Here’s another gem by Ross Wetzsteon. Originally published in the March 14, 1988, issue of New York magazine. Reprinted here with permission of the author’s widow, Laura Ross. Illustration by Sam Woolley. 

Flying. He’d wanted to fly since he was 16. Sitting at his desk in high school in Greenwood, Mississippi, he fantasized that it was a P-51 Mustang, F-86 Sabre jet. He didn’t want to be a pilot, he wanted to be a flier. A pilot just drives—the flyer flies.

And now, five years later, Morgan Freeman is sitting in the cockpit of a jet fighter at last, the Plexiglass bubble secure, the nose falling away in front, the wings swept back, the joystick between his legs. Taxi to the head of the runway, get his clearance from the control tower, let loose the engine, sore into the sky!

Okay, it’s just a T-33 jet trainer parked beside a hanger and he’s only an airman-second-class radar mechanic who’s gotten permission to sit in the cockpit for a few minutes, but this is what he’s dreamed of since he enlisted in the Air Force. Hand on the throttle, eyes scanning the sky, he lets his mind fall into a rapturous reverie—chasing the clouds, dipping his wings from side to side, nosing into a steep dive and pulling out in a swooping arc.

But something’s wrong. After a couple of minutes, he realizes he can’t find the thrill he anticipated. It isn’t there. Instead of fantasizing, he starts thinking. Maybe this isn’t what he wants after all. Maybe he only wanted it because of the movies he’d seen. For one thing, anything he shoots will stay shot. Ten minutes pass. Fifteen. The dream is fading. No, this isn’t what he wants it all. After 20 minutes, he unstraps himself, pushes back the bubble, gets out of the cockpit, leaps to the ground, and walks away—not just from the plane but from the whole idea, from war, military life, jet fighters, all of it. He’s made a decision. If it’s all about movies, he’ll become an actor instead.

Thirty years later, in her New Yorker review of Street Smart, Pauline Kael asks, “Is Morgan Freeman the greatest American actor?” and it’s clear from her rave that it’s a rhetorical question. At Christmas time, he wins awards from the National Society of Film Critics and the New York and Los Angeles film critics as Best Supporting Actor for his performance as a pimp in Street Smart. In February, he’s nominated for an Oscar—against all odds, since only an electric performance could survive such a forgettable film. A street-smart pimp? The same Morgan Freeman who just finished a nearly yearlong run as an elderly, unlettered southern chauffeur in the Off-Broadway hit Driving Miss Daisy (a performance that won him his third Obie in eight years)? The same Morgan Freeman who’s a surefire Tony nominee for his performance as a charismatic Pentecostal preacher in The Gospel at Colonus, the long-awaited Lee Breuer-Bob Telson musical that had cheering, ecstatic audiences standing on their seats at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival in 1983, then in Houston, Washington, Philadelphia, Paris, Atlanta, Barcelona, and opens on Broadway March 24?

And this is only one year. Morgan Freeman has played a wise old wino in The Mighty Gents on Broadway, an idealistic upper-middle-class architect on the soap Another World, a death-row prisoner in the film Brubaker. He’s danced with Michael Kidd at the 1964 World’s Fair, sung with Pearl Bailey in the all-black Hello, Dolly! He could be seen romping on The Electric Company, then as a stately Coriolanus at the Delacorte.

“When professionals talk range,” says a director, “the names you hear most often are Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, and Morgan Freeman. It’s that indefinable quality only the greatest actors have to completely submerge themselves in radically different roles, to make you think in each one of them, ‘He was born to play that.’ A lot of actors have that authority in one or two or even three roles, but Morgan has it in everything he does.” It’s the kind of talent that often wins accolades within the profession long before it wins public recognition, and only this year has the world finally realized what Freeman has known for 30 years—that he made the right decision when he walked away from that cockpit.

Oscars, Obies, Tonys—Morgan Freeman is grateful for the recognition, but it also makes him uneasy. “It’s like some sorta Miss America contest,” he says in a half-exasperated, half-baffled tone. “‘Most this,’ ‘Best that’—all this schmagoo about winners.” He’s rubbing the clown white out of his hair with a towel after one of this final performances in Driving Miss Daisy. “If Jack Nicholson, Nick Nolte, and Bill Hurt are all up for the same award—with absolutely different characterizations—you’re going to tell me one of them is the best?”

At the Obie ceremonies last May, Freeman told a story. “Years ago, I was nominated for a Tony award for The Mighty Gents. Oh, ah, gee whiz—I was so executed! So I got my tuxedo and I went to the ceremony, and of course I didn’t win. Now, to be big about it, you know, you say ”kay.’ But I was crushed. I didn’t like feeling crushed, so I would prefer not to have been involved in it at all. If you’re going to give me an award, fine—just give it to me. But don’tnominate me for it. Because what they’re telling you is ‘You’ve been nominated, but you didn’t win.’ Terrific. Who wants to hear that?”

But wouldn’t an Oscar make a big difference in his career?

Freeman runs a comb through his hair, pats the left side of his head, then the right—he has facial bones that even Katharine Hepburn would envy, but not a trace of narcissism. “In a way, I’m kind of contradicting what I said, because sure I’m interested in getting the nomination, but frankly I don’t care if I win or not.” For one thing, getting the nomination will help him land the film of Miss Daisy. “I would commit crimes for that. But otherwise, I don’t want to get involved. It’s just that the whole system is carrying me along,” he says, spreading his hands, palms upraised, in a gesture of helplessness. “If your luck holds, it might lead to more work. But conversely, if it doesn’t, you might not even be in the business. Believe me, I know something about that.”

