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piece of criticism she had done for some time. Pauline thought the director had been in decline for a while. She had admired the sweetness of feeling that came through in his 1977 hit Annie Hall, but she was bothered by the picture’s New York chauvinism and sneering attitude toward Los Angeles, and Allen’s self-deprecating treatment of his Jewishness worked on her nerves. In her notes for the movie (she didn’t review it), she wrote of Allen’s character, the uptight Jewish comedian Alvy Singer, “He only shows you what you see anyway.” She thought Annie Hall was a promising idea that wasn’t delved into deeply enough and never quite found its real subject because it veered off into a tale of two cities—New York versus L.A. She had also had major reservations about Allen’s 1979 picture Manhattan, which Andrew Sarris hailed as the first great film of the seventies; Pauline was disturbed that Allen chose to focus on the narcissism and career issues of three mixed-up people as being representative of what was wrong with all of New York, and she hooted at the idea that all of this neurosis was shown in contrast to the purity of the teenage girl played by Mariel Hemingway. “What man in his forties,” she wrote, with chilling prescience, “could pass off a predilection for teen-agers as a quest for true values?”

In Stardust Memories, Allen played Sandy Bates, a famous comedy director who wants to be taken seriously and find himself as an artist, but no one will let him. Pauline was annoyed by the movie’s sour narcissism; she thought that Allen was trying to become the Jewish Fellini. “Throughout Stardust Memories,” she wrote, “Sandy is superior to all those who talk about his work; if they like his comedies, it’s for freakish reasons, and he shows them up as poseurs and phonies, and if they don’t like his serious work, it’s because they’re too stupid to understand it. He anticipates almost anything that you might say about Stardust Memories and ridicules you for it.” There was no question in Pauline’s mind that Sandy was a mouthpiece for Allen’s true feelings about himself; she cited a comment he had made to Newsweek: “When you do comedy, you’re not sitting at the grown-ups’ table, you’re sitting at the children’s table.” In her reviews of Stardust Memories, she painted him as another kind of traitor, too: For years Allen’s unmade-bed looks and wired, smart Jewish humor had made him “a new national hero.” Now he seemed to be rejecting all that as well. Pauline considered it “a horrible betrayal when he demonstrates that despite his fame he still hates the way he looks and that he wanted to be one of them—the stuffy macho Wasps—all along.” She closed with a stinging slap: “If Woody Allen finds success very upsetting and wishes the public would go away, this picture should help him stop worrying.”

There was a time when Pauline had been invited to Allen’s New Year’s Eve parties, events filled with many bright lights among New York’s intelligentsia. On one invitation, Allen wrote that even if she didn’t like most of the people there, she’d have him to talk to for laughs. He was apologizing in advance for the guests at his party. Pauline had seen right through him, and she used it in her review of Stardust Memories. After that, her friendship with Allen froze solid.

She was also disappointed in Martin Scorsese’s new picture, Raging Bull, in which Robert De Niro played the middleweight boxing champion Jake LaMotta. Like Allen, Scorsese seemed to have gotten carried away with his own seriousness. She thought Raging Bull wasn’t content to be a human drama about the glory days and inevitable decline of a famous prizefighter; it aimed to be “a biography of the genre of prizefight films.” And it wasn’t even content to be that: “It’s also about movies and about violence, it’s about gritty visual rhythm, it’s about Brando, it’s about the two Godfather pictures—it’s about Scorsese and De Niro’s trying to top what they’ve done and what everybody else has done.” It was meant to be the apotheosis of all the great, tough pictures of the seventies