Pauline Kael - The Pauline Kael Reader

516 Essays, Reviews, and Interviews

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Many people today live far more fully than they would have if Pauline Kael had never written.

--- Greil Marcus

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.

--- Roger Ebert

Simply, jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.

--- Renata Adler

I regard her body of criticism as foremost an achievement in American letters, to place alongside Edmund Wilson and H. L. Mencken.

--- Phillip Lopate

She is a cunt.

--- John Huston

[This is the most - if not the only - revealing profile of Kael, who was very discreet on the subject of her Bohemian youth. Lopate tracks down her ex-husbands.]

Pauline Kael has just turned seventy. An important birthday: her house in the Berkshires is filled with flowers from well-wishers. "I don't want you to get the wrong idea there are always this many flowers around," she says with her nervous, melodic laugh. The rooms of her handsome, two-turreted stone and shingled house evidence a fine eye for American antiques: stained-glass lamps, wooden writing desks, quilt-covered beds-each item a bargain purchase, she notes with pride. Until recently, Kael-child of the Depression and bohemia-has had to struggle financially. Now, it seems, her life is serene, well ordered, almost pastoral. A copy of The Hobbit lies on her dining room table, a birthday present from her seven-year-old grandchild, Willy, who has had it read aloud to him and now wants to discuss the story with her.

Can this pleasant, obliging grandmother in sneakers, who is fixing my lunch and who reminds me uncannily of my aunts, really be the scourge of film distributors, the storm center of a dozen controversies, the acute and sometimes acidic critic whom Meryl Streep said she would kill if she could?

Kael seems the most unself-doubting (or well-guarded) person I've ever met, so logically consistent is she in her own eyes. The split occurs in others' perceptions of her. Her friends and fanatical fans see her as the most generous person alive, the best film critic America has ever had and the keenest writer of critical prose since Shaw and Orwell. Her detractors regard her as a conniving empire-builder and a reviewer of limited filmic sense whose judgments are often distorted by personal obsessions and vendettas. Rarely does one encounter an in-between position.

As it happens, I occupy a middle ground. Before I ever met Pauline Kael, I thought of her as one of several film critics I liked to read, each of whom balanced the others with strengths and blind spots. Vincent Canby might have a lighter touch with everyday movies, Andrew Sarris a deeper grasp of film tradition, J. Hoberman a more adventurous coverage of offbeat pictures and Manny Farber a stronger insight into film as a visual medium. But no one can nail a picture with Kael's passion.

Among her many virtues, she is a brilliant observer of acting styles, and can capture in apt metaphor the look and bounce of a performer. 'Astaire's grasshopper lightness was his limitation as an actor-confining him to perennial gosh-oh-gee adolescence ..." she will write, or summarize Faye Dunaway's appeal with: "Perfection going slightly to seed is maybe the most alluring face a screen goddess can have." She understands the morality of narrative structure, zeroing in unerringly on those script imbalances brought about through self-approval, hypocrisy or panderings to the Zeitgeist. She has an eye for good editing-less so for the rigors of camera composition. Hence, it comes as no surprise that she is strongest on comedies, weakest on Westerns. A dedicated fan of independent women characters and witty repartee, she was inevitably drawn to thirties screwball comedies. Most American comedies are gender-driven: Kael delights in disentangling the most gnarly problems of relations between the sexes, She can answer the question "What do women want?" But she does not like to watch men interacting with other men on the range. She is snortingly contemptuous of the virile claims of aging male stars like John Wayne and Kirk Douglas, "grinning with their big new choppers, sucking their guts up into their chests, and hauling themselves onto horses." She has a real distaste for the male valedictory mode, which causes her In dismiss much of John Ford's later work, including a beautiful elegiac work like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Her coolness toward the Western goes hand in hand with a lack of feeling for the spatial qualities of film-for mise en scene.

Her insensitivity to formalist rigor and precision is her greatest limitation as a film critic. It causes her to overpraise certain visually muddy directors, like Hal Ashby, and then express disappointment later on when their mediocrity becomes undeniable. She will write intelligently about film technique when it suits her, but the rest of the time she dismisses formalistic concerns as a sterile, academic interest-a boy's game. Her real genius is sociological. She can show how and why a particular film is reaching audiences by analyzing the social currents of the moment. She is devastatingly sharp on trendy, overrated films to which the public responds for fuzzy-headed, narcissistic reasons (Blow-Up, 81/2, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Network, Rain Man). Ironically, she can turn around and enthrone certain other underbaked, overrated films, like Bonnie and Clyde or Last Tango in Paris, because to her they touch a nerve, catch the spirit of the moment.

No one has written better about the appeal of "trash," or the tangential pleasures we get from movies that aren't very good (a sexy actor, a song, an outrageous scene). She tends to forgive silliness in the name of "fun," while being extra-hard on serious-mindedness or artistic pretension. Her position that "Vulgarity is not as destructive to an artist as snobbery" sometimes leads her into a distorting antagonism toward the art film. "The educated person who became interested in cinema as an art form through Bergman or Fellini or Resnais is an alien to me (and my mind goes blank with hostility and indifference when he begins to talk)." I flinched when I read that. Fortunately, Kael's occasional anti-intellectualism is counterbalanced by her immense cultivation. When she discusses dramatic classics like The Trojan Women, Henry V or Long Day's Journey into Night, one realizes she could have been as gifted a literary critic as a movie reviewer. She seems also well versed in painting, music, dance. Would that her imitators had an equal measure of erudition to buttress their indulgence of pop culture.

Kael's first book, I Lost It at the Movies, opens on the heights, in the early sixties, as Kael juggles discoveries of the New Wave (Godard, Truffaut) with praise of the classics (Renoir, Ophuls, De Sica), appreciations of new humanist cinema (Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray) and shrewd dissections of popular American movies of the day (Hud, West Side Story), At the outset, ex-art-house-programmer Kael displayed more of an international, film-historical side. Her feisty, experienced, candid voice seemed fully formed from the start. Indeed, the Hud review, which opens the book, is a classic demonstration of how to do a personal essay in the form of cultural criticism.

"My father, who was adulterous, and a Republican who, like Hud, was opposed to governmental interference, was in no sense and in no one's eyes a social predator. He was generous and kind, and democratic in the western way that Easterners still don't understand: it was not out of guilty condescension that mealtimes were communal affairs with the Mexican and Indian ranch hands joining the family, it was the way Westerners lived." Kael is already a sharply etched character in her criticism: the worldly, anti-puritanical moralist, filial defender of adultery and the body's prerogatives; the native-Californian ranch girl intellectual, razzing the East Coast liberal Establishment.