aesthetic terms—she wrote that “the punches that subdue the wife have the exquisite languor of slightly slowed-down motion”—was an exceptionally bold move for a female critic to make in 1972, near the height of the women’s movement. But she qualified her praise: “The rape has heat to it—there can be little doubt of that—but what goes into that heat is the old male barroom attitude: we can see that she’s asking for it, she’s begging for it, that her every no means yes.” In an essay on A Clockwork Orange in The New York Times, Fred M. Hechinger had worried that “The thesis that man is irretrievably bad and corrupt is the essence of fascism.” Now Pauline picked up the idea and took it in a different direction: “What I am saying, I fear, is that Sam Peckinpah, who is an artist, has, with Straw Dogs, made the first American film that is a fascist work of art.”
It was a stunning assertion, and it certainly stunned Peckinpah that Pauline had taken the film’s portrayal of Amy to be a kind of statement about the nature of women, as he assumed such regimented thinking to be beneath her. “Fascist, God how I hate that word,” he wrote to Pauline a year after her review appeared, “but I suppose every director in his way is a fascist. Straw Dogs was about a bad marriage and the subtle incitement of violence by [the protagonist]. It’s a funny thing, but I know that couple, which means knowledge has nothing to do with art. As I evidently failed. In a way I made it for you . . . with all the integrity I could, and missed the boat.” In his Playboy interview, he used stronger words. “Doesn’t Kael know anything about sex? Dominating and being dominated: the fantasy, too, of being taken by force is certainly one way people make love.... I like Kael; she’s a feisty little gal and I enjoy drinking with her—which I’ve done on occasion—but here she’s cracking walnuts with her ass.”
The movie season, already the most stimulating she had experienced since coming to The New Yorker, was about to come to a triumphant close. Despite her scorn for elephantine productions such as Camelot and Paint Your Wagon, Pauline hoped the screen musical could be revived in some new and invigorating way. Keeping true to the general tenor of her tastes, she believed the musical to be at its greatest when it was tough and sassy, not when it drowned in sentiment. She could barely contain her excitement once she had seen Cabaret , Bob Fosse’s tough, fearless screen version of the John Kander–Fred Ebb stage hit. Given its source material—Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin stories, which traced the fate of a disparate group of characters during the rise of Nazism—Cabaret was a welcome departure from the world of singing nuns and dancing street gangs that Pauline had come to loathe:Cabaret is a great movie musical, made, miraculously, without compromise. It’s miraculous because the material is hard and unsentimental, and until now there has never been a diamond-hard big American movie musical. The people must have said something like ‘Let’s do it right—let’s use the right people, let’s not wreck it the way Pal Joey was wrecked, and The Boys from Syracuse and Guys and Dolls and Gypsy and Sweet Charity and all the rest. Maybe it won’t work at the box office, maybe the movie moguls have basically been shrewd when they insisted on all the softening and spoiling and the big names in the leads, but let’s do it right for once anyway.
Pauline loved the score, with its “distinctive, acrid flavor—a taste of death on the tongue.” And she loved the fact that the songs didn’t spring “organically” from the story: Nearly all of the musical numbers in Cabaret took place where they made most sense to take place—on the stage of the cabaret itself. Fosse had given the audience a bracing view of a society desperately trying to maintain a party atmosphere while ignoring what was happening around them. Not only did he never relax his vision; more surprisingly, he never let it get away from him—never allowed it to become labored and heavy-handed or moralistic. “The grotesque amorality in Cabaret is frightening,” Pauline wrote, “not because it’s weak but because it’s intensely, obscenely alive.” Most of all, she saw Cabaret as glorious evidence of the courage of its filmmaker’s convictions, proving that “you can create a