Pauline Kael: Film Criticism as Literature
Pauline Kael was a movie critic who began writing for the New Yorker in 1967. With a deep knowledge of film history, a lively mind and a daring voice, for 24 years Kael wrote passionate, crotchety film reviews. Many people read one of her reviews at breakfast, and spit out their coffee in laughter or disgust. Kael found that amusing; she enjoyed being a polarizing figure. She didn’t bother to give plot summaries, nor to help readers with values different from hers to decide if they’d like the movie. When you read a Pauline Kael review, with all of her mind and heart she told you how seeing the movie made HER feel. We were always a guest in her world.
Kael spent time in Manhattan, but lived mostly in a rambling, turreted house in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires. She loved to read Tolstoy, to watch boxing matches, to listen to baroque music, to entertain friends — but, most of all, she loved movies.
She was 4’9” tall, born in 1919 on a chicken farm in Petaluma, California, the daughter of Polish-Jewish immigrants. She was the youngest of five children and her older brothers sometimes threw her around like a ball. She loved it, and loved being chased by barn animals. When Pauline was eight years old, the chicken farm failed and the Kaels moved 40 miles south to San Francisco. Pauline was smart and verbal, quick and funny, but apt to make one biting comment too many. Once in synagogue she picked up her violin and played “Onward Christian Soldiers” just to savor the reaction. She was often told, in that chauvinist time, ‘Keep your voice down.’
If her parents and their friends loved silent movies, Pauline did not. Those old silent pictures, with their close-ups, their love of faces, seemed to her mired in false shows of “morality” and “purity.” Pauline liked “talkies,” where characters spoke naturally. As a teenager, Kael fell in love with the kind of movie Hollywood made so well in those days — smart, irreverent, screwball comedies. “Duck Soup” by the Marx Brothers and the droll detective picture “The Thin Man,” and “Twentieth Century” where John Barrymore rides the Twentieth Century Limited train, over his head in love; and “It Happened One Night.” These movies weren’t sentimental or moralistic. They merrily poked fun at people and institutions that richly deserved it.
They also made journalism look like fun. In “It Happened One Night” the pampered society girl played by Claudette Colbert falls in love with Clark Gable, a newspaper reporter. “The Front Page,” another ‘30’s movie Kael loved, was about a pack of reporters competing for a big story. Kael took cues on how to act from the female stars of the 1930’s — the smarts of Katharine Hepburn; the pride of Bette Davis; the grit and determination of Barbara Stanwyck.
In 1936, Kael enrolled at Cal Berkeley. She dropped out six credits short of graduating, and joined the bohemian art scene in San Francisco. She played jazz violin in an all-female jazz band. She acted in experimental films, wrote plays, was married, divorced, and took lovers, including the filmmaker James Broughton, with whom she conceived her daughter, Gina — whom Pauline named for a woman in Stendhal’s novel, “The Charterhouse of Parma.”
Pauline found Berkeley intellectuals stuffy. They’d trained her in “term-paper pomposity.” When someone proudly told Pauline they were an English professor, she’d shrug. If they said they were a Film Studies professor, that was worse. Kael felt she’d had to throw off her university training in order to find her own voice. Universities were for the elite, and art should be for the people. She was proud that movies had grown out of coarse popular entertainment: the peep show, the music hall, the comic strip.
She hated “little films” made by directors with good intentions. Good intentions were never enough for Pauline Kael. Good intentions and noble yearnings should be banished when artists made art. She loved movies that found a mass audience by treating in poetic ways the big human themes: love and sex and war and death and food and family. Kael praised the writings of James Joyce for having “a love of the supreme juices of everyday life.” That’s what she expected from a film.
Kael was annoyed in the 1940’s that no one made great screwball comedies anymore. Hollywood seemed timid and self-righteous, falling back into the artistic dead end of “purity” and “morality.” “Citizen Kane” in 1941 felt to her like the last movie of the 1930’s, with its youthful high spirits, its newspaper backdrop. Kael’s favorite movies of the 1940’s were Italian Neo-Realist films like “The Bicycle Thief,” “Rome: Open City,” and “Shoeshine.” These films were shot on location, in war-time and post war-time Italy, about poverty and the desperation it brings.
She saw “Shoeshine” in 1947 right after an awful quarrel with a boyfriend. She left the theater, tears streaming from her eyes. When she heard a college girl whine to her boyfriend ‘I don’t see what was so special about that movie,’ Pauline walked up the street, crying blindly, unsure if her tears were for the tragedy on the screen, for her own love life or out of anger that anyone could fail to feel the radiance of “Shoeshine.” It was not enough for Pauline to love a great film; everyone else had to love it, too.