He’s bundled up now, heading out for dinner. He eats only one meal a day since he turned 50 (last June) and “my metabolism suddenly came to a screeching halt.” If awards don’t make much sense to him, bring up “range” and he immediately says, “That’s what I’m here for. I never quite made it as a ‘matinee idol’ or ‘leading man'”—the irony in his voice is more self-deprecating than sarcastic—”but I’ve always wanted to play the most interesting roles, and they’re not necessarily the leading roles. I prefer character roles. I want to get as far away from myself as possible. That’s the whole point of acting for me.”

Walking along 42nd Street, Morgan Freeman talks about the performances he most admires—not the Orson Welles of Citizen Kane but the Orson Welles of Touch of Evil; not the Laurence Olivier of Hamlet but the Laurence Olivier of Khartoum. He stops on the sidewalk, raises his right hand to his forehead in a snappy salute. “Now, that’s the level of performance you strive for.”

Like Freeman’s performance in Street Smart. Vicious yet charming, scary yet seductive, menacing yet amiable, the kind of guy who can hold a gun to your throat, then slowly smile, pat you on the cheek, and say, “Come on. I’ll buy you a cuppa coffee.” Freeman’s Fast Black has all the oxymorons you’d expect in a routinely first-rate portrayal of a pimp. But he takes them to a level deeper, playing a man so tautly in control he could snap into psychosis at any second, a man, most of all, who knows that a large part of being a successful pimp is being a gifted actor.

In one of the most chilling scenes in movie history, he grabs the prostitute played by Kathy Baker, slams her against a wall, and lays a broken scissor blade on her cheek, half an inch from her eyes. “I’m gonna take one eye. Just one,” he tells her. “You have to tell me which one—left or right?” Back and forth flash the scissors. Left? Right? Left? Right? Choose. And when he finally terrorized her into choosing, he slowly withdraws the scissors, turns them upside down, and peers through the handles as if they were eyeglasses, with a sly, get-my-point grin. Laurence Olivier himself could raise his right hand to his forehead in a snappy salute.

“What is a pimp?” Freeman asks, gesturing randomly at the passersby on 42nd Street. “Can you walk along here and pick one out? The way they usually play ’em in movies, you can. That’s just a caricature. No one I’ve ever seen in movies has done a person I know.”

He’s a regular at the restaurant; all the waiters greet him with first-name smiles. The owner rushes over, puts his arm around Freeman’s shoulder, guides him to the best table. There’s friendship in the greetings, not effusiveness, yet there’s a slightly wary reserve in his response. He speaks warmly with a hint of a drawl in his voice, but at the same time his eyes are sharply observant, some part of him remains distant, withdrawn, private. It’s as if he enjoys being known, liked, respected, but senses it could all change in a second—and if it does, he’ll be ready.

How does he “research” a part like Fast Black? He said something about people he’s known?

He’s silent for 20 seconds, 30, as if he hasn’t heard the question—it’s a trait his friends know well, the long, deadpan pause is always followed by that warm, slightly quizzical smile. “Nothing like that. All that happened was the costume designer called and said she wanted to go shopping with me. Fine. Whatever you say. I figure we’ll be going to 42nd Street, see. But then she says, ‘I want to take you to Saks Fifth Avenue,’ and as soon as she said that, my mind was galvanized! So we went shopping at Saks. The Giorgio Armani stuff was too sedate, but we were sure at the right store! ‘Cause being a pimp, it’s all about looking’ good.

“I’m not much for talking about acting,” he continues. “I’ve been called an intuitive actor, and I guess that’s right. I go with what I feel. It doesn’t do me any good to intellectualize it. Take Fast Black. He’s a real frightening guy: he’s made it into an art form—intimidating people, then slacking off—but talking about it that way didn’t help me. It was just getting into his clothes—that’s when I started putting the character in place.

“Sure technique has something to do with it, knowing when to underplay, when to overplay. When you first see Fast Black, for instance, he’s just a guy in a car having a conversation. Don’t get all animated, don’t ‘act.’ Then that scene on the basketball court, that the time to go over the top.” He looked at home driving the lane. Did he ever play basketball? Freeman draws back, puts on an “I can’t believe what I just heard” expression, raises both hands in a gesture of mock astonishment, and says in a playfully stern void, “Now, what the hell kinda question’s that to ask a man who’s tall and black?”

What about the scissors scene, though—the scene that could win him an Oscar? It seemed very thought out. “But the whole scene is Kathy’s,” Freeman says. “I’m getting all this noise becauseshe made that scene.” The reason for his modesty, of course, is that he’s judging the scene only as a matter of onscreen technique. What he can’t judge is the off-screen character that made it possible.

“Don’t underestimate trust,” says Street Smart‘s director, Jerry Schatzberg. “Actors can go out of control—I’ve seen it happen, especially in a role like that. One of the actors we auditioned got so deeply into the part that he accidentally sliced off part of his finger. So when we were finally shooting the scene with Morgan, it was frightening just to be there.”

“The people who were watching us were so frightened, they were standing flat against the walls,” says Kathy Baker. “But I trusted Morgan so much, I could give myself over to it completely. Kathy Baker wasn’t afraid, so I was free to let the character be totally scared out of her mind. Another thing about Morgan: Originally, we were shooting that scene on his face, but after a couple of takes he said, ‘No, no, this isn’t my scene, this is Kathy’s scene,’ and he reached out and put his hand over my face—‘This is where it’s happening’—and that’s the way it is in the film. How many actors would do that?”

