Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [72]
In Hollywood, the old studio heads such as Darryl F. Zanuck and Jack L. Warner—men who, whatever their shortcomings, had cared and known a great deal about the craft of moviemaking—were now retired, and they had been replaced by bright young business-school graduates with a lust for making money, some crude understanding of basic marketing techniques, and no real interest in film at all. At the same time, however, there were signs of progress in terms of taking on adult subject matter. Several films released in 1968 took on the still-controversial subject of homosexuality, but Pauline wasn’t at all sure how much it mattered if the results were mostly negative; the films were a spotty bunch, ranging from the serious (The Fox) to the sensationalistic (The Detective). During her first year at The New Yorker Pauline reviewed several of them, and Rod Steiger starred in two. This was safety-net casting at its best: Few actors were less likely to be suspected of actually being gay than Steiger, particularly since his Academy Award–winning turn in 1967 as the bigoted small-town Mississippi sheriff in Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night. The first of his 1968 films, No Way to Treat a Lady, was released in March and directed by one of Pauline’s least favorite directors, Jack Smight (who came from television). It was a black comedy, with Steiger as a cross-dressing, mother-dominated psychopath who spends his spare time strangling women. Pauline wrote that Steiger’s “presence is so strong that he often seems to take over a picture even when he isn’t the lead. This is true of George C. Scott, too, and actors this powerful just don’t fit into ordinary roles. The answer, of course, is that they need extraordinary ones—great roles.” But in Steiger’s case, the best that Hollywood could come up with was “this fag phantom of the opera.” It was a line that would haunt her years later, when a faction of gay readers accused her of having used her pages in The New Yorker to indulge in bald-faced homophobia. Certainly her choice of the word “fag” was questionable, yet she was using it for a specific purpose—to convey the crude, low-grade quality of both Rod Steiger’s role and the film’s coarse, low-comedy attitude toward gay men. In this particular context, “homosexual” would have lacked the zing she was after.
A more complicated matter was The Sergeant, released, strangely enough, during the Christmas season of 1968. In it Steiger played a career military man who develops an obsessive passion for a young private in his outfit. The movie was clearly an attempt to make a serious statement about the damage wrought by repression, but it also showed that the price paid for throwing off repression was often tragic. (The sergeant finally kisses the private, then, out of disgust, kills himself.) The outcome was a dreary film that was really all about the “daring” casting of Steiger, an excuse to let him exercise his acting skills; the audience could practically feel the actor asking for their approval, but Pauline wasn’t sure that he’d gotten it. “Does playing a homosexual paralyze him as an actor?” she wondered. “He gives such a tense, constricted performance it’s almost as if he didn’t want to convince anybody.” But the nerviest part of her review, again, would come back to plague her years later:
There is something ludicrous and at the same time poignant about many stories involving homosexuals. Inside the leather trappings and chains and emblems and Fascist insignia of homosexual “toughs” there is so often hidden our old acquaintance the high-school sissy, searching the streets for the man he doesn’t believe he is. The incessant, compulsive cruising is the true, mad