Pauline Kael ( ; June 19, 1919 – September 3, 2001) was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991. Known for her "witty, biting, highly opinionated and sharply focused" reviews, Kael often defied the consensus of her contemporaries.
One of the most influential American film critics of her era, she left a lasting impression on the art form. Roger Ebert wrote in an obituary that Kael "had a more positive influence on the climate for film in America than any other single person over the last three decades". Kael, he said, "had no theory, no rules, no guidelines, no objective standards. You couldn't apply her 'approach' to a film. With her it was all personal." In a blurb for The Age of Movies, a collection of Kael's writings for the Library of America, Ebert wrote, "Like George Bernard Shaw, she wrote reviews that will be read for their style, humor and energy long after some of their subjects have been forgotten."
For American readers, she brought attention to international cinema, and championed New Hollywood directors. Sanford Schwartz writes that, in the 1960s, she "gave a breathing, textured life to the aims and sensibilities of Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, Satyajit Ray, Akira Kurosawa, François Truffaut, and Michelangelo Antonioni, among other European and Asian directors; and she endowed Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Paul Mazursky, Brian De Palma, and Francis Ford Coppola, among American directors of the following decade, with the same full-bodied presence. [...] Her deepest subject, in the end, isn't movies at all—it's how to live more intensely."
Early life and education Kael was the fifth and last child of Isaac Paul Kael and Judith Kael (), Jewish immigrants from Poland, who moved from New York to run a chicken farm among other Jewish chicken farmers, in Petaluma, California. Her siblings were Louis (1906), Philip (1909), Annie (1912), and Rose (1913). Her parents lost their farm when Kael was eight, and the family moved to San Francisco, where Kael attended Girls High School.
Kael wrote of film critics of her generation: "We were in almost at the beginning, when something new was added to the human experience." Her parents took her to see silent films, which she later referred to, writing that D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) was "the greatest movie ever made" and that Renée Falconetti's performance in Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) was "the finest ever recorded on film". In 1936, Kael matriculated at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied philosophy, literature, and art. Her confidence in writing was evident from early on and can be seen in unpublished writings to her university friends, poet Robert Duncan and writer Violet Ginsberg. In college, as a teaching assistant, she graded papers for up to three professors, and met with students after hours offering frank advice. Kael dropped out in 1940. She had intended to go to law school, but fell in with a group of artists and moved to New York City with the poet Robert Horan.
Three years later, Kael returned to Berkeley and "led a bohemian life", writing plays and working in experimental film. In 1948, she and the filmmaker James Broughton had a daughter, Gina James, whom Kael raised alone.Seligman (2004). p. 11. Gina had a congenital heart defect for much of her childhood that Kael could not afford the surgery to correct.Brantley (1996). p. 10.
Early career From age 17, when she started college, until 30 years later, when she was publishing work in national publications, Kael held a steady stream of odd jobs to support herself and later her daughter. She wrote advertising copy and edited manuscripts, preferring to take less time-intensive work so that it would not interfere with her own writing. She took jobs such as nanny, cook, seamstress, and violin teacher in addition to her copy writing and editing work.
In 1952, Peter D. Martin, the editor of City Lights, overheard Kael arguing about films in a coffee shop with a friend and asked her to review Charlie Chaplin's Limelight (1952). Kael dubbed the film "Slimelight" and began publishing film criticism regularly in magazines.
Kael later said of her writing: "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."Brantley (1996). p. 95. She disparaged the supposed critic's ideal of objectivity, calling it "saphead objectivity", and incorporated aspects of autobiography into her criticism. In a review of Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine (1946) that has been ranked among her most memorable,Seligman (2004). p. 37. Kael described seeing the film
Kael broadcast many of her early reviews on Berkeley's alternative public radio station KPFA. From the later part of the 1950s, she was able to make a living as a critic, combining her writing and opinions with running the Berkeley Cinema-Guild and Studio, which she became involved with in 1955 after marrying its owner, Edward Landberg. He paid for Gina's heart surgery, and made Kael the cinema's manager in 1955. She programmed the films at the two-screen facility, "unapologetically repeat[ing] her favorites until they also became audience favorites". Kael took on every aspect of running the guild and studio, turning it into a thriving business. She also wrote "pungent" capsule reviews of the films that her patrons began collecting.Thomson, David (2002). "Pauline Kael." The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. . p. 449-50. Kael remained in that position until 1960, when she and Landberg divorced.
