Pauline Kael

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Pauline Kael

An undated photograph of Kael.
Born June 19, 1919
Petaluma, California
Died September 3, 2001 (aged 82)
Great Barrington, Massachusetts
Occupation Film critic
Writing period 1951 - 1991
Influenced

Pauline Kael (June 19, 1919 – September 3, 2001) was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker magazine from 1968 to 1991. Kael was known for her "witty, biting, highly opinionated, and sharply focused"[1] movie reviews. She approached movies emotionally, with a strongly colloquial writing style. She is often regarded as the most influential American film critic of her day[2][3] and left a lasting impression on many major critics including Armond White[4] and Roger Ebert, who has said that Kael "had a more positive influence on the climate for film in America than any other single person over the last three decades."[5]

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life and career

Kael was born on a chicken farm in Petaluma, California, to Isaac Paul Kael and Judith Friedman Kael, two Jewish immigrants from Poland. Affected by the Great Depression, her family lost their farm when Kael was eight and moved to San Francisco, California.[2] She matriculated at the University of California, Berkeley in 1936, where she studied philosophy, literature and the arts but dropped out in 1940 before graduating. Despite this, she intended to go on to law school, until she fell in with a group of artists[6] and moved to New York City with the poet Robert Horan.

Three years later, Kael returned to San Francisco and "led a bohemian life," marrying and divorcing three times, writing plays, and working on experimental films.[2] In 1948, Kael and filmmaker James Broughton had a daughter, Gina, though Kael would raise her alone.[7] Gina had a serious illness through much of her childhood,[8] and to support her, Kael worked a series of menial jobs—cook, seamstress—along with stints as an ad-copy writer.[9] In 1953, the editor of City Lights magazine overheard Kael—in a coffeeshop-argument about movies with a friend—and asked her to review Charlie Chaplin's Limelight.[2] Kael memorably dubbed the movie "slimelight," and began publishing film criticism regularly in magazines.

Even these early reviews were notable for their informality and lack of pretension; Kael later explained, "I worked to loosen my style—to get away from the term-paper pomposity that we learn at college. I wanted the sentences to breathe, to have the sound of a human voice."[10] Kael disparaged the supposed critic's ideal of objectivity, referring to it as "saphead objectivity,"[11] and incorporated aspects of autobiography into her criticism.[9] In a review of Vittorio De Sica's 1946 neorealist classic Shoeshine (Sciuscià) that has been ranked among her most memorable,[12] Kael described seeing the film

“ [...]after one of those terrible lovers' quarrels that leave one in a state of incomprehensible despair. I came out of the theater, tears streaming, and overheard the petulant voice of a college girl complaining to her boyfriend, 'Well I don't see what was so special about that movie.' I walked up the street, crying blindly, no longer certain whether my tears were for the tragedy on the screen, the hopelessness I felt for myself, or the alienation I felt from those who could not experience the radiance of Shoeshine. For if people cannot feel Shoeshine, what can they feel?....Later I learned that the man with whom I had quarreled had gone the same night and had also emerged in tears. Yet our tears for each other, and for Shoeshine did not bring us together. Life, as Shoeshine demonstrates, is too complex for facile endings.[12] ”

Kael broadcast many of her early reviews on the alternative public radio station KPFA in Berkeley, and gained further local-celebrity status as Berkeley Cinema Guild manager from 1955 to 1960. As manager of the two-screen theater, Kael programmed the films that were shown, "unapologetically repeat[ing] her favorites until they also became audience favorites."[13] She also wrote "pungent" capsule reviews of the movies, which her patrons began collecting.[14]

[edit] Going mass

Kael continued to juggle writing with other work until she received an offer to publish a book of her criticism. Published in 1965 as I Lost It at the Movies, the collection sold 150,000 paperback copies and was a surprise bestseller. Coinciding with a job at the high-circulation women's magazine McCall's, Kael (as Newsweek put it in a 1966 profile) "went mass."[15]

The same year, she wrote a blistering review of the phenomenally popular The Sound of Music in McCall's. After mentioning that some of the press had dubbed it "The Sound of Money," Kael called the film's message a "sugarcoated lie that people seem to want to eat."[16] Although, according to legend,[9] this review led to her being fired from McCall's (The New York Times even printed as much in Kael's obituary), both Kael and the magazine's editor have denied this. According to McCall's editor Robert Stein, "I [fired her] months later after she kept panning every commercial movie from Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago to The Pawnbroker and A Hard Day's Night."[17]

