Pauline Kael

Film critic

• Born: June 19, 1919
• Birthplace: Petaluma, California
• Died: September 3, 2001
• Place of death: Great Barrington, Massachusetts

As film critic for The New Yorker for more than twenty years, Kael conveyed the joy of watching films and made films a serious topic of discussion.

Early Life

Pauline Kael (KAY-ehl) was born in Petaluma, California, an agricultural region north of San Francisco, the fifth and last child of Polish immigrants Isaac Paul Kael and Judith Friedman. Pauline Kael’s father lost his farm during the Great Depression and moved to San Francisco, where she became a regular filmgoer. She said she had trouble dating because she often disagreed with her dates about the quality of the films they attended.

Kael attended the University of California, Berkeley, on a partial scholarship, majoring in philosophy, but she dropped out six credits short of graduation when she ran out of money. Abandoning plans to teach or to go to law school, she then went to New York with a friend, the poet Robert Horan, for three years before returning to San Francisco. While trying to write plays and working on experimental films, Kael supported herself and her daughter, Gina James, from a relationship with the poet and filmmaker James Broughton, by working as a cook, a seamstress, an advertising copywriter, a textbook writer, and a bookstore clerk. She was married and divorced three times.

In 1953, Kael argued about a film with a friend in a coffee shop when the editor of City Lights overheard them and asked Kael to review a film for his magazine. Her review of Charles Chaplin’s Limelight (1952) launched her career as a critic, and she wrote reviews and essays for such publications as The Atlantic Monthly, Film Culture, Film Quarterly, Kulchur, The Massachusetts Review, Moviegoer, Partisan Review, and Sight and Sound. She also began a weekly broadcast about film on KPFA, Berkeley’s listener-supported radio station; managed Berkeley’s Cinema Guild and Studio two-screen repertory theater, founded by Edward Landberg, one of her husbands; wrote programs for the films she showed; and lectured at universities in San Francisco and in Los Angeles.

Life’s Work

The vitality and intelligence of Kael’s writings led to the publication of I Lost It at the Movies (1965). The collection reached a larger readership than most books on films, and its publication coincided with the increasing interest in foreign-language films and the rise of university film courses. In addition to analyzing the schizophrenic nature of Hud (1963) and the pretentiousness of Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Kael attacked Andrew Sarris, the primary American proponent of the auteur theory, which holds that films reflect the personalities of their directors. This essay, “Circles and Squares,” has remained one of her most famous.

Earning more writing assignments, she moved to New York in 1965 and wrote for such slick magazines as Holiday, Life, Mademoiselle, and Vogue, but McCall’s fired her for panning The Sound of Music (1965). The New Yorker published an impassioned analysis of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and in 1968 William Shawn, the magazine’s editor, hired her as one of two film critics, with Kael writing often lengthy reviews in the fall and winter while Penelope Gilliatt served as the critic for the rest of the year. Kael’s pugnacious, colloquial style contrasted not only with Gilliatt’s more genteel approach but also with the magazine’s overall self-consciously sophisticated tone.

In 1978, Kael left film criticism, at the instigation of actor-director-producer Warren Beatty, to try the other side of the film business. She and Beatty eventually had a falling out, and she left her position as production executive to work briefly as a consultant at Paramount Pictures before returning to The New Yorker. By that time Gilliatt had left the magazine, and Kael began reviewing every other week, commuting between New York and her home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

In addition to her reviews of current films, Kael wrote capsule reviews of older films showing at repertory theaters in New York. These reviews were collected in Five Thousand and One Nights at the Movies (revised 1991). Kael published eleven other collections of reviews and essays. Deeper into Movies (1973) became the first film book to win the National Book Award for Arts and Letters. One of her most famous essays, “Raising Kane,” first appeared in The Citizen Kane Book (1971). She created a controversy by claiming that journeyman screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz was the primary creative force behind the screenplay for Citizen Kane (1941), not cowriter, director, and star Orson Welles. Kael retired from The New Yorker in March, 1991, because of declining health. She died in 2001 from Parkinson’s disease.

Significance

Kael’s tenure at The New Yorker came during a period many have termed a golden age for American films. Released from previous restraints imposed on the way filmmakers could portray sex, violence, and social and political issues, American films embraced this new freedom by presenting society in a way never seen before, especially during the decade beginning with the release of Bonnie and Clyde. As directors as varied as Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Sam Peckinpah, and Martin Scorsese broke new ground, Kael became the most widely read and debated film critic ever, acting as a cheerleader for the innovations of this exciting era.

Kael could overly praise some directors, as with her paeans to Altman’s Nashville (1975) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Ultimo tango a Parigi (1972; Last Tango in Paris), calling the latter “the most liberating film ever made.” She contradicted her position on the auteur theory by almost always seeing quality in the work of her favorites, especially Altman and Brian De Palma, whose Casualties of War (1989) she was alone in acclaiming as a masterpiece.

Kael’s negativity could also be controversial, as with her disapproval of the Holocaust documentary, Shoah (1985), which sparked a rebuttal from literary critic Alfred Kazin. She could also be hostile toward those of whom she disapproved. According to biographer Marc Eliot, Clint Eastwood sought the counsel of a psychoanalyst because of Kael’s attacks on his films.

Kael is unrivaled as the most influential American film critic. She inspired viewers to venture to see offbeat, difficult films, and the passion of her writing encouraged an entire generation of critics, including David Edelstein, Owen Gleiberman, Elvis Mitchell, Michael Sragow, and James Wolcott. The even more combative Armond White praised her for enlivening the national discourse through the way she evoked the social and political zeitgeist in her reviews. According to Louis Menand, she conveyed better than anyone else the sensation of experiencing a film. For Manohla Dargis, Kael inspired her not only to write about films but also to write. Kael’s work also had an impact on the development of such filmmakers as Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino, who called her the professor in the film school of his mind. The numerous awards for Kael’s lifetime achievements include recognition from the Newswomen’s Club of New York, the American Film Institute, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the National Book Critics Circle.

Bibliography

Brantley, Will, ed. Conversations with Pauline Kael. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Nineteen interviews conducted between 1966 and 1994. Includes chronology.

Davis, Francis. Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2002. In interviews conducted shortly before her death, Kael reflects on her life and her career and expresses disappointment at the quality of contemporary films.

Menand, Louis. “Kael’s Attack on Sarris.” In Polemic: Critical or Uncritical, edited by Jane Gallop. New York: Routledge, 2004. Places the critics’ quarrel in historical context, discusses Kael’s influence, and provides a biographical sketch.

Murray, Edward. Nine American Film Critics: A Study of Theory and Practice. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1975. Detailed look at Kael’s work praises her awareness of the significance of acting while criticizing her neglect of visual style and her impressionistic, undisciplined approach.