Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [89]
M*A*S*H became one of the most potent symbols of the New Holly wood; contrary to expectations, it buried Mike Nichols’s highly anticipated adaptation of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, which would have a disappointing release in June 1970.
Pauline’s attitudes toward pomposity and self-righteousness versus authenticity in screen drama were briskly consistent without being stiffly predictable. In February of 1970 Irvin Kershner’s Loving took her by surprise. It gave the talented George Segal, an actor Pauline had admired for years, a great role as a failed artist, plodding along while trying to provide for his wife and family, but never losing sight of the fact that he wasn’t what he once dreamed of becoming. “After so many movies that come on strong with big, flamboyant truths,” Pauline observed, “a movie that doesn’t pretend to know more than it does but comes up with some small truths about the way the middle class sweats gives us something we can respond to; it gives us something we desperately need from the movies now—an extension of understanding.” Like Altman, Kershner earned her praise by shunning the easily theatrical and manipulative and simply showing life as it was lived.
Late in February Pauline’s third book of criticism was published by Little, Brown. Again, her book had a sexy title, and also one that reflected her secure status at The New Yorker—Going Steady. It included all of her New Yorker reviews, plus “Trash, Art and the Movies.” By now a new book by Pauline was treated as something of a publishing event. “Pauline Kael is my favorite movie critic,” John Leonard stated in the opening of his New York Times review. It was a rave, with suggestions throughout that she had moved beyond the position of a mere film critic and into the pantheon of significant writers. Leonard admitted, “While I miss the polemics and the reviews of other reviewers that made her first two collections such evil fun”—the very thing that William Shawn had insisted on purging from her work—“I care about Miss Kael’s criticism as literature. Her reviews can be read before, immediately after, and long after we have seen the movie that inspires or exasperates her.”
Appearing before that positive notice, however, was a more probing one in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, written by Charles T. Samuels, a member of the English faculty at Williams College and already a prominent film commentator. Seizing on some of Pauline’s comments in “Trash, Art and the Movies,” Samuels suggested that Pauline might be more of a reviewer than a genuine critic, less an aesthetician than a social historian. In “Trash, Art and the Movies,” Pauline had written, “One doesn’t want to talk about how Tolstoi got his effects but about the work itself. One doesn’t want to talk about how Jean Renoir does it; one wants to talk about what he has done.” To Samuels, this was a warning sign. “By neglecting to analyze technique,” he wrote, “Miss Kael can do no more than assert that a given film is new, or beautiful, hoping that her language will provide the reader with something parallel to the qualities implicit in the work of art.” And underneath her consistent refusal to delve into formal analysis, Samuels went on—in the pointed yet cautious tone so often adopted by academics—was the implication that she ultimately came down on the side of trash rather than the side of art:
About film art, she reminds her readers not to be solemn, and so does not bore them with the exegesis that is needed to justify her opinions. Instead, she arms them against the cultural stigma of Philistinism and creates some of her best epithets in behalf of avowed trash. No wonder, then, that Pauline Kael is so popular. She combines high spirits with low seriousness—a winning combination in movies and now, it seems, in their criticism.
If it had been fair for her to rail unrelentingly against academia so many years, it was fair for academia to strike back, and