Her dismissal from McCall's led to a stint from 1966 to 1967 at The New Republic, whose editors constantly altered Kael's writing without permission. A few days after quitting the Republic "in despair,"[18] Kael was asked by William Shawn to join The New Yorker staff as one of its two film critics (she alternated every six months with Penelope Gilliatt until 1979, after which she became sole film critic.) Her first review in the New Yorker was a rave about Bonnie and Clyde, in which, according to critic David Thomson, "she was right about a film that had bewildered many other critics."[14]

Her colloquial, brash writing style was initially considered an odd fit with the sophisticated and genteel New Yorker; Kael remembered "getting a letter from an eminent New Yorker writer suggesting that I was trampling through the pages of the magazine with cowboy boots covered with dung."[19] However, it was during her tenure at the New Yorker, a forum that permitted her to write at some length (and with presumably minimal editorial interference), that Kael achieved her greatest prominence; by 1968, Time magazine was referring to her as "one of the country's top movie critics."[20] Kael noted that during this period her reviews were so interesting because the movies were so compelling.

[edit] New Yorker tenure

In 1970, Kael received a George Polk Award for her work as a critic at the New Yorker. She continued to publish 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.

Kael also wrote philosophical essays on moviegoing, the modern Hollywood film industry, and 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 Marilyn: a Biography, (an account of Marilyn Monroe's life); 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 argument was that Herman J. Mankiewicz (Citizen Kane's assistant screenwriter) deserved as much credit for the film as Orson Welles, a thesis that provoked controversy and hurt Welles to the point that he considered suing Kael for libel.[11]

Kael battled the editors of the New Yorker as much as her own critics. She fought with William Shawn to review the 1972 pornographic film Deep Throat, though she eventually relented.[21] According to Kael, after reading her negative review of Terrence Malick's 1973 movie Badlands, Shawn said, "I guess you didn't know that Terry is like a son to me." Kael responded, "Tough shit, Bill," and her review was printed unchanged.[22] Other than sporadic confrontations with Shawn, Kael said she spent most of her work time at home writing.[23]

Upon the release of Kael's 1980 collection When The Lights Go Down, her New Yorker colleague Renata Adler published an 8,000-word review in The New York Review of Books that dismissed the book as "jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless."[24] Adler argued that Kael's post-sixties work contained "nothing certainly of intelligence or sensibility," and faulted her "quirks [and] mannerisms," including Kael's repeated use of the "bullying" imperative and rhetorical question. The piece, which stunned Kael and quickly became infamous in literary circles,[23] was described by Time magazine as "the New York literary Mafia['s] bloodiest case of assault and battery in years."[25] Although Kael refused to respond, Adler's review became known as "the most sensational attempt on Kael's reputation";[26] twenty years later, Salon.com (ironically) referred to Adler's "worthless" denunciation of Kael as her "most famous single sentence."[27]

In 1979, Kael accepted an offer from Warren Beatty to be a consultant to Paramount Pictures, but she left the position after only a few months to return to writing criticism in mid 1980.

[edit] Later years

In the early 1980s, Kael was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. As her illness worsened, she became increasingly depressed about the state of American movies, along with feeling, she explained, that "I had nothing new to say."[22] On March 11, 1991, in an announcement The New York Times referred to as "earth-shattering," Kael announced her retirement from reviewing movies regularly.[28] At the time, Kael explained that she would still write essays for The New Yorker, along with "some reflections and other pieces of writing about movies."[28] However, she ended up publishing no new work in the ensuing ten years, besides an introduction to her 1994 compendium For Keeps. In the introduction (which was reprinted in The New Yorker), Kael stated, in reference to her film criticism, "I'm frequently asked why I don't write my memoirs. I think I have."[29]

Though she published no new writing of her own, Kael was not averse to giving interviews, in which she alternately praised and derided newly-released films and television shows. In a 1998 interview with Modern Maturity, she said she sometimes regretted not being able to review, saying, "A few years ago when I saw Vanya on 42nd Street, I wanted to blow trumpets. Your trumpets are gone once you’ve quit."[22] She died at her home in Massachusetts in 2001, aged 82.

