Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [82]
Easy Rider, released in July, had made history by becoming the first movie made by and for the counterculture to become a massive commercial hit. Wrapped for somewhere around $500,000, it was reported to have made its entire cost back in one week of release; it went on to gross more than $19 million. This study of two druggie bikers (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper) drifting around the country barely had any plot at all, but it was a raw expression of youthful paranoia about the dangers represented by Middle America. While Pauline knew that it wasn’t particularly a good movie in any artistic sense, she was fascinated by what it offered its public. “What is new about Easy Rider,” she wrote, “is not necessarily that one finds its attitudes appealing but that the movie conveys the mood of the drug culture with such skill and in such full belief that these simplicities are the truth that one can understand why these attitudes are appealing to others. Easy Rider is an expression and a confirmation of how this audience feels; the movie attracts a new kind of ‘inside’ audience, whose members enjoy tuning in together to a whole complex of shared signals and attitudes.” The significance of both films was that they continued the dialogue with the audience that had been established in Bonnie and Clyde— a dialogue that Pauline had hoped to see continue for years.
If it was individual artists such as Dennis Hopper who were going to enrich that dialogue, it was the studios, Pauline feared, who might well succeed in silencing it altogether. Too much was at stake now; it was more important than ever for her to exhort her readers to support the true artists, the good films that enlarged the moviegoing experience, and cut down the tired, the dead, the formulaic, the meretricious. From this point on, she would dig even deeper in her writing than she had before, pointing out the connections between the movies and the times from which they sprang. In the years to come her reviews took on even greater immediacy, her own excitement over what she’d just experienced in the screening room practically exploding on the page. She began to write as if her own moviegoing life depended on it—and to her, it did.
Given her sense of what she believed was about to burst through in the movies, it was axiomatic that she would reserve her fiercest attacks for the filmmakers she considered the ones who best knew how to play the studio’s political games and milk the audience. Since they were, in her view, standing in the way of the genuine artists, she began to pounce on them with a reformer’s zeal. When she returned to The New Yorker in the fall of 1969, she took aim at the director George Roy Hill, whose Western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had just opened.
Butch Cassidy took some of the thematic material of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch—the dying frontier at the fadeout of the nineteenth century—and plastered a free-spirited, youth-movement sensibility on it. It was this low cunning that bothered Pauline most. Hill came from television, and although she thought there was “a basic decency and intelligence in his work,” she felt he didn’t “really seem to have the style for anything,” certainly not for this “facetious Western,” with its relentlessly jokey, chummy tone.
Butch Cassidy was, as Pauline predicted, a huge hit, but it drew mixed reviews. In Life, Richard Schickel wrote that while he enjoyed the picture, its anachronistic, late-’60s dialogue consistently “destroys one’s sense of mood and time and place.” Pauline agreed. “The dialogue is all banter, all throwaways, and that’s how it’s delivered; each line comes out of nowhere,