been, it was probably inevitable for a critic who, in the words of the film historian Jeanine Basinger, “took risks—she was not careful. She was bold—and her boldness made people take shots at her.” But it was an accusation that would cling to her in the years to come.
“Fear of Movies” also included Pauline’s sharp observations of Woody Allen’s latest, Interiors, a study of a well-educated, upper-middle-class WASP family of New Yorkers that has been unraveling for years. The film’s dialogue, which managed to be both arid and archly literary, and the austere, earth-toned production design and conspicuously somber, sedate direction and photography, along with its concerns with the problems of a group of intellectually striving Manhattanites, all added up to a movie that seemed to Pauline as if its director was desperately begging to be taken seriously. She wondered, “How can Woody Allen present in a measured, lugubriously straight manner the same sorts of tinny anxiety discourse that he generally parodies?” To her, the film’s presentation of a WASP dilemma was a mask for classic Jewish concerns. “Surely at root the family problem is Jewish: it’s not the culture in general that imposes these humanly impossible standards of achievement—they’re a result of the Jewish fear of poverty and persecution and the Jewish reverence for learning.” Interiors was “a handbook of art-film mannerisms,” and she feared that in the end, Allen’s obsession with repressive good taste “is just what may keep him from making great movies.” (In this, she turned out to be amazingly prescient.) Pauline was delighted to have the chance to overturn the “official” verdict of Penelope Gilliatt, who had reviewed Interiors in The New Yorker only weeks earlier, saying of Allen, “This droll piece of work is his most majestic so far.”
Pauline was also displeased with Robert Altman’s latest, A Wedding. The movie had probably come about for all the wrong reasons: While Altman was shooting Three Women, a reporter from Mother Jones had asked him what he was going to film next; exasperated with her vapid questions, he recalled, he answered, “A wedding.... I’m taking this crew, and we’ll be doing weddings. Somebody gets married, and we’ll go and film it. I was really shitty. About that time we broke for lunch, and I went into this motel room with two or three other staff, and I said, ‘You know, that’s not a bad idea.’”
In A Wedding, it appears that Altman wanted to accomplish something similar to what he had achieved in Nashville—a revealing inside look at a bedrock American institution. Like Nashville it featured a big, attractive cast (including Carol Burnett, Vittorio Gassman, and Mia Farrow), but it had too many characters—forty-eight compared with Nashville’s twenty-four—and the film’s tone this time was sour, not generous, without Nashville’s constant surprises and twists. To Pauline, it was “like a busted bag of marbles—people are running every way at once.” She objected to its condescending tone: Altman, she felt, “doesn’t like the characters on the screen; he’s taking potshots at them, but he doesn’t show us what he’s got against them.” The movie’s cynical tone saddened her, and her disappointment in Altman was crystallized by her choice of a title for the review—“Forty-eight Characters in Search of a Director.”
Pauline’s growing disappointment in the movies she had been seeing had an odd, dispiriting effect on those who loyally read her each week. While there was truth to the accusation that her writing at times became hyperbolic, those reviews from the early to mid-’70s continued to convey an enthusiasm that was addictive. By the fall of 1978, however, many of her readers may have felt that they were experiencing withdrawal from a powerful drug. The great champion of the creative flowering of earlier in the decade took it personally that that period seemed all but over, and at times, her writing showed it.
She was, however, in excellent form with her review of Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata. It was a prestige project, a work by an acknowledged master that also featured a topical theme—the bitter conflict of a mother and daughter. Autumn Sonata told the story of Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman, in her first film with the director), a famed Swedish concert pianist who goes to visit her daughter, Eva (Liv Ullmann), married to a country parson. The daughter is a study in pent-up rage, which she blames on her mother’s years of neglect.
The critics, many of them impressed by the mere idea of a collaboration between the two Bergmans, were generally