Going mass-market 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 was a surprise bestseller, selling 150,000 paperback copies, and remains the collection for which she is best known. Upon the success of her book, she and Gina moved to New York and Kael began writing reviews for mass-market publications, including the women's magazine McCall's. By 1966, as Newsweek put it in a profile of her, Kael "went mass".Brantley (1996). p. 3-4.
Even with critical success, Kael's writing style was atypical of early mass-market publications, leading to conflict with editors. In 1966, Kael wrote a blistering review of The Sound of Music in McCall's. After mentioning that some of the press had dubbed it "The Sound of Money", she called the film's message a "sugarcoated lie that people seem to want to eat". p. 214-5. According to legend, this review got her fired from McCall's (The New York Times said as much in Kael's obituary), but Kael and the magazine's editor, Robert Stein, denied this. According to Stein, he 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."
Kael's dismissal from McCall's led to a stint from 1966 to 1967 at The New Republic, whose editors continually altered her writing without her permission. In October 1967, Kael wrote a long essay on Bonnie and Clyde that the magazine declined to publish. William Shawn of The New Yorker obtained the piece and ran it in The New Yorker issue of October 21. Kael's rave review was at odds with prevailing opinion, which was that the film was inconsistent in its blending of comedy and violence. According to critic David Thomson, "she was right about a film that had bewildered many other critics." A few months after the essay ran, Kael quit The New Republic "in despair".Brantley (1996). p. 12 In 1968, Shawn asked her to join The New Yorker staff; she alternated as film critic every six months with Penelope Gilliatt until 1979, and became the sole critic in 1980 after a year's leave of absence working in the film industry.
The New Yorker tenure After she had been fired by two publications, The New Yorker published two of Kael's essays, giving her a secure platform and national audience.
Initially, many considered Kael's colloquial, brash writing style an odd fit with the sophisticated and genteel New Yorker. Kael remembered "getting a letter from an eminent The New Yorker writer suggesting that I was trampling through the pages of the magazine with cowboy boots covered with dung".Seligman (2004). p. 12. During her tenure at The New Yorker, she took advantage of a forum that permitted her to write at length—and with minimal editorial interference—thereby achieving her greatest prominence. By 1968, Time magazine called her "one of the country's top movie critics".
In 1970, Kael received a George Polk Award for her work as a critic at The New Yorker. She continued to publish collections of her writing with suggestive titles such as Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, When the Lights Go Down, and Taking It All In. Her fourth collection, Deeper into Movies (1973), won the U.S. National Book Award in the Arts and Letters category."National Book Awards – 1974". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-10. (With acceptance speech by Kael.)"Arts and Letters" was an award category from 1964 to 1976. It was the first nonfiction book about film to win a National Book Award.
During her tenure at The New Yorker, Kael delved more seriously into aspects of American film making. She also wrote philosophical essays on movie-going, the modern Hollywood film industry, and what she saw as audiences' lack of courage to explore lesser-known, more challenging movies (she rarely used the word "film" because she felt it was too elitist). Among her more popular essays were a damning 1973 review of Norman Mailer's semi-fictional Marilyn: a Biography (an account of Marilyn Monroe's life); an incisive 1975 look at Cary Grant's career; and "Raising Kane" (1971), a book-length essay on the authorship of the film Citizen Kane that was the longest piece of sustained writing she had yet done.
Commissioned as an introduction to the shooting script in The Citizen Kane Book, "Raising Kane" was first printed in two consecutive issues of The New Yorker. The essay extended Kael's dispute of the auteur theory, arguing that Herman J. Mankiewicz, the screenplay's coauthor, was virtually its sole author and the film's actual guiding force. Kael further alleged that Orson Welles had schemed to deprive Mankiewicz of screen credit. Welles considered suing Kael for libel. He was defended by critics, scholars and friends, including Peter Bogdanovich, who rebutted Kael's claims in a 1972 article that included the revelation that Kael had appropriated the extensive research of a UCLA faculty member without crediting him.
Woody Allen said of Kael: "She has everything that a great critic needs except judgment. And I don't mean that facetiously. She has great passion, terrific wit, wonderful writing style, huge knowledge of film history, but too often what she chooses to extol or fails to see is very surprising."This is Orson Welles, Introduction : My Orson, page xxiii–xv, Da Capo Press, 1998 Edition
Kael battled the editors of the New Yorker as much as her own critics. She fought with Shawn to review the 1972 pornographic film Deep Throat, eventually relenting.Davis (2002). p. 32. According to Kael, after reading her unfavorable review of Terrence Malick's 1973 film 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. Other than sporadic confrontations with Shawn, Kael said she did most of her work at home, writing.Davis (2002). p. 40.