Pauline Kael (June 19, 1919 – September 3, 2001) was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker magazine from 1968 to 1991. She was known for her "witty, biting, highly opinionated, and sharply focused" movie reviews. She approached movies emotionally, with a strongly colloquial writing style. She was often regarded as the most influential American film critic of her day and made a lasting impression on other major critics including Armond White and Roger Ebert, who has said that Kael "had a more positive influence on the climate for film in America than any other single person over the last three decades."

Kael was born on a chicken farm in Petaluma, California, to Isaac Paul Kael and Judith Friedman Kael, two Jewish immigrants from Poland. Affected by the Great Depression, her family lost their farm when Kael was eight and moved to San Francisco, California. She began attending college in 1936 at UC Berkeley, where she studied philosophy, literature and the arts before dropping out in 1940. Despite this, she still intended to go on to law school, until falling in with a group of artists, and moving to New York City with the poet Robert Horan.

After three years, she returned to San Francisco and "led a bohemian life," marrying and divorcing three times, writing plays, and working on experimental films. Kael and filmmaker James Broughton had a daughter, Gina, in 1948, though Kael raised her alone. Gina had a serious illness for much of her childhood, and to support her, Kael worked in a series of menial jobs, including stints as an ad-copy writer, cook, and seamstress. In 1953, the editor of City Lights magazine overheard Kael in a coffeeshop arguing about the movies with a friend, and she was asked to review Charlie Chaplin's Limelight. Kael memorably dubbed the movie "slimelight," and began publishing film criticism regularly in magazines.

Even her early reviews were notable for their informality and lack of pretension; Kael later explained, "I worked to loosen my style—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." Kael disparaged the supposed critic's ideal of objectivity, referring to it as "saphead objectivity," and incorporated aspects of autobiography into her criticism. In a review of the 1946 film Shoeshine that has been ranked among her most memorable, Kael described seeing 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?....Later I learned that the man with whom I had quarreled had gone the same 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.

Kael broadcast many of her early reviews on the alternative public radio station KPFA in Berkeley, and gained further local-celebrity status as Berkeley Cinema Guild manager from 1955 to 1960. As manager of the two-screen theater, Kael programmed the films that were shown, "unapologetically repeat[ing] her favorites until they also became audience favorites." She also wrote "pungent" capsule reviews of the movies, which her patrons began collecting.

Kael continued to juggle writing with other work until she received an offer to publish a book of her criticism. Published in 1965 as I Lost It at the Movies, the collection sold 150,000 paperback copies and was a surprise bestseller. Coinciding with a job at the high-circulation women's magazine McCall's, Kael (as Newsweek put it in a 1966 profile) "went mass."

The same year, she wrote a blistering review of the phenomenally popular The Sound of Music in McCall's. After mentioning that some of the press had dubbed it "The Sound of Money," Kael called the film's message a "sugarcoated lie that people seem to want to eat." p. 214-5.</bgref> Although, according to legend, this review led to her being fired from McCall's (The New York Times even printed as much in Kael's obituary), both Kael and the magazine's editor have denied this. According to McCall's editor Robert Stein, "I [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."

Her dismissal from McCall's led to a stint from 1966 to 1967 at The New Republic, whose editors constantly altered Kael's writing without permission. A few days after quitting the Republic "in despair," Kael was asked by William Shawn to join The New Yorker staff as one of its two film critics (she alternated every six months with Penelope Gilliatt until 1979, after which she became sole film critic.) Her first review in the New Yorker was a rave about Bonnie and Clyde, in which, according to critic David Thomson, "she was right about a film that had bewildered many other critics."

Her colloquial, brash writing style was initially considered an odd fit with the sophisticated and genteel New Yorker; Kael remembered "getting 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." However, it was during her tenure at the New Yorker, a forum that permitted her to write at some length (and with presumably minimal editorial interference), that Kael achieved her greatest prominence; by 1968, Time magazine was referring to her as "one of the country's top movie critics." Kael noted that during this period her reviews were so interesting because the movies were so compelling.