“Well, sure,” Freeman says with a dismissive wave of the hand. “I work best when I feel I can have ideas and express ’em. Sometimes I get in trouble when I open my big mouth, but it can be a very creative part of the process when people are receptive. It was like . . . like . . . dancing’.”

He danced in Miss Daisy, too, the story of the initial unease and growing affection between an elderly Jewish widow and her black chauffeur. “Dana Ivey and me, we’re both from the South. We know things,” Morgan Freeman says wryly. “That dance they do down there, that dance between blacks and whites, that southern charm.” Gentleness, faith, patience—they come as naturally to the chauffeur as raging cynicism, and finger-poppin’ swagger came to the pimp.

“I went to see a play at Playwrights Horizons,” Freeman says, “and I started reading the notices on the bulletin board. One of ’em was a synopsis of this play called Driving Miss Daisy that sounded real interesting. I ‘member thinking, ‘Damn, who do I gotta see to do a play ’round here?’ A couple of months later, I got a call. Would I be interested in doing a play at Playwright Horizons? Turns out it’s the same play. Damn right I’m interested! But when I get the script, I go, ‘This is great,’ ‘Gee whiz,’ and all that. ‘But this play calls for an older man.’ But they tell me, ‘We’re going for quality rather than age,’ and my head, it explodes four or five times its normal size.

“So then I want to know who’s playing Daisy,” he continues. “I don’t want to be onstage with an actress twenty years older than me; that won’t work at all. But when I hear it’s Dana Ivey—well, man, oh, man, I think, ‘This is gonna be two actors up there.'”

What was up there, in fact, was an acting feast. And a rapport that, like most of Freeman’s working relationships, extends beyond the stage. “Of course, everyone knows he’s one of our very greatest talents,” says Ivey, as if in a hurry to get the obvious out of the way, “but what only his friends know is what a beautiful, sweet giving person he is. Morgan’s a mahatma, a Great Soul, with a capital G and a capital S.”

Great Soul—it could be a capsule review of his performance in The Gospel at Colonus. “When I stepped onstage at my first run-through in Minneapolis back in ’83,” says Freeman, “and I spoke the first words” (his voice drops an octave: it could resonate to the rafters, a voice rivaled only by James Earl Jones’s), “‘Think no longer that your are in command here,’ when I said that first line and heard the members of the choir going, ‘Amen!’ behind me, I said to myself, ‘Oh, shit, Morgan, this is gonna knock ’em dead!’ And then that joyous music broke out, and all that incredible singing’, and all kinds of Jesus noises goin’ on, it just wrung me. . . . ” He’s so moved by the memory he can’t finish the sentence. “I’ve been in a lotta shows in my life,” he says finally, “and I’ve thought a lot of ’em were pretty good, but this is a masterpiece.”

Gospel at Colonus, the tale of Oedipus’s final days as a Pentecostal church service, links Hellenic myth and black gospel music, Sophoclean tragedy and call-and-response exaltation, Greek catharsis and biblical ecstasy. As the minister who orchestrates the passions of the churchgoers with the intonations, cadences, and modulations of the great gospel preachers—now plunging into despair, now seized by rapture—Morgan Freeman has a serene dignity that defines, once and for all, the concept of stage presence. And in a stunning coup de theatre, he takes center stage after the show-stopping “Lift Him Up,” sung by Carolyn Johnson-White of Brooklyn’s Institutional Radio Choir with beatific frenzy—what actor would dare follow such a performance?—and not only holds the audience with his concluding sermon but lifts them yet another plateau higher. Hallelujah!

“I’d been outta work for two years,” says Freeman, “when I get this call from Lee Breuer. I’d never heard of Lee Breuer, but we sit in my kitchen for a couple of hours while he explains his ideas. He wants to do a Greek tragedy, but not with the classical European approach. We have our own classics here in America—gospel music, for instance.” Freeman is in the dialect mode he often affects with a slightly ironic edge, portraying himself as the country cousin in the city.

“So Lee is sittin’ there, rattlin’ away,” he goes on, “and he is one highly ‘lectual dude. I don’t know what hell he’s talking’ ’bout. Who is this guy? But he’s piqued my interest, ‘specially that bit ’bout European classicism. Then I find out Clarence Fountain and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama are going to play Oedipus—are you kiddin’! And these fabulous old gospel singers, they’re going to be in it, too. ‘Wow, golly, gee whiz.’ I’m goin’, ‘What’s this guy doin’? Then he tells me, ‘I need a star to glue it all together,’ and I say, ‘I’m no star,’ and he says, ‘Well, I’m going to make you a star.'”

Morgan Freeman pauses, does a bug-eyed double take. “Me? A star? I got two words for you: ‘Hah. Hah.'”

But a few weeks later, he heard Bob Telson’s music and “suddenly felt goose bumps, chills, little bits a hair standing’ up all over my body.” He pauses, drops the dialect, says solemnly, “Then, that first run-through in Minneapolis. I wanted to call everyone, right then. I wanted to get on the phone and tell everyone I know, ‘Man, this is what theater is all about.'”

Once more, Freeman is modest about his own contribution. His preaching style, for instance: “I was raised as a Methodist, but I event to Pentecostal services sometimes, and there’s no way I can do that as well as they can. Drivin’ the congregation into a frenzy? Quotin’ the Bible?”

