Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [163]
She considered Dern miscast because he seemed equally deranged before and after going to Vietnam. And one of the things that disturbed her most was the simpleminded comparison of the husband’s workmanlike lovemaking with the crippled Luke’s ability to bring Sally to a thrilling orgasm. “There’s a strong enough element of self-admiration in the film’s anti-Vietnam attitudes,” she wrote. “It’s not enough that Hyde is wrong about the war; he’s got to be a lousy lover, too.” Despite Ashby’s handiwork in the editing room, there was no arguing with his own assessment: “We started before we were ready.”
In February Paul Schrader’s debut film as a director opened. It was Blue Collar, about a trio of Detroit auto workers who attempt to blackmail their union and wind up getting crushed underfoot for their trouble. Pauline found it too heavy-handed: “Blue Collar says the system grinds all workers down, that it destroys their humanity and their hopes,” she wrote. She thought Schrader might have made a decent film had he focused on the friendship of the three men and how it is destroyed in the process of trying to get rich. But she believed he lacked the necessary wit and invention; she felt that the humorless streak revealed in Taxi Driver defeated Schrader here.
While the industry was busily congratulating itself for having realized that there was a profitable market in films about real women’s issues (Julia, The Turning Point, and Looking for Mr. Goodbar), the crest of this particular wave came in February, with the release of a movie that struck a much deeper nerve. Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman dealt with a subject that was becoming much discussed in the late ’70s: women who found a way of coping, often quite happily and successfully, without a man. The women’s movement had only pressed itself deeper into the general culture as the decade went by, and as far as many were concerned, the progress hadn’t unrolled at a fast-enough rate. As yet, there were very few female CEOs. Hollywood was still very much an old boys’ club, although in the mid-’70s, Pauline’s friend Marcia Nasatir made history by becoming the first woman vice president and head of production at United Artists; Sherry Lansing would not ascend to the presidency of Twentieth Century–Fox until 1980. Still, the spirit of the women’s movement was very much alive in the literary and entertainment worlds. It was there in the success of nonfiction works such as Nancy Friday’s bestselling study of identity, My Mother/My Self, and novels such as Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room, which sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. In entertainment, the changing times were more present on the small screen than they were in the movies. The Mary Tyler Moore Show had achieved a landmark success by presenting a woman spinning through her thirties without being married, and the woman alone cropped up in sitcoms such as Rhoda, Phyllis, and Alice. Even Edith Bunker, the sheltered Queens housewife on CBS’s iconic hit All in the Family, was shown to be working toward some kind of stronger sense of herself as the decade moved on. An increasing number of made-for-television films explored subjects of great concern to women, ranging from A Case of Rape, with Elizabeth Montgomery, to Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter, with Gena Rowlands and Bette