opinion. Denby would later recall the acute discomfort of being cast out not only by Pauline but by many of her acolytes, whom he had mistakenly considered friends. He would go on to an enviable career as a critic and commentator, but the hurt and humiliation that Pauline’s rejection brought remained with him for years.
She had a similarly conflicted relationship with another of her rebels, Paul Schrader. Since turning down the movie-reviewing post in Seattle that she had urged him to take, Schrader had been living in Los Angeles, trying to be a screenwriter. By 1973 he had finished a number of original scripts and, swallowing his pride, sent Pauline four of them—Taxi Driver, The Yakuza, Déjà Vu, and Rolling Thunder. Schrader wrote to her about them in May of that year, clearly wanting her to approve of the path he had taken. He told her that he considered Taxi Driver the best of the lot.
Pauline took the screenplay of Taxi Driver to bed with her late one night, expecting to leaf through only a few pages before dropping off to sleep. She was so riveted by it, however, that she read the entire script before dawn broke. She was unnerved by the characterization of Travis Bickle, the dissociative cabdriver so obsessed with purging the scum of New York, that she was unable to sleep with the script in the bedroom. Eventually she took it into another room, stacked a pile of other things on top of it, and went back to bed.
In mid-1974 Taxi Driver was green-lighted by Columbia Pictures. Schrader was in New York and had dinner with Pauline and the Chicago film reviewer Roger Ebert at the Algonquin. Perhaps because she didn’t want to admit she had been wrong about which vocation he should choose, she never said much to Schrader about his script. All she offered about Taxi Driver that night was that she felt Robert De Niro would never be able to do justice to the part of Travis Bickle.
In December 1974, when The Godfather, Part II was released, Pauline changed her mind about De Niro. The second Godfather film, once again directed masterfully by Francis Ford Coppola, was both a prequel and a sequel, picking up the story of Vito Corleone from his Sicilian childhood, and jumping ahead in time to the 1950s, when the new don, the cold-blooded Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), is establishing the family’s base of operations in Nevada. The Godfather, Part II was that rarest of all sequels: Unfolding at three hours and twenty minutes, it had much greater depth and breadth than the first film. Pauline found that she came close to not having “the emotional resources to deal with the experience of this film. Twice, I almost cried out at acts of violence that De Niro’s Vito committed. I didn’t look away from the images, as I sometimes do at routine action pictures. I wanted to see the worst; there is a powerful need to see it. You need these moments as you need the terrible climaxes in a Tolstoy novel. A great novelist does not spare our feelings (as the historical romancer does); he intensifies them, and so does Coppola.” She admitted that she found The Godfather, Part II so overwhelming that “about midway, I began to feel that the film was expanding in my head like a soft bullet.” Her review was a fine example of something she always sought to do—let the reader in on her thought processes. She thought that Michael’s closed-off self—his inability to have a single moment of happiness—came through brilliantly in Al Pacino’s performance. “Is it our imagination, or is Michael’s face starting to rot?” Pauline wondered of the film’s early scenes. She thought that De Niro, as young Vito, had “the physical audacity, the grace, and the instinct to become a great actor—perhaps as great as Brando.” Most of all, she expressed great admiration for Coppola, whose approach she found “openhanded: he doesn’t force the situations. He puts the material up there, and we read the screen for ourselves.” She found that “the sensibility at work in this film is that of a major artist. We’re not used to it: how many screen artists get the chance to work in the epic form, and who has been able to seize the power to compose a modern American epic? And who else, when he got the chance and the power, would have proceeded with the absolute conviction that he’d make the