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Pauline Kael

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Pauline Kael (June 19, 1919 – September 3, 2001) was a film critic who wrote for The New Yorker magazine. She was known for her erudite, eloquent, esoteric, emphatic (some say hysterical<ref>Battle of Algiers Film Review</ref> <ref name="bosley">L.A. Times, Bosley Award</ref> <ref name="pearls">Vanneman, Alan (November 2004). "The Pearls of Pauline". Bright Lights. ISSN 0147-4049. Retrieved on 2006-09-23.</ref>) movie reviews. She approached movies emotionally, with a strongly colloquial writing style. Kael's guiding thesis was that movies, regardless of other merits, must be entertaining. She was often regarded as the most influential American film critic of her day<ref>Pauline Kael. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved on 2006-09-01.</ref><ref>Remembering Pauline Kael. New Yorker. Retrieved on 2006-09-01.</ref> and made a lasting impression on other major critics including Roger Ebert and Armond White.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Kael was born on a chicken farm in Petaluma, California, to Jewish immigrants from Poland. She attended college at UC Berkeley, where she studied philosophy, literature and the arts; she briefly considered a career as a playwright. After dropping out, she worked as a freelance critic and managed a local cinema. Kael wrote many of her early film reviews for the radical public radio station KPFA in Berkeley.

At one point, she wrote an infamously 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"). She thought Paint Your Wagon to be very nearly as bad. Conversely, she considered the film versions of Fiddler on the Roof and, especially Cabaret (film), to be two of the greatest movie musicals ever made. It was during her tenure (1967 – 1991) 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 as a critic. She noted that during this period her reviews were so interesting because the movies were so compelling.

Kael's first published collection of her movie writings, I Lost It at the Movies (1965), was a bestseller, 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 "About the Town" section of The New Yorker.

Kael also wrote philosophical essays on moviegoing, the modern 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. Much of the historical material in the book has since been rebutted, by Bogdanovich, Jonathan Rosenbaum, James Naremore and newer generations of scholars.

According to Peter Biskind, author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Down and Dirty Pictures, Kael got into the unethical habit of reviewing scripts and making suggestions and then reviewing the films she’d worked on. Writer Alan Vanneman questioned her objectivity after the appearance of favorable Kael reviews of films by certain screenwriters with whom she had worked.<ref name="pearls"/> As the 1960s came to a close, she also began to give films with 'hip,' socially conscious, or antihero themes more favorable (or at least less negative) reviews, including the widely panned Billy Jack.<ref name="pearls"/>

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 to return to writing criticism.

Kael became ill with Parkinson's disease in the 1980s, and died at her home in Massachusetts in 2001, aged 82. Thrice divorced, she was survived by her daughter, Gina.

[edit] Style and Influences

Kael's opinions often were inconsistent with those of other reviewers. Sometimes, she energetically made a case for movies not universally admired, such as Last Tango in Paris and The Warriors. 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 Last Tango in Paris, "Z," and MASH that resulted in enormous boosts to those films' popularity; and enthusiastic reviews of Brian De Palma's early films. 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, and has been cited by Vanneman as another example of her lack of objectivity.<ref name="pearls"/>

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 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."<ref name="Kael">Kael, Pauline. 5001 Nights at the Movies, Henry Holt and Company, 1991. ISBN 0-8050-1367-9</ref>

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"<ref name="Kael">Kael, Pauline. 5001 Nights at the Movies, Henry Holt and Company, 1991. ISBN 0-8050-1367-9</ref>. She also called it "fascist medievalism". <ref name="Kael2">Kael, Pauline. Deeper Into Movies, Warner Books, 1973. ISBN 0714509418</ref> 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'.<ref name="Kael2">Kael, Pauline. Deeper Into Movies, Warner Books, 1973. ISBN 0714509418</ref>

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 influenced a group of young, mostly male critics who emulated her distinctive writing style. Known as the "Paulettes," they came to dominate national film criticism in the 1990s. Critics who have acknowledged Kael's influence include, among others, David Edelstein of New York Magazine, Michael Sragow of the Baltimore Sun, Armond White of the New York Sun, Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com and A. O. Scott of the New York Times.

[edit] Nixon "quote"

In the wake of Richard Nixon's landslide victory in the 1972 presidential election, Kael is frequently quoted as having said 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 New York 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, the quote is derived 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, "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."

[edit] Trivia

  • Film director Paul Schrader originally attended UCLA's graduate film program 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. Kael later turned on Schrader, as she did on many of her acolytes who became too successful for her taste, calling him "a whore who doesn't know how to turn a trick."
  • 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.
  • Winner of the 1973 Harvard Lampoon Bosley Award (named after Bosley Crowther): "Pauline Kael, whose hysterical encomium loosed Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris" on an all-too-trusting world."<ref name="bosley"/>
  • According to a Clint Eastwood fansite, Kael's "loathing" of Dirty Harry, and her famous criticism of the film, made it controversial in some cities. The website claims that "the insinuation that Eastwood was a right-wing crazy dogged the actor for years", allegedly as a direct result of Kael's review. The fansite also claims that "privately" Kael referred to Eastwood as "a dumb hick," who reminded her of the provincial relatives she left back on the chicken farm in Petaluma. <ref>http://www.clinteastwood.net/biography_3.html</ref>

[edit] References

<references/>

[edit] Secondary sources

  • 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.)

[edit] External links

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Pauline Kael
Books by Pauline Kael:  For Keeps  - Movie Love  - Hooked  - Taking It All In  - State of the Art   - When The Lights Go Down  - Reeling  - Deeper Into Movies   - Going Steady   - Kiss Kiss Bang Bang   - I Lost It at the Movies   - 5001 Nights at the Movies   - Raising Kane, and other essays   - Books about Pauline Kael:  Conversations with Pauline Kael   - Afterglow: A Last Conversation With Pauline Kael   - Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me
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