in a broadcast that McCabe “saddened and disgusted” her, and that it was “rated R, presumably for rotten.” She also noted that at the screening at the Motion Picture Academy, some forty people “got up and walked out, unable to understand the onscreen mumbling.”
Under normal circumstances Penelope Gilliatt would have reviewed McCabe as part of her regular schedule, but Pauline persuaded both Shawn and Gilliatt to let her step in and write the review in the middle of her layoff. It was the most rapturous notice she had written to date—the first of the “bliss-out” reviews for which she would soon become famous. She opened with this sentence: “McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a beautiful pipe dream of a movie—a fleeting, almost diaphanous vision of what frontier life might have been.” She found the film “so indirect in method that it throws one off base. It’s not much like other Westerns; it’s not really much like other movies.” She loved the picture’s beguiling, allusive style, its almost dreamlike view of another time, and she praised Altman for having given up “the theatrical convention that movies have generally clung to of introducing the characters and putting tags on them. Though Altman’s method is a step toward a new kind of movie naturalism, the technique may seem mannered to those who are put off by the violation of custom—as if he simply didn’t want to be straightforward about his storytelling.” Curiously, she mentioned neither Vilmos Zsigmond’s photography, with its innovative use of filters, or the inferior quality of the sound mixing.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller seduced Pauline so completely that she became its cheerleader. In the closing paragraph of her review, she confessed her fear that the movie might not find the audience it deserved. “Will a large enough American public accept American movies that are delicate and understated and searching—movies that don’t resolve all the feelings they touch, that don’t aim at leaving us satisfied, the way a three-ring circus satisfies?” Clearly, she was afraid the answer was no. The week that the review was published, she made an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show, exhorting moviegoers to get out and support this major work by a brilliant American artist. McCabe & Mrs. Miller had had a soft opening, but suddenly, after Pauline’s drum-beating on television, box office returns picked up. There is no way of knowing how much Pauline’s advocacy had to do with the increase in McCabe & Mrs. Miller’s attendance, but Altman swore that it had been a key factor. In the end, although the film never achieved hit status, Pauline helped to make it one of the year’s most talked-about movies.
Those who believed that criticism should maintain a coolly objective tone were bothered by the emotional tenor of Pauline’s support for the film, and her review confirmed many suspicions that she was incapable of staying within “correct” critical boundaries. It gave her, however, the growing confidence that her impact on readers and audiences was even greater than she had imagined.
When Pauline returned to her New Yorker duties in the fall of 1971, she led off with one of the most misleading statements of her career. Her season-opening review was of John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday, a movie that posed a particular challenge for her: The screenplay was written by Penelope Gilliatt.
“Seeing Sunday Bloody Sunday was for me like reading a novel that was very far from my life and my temperament, and that yet when finished it had me thinking,” she wrote in the opening of her review. Sunday Bloody Sunday concerned a ménage a trois involving a middle-aged Jewish doctor, an uptight female employment officer, and the casually amoral younger man whom they both love. The film’s central theme was how people learn to give up their dreams and settle for less than they had once imagined having. The seminal scene took place between Alex (Glenda Jackson) and her mother (Peggy Ashcroft). At the end of a cheerless dinner, Mrs. Grenville tries to tell Alex why she has stayed with her work-obsessed, neglectful husband:MRS. GRENVILLE: Darling, you keep throwing in your hand because you haven’t got the whole thing. There is no whole thing. One has to make it work.
What you don’t know is that there was a time when I left him. We had different opinions about everything. Everything seemed impossible.
ALEX: When?
MRS. GRENVILLE: You were three. He left me alone. It was good of him (pause). But I was mad not to know how much I