Karasik, “and I’d never seen anyone so nervous before speaking in my life. Her hands were sweating so profusely that I believed that drops were pouring off of them. She sort of held them at her side and sort of shook them. She was trembling, and breathing oddly. Then she got up there and was so brilliant.”
Reviewing the book in The New York Times Book Review, Gerald Mast called Pauline’s work “fiercely impressionistic and aggressively untheoretical,” and praised her “powerful perceptions and terrific writing.” He went on to say that he found her self-confidence in her own impressions somewhat exhausting at times—he felt that, occasionally, he longed for her to ponder the meaning of a film rather than state it so boldly. And he objected to her review of Rich and Famous—not for the reasons Stuart Byron had, but because he felt that she had not adequately considered, or even mentioned, George Cukor’s long career in dialogue comedy. “No auteurist critic, of the sort Miss Kael so vehemently despises, would ever have done so poor a job at thinking about this director,” Mast wrote.
By the mid-1980s the nature of movie criticism itself had begun to change dramatically. In keeping with the tone in recent Hollywood films, reviewing had become lighter and more “entertainment” driven. Increasingly, national newsmagazines put movies on their covers that they thought were likely to connect with a wide sector of the public and become iconic. While Pauline did not object to movies getting cover stories in Time and Newsweek, she was quite aware that this meant that magazine publishers brought pressure to bear on their reviewers to write about the films in question positively—a practice she abhorred.
TV critics had a new visibility, thanks mostly to the success of the Chicago-based reviewers Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, who became popular in the mid-1970s with a local TV program of film reviews that eventually became known as Sneak Previews. Siskel and Ebert had a regular-guy appeal, a shoot-from-the-hip, commonsense style of addressing their viewers. Their reviews were short and punchy and argumentative, always capped by a “Thumbs Up” or “Thumbs Down” summation. The format caught on, and in 1978, they moved to PBS. In 1982 their audience grew substantially when they changed their show’s title to At the Movies and went into national syndication. Siskel and Ebert became enormous pop-culture figures, and signaled a major change in what people wanted from film reviewing. They weren’t critics, exactly—at least not on their television show—but consumer guides, for whom the ultimate point was to let the audience know whether or not they should spend their hard-earned money at the box office. Siskel and Ebert were at the forefront of the “sound bite” movement—their message was fast, punchy, memorable, and made few demands of their viewers. It was also effective: The director Albert Brooks remembered that his 1985 film Lost in America had a limited release; the week after Siskel and Ebert gave the movie two “Thumbs Up,” it tripled its business.
The New York Film Critics Circle, meanwhile, remained as divided as ever. It was widely perceived that there were two basic camps, one led by Sarris and the other by Kael. It had become a game with those members who didn’t avidly belong to one camp or the other to see which came out on top in each year’s voting process. Rumors continued to the effect that Pauline commandeered her followers and “suggested” to them how they might vote, a charge that was difficult to prove. Certainly she didn’t get her way in the final voting with any degree of consistency. The same held true for the National Society of Film Critics. David Ansen remembered his excitement at being inducted into the society, but at the first meeting, the level of venom in the room was shocking. “Pauline’s archenemy, Richard Schickel, was there,” recalled Ansen. “I couldn’t believe the behavior that was going on. He was acting like a sort of naughty, nasty frat boy and he was literally making insulting comments about Pauline’s legs. He didn’t say it to her face. There were a lot of great feuds—not overtly between Pauline and Andrew Sarris. The only times I would see them in the same room were at these voting meetings, and they tended to ignore each other.” Ansen rejected the idea that Pauline insisted on people’s slavishly agreeing with her views on movies. On several occasions she would tell him that she had admired a review he had written