Pauline Kael

Based on Wikipedia: Pauline Kael

"She has everything that a great critic needs except judgment." That was Woody Allen's assessment of Pauline Kael, and he didn't mean it as an insult. What he meant was that Kael possessed terrific wit, passionate conviction, encyclopedic knowledge of film history, and a writing style so distinctive you could identify it from a single paragraph—but she was gloriously, maddeningly unpredictable in what she chose to love or hate. She might champion a gritty crime film while dismissing a prestige picture that everyone else adored. She might discover genius in a first-time director while savaging an auteur's latest masterpiece.

This unpredictability was the whole point.

The Critic Who Changed How America Watched Movies

For twenty-three years, from 1968 to 1991, Pauline Kael wrote film criticism for The New Yorker magazine. In that time, she became arguably the most influential movie critic in American history. When she died in 2001, Roger Ebert wrote in his obituary that Kael "had a more positive influence on the climate for film in America than any other single person over the last three decades."

What made her so powerful? She had no theory. No rules. No objective standards you could apply to predict what she'd think of a film. "With her it was all personal," Ebert observed. And that personal voice—witty, biting, opinionated, and sharply focused—cut through the genteel distance that most critics maintained from their subjects.

Kael wrote like she was arguing with you in a coffee shop. Which, as it happens, is exactly how her career began.

From Chicken Farms to Berkeley Bohemia

Pauline Kael was born in 1919, the fifth and last child of Jewish immigrants from Poland. Her parents, Isaac and Judith, had moved from New York to run a chicken farm in Petaluma, California—part of a community of Jewish chicken farmers in the region. When Kael was eight, the family lost the farm and relocated to San Francisco.

Her love of movies started early. Her parents took her to see silent films, and those early experiences left permanent impressions. She would later write that D.W. Griffith's Intolerance from 1916 was "the greatest movie ever made," and that Renée Falconetti's performance in The Passion of Joan of Arc from 1928 was "the finest ever recorded on film." These weren't casual opinions. Kael remembered what movies did to her when she was young, and she never stopped believing that movies should do something to you.

In 1936, she enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, to study philosophy, literature, and art. Her confidence in her own voice was evident from the start. As a teaching assistant, she graded papers for multiple professors and met with students after hours to offer what contemporaries described as "frank advice." She intended to go to law school but never finished her degree—in 1940, she dropped out and moved to New York City with the poet Robert Horan.

Three years later, she returned to Berkeley and lived what she called "a bohemian life," writing plays and working in experimental film. In 1948, she had a daughter, Gina, with the filmmaker James Broughton. Kael raised Gina alone. The child had a congenital heart defect that Kael couldn't afford to have surgically corrected for years.

Thirty Years of Odd Jobs

Here's something that gets lost in discussions of Kael's influence: she didn't become a professional film critic until she was in her mid-forties. From the time she started college at seventeen until she was publishing in national magazines thirty years later, she worked a relentless stream of odd jobs to support herself and her daughter.

She wrote advertising copy. She edited manuscripts. She worked as a nanny, a cook, a seamstress, and a violin teacher. She deliberately sought out work that wasn't too time-intensive because she refused to let it interfere with her own writing.

This matters because it shaped her perspective. Kael wasn't an academic or a professional aesthete. She was a working single mother who happened to be obsessed with movies and determined to write about them in a way that felt true to her experience. When she finally broke through, she brought that scrappy, unpretentious sensibility with her.

The Coffee Shop Discovery

In 1952, a man named Peter D. Martin, who edited a magazine called City Lights, overheard Kael arguing about movies with a friend in a coffee shop. Something about the passion and intelligence of her argument made him ask if she'd be willing to write a review. She agreed to take on Charlie Chaplin's Limelight, a sentimental drama that had been receiving respectful notices.

Kael dubbed it "Slimelight."

This was her style from the beginning. She didn't hedge. She didn't worry about contradicting the consensus. If a movie struck her as self-indulgent or phony, she said so in the most memorable terms she could devise.

She began publishing film criticism regularly, and she worked consciously on developing her voice. "I worked to loosen my style," she later explained, "to get away from the term-paper pomposity that we learn at college. I wanted the sentences to breathe, to have the sound of a human voice."

Against Objectivity

Most critics of Kael's era believed in objectivity—or at least pretended to. The idea was that a critic should stand apart from the work, evaluate it against some set of aesthetic standards, and render a dispassionate judgment.

Kael thought this was nonsense. She called it "saphead objectivity."

