Ali MacGraw: A Return to Basics
Scene: Loew's State 1, Manhattan. The innocent moviegoer and his girl head for the box office. Two signs:
TICKET HOLDERS ONLY. TICKET BUYERS
ONLY. Omigod, the temperature is about 19DEG--but they both have to see Love Story. She wants to see Ryan O'Neal, and he saw Ali MacGraw in Goodbye, Columbus and is hooked. She cried when she read the novel; he choked up. Who could resist Jennifer Cavilleri, the Radcliffe girl, condemned on the first page to a tragic death, then, loving Bach and the Beatles right to the end, expiring in her husband's arms? Leaving Harvard Scion Oliver Barrett IV with nothing but a ticket to Paris and a handful of bittersweet memories--plus about a drillion dollars from the dad who forgives him for marrying a Rhode Island Italian, now that she is dead.
Forty-five minutes later, the show breaks. While the frozen fanatics in line look on in disbelief, only about 20 customers emerge, dry-eyed. What the hell, was the theater empty? Can the film be a bomb after the New York Times called it "perfection"? More waiting, tempers rising. Then, ten minutes later, comes the second wave, the other 95% of the audience. This is more like it. Wet-eyed men looking neither right nor left. Girls carrying men's handkerchiefs, eye makeup gone, gazing at sidewalks. All victims of Erich Segal's Love Story, the five-Kleenex weeper, the marzipan heartbreaker. It has actually taken them ten minutes just to compose themselves enough to face the real world again.
THERE are millions more to come.
Close to 1,000,000 copies of Segal's hardcover book are in print. Love Story is still number one on the bestseller list--while a 95-c- edition is the top-selling paperback. Now comes the celluloid version, manipulating audiences with contrived bathos. Let's see . . . if just the people who bought the book go to the movie and take someone they love, that's 12 million tickets at $3 apiece . . . No wonder Love Story has enjoyed the largest opening-week grosses in the history of American cinema. No wonder that on Christmas Day, when it opened across the country, the movie broke the house record in 159 of 165 locations. In three days it earned $2,463,916--more than it cost to make.
O'Neal does an admirable job of acting, but Ali MacGraw may have performed a miracle for Hollywood. She is an echo of a time when Celluloid City really was the dream factory, when people truly went to the movies every weekend. For Tinsel Town, she represents not only an irretrievable past but a plausible future. To moviemakers, she is the Girl Who Made Love Story Happen after six major studios had turned it down--the actress who was moved, she says, by the script's "straight, basic, clean emotion." She is today's closest approximation of the old-style star, with the Beverly Hills mansion, the burgeoning career, the marriage to the industry and the chance to become very, very rich.
Ali dismisses all this. "I'm not hungry enough to be a star," she says. "Or even an actress." She doesn't have to be hungry or an actress. She just has to stand there, and people buy tickets. The clean-boned, finishing-school face, the large, liquid eyes that cannot express doubt, the barely upholstered model's body, the metallic purr--that is not standard histrionic equipment these days. But put them all together, and Ali makes them go. In two pictures, she has managed to suggest the incarnate campus heroine, full of itchy, bitchy resolve. Ultimately, she seems to suggest, if the right records are on the hi-fi and the right poetry is read aloud, well . . . In short, she is the kind of girl a boy would want to take home even if his parents were there, but especially if they were not.
Typically Rigged
Ali and half a dozen other handsome new faces (see color pages) represent a return to something basic in the U.S. cinema. To a fresh flowering of the romance and sentimentalism of the '30s and '40s. To a time when pictures told a story, when you could go to the movies and take the family, when you could lose yourself in fantasy, when you got chills at the final fadeout. Her appeal --and that of Love Story--is strong enough to counter gravity. Before it is finished, the movie will probably outgross The Graduate and Easy Rider, and perhaps come close to that alltime mint, The Sound of Music.
On the tinted face of it, Love Story is a typically rigged success, a prepackaged blockbuster. Take a bestseller, aim it for blue-haired old ladies, put in a sprinkling of borderline obscenities, add a couple of attractive young people to get the kids, and that's it.
Or is it? If wishes were pencils, beggars could write--and today Love Stories would be churning out of studios like episodes of Get Smart. If packaging a hit were as easy as kidding it, show business would now be impervious to hard times. Instead, it is melting and sliding into recession like an ice cube on a stove. Love Story is a calculated movie, but not an automatic smash. Such things no longer exist. Aesthetically, it may be worth no more than the price of admission. As an example of historical irony, though, it is impossible to overprice.
