Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [181]
Andrew Sarris gave her a good lashing in an odd, risky review published in The Village Voice. “When Pauline scolds the industry,” Sarris wrote, “she seems to be flailing at phantoms from the past. She has no more control over the raging unconscious of today’s unbridled movies than anyone else, but she never gives up trying to shape the future.” Much more damning was his strong suggestion that she was deeply corrupt. Citing her positive review of Fingers, a movie he disliked, he wrote, “a more candid critic than Pauline might have felt impelled to inform her New Yorker readers that this alleged denizen of Dostoevskian depths was her constant escort at screenings. It is not that I care whether Pauline chooses to be seen in public with James Toback. It is simply that her politique often seems to consist of setting one standard for people she knows and another for people she doesn’t. She thus acts as an unflagging apologist for Sam Peckinpah and Irvin Kershner, whatever their failings, while heaping a steady torrent of abuse on Don Siegel and Alan Pakula, whatever their virtues.”
The promotional tour that had been arranged for When the Lights Go Down was daunting—and a clear indication that public interest in Pauline was high. On April 1 she appeared on The Dick Cavett Show, joking about the avalanche of hate mail she had received for her positive reviews of Mean Streets and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, contrasted with only two letters for her favorable review of Last Tango in Paris. She expressed her regret that Robert Altman’s latest films didn’t display the same affection for their characters that his earlier ones had, and she skillfully downplayed her Hollywood episode by claiming that her six-month leave from The New Yorker had been coming up anyway—that she had simply prolonged it slightly.
Six days later she was a guest on the late-night talk show hit Tomorrow, with Tom Snyder. One day later, she did interviews for Women’s Wear Daily and National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. On April 9, she had interviews with the New York Post and with Arlene Francis on New York’s WOR radio. Then she was off to Boston for interviews with The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The Real Paper, WGBH-TV, and WB2 Radio, plus a lecture at the Rabb Lecture Hall. After that, she was off on a grueling lecture tour, including appearances in Detroit, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Toronto.
During one of her L.A. appearances, she was startled during the question-and-answer session when a man raised his hand and asked, “Why are you shaking?” Recently she had noticed a very slight tremor in her hands, but she had put it down to nerves, and she was astonished that it would be visible to someone sitting halfway across a large auditorium.
At The New Yorker Pauline at last had what she had always wanted—the entire reviewing post, with a commensurate raise in salary. Her schedule was adjusted slightly: Now she came down to New York every other week, checked into the Royalton for four days, and saw two movies each night, returning to Great Barrington to write her column. Often Gina or one of Pauline’s friends in the Berkshires drove her both ways.
After a pleasant trip to Colombia with Gina and their friend the author Jaime Manrique, she returned in the magazine’s June 9, 1980, issue, with a negative review of Stanley Kubrick’s latest, The Shining, a supernatural tale that boasted great technological advances but fell flat as a thriller. While Pauline enjoyed Jack Nicholson’s performance early in the film—“He has a way of making us feel that we’re in on a joke—that we’re reading the dirty, resentful thoughts behind his affable shark grins”—more of him was less as the movie went on. She thought that he was too ideally cast: “His performance begins to seem cramped, slightly robotized. There’s no surprise in anything he does, no feeling of invention.”
Her big “comeback” piece, however, came in the June 23, 1980, issue, with a lengthy essay titled