Instead, she incorporated autobiography into her criticism. One of her most memorable passages describes seeing Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine from 1946:

I saw the film after one of those terrible lovers' quarrels that leave one in a state of incomprehensible despair. I came out of the theater, tears streaming, and overheard the petulant voice of a college girl complaining to her boyfriend, "Well I don't see what was so special about that movie." I walked up the street, crying blindly, no longer certain whether my tears were for the tragedy on the screen, the hopelessness I felt for myself, or the alienation I felt from those who could not experience the radiance of Shoeshine. For if people cannot feel Shoeshine, what can they feel?

She then reveals that the man she'd quarreled with had gone to see the same film that night and had also emerged in tears. "Yet our tears for each other, and for Shoeshine, did not bring us together. Life, as Shoeshine demonstrates, is too complex for facile endings."

This was radical criticism. Kael refused to pretend that watching movies was an objective exercise. Films hit you where you live, and honest criticism had to acknowledge that.

Running the Cinema Guild

In 1955, Kael married Edward Landberg, who owned the Berkeley Cinema-Guild and Studio. He paid for Gina's heart surgery—finally correcting the defect that had shadowed the girl's childhood—and made Kael the cinema's manager.

She threw herself into the work. She programmed films for the two-screen facility, "unapologetically repeating her favorites until they also became audience favorites." She took on every aspect of running the business, turning it into a thriving enterprise. She also wrote what were described as "pungent" capsule reviews of the films she showed, and her patrons began collecting them.

This was her graduate education in practical criticism. She wasn't just watching movies and writing about them—she was learning what worked with audiences, what people responded to, what needed context and what spoke for itself.

Kael remained at the Cinema Guild until 1960, when she and Landberg divorced.

The Breakthrough

In 1965, Kael published her first book, a collection of her criticism titled I Lost It at the Movies. It was a surprise bestseller, moving 150,000 copies in paperback. It remains the collection for which she's best known.

On the strength of that success, she and Gina moved to New York, and Kael began writing for mass-market publications. She took a job at McCall's, a women's magazine with millions of readers.

This did not go smoothly.

In 1966, Kael reviewed The Sound of Music. Some of the press had dubbed the film "The Sound of Money" because of its enormous box office success. Kael called its message "a sugarcoated lie that people seem to want to eat."

According to legend, this review got her fired. The truth is slightly different. The magazine's editor, Robert Stein, later explained that he fired her months afterward, "after she kept panning every commercial movie from Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago to The Pawnbroker and A Hard Day's Night."

Kael had a gift for making enemies.

The New Yorker Years

After her dismissal from McCall's, Kael landed at The New Republic, where the editors continually altered her writing without permission. In October 1967, she wrote a long essay on Bonnie and Clyde that the magazine declined to publish. The film had bewildered many critics with its jarring blend of comedy and violence. Most reviews were negative or confused.

Kael loved it.

William Shawn, the legendary editor of The New Yorker, obtained her piece and ran it. Her rave review helped rehabilitate the film's reputation. As the critic David Thomson later wrote, "she was right about a film that had bewildered many other critics."

A few months later, Kael quit The New Republic. In 1968, Shawn invited her to join The New Yorker staff.

She would stay for twenty-three years.

Cowboy Boots Covered with Dung

Many at The New Yorker were initially horrified by Kael's colloquial, brash writing style. The magazine was known for its sophistication and gentility. Kael remembered receiving a letter from "an eminent New Yorker writer suggesting that I was trampling through the pages of the magazine with cowboy boots covered with dung."

But Shawn gave her something precious: space and freedom. At The New Yorker, she could write at length with minimal editorial interference. Her reviews ran long—sometimes very long—and they ranged far beyond the specific film under discussion to touch on American culture, sexual politics, violence, art, and commerce.

By 1968, Time magazine called her "one of the country's top movie critics." In 1970, she received a George Polk Award for her work. In 1973, her fourth collection, Deeper into Movies, won the National Book Award in the Arts and Letters category—the first nonfiction book about film to receive that honor.

Championing the New Hollywood

Kael arrived at The New Yorker at exactly the right moment. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the emergence of what's now called New Hollywood—a generation of directors who brought European art-film sensibilities to American commercial cinema.

She became their most important critical champion. As the scholar Sanford Schwartz has written, in the 1960s Kael "gave a breathing, textured life to the aims and sensibilities of Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, Satyajit Ray, Akira Kurosawa, François Truffaut, and Michelangelo Antonioni." Then, in the following decade, "she endowed Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Paul Mazursky, Brian De Palma, and Francis Ford Coppola with the same full-bodied presence."

For American readers who might never have sought out foreign films, Kael made international cinema feel vital and accessible. For young American directors making difficult, unconventional work, she provided validation and visibility.

But Schwartz makes a deeper observation: "Her deepest subject, in the end, isn't movies at all—it's how to live more intensely."

