Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [85]
But to younger readers—always a key demographic for any magazine or newspaper—Pauline was becoming a heroine. In the dialogue between screen and audience, many young film fans considered this fifty-one-year-old woman from Berkeley the ideal moderator. She shared their enthusiasms, she had a clear sense of who her audience was, and she delighted in guiding them and tracking their progress. “They’re looking for ‘truth’—for some signs of emotion, some evidence of what keeps people together,” she wrote. “The difference between the old audiences and the new ones is that the old audiences wanted immediate gratification and used to get restless and bored when a picture didn’t click along; these new pictures don’t click along, yet the young audiences stay attentive. They’re eager to respond, to love it—eager to feel.”
Some of her fans had now taken to phoning her at home to ask her opinion of various films, and she was generally good about fielding these calls. Her number was also close to that of the Thalia Theater, one of the leading revival houses in Manhattan, and while she initially considered the “wrong number” calls for the theater a nuisance, she began to keep a schedule for the Thalia handy and cheerfully told callers what was playing that day, just as she had at the Cinema Guild.
If she was on deadline, however, she sometimes pretended to be her own secretary. Ruth Perlmutter, who was running a repertory film program at Philadelphia’s Walnut Theater in the late ’60s, once phoned her to ask which Robert Bresson film she should program. Pauline, posing as her own secretary, informed Perlmutter that Ms. Kael was on deadline. Perlmutter played along and asked the “secretary” what she thought of Au Hasard, Balthasar.
“Grim,” said Pauline, and excused herself and hung up.
Late in 1969 Pauline used her column for some intriguing speculation about the future of two actresses she admired—Jane Fonda and Barbra Streisand. Fonda had spent most of the ’60s trying to make her mark as a sexy comedienne, but her films—Sunday in New York, Any Wednesday, Barefoot in the Park—were commercial in the flimsiest sense, and by the end of the decade, most critics regarded her as a case of potential wasted. Then, late in 1968, she was offered the screen version of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Horace McCoy’s 1935 novel about a group of desperate people competing in a brutal dance marathon in Hollywood. Fonda played Gloria, a would-be actress who can’t get into Central Casting; her ferocious anger is all she has left to hang on to. “How’re you going to feed it?” she snaps to a pregnant competitor (Bonnie Bedelia). When her own partner (Red Buttons) is dying of a heart attack on the floor, Gloria screams at him, “I’m tired of losing!” In the end, Gloria breaks down completely when her new partner (Michael Sarrazin) accidentally rips one of the silk stockings she’d stopped riding streetcars for a month in order to afford. She asks him to shoot her, to put her out of her misery—and he calmly grants her wish.
Fonda’s tough, economical performance dazzled Pauline. “She doesn’t try to save some ladylike