[edit] Opinions

Kael's opinions were often inconsistent with those of other reviewers. Sometimes, she energetically made a case for movies not universally admired, such as The Warriors and, memorably, Last Tango in Paris. (Soon after that film's release, Kael won the 1973 Harvard Lampoon Bosley Award, named after Bosley Crowther. She was described by the Award's judges as "Pauline Kael, whose hysterical encomium loosed Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris on an all-too-trusting world.") She was not especially cruel to some films that had been roasted by many critics, such as the 1972 Man of La Mancha, in which she praised Sophia Loren's performance. She also condemned 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 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 "Z" and MASH that resulted in enormous boosts to those films' popularity; and enthusiastic reviews of Brian De Palma's early films. Kael's scathing critique of Ryan's Daughter (1970) allegedly dissuaded director David Lean from making a film for fourteen years afterwards. Her 'preview' of Robert Altman's 1975 movie Nashville appeared several months before the film was actually completed, in an (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to catapult the film to box office glory.

[edit] Nixon "quote"

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 sometimes cited by conservatives (such as Bernard Goldberg, in his book Bias), as an example of allegedly clueless New York liberal insularity. There are variations as to the exact wording, the speaker (it has variously been attributed to other liberal women, including Katharine Graham, Susan Sontag, and Joan Didion), [1] [2] and the timing (in addition to Nixon's victory, it has been claimed to have been uttered after Ronald Reagan's re-election in 1984.) [3]

There is, in fact, no record of Kael making such a remark. The story may have originated in a December 28, 1972 New York Times article on a lecture Kael gave at the Modern Language Association, in which the newspaper quoted her as saying, "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."[30]

[edit] Views on violence

Kael had a taste for anti-hero movies that violated taboos involving sex and violence, and this reportedly alienated some of her readers. She also had a strong dislike for films that she felt were manipulative or appealed in superficial ways to conventional attitudes and feelings.

She was an enthusiastic supporter of the violent action films of Sam Peckinpah and early Walter Hill, as evidenced in her collection 5001 Nights at the Movies, which includes positive reviews of Hill's Hard Times (1975), The Warriors (1979), and Southern Comfort (1981), as well as Peckinpah's entire body of work. Although she initially dismissed John Boorman's Point Blank (1967) for what she felt was its pointless brutality, she later acknowledged it was "intermittently dazzling" with "more energy and invention than Boorman seems to know what to do with...one comes out exhilarated but bewildered."[31]

However, Kael did respond negatively to some action films that she felt pushed what she described as "right-wing" or "fascist" agendas. While praising Don Siegel's Dirty Harry (1971) as "trim, brutal, and exciting; it was directed in the sleekest style by the veteran urban-action director...," she labelled it a "right-wing fantasy [that is] a remarkably simple-minded attack on liberal values".[31] She also called it "fascist medievalism".[32] In an otherwise extremely positive critique of Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, Kael concluded that the controversial director had made 'the first American film that is a fascist work of art'.[32]

In her negative review of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Kael explained how she felt some directors who used brutal imagery in their films were de-sensitizing audiences to violence:

“ At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don't have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact de- sensitizing us. They are saying that everyone is brutal, and the heroes must be as brutal as the villains or they turn into fools. There seems to be an assumption that if you're offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship. But this would deny those of us who don't believe in censorship the use of the only counterbalance: the freedom of the press to say that there's anything conceivably damaging in these films—the freedom to analyze their implications. If we don't use this critical freedom, we are implicitly saying that no brutality is too much for us—that only squares and people who believe in censorship are concerned with brutality. ”

[edit] Alleged homophobia

In preface to a 1983 interview with Kael for the gay magazine Mandate, Sam Staggs wrote that "she has always carried on a love/hate affair with her gay legions....like the bitchiest queen in gay mythology, she has a sharp remark about everything."[33] However, in the early eighties, largely in response to her review of the 1981 drama Rich and Famous, Kael faced notable accusations of homophobia. First remarked on by Stuart Byron in The Village Voice, according to gay writer Craig Seligman the accusations eventually "took on a life of their own and did real damage to her reputation."[34]

In her review, Kael called the straight-themed Rich and Famous "more like a homosexual fantasy," saying that one female character's affairs "are creepy, because they don't seem like what a woman would get into."[35] Byron, who "hit the ceiling" after reading the review, was joined by The Celluloid Closet author Vito Russo, who argued that Kael equated promiscuity with homosexuality, "as though straight women have never been promiscuous or been given the permission to be promiscuous."[35]

