“I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde film artist. My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.” – Pauline Kael, , broadcast on KPFA (January 1963).

Born in Petaluma, California Pauline Kael was the daughter of a poultry farmer. The family moved south to San Francisco and in In 1936 she enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley, where she majored in philosophy. Despite expectations that she would proceed to law school or teaching, she went to New York with a friend, the poet Robert Horan, for about three years.

When she returned to the Bay Area, she led a bohemian life, tried her hand at writing plays and helped make experimental films. Married and divorced three times, she supported herself and her daughter, Gina James, by writing advertising copy, clerking in a bookstore and working as a cook, a seamstress and a textbook writer. The turning point in her life came, as in a Hollywood script, when she was discovered in a coffee shop in the Bay Area in 1953. She was arguing about a movie with a friend when the editor of City Lights magazine asked them each to review Chaplin’s Limelight. The friend turned in nothing. Pauline Kael’s review called the film Slimelight and a career was born.

Pauline Kael was published in Sight and Sound and Partisan Review and she had a weekly spot on a local Berkeley radio station which led to an offer to manage an art theatre, which she turned into a two-screen house, the Berkeley Cinema Guild Theaters. If she liked a film she would rescreen it repeatedly “until it also became an audience favourite.”

“I made the displays, wrote the program and cleaned the chewing gum off the seats, It was exciting turning up things and drawing an audience to see them,”

The growing reputation of her witty and uncompromising reviews resulted in offers from Universities in San Francisco and Los Angeles for her to lecture on film. When she was 46 her essays in Partisan Review led to an offer to publish her first book, ”I Lost It at the Movies,” a collection of her articles and broadcasts, which became a best seller. Assignments from magazines began to flow in, and in 1965, Pauline Kael and her daughter moved to New York. She began working for McCall.s where, contrary to the almost universal praise for the phenomenally popular The Sound of Music (Radiance that floods the screen…and warms the heart!), she wrote:

“Whom could this operetta offend? Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated in this way and are aware of how cheap and ready-made are the responses we are made to feel. We may become even more aware of the way we have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs. The dauntless, scrubbed-face heroine (Julie Andrews), in training to become a nun, is sent from the convent to serve as governess to the motherless Von Trapp children and turns them into a happy little troupe of singers before marrying their father (Christopher Plummer). She says goodbye to the nuns and leaves them outside at the fence, as she enters the cathedral to be married. Squeezed again, and the moisture comes out of thousands–millions–of eyes and noses. Wasn’t there perhaps one little Von Trapp who didn’t want to sing his head off, or who screamed that he wouldn’t act out little glockenspiel routines for Papa’s party guests, or who got nervous and threw up if he had to get on a stage? The only thing the director, Robert Wise, couldn’t smooth out was the sinister, archly decadent performance by Christopher Plummer–he of the thin, twisted smile; he seems to be in a different movie altogether.” Pauline Kael on The Sound of Music (1965)

It is a popular but erroneous legend that Pauline Kael was fired from McCall’s because of this interview. The magazine’s editor Robert Stein and Pauline Kael herself 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.”

Pauline Kael spent a frustrating year at The New Republic where her copy was being edited against her wishes. Her October 1987 piece on Bonnie and Clyde was rejected. William Shawn of The New Yorker obtained the piece and ran it in the New Yorker issue of October 21, Kael was full of praise for the film which most others had condemned, feeling it too controversial. She wasn’t afraid to criticise where she felt necessary, taking exception, for instance, at Warren Beatty’s acting while commenting that producing the film may have concentrated his mind on its scene-by-scene structure and his place in it.

“His business sense may have improved his timing. The role of Clyde seems to have released something in him. As Clyde, Beatty is good with his eyes and mouth and his hat, but his body is still inexpressive; he doesn’t have a trained actor’s use of his body and, watching him move, one is never for a minute convinced he’s impotent. It is, however, a tribute to his performance that one singles this failure out.” – Pauline Kael on Bonnie and Clyde (1967).

