Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [86]
Streisand, meanwhile, opened at the end of the year in Twentieth Century–Fox’s gargantuan screen version of the Broadway smash Hello, Dolly!, a project Pauline regarded as a horrible waste of the actress’s talents. “Somewhere along the line,” she wrote, “Hollywood got the idea that musicals were ‘family entertainment’—and had to be wholesome and overproduced and full of mugging actors and cloying ingénues and a processed plot and all the rest of the paraphernalia that has made so many people say ‘I can’t stand musicals.’” Streisand, she argued, was in a perfect position to take musicals in a new direction—contemporary and smaller-scale, scored with the pop music that the public “is alive to.” She was encouraged that even the $20-million-plus excesses of Hello, Dolly! couldn’t camouflage Streisand’s gifts as a sexy comedienne and singer. But Pauline insisted that the actress needed “to be liberated from period clothes and big-studio musical arrangements . . . Streisand could inaugurate a new kind of musical, because she uses song as Astaire used dance, expressively, to complete a role and make it a myth.”
The new year began with Luchino Visconti’s The Damned, which had opened to widespread critical acclaim. It distressed Pauline to see her colleagues throwing bouquets at this slow-moving, overlong drama about the changing fortunes of a wealthy German family during the rise of the Third Reich. One of the most widely discussed aspects of The Damned was the long sequence depicting a beer party thrown by the Brownshirts that turns into a men’s orgy. It didn’t possess the slightest hint of eroticism, but many reviewers hailed it as an example of the daring possibilities created by the screen’s new permissiveness. Pauline believed that Visconti was “not using decadence as a metaphor for Naziism but the reverse: he’s using Naziism as a metaphor for decadence and homosexuality.” The trouble, she thought, was that “Visconti, though drawn to excess, lacks the gifts of an F. W. Murnau or a Fritz Lang; he’s carefully flamboyant.” The Damned provided a good example of one of the dangers of the screen’s new openness: too many critics who should have known better rushed to praise it simply because of its flashy sensationalism, combined with the gravity of its Nazi Germany setting. Pauline was one of the few critics to review the result, not the concept, confessing, “I have rarely seen a picture I enjoyed less.”
Then, in mid-January 1970, she was seduced once again. The movie was Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, brought out by Twentieth Century–Fox. Even the backstory of the film was bound to appeal to Pauline’s rebellious streak: It was made by a group of artistically brilliant, rule-breaking, authority-defying bad boys under what basically amounted to the cover of darkness. The director was Robert Altman, a forty-four-year-old director who had grown up in Kansas City and had a low-level, stop-and-start career, mostly in television. The publicity handout for M*A*S*H described him as “a B-25 pilot in World War II, freelance magazine writer and producer of many prize-winning documentary films.” (Next to this last credit, Pauline scribbled “such as?”) He had worked extensively in television, directing episodes of Bonanza, Bus Stop, Combat!, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. His most recent feature had been That Cold Day in the Park, starring Sandy Dennis, and Pauline had loathed it.
M*A*S*H had started life as a novel by the pseudonymous Richard Hooker. Ring Lardner, Jr., had reviewed the book—a comedy about doctors serving in the Korean War—for The New York Times and thought it would make a terrific picture. Lardner’s agent, George Litto, approached the producer Ingo Preminger at Twentieth Century–Fox about the