This is not false modesty, though, because Morgan Freeman will make claims when he thinks it’s his due. “Lee’s fabulous conceptually,” he says, “but he’s also very receptive to creative input. He took a lot of my suggestions.” One major example: “I told him he shouldn’t allow too many places where the audience applauds every time they want to, we’re talking’ ’bout swollen hands—and by intermission.”

“I consider Morgan my assistant director,” says Breuer. “If I have the ability to conceptualize, he has the ability to know what the moment demands. He added professionalism without adding slickness. He provided a plumb line to direct and vital contact with the audience, which is another way of saying he helped me get rid of some of my artsy-fartsy instincts.”

Breuer pauses for a moment. “We had a little conversation early on. It was the best piece of directing I ever gave him. ‘You’re no longer a character actor,’ I told him. ‘You’ve got it all to become a star. And to do this right, you have to think of yourself as a star. You have to feel that no one else onstage is worth looking at.’ I think he thought of himself as a star for the first time. He should—everybody else does.”

Freeman is still uneasy about the notion—he’s still a “play’s the thing” actor. “People don’t usually go to the theater expecting spiritual uplift or redemption,” Freeman says, shifting the focus from himself to Gospel, “but this show gives them something they’ve been missing that they didn’t even know they’ve been missing, the experience of soul.”

It’s long past midnight now, but it’s early evening for Morgan Freeman. He likes to stay up until four, five in the morning—he cherishes that pre-dawn privacy. When he reaches his large Upper West Side apartment, his second wife, costume designer Myrna Colley-Lee, is already asleep, as is the grandchild who’s living with them. (How old is she? “‘Bout 30,” he said, “all wrapped in a 6-year old package.”) A couple of bikes lean against the wall in the hallway, a couple of dozen hats hang from a rack, the walls are covered with pictures of sailboats—not a sound in the apartment except his cat Ebony, purring in his lap.

Freeman boots up his computer (“He’s a Gemini, part show-off and part loner,” his wife says). Now it’s time for the solitude of writing. He has ideas for stories, novels, movies, but mostly he writes commentaries on current events, a series of dialect dialogues featuring Sol and C.C.—Solomon and Concerned Citizen. (“Ever’body gon’ need he’p from ever’body if we specks to survive on dis planet,” Sol says in one. “Quicker we all see dat, de better off we’s all gon’ be.”)

Tonight, though, he’s working on a piece about a recent trip down South, when he visited an elderly black man who knew his great-grandmother and grandmother at the beginning of this century. “These people, these ancients, were mine,” he types. “My people. They had meaning and substance. They endured. They continue to endure.” Morgan Freeman is proud to call himself a self-made man, but not too proud to understand that even a self-made man has roots.

Morgan Freeman had an unsettled childhood, born in Memphis in 1937, living in Charleston, Mississippi, with his grandmother until she died when he was six, off to Chicago with his mother, back to Greenwood, Mississippi, a brief period in Nashville—all the while the man he coldly refers to as his “biological father” . . . Morgan Freeman enters another of his minute-long pauses. “You really want to know all this? To tell the truth, I don’t like to talk about it.” It doesn’t seem to be a question of race so much as a difficult family situation. Freeman will probably write about it sometime, between him and his PC.

His first exposure to acting was at the age of eight—Fast Black got his start as Little Boy Blue—but he didn’t get hooked until the seventh grade, when he was literally flung onstage. “It all started with a girl named Barbara,” he says, “the class princess, as nice as you please. I wanted to get her attention, so one day I pulled a chair out from under her. Sure enough, I got attention. The teacher grabbed me by the nape of the neck, lifted me onto my toes, and marched me down the hall. I thought for sure I was gonna be ‘xpelled.

“But he opens the door and flings me into this room, and there’s this English teacher and he asks me, ‘You ever done any actin’?’ Well, under the circumstances, I’m quick to say yes. Turns out there’s these dramatic tournaments—every school does a play—and the winner goes to the state finals. Well, we do this play ’bout a family with a wounded son just home from the war—I play his kid brother. We win the district championship, we win the state championship, and dadgummit, I’m chosen as best actor. All ’cause I pull this chair out from under Barbara.”

His head-in-the-clouds phase interrupted the budding actor’s career, but ever since he walked away from that cockpit, he’s wanted his feet on the boards. The ex-airman went to Los Angeles, looked up Paramount in the phone book, and took a bus to the studio to ask for a job, only to discover, among the first questions on the application, something about familiarity with office machinery. It wasn’t his last rude awakening—he’d had one almost every year since.

“It’s all been back and forth between trying to get a part and having to get a j-o-b.” He worked as a clerk at L.A. City College, then enrolled in its theater department—”I was walking’ in tall cotton!” But when he left school and drove to New York, the only work he could find was a telegrapher. Back to the West Coast, this time to San Francisco, living on day-old doughnuts, ending up in a musical-repertory company, losing that job when he refused to play an Indian inLittle Mary Sunshine who waves an American flag—”You gonna tell me an Indian is gonna tothat?” Back to New York, knocking around, an extra in The Pawnbroker, another j-o-b, this time in the garment district. Maybe he’d have better luck as a dancer. And he did at first, successfully auditioning for the Aquacade at the 1965 World’s Fair—”the World Something or Other Extravaganza.” Where could he go but up? A $49-a-week counterman at Nedick’s in Penn Station, that’s where.

