Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael (
June 19,
1919 –
September 3,
2001) was an
American film critic who wrote for
The New Yorker magazine. She was known for her in-depth, well-informed, deeply personal, sometimes impassioned movie reviews. She approached movies emotionally (in sharp contrast to the "intellectual" preferences of her contemporaries), her writing style strictly in the
vernacular, and her guiding thesis was that movies, regardless of other
merits, must be entertaining. Many people considered her the most influential American film critic of her day, including critics
Roger Ebert and
Armond White.
Kael was born on a chicken farm in
Petaluma,
California, to Jewish immigrants from
Poland. She attended
UC Berkeley but did not graduate [
1]. She first came to fame in the 1950s, as the movie critic for
Berkeley, California radio station
KPFA. She published a number of freelance articles on movies throughout the 1950s and 1960s. At one point, she wrote a famously negative review of
The Sound of Music which, she liked to boast, resulted in her being fired from
McCall's magazine (she referred to the movie as "The Sound of Money"). But it was during her stint (1967 – 1991) at the
New Yorker, a forum that permitted her to write at some length, that Kael achieved her greatest prominence as a critic.
Kael's first published collection of her movie writings,
I Lost It at the Movies (1965), was a best-seller, and it led to a series of hardbound collections of her writings, many with (deliberately) suggestive titles such as
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, When the Lights Go Down, Taking It All In, and others. Her fourth book,
Deeper Into Movies (1973), was the first non-fiction book about movies to win a
National Book Award.
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982) collected her synopses of films that were previously published anonymously in the "Goings on About Town" section of
The New Yorker.
Kael also wrote philosophical essays on moviegoing, the modern-day Hollywood film industry, the lack of courage on the part of audiences (as she perceived it) to explore lesser-known, more challenging movies (she never used the word "film" to describe movies because she felt the word was too elitist).
Among her more popular essays were a damning review of
Norman Mailer's semi-fictional biography of
Marilyn Monroe that attacked Mailer himself as much as the book; an incisive look at
Cary Grant's career, and an extensively researched look at
Citizen Kane entitled
Raising Kane (later reprinted in
The Citizen Kane Book).
Her opinion that credit for
Citizen Kane was deserving for the film's screenwriter,
Herman J. Mankiewicz, as much as for
Orson Welles, was seen in movie circles as blasphemous at the time, generating angry responses from Welles acolyte
Peter Bogdanovich and others, and it is still a topic for debate among film buffs today.
In 1981 she accepted an offer from
Warren Beatty to be a consultant to
Paramount Pictures, but she left the position after only a few months.
Pauline Kael died at her home in Massachusetts in 2001, aged 82, from
Parkinson's disease, survived by a daughter.
Kael's opinions often were not in accord with those of other reviewers. From time to time, she energetically made a case for movies not universally admired, such as
Last Tango in Paris and
The Warriors. She also harshly criticized films that elsewhere attracted admiration, such as
It's a Wonderful Life,
West Side Story and
Shoah. The originality of her opinions, as well as the forceful and vivid way in which she expressed them, won her ardent supporters as well as angry critics.
Notable movie reviews by Kael included a venomous criticism of
West Side Story that drew harsh replies from the movie's supporters; ecstatic reviews of
Last Tango in Paris and
MASH that resulted in enormous boosts to those films' popularity; and enthusiastic reviews of
Brian De Palma's early films. Her review of
Robert Altman's 1975 movie
Nashville appeared several months before its release, in an (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to catapult the film to box office glory.
In general, Kael had a taste for movies that violate taboos involving sex and violence, a taste that disturbed many of her readers. She also had a strong distaste for films that appeal in superficial ways to conventional attitudes and feelings.
Kael battled the editors of the
New Yorker as much as her own critics. In a 1998 interview for
Modern Maturity magazine, she described an encounter with the
New Yorker's editor,
William Shawn: after Shawn read her review of
Terrence Malick's movie
Badlands, he said, "I guess you didn't know that Terry is like a son to me." Kael's response was simply: "Tough shit, Bill."
Kael is frequently quoted as having said, in the wake of
Richard Nixon's landslide victory in the 1972 presidential election, that she couldn't believe Nixon had won, since no one she knew had voted for him. The quote is usually cited by conservatives (such as
Bernard Goldberg, in his book
Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News), as an example of clueless liberal insularity. Others have speculated that it was uttered during the height of the
Watergate investigation, and was meant as an ironic commentary on Nixon's plunging popularity (in other words, how did Nixon manage such a landslide if no one would admit to voting for him?)
The quotation might best be considered apocryphal, given the lack of any positive primary evidence that Kael, or anyone else, made the statement. In addition, there does not seem to be agreement as to the exact wording, the speaker (it has variously been attributed to other liberal women, including
Katherine Graham,
Susan Sontag and
Joan Didion) or the timing (in addition to Nixon's victory, it has been claimed to have been uttered after
Ronald Reagan's re-election in 1984).
The origin of the
meme is unclear. Some have claimed that it was a garbled version of quote Kael gave to the
Wall Street Journal. Asked to comment on the election, Kael replied that it would be inappropriate for her to comment, as nobody she knew had voted for him. According to Fred Shapiro of the
American Dialect Society, it sprung from an address Kael gave to a
Modern Language Association conference on December 28, 1972, during which
The New York Times quoted her as saying, apparently facetiously, "I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them."
* Film director
Paul Schrader originally attended UCLA's graduate film programme on the recommendation of Pauline Kael. Under Kael's mentoring Schrader became a film critic, writing for the LA Weekly Press and later Cinema magazine, before taking up screenwriting and directing full-time.
* Pauline Kael was portrayed by actress Mary Charlotte Wilcox in an 1982 episode of
SCTV. Kael is initially depicted panning "Midnight Cowboy II in 3-D" before abruptly changing her mind, apparently due to the accumulated stress of having reviewed thousands of films.
*In 1975, Kael and
Woody Allen had a discussion with
Robert MacNeil on
The Robert MacNeil Report.
*
"Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher."
*
"I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him."
*
"In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising."
*
"One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down."
*
"The words "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies. This appeal is what attracts us, and ultimately what makes us despair when we begin to understand how seldom movies are more than this."*
Wes Anderson, 'Taking Pauline Kael to the Movies', Toronto,
Brick, A Literary Journal, No. 62, May 1999 (director Anderson recounts taking Kael to see his film
Rushmore.)
*
Salon Brilliant Careers: Pauline Kael*
Pauline Kael on Cary Grant*
Kael on 'A Passage to India'*
Pauline Kael on A Clockwork Orange*
The Pearls of Pauline from Brights Lights Film Journal*
Pauline Kael reviews, including the full text of Raising Kane
