Once upon a time Pauline Kael was famous. She did TV and radio, but her métier was print. At the peak of her long career Kael's audience was large and loyal and even those who loathed her sensationalism and arrogance consumed her work with a kind of kinky glee.
What made punters and players take notice were her words; her prose was supersonic, swelled with enthusiasm and soaked in sexual innuendo. She argued that the key to understanding art was about understanding the way art stirred one's feelings. Those readers here, who lived through Kael's age – 1964 and 1991 – and devoured her work, will know this much.
For those many who are too young, weren't looking, or don't care, the salient point is this: Kael was not a public intellectual with a mission in the official culture of education, politics, or civic advocacy... Kael was a film critic.
Of course, the movies have changed, and critics along with them, and today Kael is no longer famous; almost all of her many books of collected criticism have long been out of print. However, these days, if anything, serious criticism – of the long form, highly specialised kind – is growing, thanks to the web. But as Roger Ebert opined recently, “the Age of the Film Critic” at least in the popular press is gone; as media operators rationalise, film columns are being axed from weeklies, monthlies and dailies across the US and editors are desperately urging whoever is left to write in a mode intended to reflect: “the taste of the readers”. (Whatever that means!)
Kael, who died in 2001 aged 82, gained notoriety over this very issue right at the beginning of her pubic life. When in 1966 she panned The Sound of Music (she called it “the sound of money”) in McCall's, a US women's mass-audience mag, she was fired and Newsweek reported the fall-out. It was a game changer. Soon after, in 1967, she was hired by another mass-circulation mag, The New Yorker, which had no reputation for film criticism, but a name for elitism, the kind of thing Manhattan literati became famous for. Kael's first piece for that mag was a 7,000 word defence of a movie that had been clobbered months before by a huge number of critics: Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967). It set Kael's persona for The New Yorker: she was the enemy of film snobs and defender of the overlooked, the misunderstood, and the “trashy”.
Kellow, in a gentle, sober, though never witless, tone recounts Kael's life and career – her roots as a westerner, the daughter of Jewish émigrés (chicken farmers in California), her bohemian youth and early life in menial work, unhappy love affairs, her unmarried single motherhood, and lengthy apprenticeship in unpaid writing and broadcasting until her arrival aged 48 at The New Yorker – and it makes for a compelling read, as both a cultural time capsule and as a portrait of a writer who emerges as both distinct and important… and troubled. Kael, it seems, indeed did have a dark side and Kellow, to his credit, does not flinch from its emptiness, and its sadness. Based on articles and letters, and interviews with friends, family, and colleagues, Kellow's book is detailed and admiring of Kael's gifts and talent; but it's no fan letter.
Kellow records that Kael had a cavalier attitude to ethical standards. She palled around with directors and writers she liked – James Toback, Robert Altman, Woody Allen, Philip Kaufman – only for the relationships to end hellishly if Kael found their work wanting, as she often did. (At Warren Beatty's urgings she even took up a disastrous post at Paramount as “consultant”.)
In her writing, Kael was given to coining fierce often funny epigrams – but there was always a deep suspicion amongst both her fans and enemies that the thinking was shallow, the arguments meretricious: “Trash has given us an appetite for art,” she once wrote in a famous essay. Schrader, a splendid scholar in his own right, now believes she was wrong (and Kael admitted late in life that she never anticipated that there would so much “Hollywood trash”.)
Indeed, Kael had, like most critics, blind spots: docs and the avant-garde bored her, and her enthusiasm for foreign cinema was mercurial. She was not particularly sensitive to the delicate challenge of trying to create a portrait of the film in purely cinematic terms. She was for many, a “great social psychologist”, as one friend remarks here, which made her, as Schickel says, a great critic for people who did not much like movies.
Today, Kael, it strikes me, seems an unfashionable figure. What would she make of the bloggersphere and all the fan boys and girls and their cheerful disdain for many of the standards she held dear? Like the elegant construction of a sentence and the passionate exaltation of what a movie meant in ways deeper than celebrity (or notoriety), for that matter?
That's finally what makes Kellow's book essential and Kael's work meaningful: she never took words or movies for granted. They mattered to her. It was passion. Like it or not, only the best writers dig in deep that way. Kael always did.
Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark by Brian Kellow is published by Viking and is available now.
Pauline On:
Critics and Criticism…
“I don't trust critics who say they care only for the highest and the best…it's an inhuman position, and I don't believe them. I think it's simply their method of exalting themselves.”
- 1971
Pauline Loves…
Bonnie and Clyde
“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 – not an art we learned over the years to appreciate, but simply and immediately ours.” - 1967
M*A*S*H
“…This movie heals a breach in American movies; it's hip but not hopeless.” - 1970
McCabe and Mrs Miller
“Will a large enough American public accept movies that are delicate and understated and searching – movies that don't resolve all the feelings they touch…” - 1971
Last Tango in Paris
Kael thought it an artistic landmark as shattering as Stravinsky's 'The Rite of Spring': “…it has the same kind of hypnotic excitement… the same primitive force, the same thrusting, jabbing eroticism. The movie breakthrough has finally come.” - 1972
Mean Streets
“…a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking… it has a high-charged emotional range that is dizzyingly sensual.” - 1973
Pauline Hates…
The Sound of Music and The Singing Nun
“…the shoddy falseness of The Singing Nun and the luxuriant falseness of The Sound of Music are part of the sentimental American tone that makes honest work impossible.” - 1966
“I can't accept that Kubrick is merely reflecting this post-assassination, post-Manson mood. I think he digs it… Is there anything sadder – and ultimately more repellant – than a clean-minded pornographer?” - 1971
Dirty Harry
“A right-wing fantasy.” - 1971
Star Wars
“The loudness, the smash-and-grab editing, and the relentless pacing drive every idea out of your head, and even if you've been entertained, you may feel cheated of some dimension — a sense of wonder, perhaps. It's an epic without a dream.” - 1977
Ordinary People, Academy Award Best Picture for 1980
“It's earnest, it means to improve people and it lasts a lifetime.” - 1980
Top Gun
“Top Gun is a recruiting poster that isn't concerned with recruiting but with being a poster.” - 1986
Rain Man
“Wet kitsch…Tom Cruise knowing that a camera is on him produces nothing but fraudulence.” - 1988
Dances with Wolves
“Kevin Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head. The Indians should have called him 'Plays with Camera." - 1990
On retirement in February 1991
She told the New York Times that no one ought to feel sorry for her after all since she would never have to review another Oliver Stone film.
“Can't educated liberals see that a movie like [that] sucks up to them at every plot turn?”
- In interview