But he hung in, entered his Hello, Dolly!-Electric Company-Mights Gents phase, and, in 1978, won the Clarence Derwent Award for promising newcomers. “‘Newcomer,'” he says with a resigned laugh, “after twenty years.” And then that Tony nomination—”‘Ho, boy, welcome to success at last. I’m going to kick tail all over the place. Now the phone is never gonna stop ringing’!’ But the door slammed shut, just like that. All this attention and then I didn’t work for two full years. I’d taken success for granted and then—kablooey. I’ll never make that mistake again.”

Morgan Freeman gives himself some of the blame. “I kinda let my mouth run off. I felt compelled to tell people what was wrong with their ideas. I guess word got around that I was a troublemaker. One movie I was up for, “Any other black people in this movie?’ I asked them. They all looked at one another. ‘We don’t believe so,’ they said, ‘We never thought of it in racial terms.’ Well, that was a lie right there—I mean, they were casting me as an orderly—and the whole thing turned to shit on the spot.

“Another movie, I was getting a little tense about this, ya know, and when they asked me what I thought of the script, I said, ‘Yeah, well, there are twelve characters in this movie, nine white scientists and three blacks—a cook, a mechanic, and something else, I forget. What do youthink I think?’ Needless to say, I didn’t get the part.”

Troublemaker, maybe. Militant, no. “I’m so tired of hearing about the under class, about slavery. Racism isn’t new. It’s not something this country invented. ‘Aw, they won’t let us eat in this restaurant,’ but they’re no lining us up against the wall and mowing us down, either. What they’re doing in South Africa—now that’s racism. Give me a choice, and I’ll take this racism right here.”

Doesn’t this attitude get him in trouble with some of his black friends? “Naw, they’re all tired of hearing it, too. We just want to get on with the business of doing something about it. And remember our past, too. There’s a whole other kind of wonderful history of black people in this country, every kind of hero you can imagine, and the fact that nobody knows anything about it is the greatest pity of all.”

That’s one of the things he’s going to write about someday. And he’s considering a movie script about black cowboys. “I know who this country belongs to,” he says, with more determination than anger. “You can’t disenfranchise me. You’ve just gotta know how to fight.”

He’ll fight when he has to—he’ll fight to do the movie of Miss Daisy, to play Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew—but he still has that serene vision of soaring, though in a boat, not in a plane.

“When I see sailboats,” Freeman says, “it’s like seeing a bird—those white wings.” He has his own sloop, a 30-footer named Lenora II, after his grandmother. He has sailed from the Keys to Nova Scotia, and now he has his eye on a Gale Force 9, a blue-water cruiser—$150,000 “with all the hoohaw on it”—and if Gospel‘s a smash. . . .

“You ever been on the ocean?” he asks in a kind of reverie. “The birds out there, big fat gulls called shearwaters, they have these pressure-sensitive wing tips, they fly right on the water, they touch the waves—it’s the ultimate turn-on.” More than acting? “Acting’s very fulfilling, but sailing satisfies another need, a need of the soul. People need peace in their lives—grace—and that’s where it is for me.” His voice is rapturous now. “Once I hoist sail and the wind blows, I take flight. That’s how I fly now—on my own wings.”

Ross Wetzsteon was a journalist, critic, and editor in New York City for 35 years. From 1966 until his death in 1998, he worked at the The Village Voice as a contributor and editor, and for several years as its editor-in-chief. During his tenure at the Voice, Wetzsteon oversaw coverage of everything from politics to sports, but his abiding interest was the theater. For 28 years, he was the chairman of the Village Voice Obie Committee, responsible for bestowing awards for excellence on Off- and Off-Off Broadway artists and writers. Wetzsteon also contributed articles to New York Magazine, Men’s Journal, Playboy, The New York Times, Inside Sports,Conde Nast Traveler, Mademoiselle, and many other publications. He edited several anthologies, including The Obie Winners in 1980 and The Best of Off Broadway in 1984. He also wrote the preface to a collection of playwright Sam Shepard’s works, Fool for Love and Other Plays, and he was the author of Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960. He died in 1998.

When I was a teenager, the film critic Pauline Kael was one of my idols. I loved her reviews. Even when I disagreed with her I learned something new. I felt sure that I could predict which movies she’d like and which ones she’d trash, but I was never that sure. She was always surprising. She was crazy for movies and wanted to be overwhelmed by them. She wrote sprawling reviews. They were always something to look forward to.

In the late ’80s, she fell ill, and I wrote her a note, saying, in effect that she could not die before she had the chance to review my first movie. Weeks later, I received a postcard with scrawled handwriting on one side–“It wasn’t the prospect of reviewing your first movie that laid me so low, although something sure as hell did. Good luck, Pauline Kael.” She retired from the New Yorker not long after that.

Her reviews were also condensed into blurbs in the front of the New Yorker. Here is a random selection, sure, as always, to raise an eyebrow, make someone furious, and perhaps turn your head too.

It’s a rainy day in New York. Enjoy:

All of Me

US (1984): Comedy

93 min, Rated PG, Color.