Tuning Out Pollution
Irony is a joke that letters play on numbers, that humanity works on demographers. When the researchers decide that the nation hungers for raw meat, the country develops an appetite for Crunchy Granola; when politicians polarize, the voters cross party lines. Last year the television networks pushed relevance, but the viewers quickly bounced Storefront Lawyers out of their hole in the wall and into a respectable walnut-paneled office with paying clients. The explosive Young Rebels are out; Marcus Welby, M.D. (Middleclass, Dependable) is in. Last month James E. Duffy, president of ABC-TV, told the Broadcasters' Promotion Association that "while we were addressing ourselves to the very real concerns of our times --pollution, drug addiction, increasing crime, the generation gap--many viewers were tuning these problems out."
In book publishing, the situation is identical, only more so. Strome Lamon, advertising director of Simon & Schuster, figures that Love Story is about an inch from where it's at. "I think black study books and Women's Lib books have shot their wad," he says. "The kids want romance. They're discovering again that going to college is a wonderful little world. I can see them bringing back the Homecoming Queen and the pantie raids." James Silberman. Random House's editor in chief, agrees: "People are tired of reading about drugs and blacks. These books don't have the same chic any more."
Movie companies, like cuckolded husbands, are always the last to know. In '69 and '70 they imitated the headlines, following the spoor of student protest and the little-read riding hoods of Easy Rider. All they got for their pains was a lungful of exhaust. "You can't fool the kids," says a character in Wilfrid Sheed's novel, Max Jamison. Replies the critic: "Good God, they're easier to fool than psychiatrists." So they are--but only once or twice. Getting Straight picked up a nice piece of change, but it was Elliott Gould's first film after MASH, the consummate war movie. The Strawberry Statement bombed in the U.S. So did The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart. And Move. It was all reminiscent of the Royal Nonesuch in Huckleberry Finn. The first night, half the town came to the non-show. The second night the other half came. The third night, both halves came--and nearly tarred and feathered the players.
No one rises against a piece of celluloid (though some aesthetes threw beer cans at the graven image of Myra Breckinridge). Contemporary audiences have a far more effective method of protest: they stay away. For Hollywood, the 1970 statistics are terrifying; the films that are still earning heavy profits constitute a mere skeleton crew. There is MASH, in a clash by itself. There is that blown-up personality poster, Patton, which knocks the military-industrial complex--and then gift-wraps itself in the flag. As for the biggest grosser of the year, it is an overpriced, oldfashioned, romantic rhinestone called Airport. By December it had pulled in $65 million.
So the financially shaken show-business industry has rushed out to take another look at the old seismograph. The youthquake, it finds, has faded to an indecipherable rumble. Irwin Winkler, co-producer of The Strawberry Statement, announces that his next picture is being overhauled to give it "more general appeal"--a nice way of saying that unemployed teen-agers are becoming bourgeois adults. "The Easy Rider syndrome," reports Variety, may have "been put to rest."
Then along came salvation in the pastel costume of Love Story. MCA President Lew Wasserman, who began learning about show business as a vaudeville candy butcher 45 years ago, has his own judgment of Love Story: "The audience that many companies felt was no longer there has been there all the time. I don't think the romantic interest went away. We went away."
Meet John Doe
Indeed, in its desperate effort to be With It, Hollywood has run against the American grain and emerged with splinters. American romanticism began with the Revolution and continued with validity through the poetry and philosophy of the 19th century. "Pioneering," wrote Lewis Mumford, "may in part be described as the Romantic Movement in action." That action animated Progress, and eventually Commerce. It also illuminated the writings of Philosopher William James, who championed sensation over determinism, and the thought and actions of Emerson and Thoreau, who sought wisdom in intuition and found God immanent in the natural cathedral.
America's romantic gospels submerged in the super-scientific 20th century, but were never far beneath the surface. In films, they seemed to fluctuate with the toughness of the times. Gary Cooper, the loner beating the system in Meet John Doe, Frank Capra's mystical belief in neighbors and small towns (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; It's a Wonderful Life)--these were symptoms of a national desire to leave complexities behind at the moviehouse door.
