one of the most vital pieces she had written in some time, demonstrating again her Agee-like talent for working out her feelings on the page. The future Entertainment Weekly film critic Owen Gleiberman was still a student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor when Pauline’s review of The Deer Hunter appeared. “When I see something as huge, as rich, and as garbled as The Deer Hunter, regardless of how secure I am with my own feelings,” Gleiberman wrote to her, “I feel slightly off balance until I get a look at what you had to say. And what you’ve said has, I believe, made a difference in my life.”
At year’s end Pauline saw the most purely enjoyable movie she’d seen in years—Philip Kaufman’s remake of the 1956 low-budget science fiction classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The original version, about a community being systematically supplanted by pods from outer space that hatch perfect, desensitized human replicas, had been a surprise hit when it was released and was still a favorite in campus revivals, as it had come to be read as a biting commentary on the McCarthyist paranoia of the ’50s. The remake swapped the original’s small-town California setting for San Francisco but retained the paranoid atmosphere.
Pauline thought that for pure movie thrills, the new Invasion of the Body Snatchers was “the American movie of the year—a new classic.” She approved of the change of scene, because Kaufman and the screenwriter, W. D. (Rick) Richter, had beautifully captured the strays and eccentric artists that populated San Francisco. What better setting for a movie about the dangers of creeping conformity? She felt that eccentricity was “the San Francisco brand of humanity.... There’s something at stake in this movie: the right of freaks to be freaks—which is much more appealing than the right of ‘normal’ people to be normal.” She also had special praise for Veronica Cartwright, who played the film’s second female lead. Cartwright was an actress whose work Pauline had been following closely for some time. In her review of Cartwright’s 1975 film, Inserts, Pauline had compared her to Jeanne Eagels—“a grown-up, quicksilver talent.” Writing about Invasion, she observed that Cartwright possessed “such instinct for the camera that even when she isn’t doing anything special, what she’s feeling registers. She doesn’t steal scenes—she gives them an extra comic intensity.”
“Sweetie, you need a publicist—nobody knows you,” Pauline told Kaufman when they met at a Chinese restaurant shortly after the release of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Kaufman declined the idea of a publicity push, but he and Pauline maintained a pleasant friendship for years. “She recognized that Body Snatchers was in large part a comedy,” said Kaufman. “Pauline put her finger on it. It’s meant to be playful. We had such a great time making it, and everyone connected with it had a great sense of humor.”
Not long after her review of Body Snatchers appeared, Pauline also had the opportunity to meet Cartwright in New York. They had a drink at the Plaza, and Pauline was full of questions and advice on what Cartwright might do next. James Toback joined them briefly, because Pauline wanted him to interview Cartwright for a possible role in an upcoming film. “She was obsessed with James Toback,” Cartwright remembered. “I mean obsessed. It was almost motherly. She wanted to make sure a meeting was set up between us, and it was almost like she was trying to guide him through something.”
When Toback left for another appointment, Pauline and Cartwright remained behind to finish their cocktails. Evening was coming on, and Pauline invited Cartwright to attend a screening with her that night. Cartwright, who was having difficulties with her then-boyfriend, thanked her but begged off, mentioning her need to deal with her problems at home. Pauline could not hide her disappointment. “I had the weirdest feeling she was offended,” Cartwright observed. “I don’t know quite what happened, but she never reviewed me after that. She mentioned me, but she never picked me out in anything else. She was determined not to say anything.”
Pauline’s growing sense of dissatisfaction with the films she was seeing took a particularly harsh turn in her treatment of Paul Schrader’s new film, Hardcore, starring George C. Scott as a strict Midwestern Calvinist whose daughter disappears on a church youth-group trip to Los Angeles; when a private detective he has hired determines that the girl is appearing in hardcore porn movies, Scott’s character goes out to L.A. to try to find