The Pearls of Pauline
Pauline Kael, who died twenty years ago today, was America’s greatest film critic.
Twenty years and a few thousand movies ago, Pauline Kael died and took a world with her.
The acerbic essayist spent a quarter-century as a film critic for the New Yorker and in part thanks to that perch, though mostly thanks to her electric prose and contagious love of movies, she became the most important figure writing about cinema at a time when cinema was still important. Like Cyd Charisse in The Band Wagon, she came at you in sections, a barrage of jazz-era slang and parenthetical put-downs, assaultive certainty and rhapsodic delight.
There was no fence-sitting with Kael and no niceties observed. Her critical and personal style is captured by an exchange during the Q&A section of a lecture at Oregon State University in 1976. A man in the audience asked if she stood by her approving review, five years earlier, of Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart, a French dramedy about a teenage boy’s sexual self-discovery. Eventually, the 57-year-old glared at her academic interrogator and enquired: ‘Do you remember your first fuck?’ Flustered, he managed a ‘Yes’. ‘Well, honey,’ she came back, ‘just wait thirty years’.
Kael died on September 3, 2001 and because of events eight days later did not receive the send-off her status as an American cultural lodestar merited. Since then, there has been a highly readable 2011 biography, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark, by the late Brian Kellow (the source of the Oregon anecdote and plenty more) and a 2018 documentary, What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, with Sarah Jessica Parker voicing Kael’s lines.
Born in 1919 in a Jewish chicken-farming community in Petaluma, California, Kael’s family would later head south for San Fransisco after her father’s stock market dabbling cost them their farm. It was in the Golden Gate City, and later as an undergraduate at Berkeley, that she developed her sensual, almost primal, attachment to movies. Lacking means or connections, Kael struggled to find steady employment as a film critic and spent her time firing off spec pieces and raising her daughter Gina, the product of a brief union with bisexual Beat poet James Broughton.
Eventually, she secured a Guggenheim grant and used it to assemble a collection of reviews and essays, published in 1965 as I Lost It at the Movies. It was the toast of every book review section and shifted a remarkable 150,000 copies. Although the success of I Lost It at the Movies gave her some financial breathing space and name recognition, she still lacked a staff job and contributed to a succession of magazines that wanted to publish a talked-about writer but discovered they didn’t like what she was writing.
Then, in 1967, along came Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, a biopic of the legendary Depression-era hoods, with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in the title roles. Warner Brothers didn’t understand the movie and established critics rebuked Penn for making a brutal shoot-‘em-up, but Kael was certain the film would speak to the emerging counter-culture generation that was rebelling against authority, burning their draft cards and searching for meaning in a violent, chaotic America they no longer understood. Kael pounded out a mammoth essay explaining why the movie marked a hinge moment in American cinema and the broader culture.
‘Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American American movie since The Manchurian Candidate,’ she announced in the piece, eventually published in the New Yorker. ‘The audience is alive to it.’ The article helped Bonnie and Clyde become a hit and in doing so cleared the way for a wave of independent movies that washed in afterwards. It also proved to be Kael’s big break and, on the eve of her fiftieth birthday, she became a regular film critic for the New Yorker.
She now had a platform — and, by editorial convention, unlimited column inches — to champion up-and-coming movie artists (Robert Altman, Sam Peckinpah, Brian De Palma), assail those she considered hacks (Clint Eastwood, Don Siegel) and wrestle with directors and actors who left her cold (Alfred Hitchcock, Meryl Streep). Kael wrote during perhaps the greatest era for film criticism: the New Hollywood movement of the late Sixties and Seventies, a fleeting moment in which creatively gifted directors, producers and writers wrestled control of American cinema from the studios and drew in an engaged, excited youth audience for smart and stylish pictures about personal journeys, alienation and the cultural wildfires roaring across the United States and the world.
It was a short spurt of artistry in which John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, a tale of two hustlers, became the first (and only) X-rated production to win the Oscar for Best Picture; in which stoner biker movie Easy Rider made millions and counterculture icons of Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda; in which outsiders with movie cameras replaced matinee idols as the pin-ups of cinema buffs.
