Many film critics are satisfied enough to write about films. Pauline Kael, the immensely influential critic of the New Yorker magazine from 1968 to 1991, who has died aged 82 from Parkinson’s disease, always insisted that she was also writing about life — “the sense of the way movies interacted with public life”. Even more, she was writing about the sense of how they interacted with her own life.
She dismissed out of hand the pious fantasy of critical objectivity –“saphead objectivity”, in her phrase. She laid out her cards of temperament, personality, experience and prejudice, taking trick after critical trick with her sharp, funny, commonsensical and decisively individual reactions to cinema. She felt that her readers should be interested in her — and we were.
Pauline Kael was small, wiry and as energetic as a terrier. Born in Petaluma, California, she was soon an avid reader and movie enthusiast, encouraged by her father, himself a film fan. From 1936 to 1940, she studied philosophy at the Berkeley campus of the University of California; she did not complete her degree at the time, but was later given an honorary doctorate. She had intended to go on to law school, but lost interest after falling in with a group of artists and poets. For a time, she tried experimental filmmaking, writing plays and managing film houses. She sometimes did odd jobs to survive.
Kael saw herself as something of a wild westerner — she was brought up on a ranch near San Francisco –ready to take on the east coast cultural establishment. But she made a permanent move east only when the New Yorker beckoned, by which time she was nearly 50.
She was already in her mid-30s when she began writing about films, hacking out dozens of programme notes for college and film-society screenings, producing articles for very small, and then for somewhat larger, magazines. Her first published essay appeared in San Francisco’s City Lights magazine.
Her first appearance in the New Yorker, in 1967, was a 6 000-word essay eulogising Bonnie and Clyde as “the most excitingly American movie since The Manchurian Candidate“. However, her initiation at the magazine was not easy.
Although the editor, William Shawn, had promised her a free hand, her swashbuckling style grated on the style checkers, who tried to convert brusque assertions into mannerly assumptions. “I literally spent more time and effort restoring what I’d written than writing it,” she recalled. Her tone of voice was essential to her; and she kept it.
At regular intervals, she published volumes of her collected essays and reviews: I Lost It At the Movies (1965), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968), Going Steady (1970), Deeper Into Movies (1973) and Reeling (1976). Her final book, For Keeps, was published in 1994.
They make up a sustained chronicle of how films were and the way they seemed, to the sharpest-eyed observer, during a period when the cinema seemed to offer a rich sense of possibility and promise. And she enjoyed the rumpus when her 50 000-word New Yorker article, Raising Kane, reprinted in The Citizen Kane Book (1971), challenged Orson Welles’s one-man view of his masterpiece.
Looking back in 1994 Kael was as accurate as ever in pinpointing her own faults as a writer: “reckless excess in both praise and damnation … Writing very fast and trying to distil my experience of a movie, I often got carried away by words …”
Certainly, her enthusiasms could seem wild, about Last Tango in Paris she wrote: “Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form.” And when she attacked a movie, hammering it into the ground and capering across columns of print over the remains, the reader could be left with a perverse sympathy for the wrecked and wretched movie.
Kael’s opinions also fractured relationships with filmmakers, including Warren Beatty (over Reds), Paul Schrader (over Hardcore) and Woody Allen (over Stardust Memories), and she reputedly had a prejudice against Stanley Kubrick and Clint Eastwood. On the other hand, she championed directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Brian de Palma and Robert Altman.
Never one to be guiled by the fashionable, the rightminded or the expensive, she boasted that “not many reviewers have a real gift for effrontery. I think that may be my best talent.”
Kael was not often seen at European film festivals, or in London. On one trip to England, she went to call on a film-book publisher, unexpected and, as it turned out, inadequately announced. They had been chatting for some 10 minutes when the publisher, impressed by his visitor’s knowledge of the New York film scene, asked if she knew Pauline Kael. The bleak, horrified announcement, “I am Pauline Kael,” cut short a promising encounter.
Kael was criticised by many colleagues in the late 1970s when she resigned from the New Yorker to become an executive consultant for Paramount Pictures. It was, however, a shortlived move; she returned to the magazine in 1980, disenchanted with movie-making politics.
In the 1980s, a cluster of young American writers, the “Paulettes”, did Kael no service by demonstrating that the surface of her style was not inimitable. And she herself seemed to lose some of her hard edge. As Hollywood moved deeper into the era of huge budgets, violence and special effects, there was simply less worth writing about, a temptation to try to whip up the old excitement about nothing very much.
“Movie criticism now is often a report on a vacuum,” she said in 1994, three years after age and ill-health had forced her retirement from the New Yorker. Luckily, the movies had Pauline Kael at a time when they deserved her.
Derek Malcolm writes Pauline Kael could make or break reputations at will. And she was not averse to doing just that.
Hollywood took note of what she wrote, even if it did not prevent them pursuing their own course of commercial mediocrity. If a director was praised by Kael, he or she was generally allowed to work, since the money-men knew there would be similar approbation across a wide field of publications. Even after she retired, editors would seek her advice on whom to appoint — even if they didn’t always take it.
Kael, who was wrong almost as often as she was right, was not a balanced writer. She got stuck in as if the cinema were politics. She had a profound effect, most of all on the acolytes she supported. The rest of us tagged along behind. At the height of her career, it was difficult to raise one’s voice sufficiently to mask hers. But, particularly on non-American films, it was sometimes worth trying. When she was off beam, she was very off beam indeed. When she was right, you felt you had, in some way, been blessed.
Married and divorced three times, she is survived by her daughter, Gina.
Pauline Kael, film critic, born June 19 1919; died September 3 2001