Her birth as a movie critic was right out of a Hollywood movie. She was sitting in a coffee shop with a friend, trashing a film with her usual sass and gusto. Peter Martin, editor of City Lights magazine, happened to be in the coffee shop, approached her table and said he needed a review of the Charlie Chaplin film “Limelight.” Was she interested? She was. It was a chance to be a journalist, like Clark Gable in “It Happened One Night.”
Writing for City Lights led to freelance reviewing for Film Quarterly; Sight and Sound; Partisan Review; The Atlantic; Holiday; Vogue; and Life. Kael was stringent in her honesty and was never swayed by the way other critics lined up. From 1958–1962, with one of her husbands, Kael ran the Berkeley Cinema Guild and Studio, an art movie house. Running a theater was fun; it drew fellow movie-lovers, and gave her a chance to show and champion films she loved, and turn her back on those she hated.
One movie Pauline Kael loved was “Bonnie and Clyde.” She raved about it for 7,000 words in her second movie review for the New Yorker: “Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American movie since The Manchurian Candidate… Our experience as we watch it has some connection with the way we reacted to movies in childhood: with how we came to love them and to feel they were ours…” Kael also gushed about the dubious film “Last Tango in Paris.” (“Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form.”)
But there were a whole lot of movies Pauline Kael didn’t like. In 1965, when McCalls finally gave her the boot, people said it was because of Kael’s scathing review of “The Sound of Music” — which she called “The Sound of Money.” Kael’s editor at McCall’s said no, he’d actually liked her “Sound of Music” review; it was all those other major films she’d panned: “Lawrence of Arabia,” the desert epic smash of 1962; “The Pawnbroker,” a brilliantly unsettling Holocaust remembrance drama of 1964, with a great jazz score; “A Hard Day’s Night,” the cheeky Beatles musical film of 1964; “Dr. Zhivago,” the Russian epic of 1965. If Pauline Kael had liked any of those films, and had told McCall’s readers why, Robert Stein might have kept her on. But Kael seemed to Stein unable to like anything that was popular.
Kael didn’t like Charlie Chaplin films. She didn’t like the lovable British film about a ballet company, “The Red Shoes.” She didn’t trust Fellini, and mocked “La Dolce Vita.” She didn’t much like Ingmar Bergman’s films, especially his masterpieces “The Seventh Seal” and “Wild Strawberries.” Antonioni’s films she thought even worse — obscurity dressed up as profundity, giving the pseudo-sophisticated a chance to say “I love foreign films.” Kael hated Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”; she didn’t want her heartstrings pulled. She hated “High Noon” for what she saw as its faked history and smarmy morality.
Kael didn’t even like the Roman Polanski film Chinatown, for God’s sake, despite Robert Towne’s brilliant script, and the gorgeous look of the film. “The Graduate,” which is charming, sweet and tart, she found “manipulative.” After seeing Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange, she dismissed Kubrick as a “clean-minded pornographer.” She didn’t like the masterful black comedy about nuclear annihilation, “Dr. Strangelove” nor the science fiction classic “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Alfred Hitchcock, with his artistry and mass appeal, would have seemed a director for Pauline Kael to love but she was put off by the Bernard Herrmann musical scores in some of Hitchcock’s greatest works, and she called Hitchcock films meticulous and hollow.
Kael hated “Shoah,” the nine-hour French Holocaust documentary by Claude Lanzmann released in 1985 to wide acclaim. The critics Siskel and Ebert called it a masterpiece. Pauline Kael said it was bad filmmaking based on bad history. She said of Lanzmann, “If you set him loose, he could probably find anti-Semitism anywhere.”
People asked her: ‘Pauline, what movies do you like?” “I like ‘Thief of Baghdad,’ she’d reply. If they looked blank, she’d tell them all about this British fantasy film made in 1940, still delighted by some of its little details, and by her ability to recall them.
Directors braced themselves for a pan by Pauline Kael in the New Yorker. A few struck back. George Lucas named a villain in one of his movies “General Kael.” Kael panned George Roy Hill’s movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” saying its actors delivered coy lines in a murmur “in the dead sound of the studio.” George Roy Hill, who’d gone to great trouble and expense to shoot the film on location — not in a studio — wrote Kael a letter which began: “Listen, you miserable bitch…” Kael loved that letter, and read it aloud at parties.