In the '50s. "coolness" became emblematic of national life. Jack and Jackie Kennedy caused a brief romantic thaw in 1960, but assassination glazed open displays of feelings. In the middle and latter '60s, romanticism became "camp." Old movies were appreciated because the emotion was behind glass, and confined to a 20-inch screen. On that scale, a kid could safely dig Bogart's telling Sam to play As Time Goes By without being accused of emotionalism. Sentiment, no matter how florid, was permissible if it was ancient: westerns, turn-of-the-century valentines, revivals of theater period pieces like The Front Page or Harvey (preferably with period stars like James Stewart and Helen Hayes). Novels could be as old-fashioned as Silas Marner, provided that they shared the joke with the readers, as did John Fowles in The French Lieutenant's Woman.
Feeling, Not Action
Only in popular music did the romantic strain run unabashed. In Milt Okun's Great Songs of the Sixties, almost every number exerts a romantic appeal. To be sure, there are no moony love numbers. But there are long glances at the rear-view mirror (Yesterday; It Was a Very Good Year; Those Were the Days; Try to Remember), hymns to individuality in a societal crush (Little Boxes; We Shall Overcome; The Times They Are A-Changin'), and--most surprisingly in a secular era--a strong, if unspecific theology: Bridge Over Troubled Water; The Weight; Turn! Turn! Turn!. It continues to the present with Bob Dylan's New Morning.
Feelings, in short, could be sung but not said. Not in public. Not on campus. Surely not in a contemporary book or a film. Herman Hesse, yes; he was safely Nobel-prized--and safely dead. But Love Story?
The success would have been as unthinkable during the rages and outrages of 1969 as it seems inevitable in 1971. "The mood today," says Dr. Ernest Van Den Haag, a New York University social philosopher, "particularly on campus, is toward personal relationships rather than politics, love rather than sex, feeling rather than action. Not by accident does this mood coincide with the Nixon era. We've had two Presidents with activist images; they didn't solve our problems. Now the era of causes is practically over. Two years ago, we had a great number of mass actions: peace marches, college demonstrations, etc. They weren't successful. Today we're entering an era not of radical advances, but of consolidation. We're turning inside rather than outside."
The American public, suffering through assassinations, war, technocracy, revolt and recession, had eventually to suffer metal fatigue. "Systems die, instincts remain" observed Oliver Wendell Holmes. Unable and unwilling to rely on institutions or revolution, the U.S. has fallen back on pure feeling. The reaction is ominously reminiscent of the '30s and '40s, an epoch beyond the memory of the young--who nonetheless repeat its rhythms.
If it all heralds moral exhaustion, an inability to care, then the new romanticism may well be a disease loose in the body politic. But if it is merely America catching its breath, refusing to rage, to lean permanently on the poles of left and right, then it might be as salutary for the country as it will be profitable for Hollywood. With Love Story, the town sees a comeback, a chance to make films that no longer strain for an indecipherable segment of the unfathomable audience. It makes the kind of fiscal sense that no company can afford to ignore. A GP film can admit Mom and Dad, plus the two kids shut out of Easy Rider, plus an aunt or a grandmother. That makes an increase of 60%.
Of course, the film is a phenomenon --there has been nothing like it in a generation. And nothing like its star, Ali MacGraw, to remind the world of the kind of stars that used to glisten in Hollywood.
Very, Very Loved
Even offscreen, she seems to have been scripted by a nostalgic romanticist. She grew up in New York's Westchester County, amid acres of woods that looked like backdrops for Burne-Jones paintings. Ali lived like one of the foreground figures. "We had rather little money," she recalls. "My parents were artists; for Christmas, my mother used to make me things like a doll's house with chandeliers and wallpaper inside, and dresses for the dolls. In the winter, my brother Dick and I sat in front of the fireplace and talked with my father, surrounded by books. We were very, very loved." There was no cash for private high school but Ali won a scholarship to Rosemary Hall in Greenwich, Conn. "I was a terrific student and a very aggressive little girl," she smiles, "and a righteous little student leader." It was only toward the end of her stretch that she began to be bothered by a small, nagging fact: she had never had a date.
The amalgam of drive and IQ earned her another scholarship--to Wellesley. The gangly figure ungangled and the crooked teeth began to straighten. The boys started turning around when she passed, and the empty social calendar was soon crammed. There was still no money: during her freshman summer Ali waited on tables at the Chalfonte-Haddon Hall hotel in Atlantic City. Brother Dick remembers the pretty 18-year-old with the Irish temper simmering on the back burner. "To me, she really became a human being the time she was waiting on a table with a great bunch of waitress-kidders. They began riding her, and suddenly a whole tray of food landed on them."
