become the blockbuster it might have been, at least it turned out to be a hit in Manhattan, where it got mostly favorable reviews and enjoyed a good run.
For Pauline, The Long Goodbye was another Altman masterpiece, and she was beginning to despair of his ever finding a mass audience again. “Maybe the reason some people have difficulty getting into Altman’s wavelength is that he’s just about incapable of overdramatizing,” she wrote. “He’s not a pusher.” In a judgment that sounded suspiciously auteurist, she praised Altman’s contribution at the expense of Leigh Brackett’s, saying that although Brackett’s name was on the picture as scenarist, “when you hear the improvised dialogue you can’t take this credit literally.” Elliott Gould, for whom The Long Goodbye represented a return to stature after two years in the box-office wilderness, felt that the comment about Brackett was not quite fair. “But I understand Pauline,” Gould said. “When we showed the picture at the empty Grauman’s Chinese Theater before it opened, I was there and Leigh was there. I felt it was like an American jazz performance that Bob allowed me to do. I’m talking to myself all the time, because there’s no one to talk to except my cat. I said to Leigh Brackett, ‘Does this validate the work that you did?’” Brackett, fortunately, liked the end result.
While Pauline was hardly alone in enjoying friendships with filmmakers—Richard Schickel and Judith Crist, among others, fraternized with directors and stars, though they maintained their reputations as tough, honest critics—her relationships were more problematic. Because her praise could be more passionate than that of any other critic, it was all the more traumatic for the artists when she turned on them with that same degree of passion.
A particularly complicated case arose with Woody Allen. She had enjoyed two of his recent comedies, Bananas and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, feeling that he had come a long way from the facile unevenness of his first solo directorial feature, Take the Money and Run. To Pauline, Allen’s recent work suggested he was “an erratic comic genius,” and she admired the fact that Allen had “found a nonaggressive way of dealing with urban pressures. He stays nice; he’s not insulting, like most New York comedians, and he delivers his zingers without turning into a cynic.” For Pauline, Allen’s “essential sanity” was “the base from which he takes flight.”
Pauline thought that Allen’s new picture, Sleeper, a comedy set in 2173, was the most stable and most sustained of his films, “without the lapses that had found their way into his earlier work.” In it, Allen starred as the thirty-five-year-old owner of the Happy Carrot health food restaurant in Greenwich Village, who is admitted to the hospital for a peptic ulcer and wakes up two hundred years later. Allen had written to Pauline late in 1972 that Sleeper was a Buster Keaton–type comedy, though not in the pure Keaton spirit because of the intrusion of sound. Allen and Pauline had a friendly, long-running argument about the impact of sound on comedy, with Allen taking the position that sound prevented the great comics from achieving total reality. While Pauline found Sleeper consistently funny, something was missing: She felt that “Allen’s new sense of control over the medium and over his own material seems to level out the abrasive energy. You can be with it all the way, and yet it doesn’t impose itself on your imagination—it dissolves when it’s finished.”
Pauline saw deeply into the appeal Allen had for the 1970s movie audience: He was the brainy, nerdy kid who had always been beaten up on the school grounds but had managed to triumph because of his brains and wit, which, despite layers of insecurity and paranoia, he always believed in. Allen was the smart, irreverent observer of the social revolution that had been shaking up America since the ’60s, but although this brand of comedy was popular with young people—his script for Sleeper took gentle jabs at the NRA and the Nixon administration—he was anything but subversive. Quite the opposite: He was too much of a misfit to be a genuine hero of the youth movement, and he was a nostalgist with a deep love for traditional pop culture. Pauline was probably right when she judged that Allen had a misguided attraction to healthy conformity: “The battered adolescent,” she wrote, “still thinks that that’s the secret of happiness.”
Over a period of several years, Allen saw Pauline socially and frequently wrote to