In 1970, Kael received a George Polk Award for her work as a critic at the New Yorker. She continued to publish hardbound collections of her writings, many with (deliberately) suggestive titles such as Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, When The Lights Go Down, Taking It All In, and others. Her fourth book, Deeper Into Movies (1973), was the first non-fiction book about movies to win a National Book Award.

Kael also wrote philosophical essays on moviegoing, the modern Hollywood film industry, and the lack of courage on the part of audiences (as she perceived it) to explore lesser-known, more challenging movies (she never used the word "film" to describe movies because she felt the word was too elitist). Among her more popular essays were a damning review of Norman Mailer's semi-fictional biography of Marilyn Monroe; an incisive look at Cary Grant's career, and an extensively researched look at Citizen Kane entitled Raising Kane (later reprinted in The Citizen Kane Book). Her argument was that Herman J. Mankiewicz (Citizen Kane's screenwriter) deserved as much credit for the film as Orson Welles, a thesis that provoked controversy and hurt Welles to the point that he considered suing Kael for libel.

Kael battled the editors of the New Yorker as much as her own critics. She fought with William Shawn to review the 1972 pornographic film Deep Throat, though she eventually relented. According to Kael, after reading her negative review of Terrence Malick's 1973 movie Badlands, Shawn said, "I guess you didn't know that Terry is like a son to me." Kael responded, "Tough shit, Bill," and her review was printed unchanged. Other than sporadic confrontations with Shawn, Kael said she spent most of her work time at home writing.

Upon the release of Kael's 1980 collection When The Lights Go Down, her New Yorker colleague Renata Adler published an 8,000-word review in The New York Review of Books that dismissed the book as "jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless." Adler argued that Kael's post-sixties work contained "nothing certainly of intelligence or sensibility," and faulted her "quirks [and] mannerisms," including Kael's repeated use of the "bullying" imperative and rhetorical question. The piece, which stunned Kael and quickly became infamous in literary circles, was described by Time magazine as "the New York literary Mafia['s] bloodiest case of assault and battery in years." Although Kael refused to respond, Adler's review became known as "the most sensational attempt on Kael's reputation"; twenty years later, Salon.com (ironically) referred to Adler's "worthless" denunciation of Kael as her "most famous single sentence."

In 1979, Kael accepted an offer from Warren Beatty to be a consultant to Paramount Pictures, but she left the position after only a few months to return to writing criticism in mid 1980.

In the early 1980s, Kael was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. As her illness worsened, she became increasingly depressed about the state of American movies, along with feeling, she explained, that "I had nothing new to say." On March 11, 1991, in an announcement The New York Times referred to as "earth-shattering," Kael announced her retirement from reviewing movies regularly. At the time, Kael explained that she would still write essays for The New Yorker, along with "some reflections and other pieces of writing about movies." However, she ended up publishing no new work in the ensuing ten years, besides an introduction to her 1994 compendium For Keeps. In the introduction (which was reprinted in The New Yorker), Kael stated, in reference to her film criticism, "I'm frequently asked why I don't write my memoirs. I think I have."

Though she published no new writing of her own, Kael was not averse to giving interviews, in which she alternately praised and derided newly-released films and television shows. In a 1998 interview with Modern Maturity, she said she sometimes regretted not being able to review, saying, "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 Massachusetts in 2001, aged 82.

Kael's opinions often were inconsistent with those of other reviewers. Sometimes, she energetically made a case for movies not universally admired, such as The Warriors and, memorably, Last Tango in Paris. (Soon after that film's release, Kael won the 1973 Harvard Lampoon Bosley Award, named after Bosley Crowther. She was described by the Award's judges as "Pauline Kael, whose hysterical encomium loosed Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris on an all-too-trusting world.") She was not especially cruel to some films that had been roasted by many critics, such as the 1972 Man of La Mancha, in which she praised Sophia Loren's performance. She also condemned films that elsewhere attracted admiration, such as It's a Wonderful Life, West Side Story, and Shoah. The originality of her opinions, as well as the forceful way in which she expressed them, won her ardent supporters as well as angry critics.