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The comedian Jerry Lewis said: “Pauline Kael. She’s never said a good thing about me yet. That dirty old broad. But she’s probably the most qualified critic in the world… She knows what she’s talking about.”
The New Yorker tended to review films with a bemused detachment. Pauline Kael had always thought the New Yorker film reviews were written by and for people who looked down on the cinema. She felt that both movies and television were vastly more important in American culture than the New Yorker realized, and if the influence was sub-conscious, that just made it all the more powerful. On the other hand, Pauline Kael admired the New Yorker’s editorial integrity, its refusal to be corrupted by a lust for ad revenue.
One day in 1967 Kael was sick in bed, 48 years old and deeply discouraged about her future as a film reviewer. She’d been reviewing films for the New Republic, whose editors had a nasty habit of changing what she’d written without her permission. But on this sad day, suddenly the New Yorker editor William Shawn was on the telephone, telling her he admired a piece she’d written on the French director Jean-Luc Godard. Would she like to write for the New Yorker? She would. Kael’s New Yorker reviews were marvelously daring and alive: guessing a filmmaker’s intention, questioning casting decisions, predicting the reaction of the public.
William Shawn and Kael made an odd pair; Shawn was a genteel, old-fashioned gentleman; Kael was brash and tough-minded. When she panned a Terence Malick film, Shawn told her: ‘I guess you didn’t know that Terry is like a son to me.’ Kael replied: “Tough shit, Bill.” Kael was not just hard on minor actresses like Dyan Cannon, whom she said looked “a bit like Lauren Bacall and a bit like Jeanne Moreau, but the wrong bits.” Kael was also hard on Meryl Streep (“She makes a career out of seeming to overcome being miscast.”)
Kael thought the audience should talk back to a bad movie. She found costume dramas prissy and fake. When she saw Richard Harris playing Oliver Cromwell in barrel bloomers, stamping his foot in rage, Pauline called out gaily from the back of the theater: “Oh, drat!” Once before the feature attraction at the San Francisco Film Festival, a “short” was playing, and as the short went on and on, Pauline called out: “I’ve had love affairs shorter than this!”
Her confidence in her own views was unshakeable. She’d ask people “What’s your favorite movie?” When they told her, she might say: “See it again. It won’t be.” Kael didn’t see a film she was reviewing more than once. She thought writing was fresher that way — see the film, and splash out your thoughts. Don’t overthink. She was surprised when people she’d blasted in a review assumed she didn’t like them personally.
She was a passionate woman who wanted films to be like lovers, coming to her in the dark. She titled one of her film review collections “I Lost It at the Movies” and another one “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.” But Pauline never found a great husband. She wrote in a film review: “Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider. I have premonitions of the beginning of the end when a man who seems charming, or at least remotely possible, starts talking about movies. When he says ‘I saw a great picture a couple of years ago — I wonder what you thought of it?’ I start looking for the nearest exit. His ‘great picture’ generally turns out to be a socially conscious problem picture… It’s experiences like this that drive women into the arms of truck drivers.”
Kael thought being a film critic was a splendid occupation, and film critics a sort of tribe. She loved being a queen of the tribe, and cultivating younger, less gifted critics brought out her maternal side. She often called up young, male journalists to tell them she’d enjoyed a piece of theirs. ‘Keep writing with intensity,’ she’d say. ‘Don’t water your stuff down.’
Younger writers who attended film screenings with Kael were known in her circle as “the Paulettes.” Some of the Paulettes wrote very well, including David Denby, Michael Sragow, Joe Morgenstern, James Wolcott, and Terrence Rafferty. David Thomson and Owen Gleiberman were semi- Paulettes. But as Glieberman noted, “To be true to what Pauline taught us, you had to break with her.” She’d often call a Paulette on the phone and read to them an upcoming review of hers. What did they think? It was flattering that Pauline Kael of the New Yorker wanted their opinion.
But she never sugarcoated her views of the writing of the Paulettes. She could be warm and thoughtful in all the little ways friends are — but if she thought a piece of theirs was lousy, she said so. One young writer showed her a play he was writing, and asked if she liked it. Kael read it, then replied: “You don’t like your characters enough.” She wanted her Paulettes to stand up to her if they disagreed. The first time Joe Morgenstern fought with her, he felt badly until Pauline said: “That was fun, honey! Let’s have a cup of coffee.”
