Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [81]
When I discovered that Pretty Poison had opened without advance publicity or screenings, I rushed to see it, because a movie that makes the movie companies so nervous they’re afraid to show it to the critics stands an awfully good chance of being an interesting movie. Mediocrity and stupidity certainly don’t scare them; talent does. This is a remarkable first feature film by a gifted young American, Noel Black—a movie that should have opened in an art house—and it was playing in a vast and empty theatre, from which, no doubt, it will depart upon the week. And the losses will be so heavy that the movie companies will use this picture as another argument against backing young American directors.
Pretty Poison was Pauline’s kind of movie—a story of mayhem told with an appealingly subversive point of view and unexpected twists and turns—but it had the chintzy look of a cheap TV show and a tinny TV-style musical score by Johnny Mandel. Even the film’s screenwriter, Lorenzo Semple, Jr., felt that she had overpraised it. “When she was on somebody’s side, they could do no wrong for a while, which actually clouded her critical judgment, in my opinion,” Semple said. “Loyalty is nice, but in many ways she was better as a cultural critic than a movie critic. Her weakness was her extreme, idiosyncratic views, sui generis, of things. I generally agreed with her, and she liked good movies rather than bad movies. But I do think she often made up her mind whether she liked the movie and looked for reasons why she liked it.”
When the New York Film Critics Circle met to vote on its awards for 1968, a deadlock occurred between two movies in the Best Screenplay category. Pauline insisted on a compromise choice for Pretty Poison, and managed to win the majority of voters over to her side.
After the awards ceremony, she had dinner with Semple. “I’m going to bring a friend along,” she told him, and showed up with six people. Semple recalled it a “a habit of hers when she went out to dinner. You’d get stuck with a very substantial check. I always considered it sort of amusing, but I know a couple of people who gritted their teeth—‘Don’t ask Pauline to go out to dinner with you. You’ll pay for it.’”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In the summer of 1969 Pauline made another trip to Europe—this time as part of a honeymoon party. She had become good friends with the young writer Gary Carey, who edited a magazine called The Seventh Art. Carey had planned to go to France with Pauline and Gina, when he decided to get married. Pauline liked his intended, Carol Koshinskie, and no one saw any reason to make a change in plans. Gary and Carol were married on July 5, 1969, and a little more than a week later joined Pauline, Gina, and another friend, the pianist Marvin Tartack, in the south of France. For three weeks they all traveled together, jammed into a tiny Volkswagen, eating at one three-star restaurant after another in Toulouse, Marseilles, and other towns.
The success of Bonnie and Clyde had signaled a hunger for something new in film, but the process of reshaping the audience was a chaotic one: The two years following Bonnie and Clyde witnessed an industry flailing about, not really sure of what moviegoers wanted or exactly how they were going to give it to them.
This was the theme Pauline took up when she returned to The New Yorker in September. Her first column marked the beginning of what would become a tradition: her revisiting of several of the movies that had opened during her six-month layoff, movies that she thought had been misinterpreted by Penelope Gilliatt or that she simply felt compelled to weigh in on herself. In 1969 she was most interested in commenting on the pictures that had become big box-office hits over the summer: Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider. Midnight Cowboy was the story of Joe Buck (Jon Voight), an aspiring stud from Texas who moves to New York City to strike it rich as a gigolo, only to wind up hustling closeted gay men in hotel rooms and public restrooms. Pauline thought that John Schlesinger’s attempt