At the end of her sophomore year, Ali won Mademoiselle's guest-editor contest; the regulars on the magazine referred her to the Ford modeling agency. But "by the end of my junior year," Ali remembers, "I had gained too much weight for modeling. I didn't care." In 1960 she graduated and--just like Jennifer Cavilieri in Love Story--married her Harvard beau. It lasted a year and a half. "We were children," she says. "We didn't have anything to say to each other except pleasantries."
Something of the Exhibitionist
After a $50-per-week job as editorial assistant to Editor Diana Vreeland at Harper's Bazaar, Ali signed on as a photographer's helper and began to carom around New York. "I never had a hi-fi or even a sofa in those days," she recalls. "I just threw a mattress on the floor most places." One semipermanent resting place was the pad of a struggling young actor. He and a Brindle Scottish Terrier named Grounds became her most constant companions. By 1967 she had stopped carrying the cameras and began appearing in front of them. She had in fact become a sensational model--and promptly attracted the attention of a movie agent who had seen her TV commercials for Chanel No. 5 Bath Oil. Ali turned him off--fast. She had met a slew of movie people on location: "I categorically decided I didn't want to be involved in the racket."
Then came the temptation to do Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus. Ali, who loved the book, wanted the part of the central character, Brenda Patimkin, but the part did not want her. When she tried for it, she met a hundred excuses. Ali was not Jewish, she did not have enough experience, there were bigger names who wanted to play the part. Then, after six months, Director Larry Peerce decided that the inexperienced kid was right for it after all. The role earned Ali a fast $10,000 and even faster fame. "When I saw those reviews, I knew I was in over my head," she says. But she had signed a five-picture contract with Paramount and started at last to study acting. She was 30 years old. No recent ingenue had made it so big so late. There was a lot of catching up to do. Like consulting a psychiatrist. "I thought I wasn't worthy of all that attention. I was so unhappy, and scared that what I wanted to be as a person was going to go under."
As with most neoromantic concepts, that "person" had no clear form; it was a filmy outline sketched in innumerable entries in a leather-bound book that Ali keeps at her bedside. It is filled with pressed flowers, insightful quotes, like Amedee Ozenfant's "The Romanticist has in him something of the Exhibitionist," and clippings of poems, like Yevtushenko's on the Kennedy assassination: "Loving freedom with bullets, you shoot at yourself, America!" It is also filled with thin-line sketches of astonishing virtuosity, reminiscent, like the artist, of illustrations in Edwardian children's books.
Ali in Wonderland?
What was a nice, ivy-minded, dreamy kid doing in a place like Hollywood? Maybe it was a case of positive-negative attraction. Maybe it was her postgraduate fascination with F. Scott Fitzgerald, the ultimate Princetonian, fresh from Metro drinking himself to death just one year after Alice MacGraw was born. Fitzgerald wrote: "People in the East pretend to be interested in how pictures are made, but if you tell them anything, they never see the ventriloquist for the doll. Even the intellectuals, who ought to know better, like to hear about the pretensions, extravagances, and vulgarities--tell them pictures have a private grammar and watch the blank look come into their faces."
Paramount Production Chief Robert Evans remembers that blank look. "I shook hands with her for a year and a half. Otherwise she had nothing to do with me. I wasn't her kind of guy. Everything I represented seemed to turn her off." Recalls Ali: "I took one look at that enormous house of Bob's and in my highhanded way said, 'Well, I know what this is about and it's not for me.'" What it was about was 18 rooms and 26 phones, most of them chorusing with jangles from New York.
Evans himself seemed not to have been born but to have exited directly from a '30s scenario. A refugee from New York's Seventh Avenue fashion industry, he had been twice married and was a celebrated Hollywood rounder. His entrance into motion pictures was too ridiculous to have been invented.
Norma Shearer had seen him lounging, tan and beautiful, at poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She decided that he was just the chap to play her late husband, MGMogul Irving Thalberg, in the movie Man of a Thousand Faces. As it turned out, Actor Evans had one face: immobile. He also played Ava Gardner's bullfighter in The Sun Also Rises. It was bad enough that Papa Hemingway did not want him in the film. Neither did Tyrone Power. Or Errol Flynn. Even Mel Ferrer turned thumbs down. "They resented the fact," says Evans with acuity, "that a pants manufacturer was playing Pedro Romero."
