Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [93]
A few blocks uptown, on Ninety-fifth Street just west of Broadway, was the reassuringly run-down Thalia, where the seats were on a slight incline, and friends of old film could encounter some of the most difficult-to-find old Hollywood classics. (The Thalia was also featured in Annie Hall.) And on 107th Street, the Olympia showed a constantly rotating program of old Spanish-language films. Over the years, even more repertory cinemas would crop up all over town, in some unlikely neighborhoods, proving Toby Talbot’s assertion that “there was an obvious hunger for film. Our patrons were as interested in who made the film as in what it was about and who was in it. They cared about visual style and wanted to follow a director’s body of work.”
Pauline delighted in the public’s growing excitement about what was happening in film. She felt she was at the vertex of the most thrilling burst of activity taking place in the arts, and although she often attended the theater, she commented to friends that generally she didn’t find it nearly as exciting as film. The commercial theater, in her view, was still trading on tired conventions and predictably “serious” forms of audience manipulation, and had not succeeded in really connecting with the times, as the movies now showed every promise of doing.
With all of the enthusiasm New Yorkers showed for the movies, it wasn’t surprising that the activities of the New York Film Critics Circle were more frequently reported than they had been in years. Pauline was, by 1970, an integral member, having been admitted in 1968, following her appointment at The New Yorker. When it was founded in 1935, the NYFCC had been composed of newspaper critics only, but over time, the membership restrictions had been relaxed to include prominent magazine reviewers as well. From its inception the NYFCC had earned a reputation for going its own way, its members being less susceptible to a movie’s box-office standing than were the voting members of the Motion Picture Academy. As far back as the 1940s, the NYFCC sometimes awarded top prizes to performers not even nominated in that year’s Oscar race—Ida Lupino in The Hard Way, Tallulah Bankhead in Lifeboat. Pauline believed it was important to uphold the integrity of the group, as she believed that a good critic’s review was the only genuine truth on which moviegoers could depend: Everything else, she was fond of saying, was nothing but advertising in one form or another.
The NYFCC operated under a fairly simple system: Nominations were made by writing down one name or title per category on a folded slip of paper. Any selection lacking at least two votes was eliminated. On successive ballots members ranked first-, second-, and third-place choices on a point system—and the balloting continued until one choice had a clear two-thirds majority. All of the balloting was secret; no critic was permitted to take the floor and argue the case for his favorites unless a stalemate occurred.
Because the NYFCC held to such strict rules, there was practically no opportunity for personality clashes to arise among its various members. Only occasionally was there a disruption of the circle’s orderliness—as in 1969, when Renata Adler, who had briefly succeeded Bosley Crowther as chief movie critic of The New York Times, announced that she could take no more of the meeting and stormed out, insisting that she had to see her analyst immediately—and whatever alliances and rivalries revealed themselves, did so subtly. Judith Crist remembered that “at one end of the table were the intellectuals [Adler, Stanley Kauffmann, Andrew Sarris] and the rest of us were the ink-stained newspaper people.” Pauline would attend the meetings in her regulation outfit—plain slacks, simple blouse, and sneakers—and sit passively, a Sibyl-like smile on her face,