A short life of the author
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) was born on a chicken farm in Petaluma, California, and became the most influential, most imitated, and most controversial film critic in American history. Her reviews in The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991 — passionate, combative, funny, intellectually voracious, and written in a style that owed as much to jazz as to literary criticism — transformed film criticism from a genteel consumer guide into a form of personal and cultural writing that could stand beside the best literary journalism.
Life and Career
Kael attended the University of California, Berkeley, without graduating, and spent her twenties and thirties in a series of marginal jobs — managing a repertory cinema in Berkeley (where she programmed adventurous double features and read her own notes from the stage), writing for Film Quarterly, Partisan Review, and other obscure magazines, raising a daughter as a single mother, and developing the fierce, conversational critical voice that would make her famous. She was nearly fifty when she got her first regular reviewing job.
Her break came with a review of Bonnie and Clyde in The New Republic in 1967. The film had been dismissed by most critics as gratuitously violent; Kael argued that its violence was the point — that it captured something new and dangerous about American culture — and her defence of the film, passionately argued and brilliantly written, demonstrated her method: impassioned advocacy, precise observation, and a willingness to fight.
William Shawn hired her at The New Yorker in 1968, where she alternated with Penelope Gilliatt on a six-months-on, six-months-off schedule. Her reviews were events: readers did not just want to know what Kael thought of a film; they wanted to experience the force of her intelligence engaging with it. She championed Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, and the American New Wave, and attacked the prestige middlebrow — “the audience for the safe stuff” — with relentless energy.
I Lost It at the Movies (1965) was her first collection. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968), Deeper into Movies (1973, which won a National Book Award), and Reeling (1976) established her as the dominant critical voice in American film culture. Her essay “Raising Kane” (1971), arguing that Herman Mankiewicz rather than Orson Welles deserved primary credit for the Citizen Kane screenplay, provoked a fierce and unresolved controversy.
She retired in 1991, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, and lived quietly in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, until her death.
Major Works and Themes
Kael’s criticism is driven by a belief that movies should make you feel something — that the great sin of art is timidity, and that the visceral response of the audience is the primary datum of criticism. She distrusted theory, disliked the academic study of film, and wrote from the body as much as the mind.
Her style — long, sinuous sentences, unexpected metaphors, sudden shifts from analysis to autobiography to polemic — is inimitable and has been disastrously imitated.
Controversies
Kael provoked fights throughout her career — it was her natural mode. Her essay “Raising Kane” (1971), published as the introduction to The Citizen Kane Book, argued that the Citizen Kane screenplay was primarily the work of Herman Mankiewicz rather than Orson Welles, challenging the auteur theory she simultaneously helped to promote. Peter Bogdanovich and other Welles scholars attacked her evidence and her conclusions, and the debate has never been fully resolved.
She was criticised for being too generous to her favourites (De Palma, in particular, received reviews from Kael that his films arguably did not merit) and too savage to those she disliked. Her review of Shoah was notorious for its hostility. Her contempt for Stanley Kubrick grew over the decades. She was accused of allowing personal relationships to influence her critical judgements — a charge that was difficult to refute given her intense personal engagement with the filmmakers she championed.
Legacy
Kael’s influence on film criticism was total: every subsequent American film critic has defined themselves in relation to her, whether as disciple or opponent. The “Paulettes” — critics she mentored and influenced, including David Edelstein, James Wolcott, David Denby, and Owen Gleiberman — carried her sensibility into the next generation. Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, and other filmmakers have cited her as a formative influence.
Her writing transcends film criticism. For Keeps (1994) — a 1,291-page selection from her reviews — reads as a cultural history of American life from the 1950s through the 1980s, told through the lens of the movies. She remains the only film critic whose collected reviews constitute a body of American literature.
Collecting Kael
I Lost It at the Movies (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1965) is the debut and most collected title, bringing $50–$200. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968) brings $30–$100. Deeper into Movies (1973) — the National Book Award winner — brings $20–$80. For Keeps (Dutton, 1994) is the essential one-volume selection. Kael signed at readings and events, and signed copies are available at modest premiums.