But for Evans, after the infighting and jealousies of Seventh Avenue, the business side of Hollywood was like a week in the country. He sold his shares in the pants company (Evan-Picone), grossed a few million bucks and began a new life as an independent producer. Conglomerateur Charles Bluhdorn figured that Evans was just the man to run Gulf & Western's new bauble, Paramount, and put him in charge. Evans started well, with successful films, including The Odd Couple, Barefoot in the Park, Rosemary's Baby and Goodbye, Columbus. But he also shepherded some monumental losers, notably Paint Your Wagon and Darling Lili.
Losses mounted; Evans became a Seconal customer. He was not, after all, Irving Thalberg. Still, he was a contemporary version of the studio czar, a two-time loser as a husband, an 18-hour-a-day man at the office, constantly visible at parties, previews, promotions. Was this what a Wellesley girl was meant for? Entries in the Ali MacGraw notebook: 1) "To marry a second time represents the triumph of hope over experience." 2) "Do you want to be in the movies?" he asked. "Yes, I think so . . . Now," she said. "Why?" "Because . . . I guess . . . it will be okay to invent my life for three months every year." 3) [after a particularly good day with Evans] "Today is September 28th, 1969, and I cannot remember that I ever had a more beautiful happy day in my whole life. Maybe I did . . . I can't remember . . . I doubt it. . ."
Star stuff. Disney dust. But all of it absolutely legit. Six weeks after Ali took a derisive look at the Evans mansion she married him, phones and all. The baby she is expecting in February is referred to by its mother as "The Phone." "Bob never wished he was somebody else," says Ali. "It's a good feeling for a woman to be with a man like that." As for the Hollywood life-style that comes with the role: "Hollywood scares me. But we don't live the Hollywood life. Bob goes to the office and works his ass off. I stay home and read. Bob is in touch: I'm in touch with reality less of the time than most other people."
Who in his right head would have believed that Ali MacGraw would be the divining rod for a movie trend? A lady who never watches television, who wrote a whole book when Grounds was killed by a car, who copied out Fitzgerald's Winter Dreams in longhand for Evans? Not even her husband could see it. Recalls Evans: "When Ali read Love Story and cried, I thought, 'Fine, it's an emotional story, she responds to it, and maybe some small segment of the public will. Maybe some middle-aged people. Maybe some kids, some Ali MacGraws. I hated all those Now pictures--including some of our own. I thought it would be a good, small, profitable trend bucker. But a phenomenon? No way.' "
Other People's Convictions
Nevertheless, Evans treated Love Story as if it were something more than a home movie. On location Evans started doing his cinemogulimitation. "The picture became an obsession with him," recalls Evans' assistant Peter Bart. "He went on location. Lived with the crew. He was with it every night. He edited it, mixed the music, took over the promotion. It was like old Hollywood all over again." So were the previews, the whispered anxieties, the scrutinizing of key faces: "I saw Edward G. Robinson cry." "Eddie Robinson's 73 years old, for God's sake." "The kids like it, I saw tears." "Those are yawns." "Those are tears, I tell you . . ."
They were tears. And the kids have bought it. On Christmas weekend --largely from young couples and families--Love Story grossed more than any film in history: $2,463,916. It has only begun to bring in the money, but it has already altered the "new" Hollywood beyond ready recognition. The place where executives put away their cigars and grew sideburns overnight, the industry that was welcoming kids from U.C.L.A. with a Bolex and a two-page outline--suddenly, it is in show business again. Says Evans: "At Paramount we learned a long, four-year, expensive lesson. From now on we make our kind of pictures. No directors who have final cut. We have final cut. Paul Newman may be one of our best actors, but he will not be allowed to make more WUSAs to salve his liberal conscience. From now on, there will be no concessions to swingers or to stars over here. The story is the star."
The story all over Hollywood, unless the business is careful, may turn out to be Love Story in disguise. MGM Production Chief Herb Solow is dead set against imitation, but adds: "We have a couple of romantic projects we developed over the years. We've taken them out again for a fresh look in the light of the success of Ryan's Daughter and Love Story."1 American International Pictures, which likes to exhibit the courage of other people's convictions, is at the head of the line. From the company that gave you Beach Blanket Bingo and I Was a Teen Age Werewolf will soon come--Wuthering Heights. "We were among the first to get into the youth-rebellion market," says Samuel Arkoff, A.I.P. chairman. "But we began to sense that that vein was pretty well mined. We felt there was going to be an abrupt shift to love stories."