In response to her review of Rich and Famous, several critics reappraised Kael's earlier reviews of the sixties gay-themed movies Victim and The Children's Hour, including a wisecrack Kael made about the lesbian-themed Children's Hour: "I always thought this was why lesbians needed sympathy—that there isn't much they can do."[36] Craig Seligman has defended Kael, saying that her perceived "bigotry" was simply her showing "enough ease with the topic to be able to crack jokes—in a dark period when other reviewers....'felt that if homosexuality were not a crime it would spread.'"[37] Kael herself rejected the accusations as "craziness," adding, "I don't see how anybody who took the trouble to check out what I've actually written about movies with homosexual elements in them could believe that stuff."[38]

[edit] Influence

Almost as soon as she began writing for The New Yorker, Kael carried a great deal of influence among fellow critics. In the early seventies, Cinerama distributors "initiate[d] a policy of individual screenings for each critic because her remarks [during the film] were affecting her fellow critics."[39] In the seventies and eighties, Kael cultivated friendships with a group of young, mostly male critics, some of whom emulated her distinctive writing style. Referred to derisively as the "Paulettes," they came to dominate national film criticism in the 1990s. Critics who have acknowledged Kael's influence include, among many, A. O. Scott of The New York Times,[40] David Denby and Anthony Lane of The New Yorker,[41][42] David Edelstein of New York Magazine,[43] Greil Marcus,[43] Elvis Mitchell,[44] Michael Sragow,[43] Armond White, and Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com.[45] It was repeatedly alleged that, after her retirement, Kael's "most ardent devotees deliberate[d] with each other [to] forge a common School of Pauline position" before their reviews were written.[46] When confronted with the rumor that she ran "a conspiratorial network of young critics," Kael said she believed that critics imitated her style rather than her actual opinions, stating, "A number of critics take phrases and attitudes from me, and those takings stick out—they’re not integral to the writer’s temperament or approach."[47]

When asked in 1998 if she thought her criticism had affected the way films were made, Kael deflected the question, stating, "If I say yes, I’m an egotist, and if I say no, I’ve wasted my life."[22] Several directors' careers were indisputably affected by her, though, most notably Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader, who was accepted at UCLA Film School's graduate program on Kael's recommendation. Under her mentoring, Schrader worked as a film critic before taking up screenwriting and directing full-time. Also, film critic Derek Malcolm claimed that, "If a director was praised by Kael, he or she was generally allowed to work, since the money-men knew there would be similar approbation across a wide field of publications."[11] Alternately, Kael was said to be able to prevent filmmakers from working; David Lean claimed that her criticism of his work "kept him from making a movie for 14 years."[48]

Though he began directing movies after she retired, Quentin Tarantino was also influenced by Kael. He read her criticism voraciously growing up and said that Kael was "as influential as any director was in helping me develop my aesthetic."[29] Wes Anderson recounted his efforts to screen his film Rushmore for Kael in a 1999 The New York Times article titled "My Private Screening With Pauline Kael". He later wrote Kael that "your thoughts and writing about the movies [have] been a very important source of inspiration for me and my movies, and I hope you don't regret that."[5]

In his 1988 film Willow, George Lucas named the lead villain "General Kael," after the critic. Kael had often reviewed Lucas' work without enthusiasm; in her own (negative) review of Willow, she stylishly described the character as an "hommage a moi."