Steve Martin is Roger, a lawyer who has been sent to revise the will of Edwina (Lily Tomlin), a rich, bedridden spinster. Edwina has imported a Tibetan swami (Richard Libertini), who at the moment of her death is supposed to capture her spiritual substance in a bronze pot and transfer it into the curvy body of the lovely Terry (Victoria Tennant), who has agreed to vacate it. Edwina instructs Roger to arrange for Terry to inherit everything she has, but he thinks she’s crazy and refuses. The argument precipitates her demise, and in the confusion her spirit pops into Roger’s body, and enters into joint occupancy with him. This is the nifty premise of a romantic comedy about how two antagonists in the same body fall in love. Martin and Tomlin are both uninhibited physical comics. They tune in to each other’s timing the way lovers do in life, only more so, and in her early scenes Tomlin presents a distinctive enough caricature for us to sense Edwina’s presence when Martin simulates her being inside him. He’s a wizard at keeping her vivid for us. And the director, Carl Reiner, seems to have an intuitive rapport with the two leads, with Libertini as the disoriented Tibetan, with Jason Bernard, who plays a black musician pal of Roger’s, and with the talented Madolyn Smith, who plays Roger’s nasty fiancée. Reiner’s weakness is that the gags aren’t thought out visually in terms of the LA locations; the camera setups are often klunky, especially in Edwina’s mansion (it’s Greystone, where THE LOVED ONE was also shot, and which was for some years the base of the American Film Institute). The film has a halfhearted subplot about Dana Elcar as Roger’s philandering boss; it also suffers a dip in energy when Edwina’s spirit finally enters Terry’s body, because the beautiful, mild Victoria Tennant doesn’t indicate that Terry is at all changed. Edwina seems to disappear (but she comes back). Parts of this picture give viewers the kind of giddy pleasure that is often what we most want from the movies. The ingenious script, by Phil Alden Robinson, was adapted from an unpublished novel, Me Two, by Ed Davis. Universal.

A Clockwork Orange

US (1971): Science Fiction

137 min, Rated R, Color.

This Stanley Kubrick film might be the work of a strict and exacting German professor who set out to make a porno-violent sci-fi comedy. The movie is adapted from Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel, which is set in a vaguely socialist future of the late 70s or early 80s-a dreary, routinized England that roving gangs of teenage thugs terrorize at night. In this dehumanizing society, there seems to be no way for the boys to release their energies except in vandalism and crime. The protagonist, Alex (Malcolm McDowell), is the leader of one of these gangs; he’s a conscienceless schoolboy sadist who enjoys stealing, stomping, raping, and destroying, until he kills a woman and is sent to prison. There he is conditioned into a moral robot who becomes nauseated by thoughts of sex and violence. Burgess wrote an ironic fable about a future in which men lose their capacity for moral choice. Kubrick, however, gives us an Alex who is more alive than anybody else in the movie, and younger and more attractive, and McDowell plays him exuberantly, with power and slyness. So at the end, when Alex’s bold, aggressive, punk’s nature is restored to him, it seems not a joke on all of us (as it does in the book) but, rather, a victory in which we share, and Kubrick takes an exultant tone. Along the way, Alex has been set apart as the hero by making his victims less human than he; the picture plays with violence in an intellectually seductive way-Alex’s victims are twisted and incapable of suffering. Kubrick carefully estranges us from these victims so that we can enjoy the rapes and beatings. Alex alone suffers. And how he suffers! He’s a male Little Nell-screaming in a strait jacket during the brainwashing; sweet and helpless when rejected by his parents; alone, weeping, on a bridge; beaten, bleeding, lost in a rainstorm; pounding his head on a floor and crying for death. Kubrick pours on the hearts and flowers; what is done to Alex is far worse than what Alex has done, so society itself can be felt to justify Alex’s hoodlumism. With Patrick Magee and Adrienne Corri; score by Walter Carlos. Produced by Kubrick, for Warners.

M*A*S*H

US (1970): War/Comedy

116 min, Rated PG, Color.

Robert Altman’s marvellously unstable comedy-a tough, funny, and sophisticated burlesque of military attitudes that is at the same time a tale of chivalry. It’s an episodic film, full of the pleasures of the unexpected, and it keeps you busy listening to some of the best overlapping comic dialogue ever recorded. The title letters stand for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital; the heroes, played by Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould, are combat surgeons patching up casualties a few miles from the front during the Korean war. They do their surgery in style, with humor; they’re hip Galahads, saving lives while ragging the military bureaucracy. They’re quick to react to bull-and in startling, unpredictable ways. The movie’s chief charm is a free-for-all, throwaway attitude. It combines traditional roustabout comedy with modern attitudes. It’s hip but it isn’t hopeless. A surgical hospital where the doctors’ hands are lost in chests and guts is certainly an unlikely subject for a comedy, but M*A*S*H is probably the sanest American movie of its era. With Tom Skerritt, Sally Kellerman, Robert Duvall, René Auberjonois, Jo Ann Pflug, Gary Burghof, Fred Williamson, Roger Bowen, David Arkin, Michael Murphy, John Schuck, Kim Atwood, Bud Cort, Carl Gottlieb, and Corey Fischer. The semi-improvised material takes off from a script by Ring Lardner, Jr., based on the novel by Richard Hooker (a doctor’s pseudonym). Cinematography by Harold E. Stine. Produced by Ingo Preminger; the associate producer was Leon Ericksen. (The movie provided the basis for the long-running TV series starring Alan Alda.) 20th Century-Fox.

Richard Pryor-Live in Concert

US (1979): Comedy

78 min, No rating, Color.

Probably the greatest of all recorded-performance films. Pryor has characters and voices bursting out of him. He personifies objects, animals, people, the warring parts of his own body, even thoughts in the heads of men and women–black, white, Oriental; when he tells us about his heart attack, he is, in almost the same instant, the helpless body being double-crossed by its heart, the heart itself, a telephone operator, and Pryor the aloof, dissociated observer. Watching this mysteriously original physical comedian you can’t account for his gift and everything he does seems to be for the first time. The film retains the impetus of a live performance. Directed by Jeff Margolis.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

US (1982): Science Fiction

113 min, Rated PG, Color.

