"Part Two" of Pauline Kael's
Reeling (1977) opens with "End of Innocence", an intriguing text that has American involvement in Vietnam and the Watergate Hotel break-in by members of the Nixon administration as keys factors in a shift from the post-war American hero as a "natural leader" and a representative of the strongest (and free-ist?) economy in the world to "an enemy of all men -- a man out for his own good only, and, very likely, a psychotic racist." The publication date of Kael's text (first published in the
New Yorker) is October 1, 1973, 15 days before the U.S. Department of Justice brought a suit against Trump Management Corporation for "
discrimination against [B]lacks in rental apartments," of which TMC at the time owned more than 14,000 units in New York City.
For more -- and less -- on the topic of real estate and race relations in NYC, check out Hal Ashby's
The Landlord (1970), a film on which Kael had this to say:
Hal Ashby’s début film as a director is one of his best. Based on the novel by Kristin Hunter, a black woman, and adapted by another black writer, William Gunn, it’s about a rich blond bachelor (Beau Bridges) who gets in over his head when he buys a house in a black ghetto, intending to throw out the tenants and turn it into his own handsome town house. The tenants include Pearl Bailey and Diana Sands, in probably her finest screen performance—when she becomes sexually and emotionally involved with the new landlord, he starts learning something about passion and terror. The dialogue is crisp and often quite startling, and though the editing may be a little too showy and jumpy, the picture has originality and depth, and it’s full of sharp, absurdist humor. Lee Grant is particularly funny as Beau Bridges’s ditzy mother, and Lou Gossett, Jr., is fairly amazing as Diana Sands’s axe-wielding husband. Released in 1970.—Pauline Kael
