1975: the year that changed cinema forever

Reviewing Barry Lyndon for the New Yorker in December 1975, a California girl made a plea for one of her countrymen to come in from the bitter English cold. “I wish Stanley Kubrick would come home to this country to make movies again, working fast on modern subjects,” Pauline Kael wrote. “Maybe even doing something tacky, for the hell of it.” It’s telling that in the midst of dinging the director she’d once dubbed ‘Stanley Strangelove’ for what she saw as the excessive misanthropy and insufficient momentum of his 18th-century picaresque – “a three-hour slide-show for art history majors” – Kael cast aspersions on Kubrick’s patriotism. Her thesis, such as it was, was that living and working in the United Kingdom had left a Brooklyn-born hustler cut off from his authentic artistic impulses – the unfortunate victim of lofty literary ambitions and a tightened sphincter. “There was more film art in his early The Killing than there is in Barry Lyndon,” wrote Kael acidly. “And you didn’t feel older when you came out of it.”

For all her staunchly anti-intellectual posturing, Kael was a clever dialectician, presiding regally over a film-critical discourse defined largely by devotion to and dissent from her chosen positions. In 1975, Kael’s sneering disdain for Barry Lyndon was contextualised by her similarly performative – and far more persuasive – enthusiasm for Robert Altman’s Nashville, itself a three-hour epic drenched in misanthropy but fast, modern and surpassingly tacky. (The garish Tennessee-meets-Vegas ensembles of Henry Gibson’s Top 40 crooner Haven Hamilton predate Glen Campbell; he’s the original Rhinestone Cowboy). Tellingly, what Kael responded to most ecstatically in Nashville was its star-spangled virtuosity, the way it smuggled a strain of exotic, transatlantic sophistication on to salt-of-the-earth home turf. Set at a massive country and western summit populated by glad-handers, rubberneckers and lone gunmen, Nashville was a come-dressed-as-the-sick-soul-of-America party, minus the perceived snobbery of the European auteur cohort. She especially loved the bit where one yammering foreign correspondent – “Opal from the BBC”, brilliantly played by Geraldine Chaplin as a cold fish out of water – observes a group of rowdy, ten-gallon revellers and sighs “pure, unadulterated Bergman” before noting that “[they’re] all wrong for Bergman”. It’s a great line, and a nifty way for a pop-cultural omnivore like Altman to have his fancy Swedish takeaway and eat it, too. Kael didn’t review Arthur Penn’s Night Moves that same year, but it’s easy to picture her smirking at Gene Hackman’s glancing review of My Night at Maud’s therein – he thought Eric Rohmer’s 1969 talk-a-thon was “like watching paint dry”…