Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [98]
In the 1960s few directors were as esteemed as David Lean. Both Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago had been enormous worldwide successes and had generally received good press, although some critics understandably preferred his earlier, small-scale work in pictures such as Brief Encounter and Oliver Twist. Ryan’s Daughter was a love story, set following the Easter Rising in Ireland, about a country lass (Sarah Miles) who escapes the disappointment of her marriage to a much older schoolteacher (Robert Mitchum) by having an affair with a British soldier (Christopher Jones). Lean gave this essentially simple story his customary grand-scale production, filming in the West of Ireland for more than a year. It was an arduous shoot; rather than use an actual village, Lean sought to construct one of his own, on County Kerry’s Dingle peninsula. Initially budgeted at $9 million, Ryan’s Daughter far exceeded that, while MGM’s new president and CEO, James Aubrey, fumed back in Hollywood. This was the era of small films, such as Joe and Five Easy Pieces, both of which had brought in enormous returns on minimal investments. To Aubrey and the other bosses at MGM, Lean was out of touch with the times. Lean, who had always been a revered prestige director, suddenly found his new picture annihilated by the critics, chief among them Pauline. She had never liked his fussy, meticulous brand of epic filmmaking, which she regarded as all polish and no surprises. His films, she wrote, had “no driving emotional energy, no passionate vision to conceal the heavy labor.” Ryan’s Daughter was nothing more than “gush made respectable by millions of dollars ‘tastefully’ wasted.”
Exactly who led the charge at the NSFC’s evening with Lean is open to question; what is certain is that Pauline was one of several critics who subjected the director to some tough questioning. She asked Lean if he really felt he could get away with portraying Robert Mitchum, of all actors, as “a lousy lay.” Several members of the group had had a few cocktails and joined in the fray, calling Ryan’s Daughter unworthy of inclusion in the Lean canon. All of this was devastating to the famously retiring director, who had a long history of shrinking from even the mildest form of criticism. Finally, toward the end of the evening, Lean managed to stammer that Pauline probably wouldn’t be satisfied until he turned out a 16 mm picture in black and white. Pauline laughed. “We’ll give you color.”
The evening, and the torrent of bad reviews that greeted Ryan’s Daughter’s release, led to a creative paralysis in Lean that lasted until 1984, when he made what turned out to be his final picture, A Passage to India.
During the same time, Pauline covered one of the year’s biggest hits, Love Story, directed by Arthur Hiller. It was based on the runaway success by Erich Segal, which made publishing history in a lowbrow way by becoming the first novelization of a screenplay to climb to the top of The New York Times Best Seller List. The paperback, whose cover became one of the iconic images of the early ’70s, sold over 4 million copies. Pauline wrote, “The book has been promoted from the start as an antidote to dirty books and movies, as if America were being poisoned by them.” The film, she noted, played to both the new and old audience by portraying generation-gap tensions between the hero (Ryan O’Neal) and his stuffy Boston Brahmin father (Ray Milland). In the New York Daily News, Kathleen Carroll though that Love Story “should bring joy to millions of moviegoers sickened by the overdose of sex and drugs in the movies.” Pauline agreed, writing, “It deals in private passion at a time when we are exhausted from public defeats, and it deals with the mutual sacrifice of a hard-working, clean-cut pair of lovers, and with love beyond death.”
Although Gina often observed to Pauline’s friends that the best way to get along with her was to agree with her, the truth was more complicated than that. Pauline had both a distaste for sycophancy and a need for a certain