Wonderful dumb fun. The director, Nicholas Meyer, hits just the right amused, slightly self-mocking note in the opening scenes, and the same actors who looked flabby and embarrassed in the 1979 STAR TREK-THE MOTION PICTURE turn into a troupe of confident, witty professionals. The theme of this endlessly inventive movie is death and rebirth, with the prim, smug Admiral Kirk (William Shatner), who has become stiff from sitting at his administrative post, taking a three-week cruise on his old starship, the Enterprise, encountering his old enemy, the maniacal Khan (Ricardo Montalban), and waking up. Montalban plays his fiery villainy to the hilt, smiling grimly as he does the dirty; his bravado is grandly comic. The regulars are all present: Mr. Spock, “Bones” McCoy, Sulu, Uhura, Scotty, and the fuddled Chekov. And the crew has acquired a voluptuous half-Vulcan–Saavik, played by Kirstie Alley. Such guest performers as Paul Winfield, Bibi Besch, and Judson Scott shine in their roles, and DeForest Kelley makes the prickly Bones more crisply funny than he used to be; his performance helps to compensate for the disappointment of Leonard Nimoy’s ashen, dried-out Spock. The pieces of the story fit together so beautifully that eventually the director has you wrapped up in the foolishness. By the end, all the large, sappy, satisfying emotions get to you. The story is credited to Jack B. Sowards and Harve Bennett, and the script to Sowards, yet it isn’t hard to detect Meyer’s hand (especially when he leaves his signature–at a crucial point he has the hero echo the words of the hero in TIME AFTER TIME). Paramount.

Star Wars

US (1977): Science Fiction

121 min, Rated PG, Color.

One of the biggest box-office successes in movie history–probably because for young audiences it’s like getting a box of Cracker Jack that is all prizes. Written and directed by George Lucas, the film is enjoyable in its own terms, but it’s exhausting, too: like taking a pack of kids to the circus. There’s no breather in the picture, no lyricism; the only attempt at beauty is in the image of a double sunset. The loudness, the smash-and-grab editing, and the relentless pacing drive every idea from your head, and even if you’ve been entertained, you may feel cheated of some dimension–a sense of wonder, perhaps. It’s an epic without a dream. Maybe the only real inspiration involved was to set its sci-fi galaxy in the pop-culture past, and to turn old-movie ineptness into conscious Pop Art. And maybe there’s a touch of genius in keeping the film so consistently what it is, even if this is the genius of the plodding. Lucas has got the tone of bad movies down pat: you never catch the actors deliberately acting badly; they just seem to be bad actors, on contract to Monogram or Republic, their klunky enthusiasm polished at the Ricky Nelson school of acting. In a gesture toward equality of the sexes, the high-school-cheerleader princess-in-distress (played by Carrie Fisher) talks tomboy-tough–Terry Moore with spunk. (Is it because the picture is synthesized from the mythology of serials and old comic books that it didn’t occur to anybody that she could get the Force?) With Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, Harrison Ford as Han Solo, Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca, Anthony Daniels as C-3PO, Kenny Baker as R2-D2, and Alec Guinness as Ben Obi-Wan Kenobi. A Lucasfilm, released by 20th Century-Fox.

The Sound of Music

US (1965): Musical/Biography

174 min, No rating, Color.

Set in Austria in 1938, this is a tribute to freshness that is so mechanically engineered and so shrewdly calculated that the background music rises, the already soft focus blurs and melts, and, upon the instant, you can hear all those noses blowing in the theatre. Whom could this operetta offend? Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated in this way and are aware of how cheap and ready-made are the responses we are made to feel. We may become even more aware of the way we have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs. The dauntless, scrubbed-face heroine (Julie Andrews), in training to become a nun, is sent from the convent to serve as governess to the motherless Von Trapp children, and turns them into a happy little troupe of singers before marrying their father (Christopher Plummer). She says goodbye to the nuns and leaves them outside at the fence, as she enters the cathedral to be married. Squeezed again, and the moisture comes out of thousands–millions–of eyes and noses. Wasn’t there perhaps one little Von Trapp who didn’t want to sing his head off, or who screamed that he wouldn’t act out little glockenspiel routines for Papa’s party guests, or who got nervous and threw up if he had to get on a stage? The only thing the director, Robert Wise, couldn’t smooth out was the sinister, archly decadent performance by Christopher Plummer–he of the thin, twisted smile; he seems to be in a different movie altogether. With Eleanor Parker, Richard Haydn, Peggy Wood, Anna Lee, and Marni Nixon. The music is by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II; the script by Ernest Lehman is based on the stage version by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. Academy Awards: Best Picture, Director, Editing (William Reynolds), Musical Scoring (Irwin Kostal), Sound (the 20th Century-Fox Sound Department).

Dog Day Afternoon

US (1975): Crime

130 min, Rated R, Color.