Writing in a time before film criticism gave way to consumer reviews and entertainment copy, Kael was as acute an observer of American social and cultural life as Susan Sontag or Norman Mailer. Opening her essay ‘Are Movies Going to Pieces’, Kael, still living in San Fransisco, reflected on the unease she felt travelling to Los Angeles:
It’s the city of the future, and I am more a stranger there than in a foreign country. In a foreign country people don’t expect you to be just like them, but in Los Angeles, which is infiltrating the world, they don’t consider that you might be different because they don’t recognise any values except their own. And soon there may not be any others.
This was 1965 and she was teasing out a creeping cultural annexation that, in 2021, holds huge swathes of territory across the West.
A staunch liberal — after the 1972 presidential election, in which the Republican ticket won a 49-state landslide, she remarked: ‘I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon’ — Kael scorned soapbox movies that purported to depict ‘real’ working-class life but merely reflected filmmakers’ radical prejudices and offered an image of politicised proletarians unrecognisable to blue-collar Americans. These films were for ‘those liberals and progressives whose political thinking has never gone beyond the Thirties. Depression social consciousness is their exposed nerve: touch it and it becomes the only reality, more vivid than the actual conditions they live in’. The New Statesman averred that, ‘in writing about the cinema, she covers life itself’.
Her pen could cut like a katana. Of William Peter Blatty, writer of The Exorcist, she pronounced: ‘When you hear him on TV talking about communicating with his dead mother, your heart doesn’t bleed for him, your stomach turns for him.’ Reviewing Hardcore, directed by her friend Paul Schrader, she quipped: ‘For Schrader to call himself a whore would be vanity: he doesn’t know how to turn a trick.’ Manhattan, in which a 42-year-old Woody Allen finds a 17-year-old Mariel Hemingway more relatable and perceptive than his contemporaries, drew this line: ‘What man in his forties but Woody Allen could pass off a predilection for teenagers as a quest for true values?’ Her caustic wit got her into trouble when, surrounded in her personal life by gay men, she thought nothing of dismissing 1968’s No Way to Treat a Lady, in which Rod Steiger played a mama’s boy serial killer, as ‘this fag Phantom of the Opera’. The barb was dug up years later and used against her by her enemies, of which there were many.
Those enemies were gleeful when a 1979 transfer to Hollywood to become a script consultant proved unsuccessful and short-lived. Wounded by her failure in LA, Kael returned to the New Yorker — and an ambush from one of her colleagues. Renata Adler, who had reviewed movies in Kael’s absence, caused an arts and media-world scandal by describing Kael’s criticism as ‘jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless’ in a 1980 essay for the New York Review of Books. Kael survived the attempt to knock her off her pedestal and it would later be remarked, perhaps cruelly, that her ‘piece by piece, line by line’ comment about Kael was the only sentence Adler ever wrote that anyone could remember. Kael continued to write about movies for the New Yorker until her retirement in 1991.
By rights, she didn’t belong at what was still the tony calendar of Upper East Side cultural life. She regarded herself as a rough-hewn westerner and went out of her way to scandalise easterners with sexually aggressive language in person and in print. This flummoxed and frustrated her gentlemanly editor William Shawn in equal measure. When she panned Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Shawn called her into his office and remarked: ‘I guess you didn’t know that Terry is like a son to me.’ ‘Tough shit, Bill,’ she shot back. While Shawn preferred to persuade writers to conform with his starched-collar style and drawing-room decorum, Kael would try to rile him by dropping outrageous language into copy that she knew could never be published in America’s foremost cultural weekly. The famously laidback Shawn was aghast when, in her column on 1978’s Goin’ South, she described Jack Nicholson as ‘a commercial for cunnilingus’. There was no persuasion this time: Shawn ordered the sub-editors to delete the offending imagery.
Not only her language but her judgement was called into question at times. Her decision to review Robert Altman’s Nashville favourably based on a rough cut of the picture was deemed unethical by some, as was the Jean Brodie-esque sway she was said to exert over a coterie of young acolytes dubbed the Paulettes. As time went on, and the movies generally got worse, she praised good films in ever more hyperbolic terms. A notorious example was her write-up of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, in which she said the date of its screening at the New York Film Festival ‘should become a landmark in movie history comparable to May 29, 1913 — the night Le Sacre du Printemps was first performed — in music history’.
