Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [62]
Because it had been released months before she began work at McCall’s, Pauline had not reviewed The Sound of Music for the magazine. But in April 1966, when MGM released its own big entry in the family-musical sweepstakes—The Singing Nun, starring Debbie Reynolds—Pauline took it as an opportunity to annihilate retrospectively The Sound of Music, which she predicted would prove to be “the single most repressive influence on artistic freedom in movies for the next few years.”
While she herself was not immune to the movie’s basic appeal, as she acknowledged,
You begin to feel as if you’ve never got out of school.... This is the world teachers used to pretend (and maybe still pretend?) was the real world. It’s the world in which the governess conquers all. It’s the big lie, the sugarcoated lie that people seem to want to eat. They even seem to think that they should feed it to their kids, that it’s healthy, wonderful “family entertainment” . . . Why am I so angry about these movies? Because the shoddy falseness of The Singing Nun and the luxuriant falseness of The Sound of Music are part of the sentimental American tone that makes honest work almost impossible.
Taking such a morally indignant tone was a risky move, for while her righteous anger might have had its place in one of the small film or literary quarterlies, to attack a movie that the world had taken to its heart in a big-circulation women’s magazine such as McCall’s struck many readers as unsuitable and oddly misplaced.
By mid-May, it was announced that Pauline and McCall’s would part company, a story that was big enough news to merit coverage in Newsweek. “The reviews became less and less appropriate for a mass-audience magazine,” Stein told Newsweek. “I still think she’s one of the best movie critics around. My hiring her was, I thought, a noble experiment. The experiment did not work out.”
Pauline did not look back on her brief stint at McCall’s with rancor and celebrated her departure from the magazine by taking Gina on a trip to Europe in late May 1966. While they were stopping off in London at the Mount Royal Hotel, Robert Mills wrote to her that she had earned $1,000 in royalties for I Lost It at the Movies and $1,500 from the latest McCall’s payment. “What would you like us to do with all this money?” he asked.
Mills cast around for another regular reviewing job, and while Pauline and Gina were still abroad, he received an offer: The New Republic wanted her to be its regular movie columnist, to replace one of the critics she admired least, Stanley Kauffmann, who was leaving for what would be an extremely short-lived stay as drama critic for The New York Times. Founded in 1914 by Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann, the magazine had long been known for its in-depth essays on politics and culture that generally embraced a liberal point of view. By the 1960s its political stance was harder to pin down. While it had come out against the Vietnam War, it was also sharply critical of the wave of protest and activism that had swept across America in mid-decade. Its circulation was anything but mass—it hovered on either side of 50,000—and its editor, Robert Evett, offered Pauline terms that were not nearly as lucrative as the McCall’s deal had been—twenty-four columns a year at $300 each. Still, she believed that as an outlet for her talents, The New Republic made more sense than McCall’s had.
Her debut column appeared on October 8, 1966—“The Creative Business,” another analysis of the artistic bankruptcy rampant in Hollywood—after which she settled down to the business of reviewing movies. Her October 22 column featured reviews of two sprawling epics, Hawaii and The Bible, and surprisingly, for someone who had always harbored an antipathy to the grandiosity of David Lean’s films, she liked both. The Bible was directed