interaction of movies and our national life during a frantic time when three decades seem to have been compressed into three years and I wrote happily—like a maniac—to keep up with what I thought was going on in movies—which is to say, our national theater.” She added, “Right now, movie critics have an advantage over critics in most other fields: responsive readers. And it can help you to concentrate your energies if you know that the subject is fresh and that your review may make a difference to some people.”
It was a sentiment that was picked up in the opening paragraph of the front-page notice in The New York Times Book Review on February 18, 1973. The reviewer was the eminent literary critic Irving Howe, who opened with the observation, “Right now, movie criticism in America seems livelier, more pungent than literary criticism.... Movies have recently carried a sharper air of excitement than have books; and some people have begun to develop, or fumble toward, a film esthetic.” Howe admired Pauline’s “crisp sentences,” “aggressive wit,” and the fact that “she brings to her movies a grounding in literary culture such as some movie reviewers take to be merely ‘linear’ and others don’t even know they need.” He admired the fact that “her approach to a new film is empiric and careful, not too different from that which a good critic of drama or fiction would employ.” There was a caveat, however. “Sometimes she drops into a sort of brawling, Marie Dressler–like posture to assault the position of high-brow seriousness from which, in the main, she works.” He questioned her “excessive praise for movies like M*A*S*H and McCabe & Mrs. Miller” and picked apart her taste in advocating for films such as Fiddler on the Roof, The Conformist, and The Last Picture Show: “I suspect either that, as a result of seeing too many movies, her standards are slipping or she is kidding. And it doesn’t look as if she’s kidding.” Howe took an academic’s viewpoint of what he considered her principal weakness—that she did not “work out of a secure critical tradition. Its absence allows her a pleasing freedom of improvisation, but makes very hard the achievement of reflective depth and delicate judgment.” The other reviews were excellent, and, for the fourth consecutive time, a Kael collection enjoyed brisk sales.
In the summer of 1973 Pauline took time out from her lecture appearances to accept an offer from The New York Times Book Review to write about the latest project by Norman Mailer: a coffee-table-sized illustrated biography of Marilyn Monroe, titled simply Marilyn. Pauline had never been a fan of Mailer; in 1968 she had panned his film Wild ’90, calling it “the worst movie that I’ve stayed to see all the way through.” While she certainly recognized Mailer’s literary gifts (just as she recognized Joan Didion’s), she didn’t particularly respond to them; these representatives of New Journalism were mostly showing off too self-consciously for her taste, and she recoiled from Mailer’s brand of literary machismo.
The very idea of Mailer on Monroe was bound to make her a little dubious from the outset. To Pauline, Monroe was at best an overripe, teasing blond comedienne who became adept at a kind of “self-satire,” and Pauline thought that Monroe’s “slow reaction time made her seem daffy, and she tricked it up into a comedy style.” Pauline had found Monroe amusing in her one all-out carnal temptress role, as Rose Loomis in the 1953 Henry Hathaway thriller Niagara. But by 1973, the Monroe cult, campaigning to have the star considered a potentially great actress consistently deprived of the right material, had built to fever pitch. The woods were full of actors who claimed to have been present at the famous Actors Studio class in which Monroe played a scene from Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie with Maureen Stapleton, reportedly to revelatory effect. (Her performance as Roslyn in The Misfits, written by her husband Arthur Miller, makes a persuasive argument that she was not everything that was being said of her. Miller may have had the best intentions of giving her something meaty to dig into as an actress, but she simply could not pull it off: her interminable pauses between lines are a heavy-handed cue to us that she’s being “emotional” and derail any chance she has of getting a real performance tempo going.)
Part of the problem Pauline had with Mailer’s take on Monroe was that he was trying to mine the legend for more