The most reviled piece she ever wrote was not, however, an ill-considered rave but a cold, unsentimental pan of Claude Lanzmann‘s Shoah, a nine-hour documentary with testimony from the survivors and perpetrators of the Holocaust. Shoah was acclaimed for its scale, precision, factual drama, unparalleled research, and raw, haunting power. Kael branded it ‘logy and exhausting’, ‘a form of self-punishment’ and sniffed that Lanzmann ‘could probably find antisemitism anywhere’. The essay was horrific and there was a horrific logic to it: all her life, Kael had poured scorn on films that were supposedly beyond criticism because of the sensitivity of their subject matter. Finding Shoah a dud, and being someone who had not striven to retain much if any of the Jewish identity her parents brought over from Poland, she saw no reason not to tear it to shreds in print.
The Eighties were not a rewarding time for Kael. The studios were back in charge and Jaws and Star Wars, as well as marking a reversion to childlike nostalgia, had shown how mass-marketing campaigns could render films critic-proof. It had become less of a gamble to stump up $40m for a family-friendly science fiction or action picture than it was to invest $4m in the kind of small, independent productions that had found an audience in the Seventies. As the quality of the movies she reviewed went into decline, so did Kael’s health and it was becoming harder to explain away the tremors that her doctor had already told her was Parkinson’s disease. Her last ever review, of the Steve Martin comedy LA Story, was published in the February 11, 1991 issue of the New Yorker. Her final words were reserved for a still relatively unknown actress who would later play her voice on film, Sarah Jessica Parker. ‘She’s the spirit of LA,’ Kael concluded. ‘She keeps saying yes.’
It’s difficult to convey just how influential, how loved and hated and imitated, Kael was because, from today’s vantage point, it’s hard to imagine a film reviewer having much purchase beyond the entertainment pages of a newspaper or the back-of-the-book of a magazine. When Kael’s retirement was announced, it made the New York Times. Her 80th birthday was marked with a poem by the humorist Roy Blount Jr in which Kael appeared during Creation and, much to His chagrin, began critiquing the Almighty’s debut production. (‘“And who really cares whom I make first male?/ A first-mate type. Think Alan Hale.”/ “Oh God,” said Pauline, “a feminist flick/ With the Holy Ghost as the only dick.”’) She mattered because the movies mattered.
The movies still matter to some but they no longer enjoy the same pop-culture dominance or inspire the mass devotion they did in 1969, when Kael termed them ‘our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons’. People are more displaced than ever now, albeit in a different sense than Kael meant back then, but the culture is so much more fractured. Video games, particularly streamed multi-player affairs, probably come closest to approximating the visual sweep, democratic creativity and shared experience of Kael-era cinema. And just as movies have lost their place on the podium, criticism — not just of movies but of the arts in general — has been driven to the sidelines.
Film critics are now the go-to cost-saving measure when a newspaper is looking to ‘rationalise’ staff numbers; that is assuming the newspaper still employs a critic, which some no longer do. Kael believed the critic was all that stood between the movie-goer and the marketing departments, a battle that was lost long ago. Whether in the mainstream media or among YouTubers and bloggers, so much of what passes for criticism today should properly be understood as freelance marketing, wide-eyed fandom and pithy capsules that could as readily be reviewing the new Hotpoint as the latest Haneke.
It would be much too big a claim to say that, without Kael, there would have been no Godfather, no Taxi Driver, no M*A*S*H and no Deer Hunter but we can say that the environment in which these movies were made and in which the people who made them flourished would have been less tended, more arid, less sustainable and more susceptible to swift reclamation by the studio machine. Movies, for Pauline Kael, were the greatest come-on of all and even though the tryst more often proved lousy than blissful, the flirtation was always worth it. Cinema doesn’t woo us as it once did and we aren’t as interested in making the first move. We prefer relentless irony and think it makes us clever, political prescription and think it makes us moral, formulaic fandom and think it makes us faithful. We no longer lose it at the movies, or anywhere else for that matter. In our tastes and our responses, we are flaccid, sexless — cultural virgins.
If this blog was to alert a new audience to the pen of a acerbic female critic they may well have missed, then it has been an unqualified success.
I'd never heard of Pauline Kael, but I'll search out some of her work now. Reminded me of Clive James, who I adored. Might be way off the mark on that, but I'm looking forward to discovering more. This was an outstanding critique of an exceptional writer, thank you.