If Kael saw talent in a young director, she kept track of them. She raved about the early Martin Scorsese film “Mean Streets.” Here was a film stylized but not artificial, a film that showed the extreme emotions of its characters without resorting to distortion. Kael adored Francis Ford Coppola’s first two “Godfather” movies. They did what she expected films to do: they found poignant, poetic ways to treat love and sex, war and death, food and family. But having explained what made “The Godfather” so rare, so powerfully exceptional, Kael expected Francis Ford Coppola to match it with each new film. When he released clunkers like “Tucker” and “The Cotton Club,” she wrote: “We’ve never had another director whose fall was so prolonged, or one who harangued the press so bitterly, blaming it for his burnout and his miscalculations.”
She’d advise writers, “If you want to write what you really think, you have to find the right magazine.” She was perceptive about how the world corrupts film critics. A magazine publisher wants a cover story on a certain film, and the editor needs a rave review to justify the cover. Kael helped her Paulettes to think about their careers but she had to know what movies they liked, and why. She could disagree amicably about a movie or two — but with the third disagreement, a Paulette was wise either to change his opinion or change the subject. She was like your charming, crotchety old aunt — but a little more dangerous. David Thomson called her “The Godmother.”
Pauline often asked why housewives in movies were portrayed as “mindless.” She’d say it takes great intelligence to raise children, it’s fascinating to watch them grow and it can be more creative than whatever your husband does to pay the rent. Her relationship with her own daughter, Gina, was complex. She’d raised Gina as a single mother, making sacrifices along the way, working as a seamstress, a cook, a clerk in a bookstore. Unhappy with Gina’s teachers, Pauline had taken Gina out of school and home-schooled her.
But Pauline expected a lot from Gina, too. Pauline didn’t have a driver’s license — nor did she type. So Gina was her mother’s typist and sometime chauffeur. This often meant driving long distances from Pauline’s house in Great Barrington. Some people said that Gina had hoped to go to college, and to become a dancer, and that she’d given up these dreams to be her mother’s caretaker. Pauline often seemed domineering with Gina — but Gina didn’t complain in any obvious way, and Pauline was fierce when crossed on the subject. Friends left them to work out their mother-daughter business in private.
As early as 1974, Kael had complained of the “nihilism” of movies and of feeling “wiped out, desolate.” By the mid-1980’s, she didn’t much enjoy reviewing films anymore. Hollywood movies seemed to her less skillfully made — and less culturally relevant. When friends suggested she write her memoirs, she’d reply: “I already have.” The reviews were that personal to her.
Pauline Kael came down with Parkinson’s Disease. As a girl, she’d wanted to be like Katherine Hepburn and now she’d finally been granted a perverse version of her wish — they both had Parkinson’s. Well, she was determined not to tremble the way Katherine Hepburn had, so she got a good massage therapist. When she learned that George Roy Hill also had Parkinson’s Disease, she sought out the man who’d called her “a miserable bitch” and warmly gave him the name of her therapist.
Pauline Kael died in 2001. Baroque music played at her funeral service. Gina said in her eulogy: “My mother had tremendous empathy and compassion — though how to comfort, soothe or console was a mystery that eluded her.”
Kael had changed the art of film criticism. One way was by her insistence that “serious” movies must be entertaining to be any good. Before Kael, people in the industry and in the audience would often forgive “serious” movies for being boring, because these films were, you know, “serious.” Kael convinced a lot of people to stop thinking that way.
Kael also showed that film criticism can be literature, worth reading for style alone. The prestigious Library of America published 800 pages of Kael’s essays and reviews under the name “The Age of Movies.” A remark of hers which stays with me is one she made in passing about the John Huston film “The Man Who Would Be King”: “The ironies go by too fast — we want them to vibrate a little.”
Dozens of Pauline Kael’s friends missed her intensely. One younger writer recalled showing something he’d written to Pauline. She’d said: “Do you love it?” “What do you mean?” he asked. She replied “Do you love writing?” He confessed: “No, it’s misery.” Then she looked at him with great sadness, because she loved writing. Now that Pauline Kael was gone this writer vowed to try to love the writing process a little more.
Kael once described Steven Spielberg as “a boy soprano singing with joy.” Right up to the end, there was something childlike and joyful in Pauline Kael, too, a woman sitting in the dark, out on a date, scribbling furiously in a treasured notebook, getting down her reactions while they were fresh. “Film criticism is exciting,” she once wrote, “just because there is no formula to apply, just because you must use everything you are, and everything you know.”
