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other friends when she read Canby’s reviews in the Times, crowing over how he had missed a particular point. Life’s Richard Schickel was a good critic, but Pauline found him to be pompous and unpleasant. She respected The Saturday Review’s Hollis Alpert, even though their opinions on films often diverged, and she acknowledged the formidable intellect, literary background, and linguistic prowess of John Simon, although she found his criticism needlessly cruel and demeaning, and personally, she didn’t take to him at all. (Once, at a screening of a particularly trashy film, Simon greeted her by saying, “Pauline! Of course, you come to all the finest pictures.” She responded by giving him the finger.) Pauline also suspected Simon of not being able to surrender himself to the art form, as she could; she found his knowledge more impressive than his actual responses to film. She was anything but an intellectual snob, however, and was genuinely fond of the man who was arguably the worst writer in the circle, the New York Post’s Archer Winsten. (Pauline told friends that she had to admire a man whose great passion in life was for skiing.)

On the whole, however, it was difficult for Pauline to approve of most of her colleagues for one simple reason: Practically all of them had preceded her in the profession. Pauline had a bit of a Magellan complex: It was easiest for her to give her approval when she was discovering a film or director before other critics had. Some of her friends felt that this explained her antipathy toward certain directors—Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford, for example. Andrew Sarris had written expansively about both men early in his career, and Pauline wasn’t particularly interested in following his lead. “There were a lot of directors who were off the table for her because they were on Andy’s plate,” observed Paul Schrader, who began his career as a movie critic before becoming a director in the 1970s. “I always assumed Ford was one of those. Andy beat her to John Ford, and she beat Andy to Jean Renoir.” The same principle held true for critics themselves: She wouldn’t approve of many of them until the next generation came along—and she was in a position to help shape their career paths and push them toward positions of importance.

In the fall of 1970 Pauline returned to The New Yorker with a traditional season-opening think piece designed to exhort her readers to pay attention to what was happening in the movie industry. “Numbing the Audience” was an open attack on the coarsely manipulative tactics of the studios’ attempts to latch on to new viewers. After pointing out that most of the films released over the summer had been both artistic and box-office calamities, Pauline declared that those who had engineered the corporate takeovers of the old studio system were going down a road that was certain to run out on them. “It used to be understood that no matter how low your estimate of the public intelligence was, how greedily you courted success, or how much you debased your material in order to popularize it, you nevertheless tried to give the audience something.”

Too many of the new pictures, she argued, weren’t giving the audience anything. For key evidence she pointed to the mass of youth pictures, such as Getting Straight, one of the year’s big hits with college audiences. It starred Elliott Gould as Harry Bailey, a candidate for a master’s degree in English who had a past as a civil rights activist. There were a few sequences calculated to bring forth cheers from the audience—the police moving in on the campus demonstration; Harry having an emotional meltdown while being grilled in his oral exams by a pompous English professor. Gould was at his most appealing—the archetypal, sexy, brainy, questioning college man of the early 1970s. But Pauline felt that Getting Straight was a shameful waste, since “no contemporary American subject provided a better test of the new movie freedom than student unrest. It should have been a great subject: the students becoming idealists and trying to put their feelings