One of the best “New York” movies ever made. Sidney Lumet directed this fictional re-creation of an unusual bank robbery on a 97-degree day in August, 1972, working from Frank R. Pierson’s very fine script. Sonny (Al Pacino), who is trapped in the middle of robbing a bank, with a crowd gathering in the street outside, is a married working-class man; he got into this robbery mess by trying to raise money for his lover Leon (Chris Sarandon) to have a sex-change operation. The most touching element in the film is Sonny’s inability to handle all the responsibilities he has assumed. Though he is half-crazed by his situation, he is trying to do the right thing by everybody-his wife and children, the suicidal Leon, the hostages in the bank. In the sequence in which Sonny dictates his will, we can see that inside this bungling robber there’s a complicatedly unhappy man, operating out of a sense of noblesse oblige. Pacino has a telephone conversation with Sarandon that by ordinary dramatic standards goes on too long, but this willingness to violate ordinary practice permits the two actors to go further and further emotionally. Lumet keeps so much low comedy and crazy melodrama going on in the bank, on the street, among the police, that he can risk the long, quiet scenes that draw us in. (He doesn’t even use a musical track.) Pacino’s Sonny, grandstanding to the crowds who cheer him on, brings just the right urban craziness to the situation. The contrast between the small, frightened nutty robbers inside the bank and the huge apparatus of police, F.B.I., and news media outside adds to the lunacy. And Sarandon gives one of the finest homosexual performances ever seen in a movie; he’s true to Leon’s anguish in a remarkably pure way-he makes no appeal for sympathy. There are structural problems and there are gross, static scenes involving Sonny’s relatives, but there are also surprising, wonderful things from such actors as John Cazale, who plays Sonny’s partner in the robbery with a despairing burnt-out face, and Charles Durning as a police detective who becomes irascible and begins shouting like Sonny. The cast, which is huge and of highly variable quality, includes Penny Allen, Carol Kane, Gary Springer, James Broderick, Judith Malina, Susan Peretz, and Sully Boyar. (Sonny is based on John Wojtowicz, who was serving a 20-year sentence when the film was released.) Produced by Martin Bregman and Martin Elfand. Warners.

Street Smart

US (1987): Crime

97 min, Rated R, Color.

Morgan Freeman may be the greatest American actor in movies. He gives the role of a Times Square pimp, Fast Black, a scary, sordid magnetism that gives the picture some bite. Magically, he sustains Fast Black’s authenticity; it’s like sustaining King Lear inside GIDGET GOES HAWAIIAN. The ostensible star is Christopher Reeve; he appears as a Harvard-educated free-lance writer who fabricates a story about “24 hours in the life of a pimp,” and then becomes enmeshed in Fast Black’s efforts to get clear of a murder charge. The director, Jerry Schatzberg, can make viewers feel the beauty and excitement of everyday grit, and he makes the script (by David Freeman) look and play better than it deserves to, but he can’t give it conviction, rootedness–he can’t conceal the author’s thin, brassy attitudes. Reeve is willing to play a suck-up who’s trying to make his name, yet as an actor he’s physically too inexpressive to play inexpressiveness; it isn’t the character who’s a lug–it’s Reeve. And when we’re told that this journalist has gained the cunning to out-street-smart Fast Black, it’s a white boy’s dream of glory. The screenwriter did, in fact, fabricate “The Lifestyle of a Pimp,” in New York, May 5, 1969; there were no dire results. In the movie, he piles on fantasies of all the things that could or should have happened. Most of the performers do their damnedest. Kathy Baker brings a sexy intelligence to the role of the prostitute Punchy, and André Gregory is terrific as Reeve’s smug, dryly self-amused editor. (He’s his own yes-man.) Schatzberg and his cinematographer, Adam Holender, bring off the trick of using Montreal for most of the Manhattan locations. The funky jazz score (by Robert Irving III) features Miles Davis, and Kathy Baker seduces Reeve to Aretha Franklin singing “Natural Woman.” Released by Cannon Films.

Mean Streets

US (1973): Crime

110 min, Rated R, Color.

A true original, and a triumph of personal filmmaking. This picture about the experience of growing up in New York’s Little Italy has an unsettling, episodic rhythm and it’s dizzyingly sensual. The director, Martin Scorsese, shows us a thicker-textured rot than we have ever had in an American movie, and a riper sense of evil. With Harvey Keitel as Charlie, Robert De Niro as Johnny Boy, and Richard Romanus, David Proval, Harry Northup, George Memmoli, Amy Robinson, Cesare Danova, and, in bits, David Carradine, Robert Carradine, and the director–he’s the gunman in the car. Script by Scorsese and Mardik Martin; cinematography by Kent Wakeford; produced by Jonathan Taplin. (Most of the film was actually shot in Los Angeles.) Warners.

GoodFellas

US (1990): Drama/Crime

146 min, Rated R, Color.

The director, Martin Scorsese, gives you a lift. He loves the Brooklyn organized crime milieu, because it’s where distortion, hyperbole, and exuberance all commingle. His mobsters are high on having a wad of cash in their pockets. The movie is about being cock of the walk, with banners flying and crowds cheering. Based on Nicholas Pileggi’s non-fiction book WiseGuy, it’s a triumphant piece of filmmaking-journalism and sociology presented with the brio of drama. But the three major hoods, played by Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro, and Joe Pesci, don’t have a strong enough presence, and the movie lacks the juice and richness that come with major performances. (It’s like the Howard Hawks SCARFACE without Scarface.) What you respond to is Scorsese’s bravura: the filmmaking process becomes the subject of the movie. Watching it is like getting strung out on pure sensation. Paul Sorvino as Paulie and Lorraine Bracco as Karen both come through, and Tony Darrow as a restaurant owner, Welker White as a drug courier who needs her lucky hat to make a coke delivery, and other performers in minor roles give the movie a frenzied, funny texture. Christopher Serrone plays the boy who turns into Liotta. The screenplay is by Pileggi and Scorsese; the cinematography is by Michael Ballhaus; the editing is by Thelma Schoonmaker. Warners.