Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [84]
“Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice is a slick, whorey movie,” she wrote in The New Yorker, “and the liveliest American comedy so far this year.” She loved Mazursky’s freedom with his actors, his way of “letting the rhythm of their interplay develop.” She felt that he had “taken the series of revue sketches on the subject of modern marital stress and built them into a movie by using the format of situation comedy, with its recurrent synthetic crises.” She particularly loved Dyan Cannon’s performance, writing that she “looks a bit like Lauren Bacall and a bit like Jeanne Moreau, but the wrong bits.”
The two women met at a screening in Manhattan not long after the release of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. “Someone tapped me on the shoulder from behind,” recalled Cannon, “and it was Pauline. She said, ‘I’m a fan’—and she said that didn’t come easily with her. I said, ‘So am I a fan.’ And I was. Her voice was so strong, and she didn’t care what we thought of it, and she seemed to be true to it, always.”
Another artist who benefited from Pauline’s critical support in the fall of 1969 was the documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, whose new movie High School—a pitilessly straightforward look at the futility and frustration of life at Philadelphia’s Northeast High School—also played at the New York Film Festival. High School resonated deeply with Pauline, and she called Wiseman “probably the most sophisticated intelligence to enter the documentary field in years.” What emerged most powerfully in her review of High School was her rage at what she believed to be the inadequacy of her own education. She found the teachers shown in the film to be “the most insidious kind of enemy, the enemy with corrupt values who mean well.” She loved the film’s unflinching treatment of teachers, the same kind of teachers she had grown to despise as a girl and had been railing against ever since:
High School is so familiar and so extraordinarily evocative that a feeling of empathy with the students floods over us. How did we live through it? How did we keep any spirit? . . . Here it is all over again—the insistence that you be respectful; and the teachers’ incredible instinct for “disrespect,” their antennae always extended for that little bit of reservation or irony in your tone, the tiny spark that you desperately need to preserve your self-respect.
Pauline immediately grasped what Wiseman was trying to get at in High School. “Many of us grow to hate documentaries in school,” she wrote in her by now familiar student-rebel tone, “because the use of movies to teach us something seems a cheat—a pill disguised as candy—and documentaries always seem to be about something we’re not interested in.” Wiseman, on the other hand, never stooped to didacticism. He took a dispassionate view of the audience’s common experience.
Wiseman, who became a friend of Pauline’s and often dined with her and Joe Morgenstern, recalled, “Joe is a very soft-spoken, kind guy. I think that she was attracted to people who were not tough, or not tough in any obvious way.” After her review of High School appeared, the film turned up on about two hundred screens each month—amazing statistics for a documentary. Wiseman found himself the center of generous critical attention and didn’t mind that she reviewed his work only sporadically thereafter. “The impression I had was that she felt I didn’t need her,” he said, “and that she was saving her space for people who did.”
For many longtime readers of “The Current Cinema,” Pauline’s increasingly expansive style took getting used to; after she returned to her reviewing post in 1969, a number of complaining letters landed on William Shawn’s desk. “Dear Sir: I think I’ve figured it out. Pauline Kael is the Long Winded Old Lady,” wrote one subscriber. “Six full columns to review The