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and Old Lace, Laurence Olivier’s 1953 The Beggar’s Opera with René Clair’s Sous les toits de Paris, which Pauline described in her notes as “one of the first imaginative approaches to the musical as a film form.” Sometimes there was a thematic connection, as with the English comedies The Man in the White Suit and Lucky Jim, or Pauline’s “corruption-in-Mexico” double bill of John Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados. Frequently Pauline’s notes were hilariously personal and direct: when the Guild showed Howard Hawks’s Red River, she wrote that the film was “not really so ‘great’ as its devotees claim (what Western is?) but it’s certainly more fun and superior in every way to that message movie The Gunfighter, which Dwight Macdonald, in the November Esquire, puts forward as ‘the best Western’ because it showed ‘movie types behaving realistically instead of in the usual terms of romantic cliché.’”

Pauline was not deeply enamored of much of the pre- and postwar British cinema, but she had a great fondness for some of the great Ealing comedies, such as The Happiest Days of Your Life, as well as Laurence Olivier’s stirring 1955 version of Richard III, and she saw to it that they all got generous exhibition. With her exceptional taste, as well as the rapidly growing popularity of her program notes, hers began to become the voice of the Berkeley Cinema Guild. Audiences picked up, and the Friday and Saturday night showings often had lines down Telegraph. Audience members were almost giddy with a sense of discovery of so many hard-to-locate movies. Carol van Strum, who became a friend of Pauline’s in these years, remembered the thrill of receiving her movie education at the Cinema Guild. “My parents hardly ever went to the movies,” said van Strum. “Part of it was me: they took me to see Drums Along the Mohawk, and I got so scared I never wanted to go back. I missed The Third Man, Buster Keaton, W. C. Fields—and it was magic finding them at the Guild.” The exhibitors who supplied the prints began to notice the Guild’s success and began to talk about changing the way they were going to charge. “They were doing it on a nightly rental basis,” said Stephen Kresge. “Then they found out that many weekends, the Cinema Guild was grossing the highest of any of the theaters in Berkeley.”

It was becoming well known around the Bay Area that Pauline was the prime mover responsible for putting the Cinema Guild on the map. Friendly, gregarious, and bawdy, she was becoming something of a local character. She dressed down—with her finances in the shape they were in, it was impossible to do anything else—and locals grew accustomed to seeing her up on a ladder changing the Guild’s marquee, a hip flask filled with Wild Turkey dangling from a belt loop. Landberg, on the other hand, struck people as cold and diffident. “Landberg was very remote,” recalled Ariel Parkinson, widow of the poet and Berkeley English professor Thomas Parkinson. “He almost cultivated the image of the faceless man. The theater was a fully cooperative enterprise, or at least it seemed to me. I think it’s a shame that people don’t remember Ed Landberg, but then he was very self-effacing. Pauline was the one.”

Pauline’s relationship with Landberg was more in the nature of a meeting of minds, and even that was a bit shaky, as Landberg was a peculiar, somewhat morose man who seemed unable to express joy and enthusiasm in the same way Pauline did. She tried her best to see him as a man of quality and refinement and was encouraged by certain gestures on his part; he had given her a gift of a recording of Gluck’s opera Orphée et Eurydice, and she clung to this as evidence that he would make a good match for her. Landberg also provided a degree of financial security, and she thought that at last she might be able to establish a bit of stability for herself and for Gina. If she was searching for a father figure for her daughter, however, she was doomed to be disappointed: Landberg made no secret of his dislike for children in general and showed no interest