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Books

[edit] Selected reviews and essays

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Pauline Kael. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved on 2006-09-01.
  2. ^ a b c d Van Gelder, Lawrence. "Pauline Kael, Provocative and Widely Imitated New Yorker Film Critic, Dies at 82", The New York Times, 2001-09-04. Retrieved on 2008-03-25. 
  3. ^ Remembering Pauline Kael. New Yorker. Retrieved on 2006-09-01.
  4. ^ Ross, Matthew. The Critic (Interview with Armond White). Filmmaker. Retrieved on 2007-01-19.
  5. ^ a b Feeney, Mark. Viewing the parcels of Pauline. Boston Globe. Retrieved on 2007-01-19.
  6. ^ Obituary: Pauline Kael | Obituaries | guardian.co.uk
  7. ^ Seligman (2004). p. 11.
  8. ^ Brantley (1996). p. 10.
  9. ^ a b c Tucker, Ken. "A gift for effrontery", Salon.com, 1999-02-09. Retrieved on 2007-04-18. 
  10. ^ Brantley (1996). p. 95.
  11. ^ a b c Houston, Penelope. "Obituary: Pauline Kael", The Guardian, 2001-09-05. Retrieved on 2007-04-19. 
  12. ^ a b Seligman (2004). p. 37.
  13. ^ Hom, Lisa. "All Hail Kael: A film series remembers the uncompromising New Yorker critic Pauline Kael", San Francisco Weekly, 2001-11-21. Retrieved on 2007-04-18. 
  14. ^ a b Thomson, David (2002). "Pauline Kael." The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-3757-0940-1. p. 449-50.
  15. ^ Brantley (1996). p. 3-4.
  16. ^ Kael, Pauline (1968). Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Toronto: Bantam. ISBN 0-31648-163-7.  p. 214-5.
  17. ^ "THE SOUND OF MUSIC: Kael's Fate", The New York Times, 2000-09-03. Retrieved on 2007-04-18. 
  18. ^ Brantley (1996). p. 12
  19. ^ Seligman (2004). p. 12.
  20. ^ "The Pearls of Pauline", Time, 1968-07-12. Retrieved on 2007-04-19. 
  21. ^ Davis (2002). p. 32.
  22. ^ a b c d Goodman, Susan. "She Lost It At the Movies" (reprint), Modern Maturity, March/April 1998. Retrieved on 2007-04-19. 
  23. ^ a b Davis (2002). p. 40.
  24. ^ Adler, Renata. "The Perils of Pauline", The New York Review of Books, 1980-08-14. Retrieved on 2007-04-19. 
  25. ^ "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Ouch Ouch)", Time, 1980-08-04. Retrieved on 2007-04-19. 
  26. ^ Seligman (2004). p. 137.
  27. ^ Johnson, Dennis Loy. "Interview with the heretic", Salon.com, 2000-08-21. Retrieved on 2007-04-19. 
  28. ^ a b Maslin, Janet. "For Pauline Kael, Retirement as Critic Won't Be a Fade-Out", The New York Times, 1991-03-13. Retrieved on 2008-03-25. 
  29. ^ a b Corliss, Richard. "That Wild Old Woman", Time, 1994-11-07. Retrieved on 2007-04-19. 
  30. ^ Shenker, Israel. "2 Critics Here Focus on Films As Language Conference Opens" (fee required), The New York Times, 1972-12-28. Retrieved on 2007-04-18. 
  31. ^ a b Kael, Pauline. 5001 Nights at the Movies, Henry Holt and Company, 1991. ISBN 0-8050-1367-9
  32. ^ a b Kael, Pauline. Deeper Into Movies, Warner Books, 1973. ISBN 0-7145-0941-8
  33. ^ Brantley (1996). p. 91.
  34. ^ Seligman (2004). p. 151.
  35. ^ a b Seligman (2004). p. 152.
  36. ^ Seligman (2004). p. 155.
  37. ^ Seligman (2004). p. 156.
  38. ^ Brantley (1996). p. 96.
  39. ^ Brantley (1996). p. 16.
  40. ^ Scott, A. O. "The Movies Lose a Love And a Friend", The New York Times, 2001-09-16. Retrieved on 2008-04-02.
  41. ^ Denby, David. "My Life As a Paulette," The New Yorker, 2003-10-20.
  42. ^ Charlie Rose interview with Lane
  43. ^ a b c Menand, Louis. "Finding It at the Movies", The New York Review of Books, 1995-03-23. Retrieved on 2008-04-02. In his review, Menand writes of Kael's influence on Sragow, Edelstein, and Marcus.
  44. ^ "Q&A: Elvis Mitchell: Part 1", Undercover Black Man, 2007-03-05.
  45. ^ Zacharek, Stephanie. "The critic: Pauline Kael, R.I.P.", Salon.com, 2001-09-03.
  46. ^ "Pauletteburo?: Fur flies over the Kael "kopy kats"", The Phoenix, 1997-03-27. Retrieved on 2007-04-19. 
  47. ^ Espen, Hal. "Kael Talks," The New Yorker 21 March 1994. p. 134-43.
  48. ^ Jacobs, Diane. "REVIEW: Running Time: 17,356,680 Minutes", The New York Times, 1999-11-14. Retrieved on 2007-04-19. 

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