Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [97]
Pauline could never quite find it within herself to encourage Gina to enter into the mainstream of life. Dana Salisbury felt that Pauline’s obliviousness to what might be best for Gina was part of a much larger family emotional blueprint. Salisbury claimed that all three of the Kael sisters were “tone deaf about the effects of things on people. In the case of my mom, I know that it was not deliberate. In the case of Rose, she was unwilling even to consider it. In the case of Pauline, she was above considering it.”
The pictures that opened in the fall of 1970 were mostly poor, and Pauline had little good to say about any of them. In November, however, she was delighted to discover Barbra Streisand’s latest vehicle, The Owl and the Pussycat , based on Bill Manhoff’s hit Broadway comedy of 1967. Streisand played her first completely contemporary screen role—a New York prostitute who starts a bumpy romance with a neurotic, failed writer, played by one of Pauline’s favorites, George Segal. “I think George lifted Barbra, in a way,” recalled Buck Henry, who wrote the screenplay. “I was trying to capture Barbra’s New York accent and use it in the tawdriest way possible. I begged her to say ‘Fuck off’—I wanted her to say it so badly, and she did it wonderfully.” The teaming worked beautifully as far as Pauline was concerned. “Were Hepburn and Tracy this good together, even at their best, as in Pat and Mike?” she wondered. “Maybe, but they weren’t better.” Most of all, she thought it was bracing “to see Streisand get out from under the archaic production values of large-scale movies” such as Hello, Dolly! She found her “like thousands of girls one sees in the subway, but more so—she is both the archetype and an original, and that’s what makes a star.”
In addition to the New York Film Critics Circle, Pauline belonged to another prominent critics’ group, the National Society of Film Critics. The society tended to be looked on as the bastard cousin of the NYFCC, although it had been founded for valid reasons. Since the city’s major newspaper strike in 1962, the NYFCC had accepted magazine critics as members, but it was still perceived as an organization dominated by daily newspaper reviewers. With the demise of The New York Herald-Tribune in 1967, only four daily newspapers were still operating, and it was decided that the handful of members of the NYFCC did not really constitute a proper sampling of critical thought in New York. Among the founders of the National Society of Film Critics were Hollis Alpert, Andrew Sarris, Joe Morgenstern, and Pauline. Partly because it was seriously underfunded, the NSFC never developed the cachet of the NYFCC; during some years, the society couldn’t afford even a no-frills awards dinner, so honorees were simply notified by mail. The organization, however, had other objectives, one of which was to establish a series of dialogues between critics and some of the most acclaimed film directors of the day. Richard Schickel, who served as chairman of the NSFC in 1970, termed the project “a good idea in theory, a bad one in practice,” a point of view that was borne out when David Lean was invited to appear before the group following a special screening of his new film, MGM’s Ryan’s Daughter, at the Ziegfeld Theater on