Criticising Criticism Series: Fifty Years Ago Pauline Kael Wrote The Most Famous Review in Film History - For A Movie That Was Completely Undeserving Of It

 

In 1973, like so many of the years in that fabled decade, some of the greatest films of all time were made. And whereas the Academy Awards is rarely the barometer of such things – they ignored Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets and Terence Malick’s Badlands, both of which are now considered among the greatest films in history -  when it came to nominations at least, they did a far better job that they usually do.

The Exorcist became the first horror film to ever receive a Best Picture nomination and it remains the most nominated horror film in history. American Graffiti, a film that demonstrates what a great creative force we lost when George Lucas decided to focus his entire career on a galaxy far, far away received five nominations. Cries & Whispers, one of Ingmar Bergman’s greatest films received five nominations and Ingmar Bergman was nominated for Best Director. (The Academy rules at the time allowed nominees for Best Foreign Film to be eligible for all other awards the year after they were released. Cries & Whispers had won the year before.) Even The Sting, which is not at the level of these masterpieces, has entered culture as one of the most intricate caper films of all time; by comparison Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven films have fewer double crosses.

And several other films that are part of the dialogue as cultural milestones received their fair share of recognition. Peter Bogdanavich’s follow up to The Last Picture Show received three Oscar nomination and recognized Tatum O’Neal for Best Supporting Actress. Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail earned Jack Nicholson and Randy Quaid Academy Award nominations.  Sydney Pollack’s The Way We Were, one of the most culturally resonant love stories, earned five nominations. And Day For Night one of Francois Truffaut’s greatest works, won Best Foreign Film that year. (Keeping with the pattern that Cries and Whispers set, the following year it was nominated for three Academy awards, including two for Truffaut for direction and writing.)

Yet in the minds of some of the most prominent film critics of the era, the best film of 1973 had come out in theaters before the Oscars for 1972 had even been given.  And unlike every film that I have listed before, this movie has not only been one that couldn’t be made today, there’s a very good argument it shouldn’t have been made in 1972, much less revered the way it was by so many. That film was Last Tango in Paris arguably the most controversial film of the entire decade and certainly the most polarizing.

When it came out in 1973 Pauline Kael wrote arguably the most famous film review in the history of film criticism, certainly one of the most quoted.  Among the lines are: “In Last Tango in Paris, (Marlon) Brando and (Bernardo) Bertolucci have altered the face of an art form” She said that in years to come it would be compared Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.”

Roger Ebert was similarly reverent at the time. He would look back at the film on two separate occasions. Looking at in August of 1995, he referred to it as ‘the banner for a revolution that never happened.” He said rewatching it reminded him of ‘revisiting a house you don’t live in any more and where you did wild things you don’t do anymore.” He claimed the movie – which was released with an X-rating, the kiss of death – ‘frightened off imitators’ and films that did not deal with graphic sexuality. I don’t deny that most Americans films don’t deal with sexuality frankly any more, but looking at Last Tango in Paris even a brief summary makes you actually wonder if this was the rare occasion that Hollywood realized what the critics didn’t and knew they were better served running for the hills.

Even a decade later when Ebert officially put in his Great Movies series (it was in the third volume) he had not changed his fundamental opinion on it.  I’m actually kind of appalled by this given that one of the things I’ve always admired about Ebert was his ability with the passage of time to change his mind. In that same entry, he took another look at Triumph of the Will, a film that he had once considered the greatest documentary of all time and realized that the ‘only people who could admire it were Nazis.’ The only way it could be consider great was at a work of propaganda. Ebert never shied away from dealing with recognizing great films as problematic – he acknowledged in previous volumes the fundamental difficulty with both Gone With The Wind and Birth of a Nation, even as he insisted that they should not be banned. Even among films he ranks among the greatest ever made, he admits decades later that many have flaws that he couldn’t see at the time – in this volume he looks at films such as Cool Hand Luke and Easy Rider and says that both movies only rank among the great ones because of the work of Paul Newman and Jack Nicholson, respectively. Yet his opinion of Last Tango remained fundamentally that of nostalgia, even as he acknowledges out loud something that should have gotten the film released anywhere.

Now I confess that I have only tried to see Last Tango in Paris once. I didn’t particularly want to: I’d heard descriptions of it starting when I was thirteen years old that fundamentally repulsed me.  Even before I knew criticism was something I wanted to pursue, I had a sinking feeling this was the kind of film that critics appreciate when they want to feel smart rather than anything to do with the subject matter. But I knew at some point I had to at least try to watch it.

So when I was twenty-four, I recorded it on Cinemax and tried to watch the film. I’ll admit this was the time in my life I was looking for films as much for pornographic value as I was artistic, but just listening to the description arousal was not anything I was expecting.

I got about twenty five minutes into it, up until the first time that Jeane and Paul first meet.  I watched about ten seconds of what Paul does to Jean, and I shut the tape off. Even that much made me feel like I needed a shower. I rewound the film, taped over as quickly as possible and have done everything in my power to avoid it since.

In retrospect what I find the most horrifying is that so many enlightened liberal people – including Kael and Ebert – seem to have acknowledged what happens in this scene and chose to ignore it. Here is the exact quote in Ebert’s first review:

“Paul rapes her, if rape is a term to describe an act so casually accepted by the girl.

I realize that the 1970s were not the most friendly time to women, to say the least, but how could anyone write those words and truly think that this would make anyone, much less a woman want to see this movie? This film grossed $36 million at the U.S box office (in 1973 dollars). How many of those ticket-buyers were female we will never know, and since theaters do not grant refunds we will also never know how many women ran out appalled after some of the scenes. Even if they got past that, I don’t think the infamous ‘butter scene’ would have kept in the theater much beyond that.