Notable movie reviews by Kael included a venomous criticism of West Side Story that drew harsh replies from the movie's supporters; ecstatic reviews of "Z," and MASH that resulted in enormous boosts to those films' popularity; and enthusiastic reviews of Brian De Palma's early films. Her 'preview' of Robert Altman's 1975 movie Nashville appeared several months before the film was actually completed, in an (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to catapult the film to box office glory.

Kael is frequently quoted as having said, in the wake of Richard Nixon's landslide victory in the 1972 presidential election, that she "couldn't believe Nixon had won," since no one she knew had voted for him. The quote is sometimes cited by conservatives (such as Bernard Goldberg, in his book Bias), as an example of allegedly clueless New York liberal insularity. There are variations as to the exact wording, the speaker (it has variously been attributed to other liberal women, including Katharine Graham, Susan Sontag, and Joan Didion), http://www.college.columbia.edu/cct/aug01/aug01_letterseditor.html http://www.slate.com/id/2000108/entry/1001145/ and the timing (in addition to Nixon's victory, it has been claimed to have been uttered after Ronald Reagan's re-election in 1984.) http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110010021

There is, in fact, no record of Kael making such a remark. The story may have originated in a December 28, 1972 New York Times article on a lecture Kael gave at the Modern Language Association, in which the newspaper quoted her as saying, "I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them."

Another version of the origin of the story is that Kael was asked to comment on Nixon's election and replied that she couldn't as she knew no one who had voted for the man. The reporter supposedly then distorted the quote somewhat to make the famous statement.

Kael had a taste for anti-hero movies that violated taboos involving sex and violence, and this reportedly alienated some of her readers. She also had a strong dislike for films that she felt were manipulative or appealed in superficial ways to conventional attitudes and feelings.

She was an enthusiastic supporter of the violent action films of Sam Peckinpah and early Walter Hill, as evidenced in her collection 5001 Nights at the Movies, which includes positive reviews of Hill's Hard Times (1975), The Warriors (1979), and Southern Comfort (1981), as well as Peckinpah's entire body of work. Although she initially dismissed John Boorman's Point Blank (1967) for what she felt was its pointless brutality, she later acknowledged it was "intermittently dazzling" with "more energy and invention than Boorman seems to know what to do with...one comes out exhilarated but bewildered."

However, Kael did respond negatively to some action films that she felt pushed what she described as "right-wing" or "fascist" agendas. While praising Don Siegel's Dirty Harry (1971) as "trim, brutal, and exciting; it was directed in the sleekest style by the veteran urban-action director...," she labelled it a "right-wing fantasy [that is] a remarkably simple-minded attack on liberal values". She also called it "fascist medievalism". In an otherwise extremely positive critique of Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, Kael concluded that the controversial director had made 'the first American film that is a fascist work of art'.

In her negative review of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Kael explained how she felt some directors who used brutal imagery in their films were de-sensitizing audiences to violence:

At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don't have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact de- sensitizing us. They are saying that everyone is brutal, and the heroes must be as brutal as the villains or they turn into fools. There seems to be an assumption that if you're offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship. But this would deny those of us who don't believe in censorship the use of the only counterbalance: the freedom of the press to say that there's anything conceivably damaging in these films—the freedom to analyze their implications. If we don't use this critical freedom, we are implicitly saying that no brutality is too much for us—that only squares and people who believe in censorship are concerned with brutality.

In preface to a 1983 interview with Kael for the gay magazine Mandate, Sam Staggs wrote that "she has always carried on a love/hate affair with her gay legions....like the bitchiest queen in gay mythology, she has a sharp remark about everything." However, in the early eighties, largely in response to her review of the 1981 drama Rich and Famous, Kael faced notable accusations of homophobia. First remarked on by Stuart Byronin in The Village Voice, according to gay writer Craig Seligman the accusations eventually "took on a life of their own and did real damage to her reputation."

In her review, Kael called the straight-themed Rich and Famous "more like a homosexual fantasy," saying that one female character's affairs "are creepy, because they don't seem like what a woman would get into." Byron, who "hit the ceiling" after reading the review, was joined by The Celluloid Closet author Vito Russo, who argued that Kael equated promiscuity with homosexuality, "as though straight women have never been promiscuous or been given the permission to be promiscuous."

