on. Forget whether you think he’s a lousy director or a good director—the significance of Steven Spielberg has very little to do with what is on the screen. He, along with George Lucas, is completely shifting where money will be spent on movies from now on. The audience that is going to be appealed to is going to go way down in age. Movies are going to be made for twelve-year-old boys, and there’s going to be a sliver of money spent, relatively speaking, on the rest of us. And that’s what she was missing. I said, Jaws and Star Wars are going to change the whole structure of Hollywood. You could see it and feel it. And that is not a phenomenon that she ever really labeled.”
In the fall of 1977 Pauline reviewed Fred Zinnemann’s Julia, based on a celebrated segment of Lillian Hellman’s bestselling memoir, Pentimento. In it, Hellman recalled, in a tone of tastefully restrained heroism, how in the 1930s she had gone deep into Nazi Germany on a dangerous mission to smuggle $50,000 to her old childhood friend Julia, who was involved in the underground resistance. Pauline had highly conflicted feelings about Hellman as a playwright. Despite her fond memories of Tallulah Bankhead in The Little Foxes, she believed that Hellman’s precisely embroidered dramas laid out in neat arrangements of black and white represented the brand of immaculate craftsmanship that had seriously arrested the development of the American theater. But there was also already considerable evidence that the “Julia” episode had at the very least been partially invented. “She was quite obsessed with the fact that Hellman was a liar,” said Richard Albarino, “and that the story was fabricated. It wasn’t because of her politics. Pauline seemed to be like an old-time Adlai Stevenson liberal. Very moderate—not leftish. She didn’t like excess in any of these things. She had a great deal of admiration for the establishment and liked order—which I think is reflected in her review.”
Pauline’s greatest difficulty with Julia, however, involved Jane Fonda. There had been signs that the actress might not fulfill the promise she had shown in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Klute. Since winning the Academy Award for the latter, Fonda had filmed only sporadically