Ebert modified his review twenty years later, referring to the anonymous encounters as ‘brutal, lonely sex’.  When it came to reviewing the film again for the Great Movies, he was back to calling their first encounter rape. None of those times does he show any redeeming factors for Jeanne, and listen to some of his original review:

“It is said in some quarters that the sex in the movie is debasing to the girl, but I don’t think it is. She’s almost a bystander, a witness at the scene of an accident. She hasn’t suffered enough, experienced enough, to more than dimly guess what Paul is doing to her…only an idiot would criticize this movie because the girl is so often naked but Paul never is. That’s their relationship.”

I admire Ebert and his views on feminism and women’s issues would evolve immensely over time, but it’s hard to look at this review and see that Ebert is doing everything in his power to diminish Schneider and make this film all about what the powerful men – which Brando was, make no mistake – was doing to this woman.

He goes further and diminishes Schneider even as he raves about Brando and Bertolucci in this film. He tries to moderate in his original review by saying: “That’s not her fault, Bertolucci directs her that way…He wants a character who does not quite understand the situation she finds herself in.”  Ebert does everything in his power to say that this film is not about sex but a physical function of the soul’s desperation. But even then he makes it clear its about Paul, not ‘the girl’.

To be fair to Ebert in later reviews he tried to redeem Schneider as a performer but in neither case does he do anything to show sympathy for what Schneider went through as a result.  The best he can say about this performer whose career he admits dissipated after the film, was that Brando and Bertolucci are not nearly as interested in her as in Paul.  Well, that’s a kind way to refer to an actress whose most famous role was in a film where she was naked for most of it and had her character raped and sodomized. I bet she thinks it was worth it. Actually she doesn’t.

The making of the film itself was a controversial experience.  In the immediate aftermath Brando and Maria Schneider admitted that they felt ‘raped’ by it and neither would speak with Bertolucci again. Brando would later say in his autobiography that Bertolucci was one of the three best directors he ever worked with, and there is a certain idea that the film was a collaborative process.  Yet Brando’s reputation, already suffering after he declined his Academy Award for The Godfather, never truly recovered after this film even though he received his seventh and last Oscar nomination for Best Actor. With the exception of Apocalypse Now, which Coppola acknowledged was a nightmare for everybody and possibly A Dry White Season he never appeared in another film of this caliber again. There’s an argument that his work in the one-two punch that should have put him back on the A-list destroyed whatever feeling Hollywood had for one of the greatest actors in its history.

But Bertolucci? He came out fine. Not only was he nominated for Best Director, he had a fairly successful career as a director, though if you know anything about the films he made after that, there’s something truly troubling about it. Much of his most Last Tango career dealt with huge epic films such as 1900 (a six hour long mess starring Robert DeNiro and Gerard Depardieu), The Sheltering Sky and his eventually Oscar winner The Last Emperor, a movie so overblown and blatantly Oscar bait it overwhelmed such subtle and clearly better films as Moonstruck and Broadcast News.

His smaller films are more troubling. La Luna is a film where Jill Clayburgh plays an opera singer who begins an incestuous relationship with her son. Stealing Beauty is a film where Liv Tyler plays a college poet who comes to Italy and has  her sexual awakening with many older men. Besieged is about an African exile played by Thandie Newton, who keeps house for an older Englishman (David Thewlis) who becomes obsessed with her and will get her husband out of jail if he has sex with her. His final film was The Dreamers and involves the relationship between a young American in 1967 Paris and his relationship with two siblings who share a love of film with him – and each other. This one couldn’t escape an NC-17 rating.

In all of these movies Bertolucci would appear to be dealing with controversial and important issues and the roles of sex. In reality (and yes, I’ve seen three of these movies) he seems to be focusing a lot of time and energy showing young women as naked as possible.  Tyler and  Eva Green (the female lead in The Dreamers) have never commented about this; Newton, who has been publicly outspoken about many things, might well have at some point.

There has been much discussion over the years about, given Woody Allen’s behavior in private life, his films should be taken out of circulation. I’ve never heard any discussion of Bertolucci in that context, but that may be because he was nowhere as successful and made far fewer films, many of them with foreign backing.  There are many critics who believe Americans have far too a Puritanical attitude about sex and nudity in general, and I tend to agree with them. But there’s a difference between being offended by what you see on the screen and clear examples of exploitation. Sexual harassment suits, much less the #MeToo movement did not exist in the 1970s, but it’s hard not to look at the kind of films Bertolucci spent his career making and truly wonder why so many critics looked at them and saw art rather than exploitation.

What did critics such as Kael see when they saw Last Tango the first time? Why did such an enlightened writer as Ebert keep seeing it and keep considering it something Hollywood should have learned from? I’m all for films that want to put sex into the light, but a movie like Last Tango in Paris really makes you think that it should be shoved in the darkest corner and never looked at again. I later learned that some New York theaters marketed it by charging a $5 rate, which was the going rate for porno theaters in Times Square at the time. I can’t help but think that those men in raincoats who came to those films would have been disappointed not only in getting what they didn’t expect but  not being happy with they got.

In closing I think the most honest and frankly appropriate reaction to Last Tango in Paris came not from a film critic but Lucille Ball. Asked what she thought after seeing the film she said: “I want to bash Brando in the nose and I have these three rings on!”  It might have been far more appropriate to bash Bertolucci in the nose. I know how the movie ends and given how it came out I think Schneider – and cinema – would have been better served if she turned the gun on her director instead of Brando.