In response to her review of Rich and Famous, several critics reappraised Kael's earlier reviews of the sixties gay-themed movies Victim and The Children's Hour, including a wisecrack Kael made about the lesbian-themed Children's Hour: "I always thought this was why lesbians needed sympathy—that there isn't much they can do." Craig Seligman has defended Kael, saying that her perceived "bigotry" was simply her showing "enough ease with the topic to be able to crack jokes—in a dark period when other reviewers....'felt that if homosexuality were not a crime it would spread.'" Kael herself rejected the accusations as "craziness," adding, "I don't see how anybody who took the trouble to check out what I've actually written about movies with homosexual elements in them could believe that stuff."

Almost as soon as she began writing for The New Yorker, Kael carried a great deal of influence among fellow critics. In the early seventies, Cinerama distributors "initiate[d] a policy of individual screenings for each critic because her remarks [during the film] were affecting her fellow critics." In the seventies and eighties, Kael cultivated friendships with a group of young, mostly male critics, some of whom emulated her distinctive writing style. Referred to derisively as the "Paulettes," they came to dominate national film criticism in the 1990s. Critics who have acknowledged Kael's influence include, among many, David Edelstein of New York Magazine, Michael Sragow of the Baltimore Sun, Armond White of the New York Sun, Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com, and A. O. Scott of the New York Times. It was repeatedly alleged that, after her retirement, Kael's "most ardent devotees deliberate[d] with each other [to] forge a common School of Pauline position (with Kael's assent?) before articles [were] written." When confronted with the rumor that she ran "a conspiratorial network of young critics," Kael said she believed that critics imitated her style rather than her actual opinions, stating, "A number of critics take phrases and attitudes from me, and those takings stick out-they’re not integral to the writer’s temperament or approach."

When asked in 1998 if she thought her criticism had affected the way films were made, Kael deflected the question, stating, "If I say yes, I’m an egotist, and if I say no, I’ve wasted my life." Several directors' careers were indisputably affected by her, though, most notably Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader, who was accepted at UCLA Film School's graduate program on Kael's recommendation. Under her mentoring, Schrader worked as a film critic before taking up screenwriting and directing full-time. Also, film critic Derek Malcolm claimed that, "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." Alternately, Kael was said to be able to prevent filmmakers from working; David Lean claimed that her criticism of his work "kept him from making a movie for 14 years."

Though he began directing movies after she retired, Quentin Tarantino was also influenced by Kael. He read her criticism voraciously growing up and said that Kael was "as influential as any director was in helping me develop my aesthetic."

* I Lost It at the Movies (1965) * Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968) ISBN 0-31648-163-7 * Going Steady (1969) ISBN 0-55305-880-0 * Deeper Into Movies (1973) ISBN 0-7145-0941-8 * Reeling (1976) * When The Lights Go Down (1980) ISBN 0-03042-511-5 * 5001 Nights at the Movies (1982, revised in 1984 and 1991) ISBN 0-8050-1367-9 * Taking It All In (1984) ISBN 0-03069-362-4 * State of the Art (1987) ISBN 0-71452-869-2 * Hooked (1989) * Movie Love (1991) * For Keeps (1994) * Raising Kane, and other essays (1996)

* "Trash, Art, and the Movies", essay published in the Feb. 1969 issue of Harper's. * "Raising Kane", book-length essay on the making of Citizen Kane published in the Feb. 20, 1971 and Feb. 27, 1971 issues of The New Yorker. * "Stanley Strangelove", review of A Clockwork Orange from a January 1972 issue of The New Yorker. * "The Man From Dream City", profile of Cary Grant from the August 14, 1975 issue of The New Yorker. * "Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers", essay published in the June 23, 1980 issue of The New Yorker. * "A Passage to India, Unloos'd Dreams", review of A Passage to India from the January 14, 1985 issue of The New Yorker.

* Brantley, Will, ed. (1996). Conversations with Pauline Kael. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 0-87805-899-0. * *

* Pauline Kael Archives, a collection of articles and commentary about Kael * Pauline Kael A-Z, 2,846 capsule film reviews written by Kael * The Pearls of Pauline from Brights Lights Film Journal