that the mod scene represented the spiritual aridity of the times was nothing but a pompous, moralizing pose. While Antonioni had tapped into the alienation and unresponsiveness of modern youth, he had missed “the fervor and astonishing speed in their rejections of older values; he sees only the emptiness of pop culture.”
In her reviewing career to date, Pauline had shown a powerful gift for defending the great talents she believed had been prevented from doing their best work by Hollywood; Orson Welles’s Falstaff provided her with another such opportunity. After Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles’s career had consisted mainly of giving hammy performances in a string of mediocre pictures and trying to amass enough cash to finance a project that might restore his reputation as a director. He had come tantalizingly close with Othello, finally released in 1955 after years of stop-and-start filming, and Touch of Evil, a wholly original thriller set in a Mexican border town, but both films received minimal distribution and flopped.
In the 1960s he had one more chance, with Falstaff (later known as Chimes at Midnight), which he had been shooting in Europe for years. It was an amalgamation of several Shakespeare plays, with the most poignant part of Henry IV, Part I at its center: Prince Hal’s recognition of his destiny and gradual pulling away from Falstaff. Pauline admitted that technically, the movie was a mess, showing many signs of its chaotic filming, but she found “the casting superb and the performance beautiful.” The Battle of Shrewsbury, she felt, ranked with “the best of Griffith, John Ford, Eisenstein, Kurosawa—that is, with the best ever done.” And yet its technical defects were preventing it from getting proper distribution. “And Welles—the one great creative force in American films in our time, the man who might have redeemed our movies from the general contempt in which they are (and for the most part, rightly) held—is, ironically, an expatriate director whose work thus reaches only the art-house audience.”
The New Republic continued to tamper with her copy, and by the summer of 1967 she realized she could not continue for much longer. She resigned her post, using her latest royalty check for I Lost It at the Movies to take Gina to Europe for a few weeks. She was not at all sure that another steady reviewing job would present itself.
Pauline was distressed that the creative ferment that had burst out of France and Britain at the end of the ’50s seemed to have dried up. It was particularly sad to see what had happened to François Truffaut, who had taken on the ill-advised Fahrenheit 451 and was now preparing what would turn out to be a hollow parody of his idol, Alfred Hitchcock, The Bride Wore Black. One of the few French directors to keep his hold was Jean-Luc Godard, whose Band of Outsiders Pauline had admired. She felt that Breathless and Band of Outsiders derived their spark from the fact that they were “movies made by a generation bred on movies . . . Godard is the Scott Fitzgerald of the movie world, and movies are for the sixties a synthesis of what the arts were for the post–World War I generation—rebellion, romance, a new style of life.” Unfortunately, Band of Outsiders failed to intrigue American audiences and played in New York for only a single week in March 1966.
American movies, Pauline believed, were in a shambles. She was certain that she had been right about the dangerous example set by The Sound of Music. Big, expensive, self-important pictures seemed to be all that interested the studios. Very seldom did she see anything that reflected the current climate in America in a serious or challenging way, and she had come to fear that perhaps there wasn’t even a public for such movies. Impressed as she had been by Truffaut’s and Godard’s early films, she had stopped short of genuine capitulation to them: that degree of abandon she still reserved for an American movie.
And then, on August 4, 1967, Bonnie and Clyde opened at the Montreal Film Festival.
The picture had first gone into development in 1963, when David Newman and Robert Benton, both staff art directors at Esquire, had gotten together to write a treatment based on the legendary Depression-era crime sprees of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Like Pauline, Newman and Benton were impatient for the American film to move forward, and their telling of the story of Bonnie and Clyde showed the influence of the