Edd Henry, vice president of MCA, concurs: "The old film styles will be popular again. There will be warm, pleasant love stories--if they can find the people to play them. One of the problems in doing love stories is that there are no Tyrone Powers and Ava Gardners. There is a need to get some nicer-looking people."
For a start they might try Ali MacGraw, but there are a whole flock of CAMERA 5 young starlets who fit the mood of the return to romance. There is, for example, Margot Kidder, a Love Story hater ("Two marshmallow people marching around trying to be brave") and one of the great bodies of the Western world as well as the Tomato Surprise of Quackser Fortune. Or Carrie Snodgress, unforced, radiant star of the arch, dim Diary of a Mad Housewife. Perhaps the most technically skilled of the new romanticists, she insists:
"We need stories about relationships between people. Real relationships that confront the normalcy of life. There's a difference between opportunistic eroticism and the eroticism of truth."
Karen Black, the most delightful piece of Five Easy Pieces, agrees. "Sex is a good subject," she says. "But if your sense of sex is covert and your ideas about sex bring an aberrated gleam to your eye, the scene is going to be below my level of acceptability." How's that again? "Sexuality has more to do with it than just going to bed with someone. It has to do with loving, listening, touching, making the other person happy." Joanna Shimkus (The Virgin and the Gypsy) is, like Ali MacGraw, a model turned actress--with a special, highly charged screen presence. She, too, is part of the new romanticism. "I'm old-fashioned," she insists. "I don't believe in promiscuity. I don't believe in drugs. Anything that feels as good as pot must be bad for you. I believe in love. I guess at heart I'm a pure romantic. I believe a woman's place is in the home."
Sarah Miles not only endorses the new romanticism; she is part of it in the overblown Ryan's Daughter, a love story set in troubled Ireland, that was written by her husband, Robert Bolt. "The critics are panning the movie," she admits, "but people desperately want it because they're pouring into the box office. I think people are weary of all the sex stuff. They want a story, which they're not getting at the moment. I believe in the film because I'm a romantic to the end. I believe in morality; I believe in right and wrong and not doing your own thing. I believe in working for marriage."
The problem in the '70s will not be enough players. Where there are beautiful women, men can always be found. Far more threatening to the reviving industry is a misreading of the entrails, a miscalculation of public opinion. To return to the stereotypical Joan Crawford flick ("Let me alone, Paul, I'm a lost crusade") would be to drown in a sea of sorghum, to turn off the young, the middle-aged and the old. To generations brought up on television, every plot is known; to a sexually liberated society, every shock has been felt or consciously bypassed.
Volcanic Desire
The lesson of Love Story's incredible success lies in its ties to romanticism, in its simple--and simple-minded--refusal to swing, in its ability to entertain. That it seems to herald a return to old-fashioned film making is not necessarily bad news for new film makers. In a dying industry, there is no room for anyone; in a boom town, everybody works. Love Story can only bring grief if it is treated like a new I Sound of Music, the film that was responsible for such trendy megaton disasters as Sweet Charity, On a Clear Day and Paint Your Wagon.
Gordon Stulberg, president of Cinema Center Films, expresses a questionable view when he declares: "There is a volcanic desire on the part of directors, executives and players to come up with films that will open in New York and get The New Yorker, TIME, the New York Times. They live in euphoria for three weeks, and then the film goes out of town and dies. Our supposition and proposition at this company is a broad base of entertainment."
Entertainment, yes; sleaziness, no. Violinist Mischa Elman used to admit, "If I don't practice, the first night I notice it; the second night the critics notice it; the third night, the public." It is true that Airport, for example, was bombed by reviewers--and is still the big picture of 1970. There will always be an Airport in the worst of years. Forgotten are the features that did not work for either critics or public--overpriced losers like Scrooge, or Dirty Dingus Magee or Cromwell, or Tora! Tora! Tora!
It is perhaps too early to tell whether the new romanticism is a wave or a ripple, whether the new, new Hollywood will hold or go under. What is certain is that Love Story has succeeded because of some organic need in '70s America, that people will leave the tube for a movie--if it is the right movie. What will be the right films for the '70s? Well, since Ali MacGraw appears to be the best indicator, perhaps a Samuel Johnson quote, carefully entered in her leather notebook, ought to be engraved over the entrances to the major studios: "Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble."
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