The Controversy Over Citizen Kane

In 1971, Kael wrote what may be her most controversial piece: "Raising Kane," a book-length essay on the authorship of Citizen Kane.

Some background: Citizen Kane is regularly cited as the greatest American film ever made. Its director, Orson Welles, was twenty-five years old when he made it, and he received credit for co-writing the screenplay with Herman J. Mankiewicz.

Kael's essay argued that Mankiewicz was virtually the sole author of the screenplay and the film's actual guiding creative force. She further alleged that Welles had schemed to deprive Mankiewicz of screen credit.

Welles was furious. He considered suing her for libel.

Other critics and scholars came to Welles's defense. Peter Bogdanovich wrote a rebuttal that included a damaging revelation: Kael had appropriated extensive research from a UCLA faculty member without crediting him.

The essay remains controversial. But it also represented something important about Kael's approach: she was willing to attack sacred cows and revise accepted narratives, even when doing so made her powerful enemies.

The Attack from Within

Kael's most notorious public humiliation came from an unexpected source. In 1980, when her collection When the Lights Go Down was published, her New Yorker colleague Renata Adler wrote an 8,000-word review for The New York Review of Books.

It was devastating.

Adler dismissed the entire book as "jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless." She argued that Kael's post-1960s work contained "nothing certainly of intelligence or sensibility" and catalogued her stylistic mannerisms with prosecutorial precision.

Time magazine called it "the New York literary Mafia's bloodiest case of assault and battery in years." It became known as "the most sensational attempt on Kael's reputation."

Kael never responded publicly.

The Brief Hollywood Detour

In 1979, Warren Beatty convinced Kael to leave criticism temporarily and become a consultant to Paramount Pictures. She lasted only a few months before returning to The New Yorker.

The experience seemed to confirm something she already knew: she was a critic, not a filmmaker. Her power came from watching and writing, not from participating in the industry she analyzed.

The Slow Departure

In 1971, Kael purchased a house in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and began dividing her time between there and New York. She would see movies and turn in her articles in the city, but reportedly did most of her actual writing in Massachusetts.

In the early 1980s, she was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. The condition can affect cognition as well as movement, and commuting between Massachusetts and New York became increasingly difficult. As her health declined, she grew depressed about the state of American films and felt, as she put it, that "I had nothing new to say."

On March 11, 1991, in an announcement The New York Times called "earth-shattering," Kael retired from reviewing films regularly. She said she would continue to write occasional essays, but over the next ten years, she published almost nothing new.

In the introduction to her 1994 compendium For Keeps—which was reprinted in The New Yorker—she wrote: "I'm frequently asked why I don't write my memoirs. I think I have."

She meant it literally. Her criticism was autobiography. The films she championed, the directors she discovered, the battles she fought—they told the story of her life more completely than any conventional memoir could.

The Voice That Lingers

Kael gave occasional interviews after her retirement, sometimes offering opinions on new films and television shows. In 1998, she told Modern Maturity magazine that she sometimes regretted not being able to review: "A few years ago, when I saw Vanya on 42nd Street, I wanted to blow trumpets. Your trumpets are gone once you've quit."

She died at her home in Great Barrington on September 3, 2001. She was eighty-two.

Why She Still Matters

What made Pauline Kael different from other critics?

Partly it was her range. The New York Times observed that "Kael could mingle references to literary lions like Saul Bellow, Jean Genet and Norman Mailer with demotic condemnations like loony, sleazo, junk and bummer." She moved fluidly between high culture and low, refusing to recognize the distinction as meaningful.

Partly it was her courage. She said what she thought, even when it meant attacking popular films or powerful directors. She didn't soften her opinions to avoid controversy.

But mostly it was her voice. Kael wrote the way she talked—passionately, personally, with the rhythm of someone who was genuinely excited or genuinely appalled by what she'd just seen. In her obituary, Roger Ebert compared her to 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."

That comparison is apt. Shaw's drama criticism from the 1890s is still readable today, not because anyone cares about the plays he reviewed, but because his prose remains vital. Kael achieved the same thing. Her reviews of films you've never seen and may never see are still worth reading because of how she wrote them.

She once wrote of film critics of her generation: "We were in almost at the beginning, when something new was added to the human experience." Movies were barely fifty years old when she started watching them. She witnessed the transition from silent films to talkies, from studio-system productions to independent cinema, from celluloid to video. She chronicled an entire art form as it grew up.

And she did it in a voice so distinctive that decades after her death, anyone who writes about movies has to reckon with her example—whether they're following it or pushing against it.

Your trumpets are gone once you've quit, she said. But her trumpets are still audible, if you know how to listen.