Pauline Kael’s long, robust and wide-ranging review was instrumental in rescuing Bonnie and Clyde from critical and commercial failure. After reading Kael’s article many critics re-evaluated the film and amended their own reviews. Kael was writing when a new generation of filmmakers who were challenging and breaking up the old Hollywood ways; people such as Martin Scorsese, Bob Rafelson, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, William Friedkin, Robert Altman, Brian De Palma and Sam Peckinpah. Forty-eight-year-old Pauline Kael was in tune with the zeitgeist.

After a few further months at the New Republic Pauline Kael was offered a staff position at the New Yorker by William Shawn who was willing to let her write whatever she wanted and at length, Pauline Kael began to review movies for the magazine. Until 1979, she reviewed weekly from September through March, and Penelope Gilliatt reviewed for the other half of the year. Kael then became the sole critic in 1980 after a year’s leave of absence working in the film industry. She had left for Hollywood where briefly worked as a production executive for Warren Beatty. After that job ended over what were described as artistic differences, Paramount Pictures put her under contract as a consultant and scout for several months before she returned to The New Yorker to resume her film reviewing.

Pauline Kael began writing every two weeks, commuting to New York from a Victorian home on four and a half acres in Massachusetts that she bought for $37,000 in 1970. In New York, she stayed in a hotel for four days and saw two movies nightly. Back home at night, she wrote. Her daughter, an artist, lived nearby with her family. Kael reputedly saw films once only, sometimes writing as she watched, yet she seemed to remember everything, from lighting and costumes to writing, sound, direction and performances. She stayed at The New Yorker until her retirement in 1991 at the age of seventy-one when she continued to write, adding three more books of criticism and film history to add to the ten already written since the 1965 publication of I Lost It at the Movies.

To single out individual quotes from Pauline Kael is a thankless task as there are so many pieces of hers that are worth quoting. It’s not sufficient to say that they would fill abook, they have, fourteen of them. Here are just four, chosen by Guardian commentators on June 13, 2019:

“Jane Fonda’s motor runs a little fast. As an actress, she has a special kind of smartness that takes the form of speed; she’s always a little ahead of everybody, and this quicker beat – this quicker responsiveness – makes her more exciting to watch. She has somehow got to a plane of acting at which even the closest closeup never reveals a false thought and, seen on the movie streets a block away, she’s Bree, not Jane Fonda, walking toward us.” – Pauline Kael on Klute (1971)

“Repo Man is set in a scuzzy sci-fi nowhere: it was shot in the Los Angeles you see when you’re coming in from the airport – the squarish, pastel-coloured buildings with industrial fences around them, although they don’t look as if there could be much inside that needed to be protected. The action in the film takes place on the freeways and off-ramps, and the lots in back of these anonymous storefronts and warehouses that could be anything and turn into something else overnight. It’s a world inhabited by dazed sociopaths – soreheads, deadbeats and rusted-out punkers. The young English writer-director Alex Cox keeps them all speeding around – always on the periphery. There’s nothing at the centre.” – Pauline Kael on Repo Man (1984

“Frank Capra’s most relentless lump-in-the-throat movie … In its own slurpy, bittersweet way, the picture is well done. But it is fairly humourless and, what with all the hero’s virtuous suffering, didn’t catch on with the public. Capra takes a serious tone here, though there’s no basis for the seriousness; this is doggerel trying to pass as art.” – Pauline Kael on It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

“Robert Altman is almost frighteningly nonrepetitive. He goes out in a new direction each time, and he scores an astonishing 50% – one on, one off. M*A*S*H was followed by Brewster McCloud, and McCabe and Mrs Miller has now been followed by Images. I can hardly wait for his next movie.” – Pauline Kael on Images (1972)

“I loved writing about things when I was excited about them. It’s not fun writing about bad movies. I used to think it was bad for my skin. It’s painful writing about the bad things in an art form, particularly when young kids are going to be enthusiastic about those things because they haven’t seen anything better, or anything different.” – Quoted in Francis Davis, Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael (published 2003)

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