a big-circulation women’s magazine such as McCall’s struck many readers as unsuitable and oddly misplaced.
By mid-May, it was announced that Pauline and McCall’s would part company, a story that was big enough news to merit coverage in Newsweek. “The reviews became less and less appropriate for a mass-audience magazine,” Stein told Newsweek. “I still think she’s one of the best movie critics around. My hiring her was, I thought, a noble experiment. The experiment did not work out.”
Pauline did not look back on her brief stint at McCall’s with rancor and celebrated her departure from the magazine by taking Gina on a trip to Europe in late May 1966. While they were stopping off in London at the Mount Royal Hotel, Robert Mills wrote to her that she had earned $1,000 in royalties for I Lost It at the Movies and $1,500 from the latest McCall’s payment. “What would you like us to do with all this money?” he asked.
Mills cast around for another regular reviewing job, and while Pauline and Gina were still abroad, he received an offer: The New Republic wanted her to be its regular movie columnist, to replace one of the critics she admired least, Stanley Kauffmann, who was leaving for what would be an extremely short-lived stay as drama critic for The New York Times. Founded in 1914 by Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann, the magazine had long been known for its in-depth essays on politics and culture that generally embraced a liberal point of view. By the 1960s its political stance was harder to pin down. While it had come out against the Vietnam War, it was also sharply critical of the wave of protest and activism that had swept across America in mid-decade. Its circulation was anything but mass—it hovered on either side of 50,000—and its editor, Robert Evett, offered Pauline terms that were not nearly as lucrative as the McCall’s deal had been—twenty-four columns a year at $300 each. Still, she believed that as an outlet for her talents, The New Republic made more sense than McCall’s had.
Her debut column appeared on October 8, 1966—“The Creative Business,” another analysis of the artistic bankruptcy rampant in Hollywood—after which she settled down to the business of reviewing movies. Her October 22 column featured reviews of two sprawling epics, Hawaii and The Bible, and surprisingly, for someone who had always harbored an antipathy to the grandiosity of David Lean’s films, she liked both. The Bible was directed by John Huston, and she preferred his approach to the “ploddingly intelligent and controlled” work of Lean; she thought Hawaii was superbly edited, and that its director, George Roy Hill, “compensates for his inexperience in the medium by developing strong characterizations that succeed in binding the material.”
It was a disagreement over Hawaii that led Pauline to one of the most enduring of her friendships with a colleague. Joseph Morgenstern was a young critic at Newsweek who had been invited to appear on the entertainment reporter Pat Collins’s radio show to discuss current films. When he arrived at the studio, he found that Pauline was also a guest. “I could hardly get a word in edgewise,” Morgenstern remembered. “The talk turned to Hawaii. At the time, I thought it was just a big, clumsy movie. Pauline said vociferously on the radio that it has a social conscience, talks about smallpox, this and that. But she overpraised it, as was her wont. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing on the air, and I said it. That goaded her. And as soon as we got off the air, she said, ‘That was fun, honey. Let’s have a cup of coffee!’” It was the beginning of a thirty-six-year friendship.
It had begun to bother Pauline that the youth audience, in particular, didn’t seem more discriminating about the movies it considered “great.” All that seemed to matter was that they felt hip. She regarded this as the worst sort of narcissism, while at the same time dreading that her lack of enthusiasm for many of the new pictures might brand her as some kind of hidebound reactionary. She was particularly troubled by some of the films coming out of Britain, with their bouncing pop-music scores, fast editing, and accelerated camerawork taking in the gritty streets of mod London.
In her November 5, 1966, column for The New Republic, “So Off-beat We Lose the Beat,” she complained that Morgan! was nothing more than “a modernized version of an earlier, romantic primitivist notion that people are