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Squares” a careerist move? By taking such a hard public line against another respected critic—at the time Sarris was, by his own admission, hardly the widely read critic he later became, but he was one of the darlings of intellectual and academic film circles—Pauline was clearly clamoring for attention. In “Circles and Squares” she believed she was taking the position of good common sense, challenging the auteurists’ dubious claims. In her aggressive, can-you-believe-this? tone, she was practically daring the movie-loving public not to take her side of the argument. At this, she was enormously successful. Sarris himself admitted that Pauline’s “attack on the theory received more publicity than the theory itself.” In the end Pauline’s hostility toward the auteurists was, more than anything, a matter of taste: She could not believe that any thinking person would prefer the work of an erratic filmmaker like Nicholas Ray over that of a proficient, gifted craftsman like John Huston.

One of the misconceptions about “Circles and Squares” was that it engendered a lifelong feud between the two critics. Although Sarris did bring up the disagreement in occasional articles over the next several decades, Pauline put the matter squarely behind her. There was a certain clean detachment in many of her broadsides against other critics, and she was often astonished to learn that the objects of her critical wrath were under the impression that she hated them personally. Again, her behavior betrayed a certain naïveté: She could not always understand why a fellow critic whom she had roundly criticized might feel threatened by her.

Certainly the reading public’s response to her essay—which wouldn’t become fully clear for years to come—would make it clear to both Pauline and Sarris that they had arrived at a greater level of recognition than they had ever had before. Their meeting was historic, in a sense. They had no way of knowing that in the years ahead, their highly individual points of view would line up critics on either side of a dividing line, pro-Kael and pro-Sarris. And that division would become part of one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of movie criticism.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The mid-1960s was a good time for Pauline to be coming into her own as a writer: The postwar flourishing of the art-house circuit and the explosion of interest in new foreign films meant that there were now more opportunities for film critics than ever before. Movies were no longer just a great common pastime, like Saturday afternoon baseball games. Now they were playing a more significant role in the culture as people became interested in exploring the connections between cinema and contemporary life. Hit films stayed in theaters longer and were dissected in national magazine cover stories, on television and radio talk shows, and in film studies courses, and movies were well on their way to demonstrating to the world that they really were the liveliest art.

The change had been coming since the 1950s when, in the flush of postwar prosperity, Americans became more inquisitive about the arts. “Growing numbers of middle-class consumers felt it their responsibility to be au courant,” wrote the social historian Todd Gitlin in his book The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. “They were accumulating coffee-table books, subscribing to Saturday Review and the Book-of-the-Month Club, buying records, briefing themselves about art.” By the following decade the national fascination with arts and culture had taken on a decidedly different shade of meaning with the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the tremendous upheaval wrought by the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Young audiences, in particular, wanted more from the movies than mere entertainment. There was still an enormous audience for Walt Disney family pictures and fluffy comedies, but people had also developed an appetite for films that conveyed the anxieties of the times. Movies such as The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, and Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop