Pauline Kael, Influential Film Critic, Dies at 82

Pauline Kael, the provocative film critic who molded a generation of reviewers with her singularly passionate, often discursive and always insightful writing on movies during two decades at the New Yorker magazine, died Monday at her home in Great Barrington, Mass.

She was 82 and suffered from Parkinson’s disease.

Kael was the high priestess of film criticism, either hated or loved by fellow critics for the originality and unswerving nature of her opinions. She wrote 13 books, beginning with “I Lost It at the Movies” in 1965, which pushed her to the forefront of her field. Other influential volumes included “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” in 1968, “Reeling” in 1976, and “For Keeps,” her final book, published in 1994.

Her reviews and essays were prized not only for their analyses of movie plot lines, style, dialogue and purpose, but as cultural history and commentary.

Critic Anatole Broyard once wrote that reading a Kael review “gives you a pretty good idea of the current state of our morality, our aesthetics, [and] our politics . . . Very few pictures are worth 1,000 of her words.”

She spawned scores of imitators, some of whom were often derided as “Paulettes.” She became such a force that “[a] whole generation of film critics has had to respond to her either by imitating her or resisting her,” Janet Maslin wrote in the New York Times in 1991, when Kael retired from the New Yorker.

“She had an enormous impact on a whole generation of critics,” said David Denby, who has Kael’s old job as the movie critic for the New Yorker. “She opened a lot of doors to different ways of writing about movies. There was no simple set of rules for her. You had to respond with everything you had, not just what you knew about movies but what you knew about painting, literature, life, other people. That was what made the writing so three-dimensional, so engaging. People felt a need to argue with it, to rethink it themselves. She was enormously provocative in that way.”

Other critics saw her opinions as extravagantly eccentric. “She had her lifelong prejudices against Stanley Kubrick or Clint Eastwood. You never knew what they were based on, but they were particularly vicious,” said film critic and historian Richard Schickel. She clashed famously with critic Andrew Sarris on the auteur theory of film that focused on a director’s style over plot or other features.

Kael was the youngest of five children who grew up on a ranch in Petaluma, near San Francisco. She once described herself to historian Studs Terkel as “a bookish girl from a bookish family.”

She majored in philosophy at UC Berkeley and intended to go to its law school, which had accepted her. But she lost interest in the law when she fell in with a group of artists and poets.

After earning her bachelor’s degree, she tried to write plays, essays and film scripts to support herself and a daughter. She also began to review movies for a public radio station in Berkeley and managed an art-movie house for which she wrote the movie notes. Her first published essay ran in San Francisco’s “City Lights” magazine and was about movies.

The publication of her first collection of reviews in 1965 brought her to New York City, where she began to write on film for national magazines such as McCall’s.

She made her debut in the New Yorker in 1967, when editor William Shawn bought her 6,000-word essay on “Bonnie and Clyde.” Its beginning capsulized Kael’s approach to movies: “How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on? ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ is the most excitingly American movie since ‘The Manchurian Candidate.’ The audience is alive to it. Our experience as we watch it has some connection with the way we reacted to movies in childhood: with how we came to love them and to feel they were ours--not an art that we learned over the years to appreciate but simply and immediately ours.”

That piece led to regular reviewing assignments from the legendary Shawn. But she battled him over every piece, describing their encounters like a match between “two little pit bulls. . . . I had to fight for every contraction, every bit of slang, every description of a scene in a movie that he found morally offensive.”

Her clout was such that filmmakers courted her--and tried to use her influence. Robert Altman showed her a rough cut of his 1975 film “Nashville,” knowing that Paramount wanted to cut several scenes. She wrote about the scenes months before the film was released in such detail that the studio could not force its changes on Altman. Paramount ultimately reprinted her entire laudatory review in ads.

She contributed to the success of other films, such as Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris.” She said its 1972 premiere “should become a landmark” comparable to the night Stravinsky first performed “Rite of Spring.”

Her opinions also fractured relationships with movie makers. This happened with Warren Beatty on “Reds,” Paul Schrader on “Hardcore” and Woody Allen on “Stardust Memories.” “It really hurt me to write about ‘Stardust Memories’ because I like Woody a lot,” she told People magazine in 1983. “That was very painful, but I hated the movie. I have so much pride about what I say that I just wouldn’t fudge it.”

“Raising Kane” was one of her longest and most famous pieces, taking up huge chunks of two issues of the New Yorker in 1971. She offered a revisionist view of “Citizen Kane,” which she called the best movie ever made. She said less credit for the classic should go to director Orson Welles and more was owed to screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz and cinematographer Gregg Toland, whom she believed was chiefly responsible for the film noir style.

She was assailed by many colleagues in the late 1970s when she resigned from the New Yorker to become an executive consultant for Paramount Pictures. It was a short-lived career switch; she returned to the magazine in 1980, disgusted with movie-making politics.

It distressed her that so many younger critics aspired to write in her style. “[I]t’s like a succubus,” she told the Boston Globe in 1989. “It’s awful to open something up hoping to read something and instead find your own thoughts being echoed.”

Her work in the late 1960s and 1970s may have been Kael at her best. She championed such filmmakers as Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Brian de Palma, Altman and Bertolucci. She stood apart from other critics in her enthusiasm for many mainstream Hollywood products. “She anointed herself the liberator of American film criticism, freeing it from snooty academics who treated movies as weightless divertiseements,” Neal Gabler wrote in the New York Times Book Review. “Pauline Kael taught us how to stop worrying and love movies.”

She rhapsodized about such movies as “The Godfather,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Cabaret,” “Taxi Driver.” She once tried to explain why the period was such a golden era in filmmaking: “It had something to do with the counterculture. The anger about the Vietnam War and the chaos of American society in that period helped produce some good movies. Directors had something to be against,” she told the Toronto Star last year. “It stirred their juices, and it gave their movies a sense of social criticism.”

She was far less enthusiastic about Hollywood’s products of the 1980s. And other critics felt her tastes were more often than not out of synch with the public.

She found movie making in the 1990s downright grim.

“The big movies of the 1990s were mostly dismal, worse than in any period I’ve experienced,” she told the Toronto Star. “Of course, there have been some fine movies and a few startlingly good ones, but they have hardly ever been the big hits. I don’t find a dominant artist in this era. It’s been more about individual movies and less about bodies of work.” Among the few she liked from the ‘90s and 2000: “Pulp Fiction,” “Dumb and Dumber,” “The Cider House Rules,” “Mission to Mars,” “Besieged,” and the German movie “Run Lola Run.”

She hated “American Beauty,” which won the best picture Oscar in 1999. “It buries us under the same anti-suburbia attitudes that were tried out in “Carnal Knowledge” and “The Ice Storm.” Can’t educated liberals see that the movie sucks up to them at every plot turn?”

Despite her distaste for most movies of the last decade, she remained acutely interested in filmmaking. Michael Sragow, the film critic for the Baltimore Sun, spoke to her Friday. “As soon as I mentioned a director we both liked--Lamont Johnson--she had this amazing burst of energy and said, ‘Isn’t he amazing?’

“She was a writer and critic of enormous vitality and emotional depth. Like method actors, she was in the moment as a critic.”

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Excerpts

The following are excerpts of reviews by Pauline Kael:

* On “Breathless,” 1961: “The jazz score, the comic technique are perfectly expressive of the lives of the characters. . . . And as the film seems to explain the people in their own terms, the style has the freshness of ‘objectivity.”’

* On “Top Gun,” 1986: “What is this commercial selling? It’s just selling, because that’s what the producers, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, and the director, Tony (Make It Glow) Scott, know how to do. . . . ‘Top Gun’ is a recruiting poster that isn’t concerned with recruiting but with being a poster.”

* On “Return of the Jedi,” 1983: “The battle between good and evil, which is the theme of just about every big fantasy adventure film, has become a flabby excuse for a lot of dumb tricks and noise.”

* On “Diner,” 1982: “The sleaziest and most charismatic figure of the group is Boogie, played by Mickey Rourke . . . With luck, Rourke could become a major actor: he has an edge and magnetism, and a sweet, pure smile that surprises you. He seems to be acting to you, and to no one else.”

From Associated Press