PARTISAN REVIEW
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Pauline Kael's
New Yorker
review defined all the tenns of the
Last Tango
"controversy" and, with their usual sense of the publicity
value of polemic, the other film reviewers responded, necessarily within
or against Kael's first assertions.
Time
and
Newsweek
did cover stories
respectively on Brando the star and Bertolucci the director. Porno–
graphy buffs leaped to compare
Last Tango
unfavorably with
Deep
Throat
("much less pretentious" sex scenes); Harry Reasoner and
William F. Buckley, Jr., said
Newsweek,
denounced the film without
having seen it; and in
The New Republic
Stanley Kauffmann with
a melancholy wink reported that, when he revealed to a lecture au–
dience that Brando's penis appeared neither in the cut nor the original
version of the film, the women groaned. United Artists, the distribu–
tors of the film, picking up on both Kael's general praise ("Bertolucci
and Brando have altered the face of an art form") and her emphasis
on the film's sexual "breakthrough" ("the most powerfully erotic
movie ever made"), launched an admirably schizoid advertising cam–
paign prestigiously spreading Kael's review over two pages of
The
New York Times
Sunday "Arts and Leisure" Section, while arranging
interviews with Maria Schneider in which the main question seemed
to
be
whether or not she and Brando were actually doing
it
either on
or off the screen.
If
we consider what
Last Tango
has become in the past few
months, perhaps Kael was more prescient or more accurate than she
knew when she opened her review by comparing its first showing to
the premiere of Stravinsky's
Le Sacre du Printemps
in 1913. Both
works, she wrote, were "landmarks" in cultural history because
Last
Tango
has "the same kind of hypnotic excitement as the
Sacre,
the
same primitive force, and the same thrusting, jabbing eroticism."
But the two works are really comparable, I would say, because both
exist more as cultural events than as aesthetic experiences. The main
difference is that the cultural floor-managing of
Last Tango
was car–
ried on not by the artists and their audience, as was
Le Sacre,
but
by the critics. Whatever her intent, Kael's review did not support
the movie; it obliterated it.
Time
announced with obvious glee in the
first paragraph of its story about
Last Tango:
"Debates about its
meaning and merits are raging among critics, intellectuals, theologians,
and editorial writers." Contemporary culture can define the value of
art
only as the accumulation of arguments about it. Why else does
