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This photo of Pauline Kael appeared opposite a 2006 New York Times article on criticism that described her as "unbeatable."^[1]

Pauline Kael (June 19, 1919 – September 3, 2001) was a Jewish-American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker magazine. She was known for her "witty, biting, highly opinionated, and sharply focused"^[2] 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^[2][3] and made a lasting impression on other major critics including Armond White^[4] 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."^[5]

Kael was born on a chicken farm in Petaluma, California, to Jewish immigrants from Poland. She attended college at UC Berkeley, where she studied philosophy, literature and the arts; she briefly considered a career as a playwright. After dropping out, she worked as a freelance critic and managed a local cinema. Kael broadcast many of her early film reviews on the alternative public radio station KPFA in Berkeley.

At one point, she wrote a negative review of The Sound of Music which resulted in her being fired from McCall's magazine (she referred to the movie as "The Sound of Money"). She thought Paint Your Wagon to be very nearly as bad. Conversely, she considered the film versions of Fiddler on the Roof and, especially Cabaret, to be two of the greatest movie musicals ever made. It was during her tenure (1967 – 1991) 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 as a critic. She noted that during this period her reviews were so interesting because the movies were so compelling.

In 1970 she received a George Polk Award for her work as a critic at the New Yorker.

Kael's first published collection of her movie writings, I Lost It at the Movies (1965), was a bestseller, and it led to a series of 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. 5001 Nights at the Movies (1982) collected her synopses of films that were previously published anonymously in the "About the Town" section of The New Yorker.

Kael also wrote philosophical essays on moviegoing, the modern Hollywood film industry, 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 that attacked Mailer himself as much as the book; 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 opinion that credit for Citizen Kane was deserving for the film's screenwriter, Herman J. Mankiewicz, as much as for Orson Welles, generated angry responses from Welles acolyte Peter Bogdanovich and others.^{[citation needed]} Some of the historical material in the book has since been rebutted, by Bogdanovich, Jonathan Rosenbaum, James Naremore and newer generations of scholars.

According to Peter Biskind, author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Down and Dirty Pictures, Kael got into the unethical habit of reviewing scripts and making suggestions and then reviewing the films she’d worked on. As the 1960s came to a close, she also began to give films with 'hip,' socially conscious, or antihero themes more favorable (or at least less negative) reviews, including the widely panned Billy Jack.^{[citation needed]}

In 1981 she 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.

Kael became ill with Parkinson's disease in the 1980s, and died at her home in Massachusetts in 2001, aged 82. Thrice divorced, she was survived by her daughter, Gina.

Kael's opinions often were inconsistent with those of other reviewers. Sometimes, she energetically made a case for movies not universally admired, such as Last Tango in Paris and The Warriors. 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 Last Tango in Paris, "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 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 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."^[6]

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"^[6]. She also called it "fascist medievalism". ^[7] 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'.^[7]

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.

Kael battled the editors of the New Yorker as much as her own critics. In a 1998 interview for Modern Maturity magazine, she described an encounter with the New Yorker's editor, William Shawn: after Shawn read her review of Terrence Malick's movie Badlands, he said, "I guess you didn't know that Terry is like a son to me." Kael's response was simply: "Tough shit, Bill."

Kael influenced a group of young, mostly male critics who emulated her distinctive writing style. Known as the "Paulettes," they came to dominate national film criticism in the 1990s. Critics who have acknowledged Kael's influence include, among others, 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.

In the wake of Richard Nixon's landslide victory in the 1972 presidential election, Kael is frequently quoted as having said that she "couldn't believe Nixon had won," since no one she knew had voted for him. The quote is usually cited by conservatives (such as Bernard Goldberg, in his book Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News), as an example of allegedly clueless New York liberal insularity. No positive primary evidence exists that Kael, or anyone else, made the statement. In addition, there does not seem to be agreement as to the exact wording, the speaker (it has variously been attributed to other liberal women, including Katherine Graham[1], Susan Sontag and Joan Didion[2]) or the timing (in addition to Nixon's victory, it has been claimed to have been uttered after Ronald Reagan's re-election in 1984)[3].

The origin of the meme is unclear. According to Fred Shapiro of the American Dialect Society, the quote is derived from an address Kael gave to a Modern Language Association conference on December 28, 1972, during which The New York Times 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." [4]

• Film writer and director Paul Schrader originally attended the graduate program at UCLA Film School on the recommendation of Pauline Kael. Under Kael's mentoring Schrader became a film critic, writing for the LA Weekly Press and later Cinema magazine, before taking up screenwriting and directing full-time.
• In 1975, Kael and Woody Allen had a discussion with Robert MacNeil on The Robert MacNeil Report.
• Winner of the 1973 Harvard Lampoon Bosley Award (named after Bosley Crowther): "Pauline Kael, whose hysterical encomium loosed Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris" on an all-too-trusting world."^[8]
• According to a Clint Eastwood fansite, Kael's "loathing" of Dirty Harry, and her famous criticism of the film, made it controversial in some cities. The website claims that "the insinuation that Eastwood was a right-wing crazy dogged the actor for years", allegedly as a direct result of Kael's review. The fansite also claims that "privately" Kael referred to Eastwood as "a dumb hick," who reminded her of the provincial relatives she left back on the chicken farm in Petaluma. ^[9]

• Wes Anderson, 'Taking Pauline Kael to the Movies', Toronto, Brick, A Literary Journal, No. 62, May 1999 (director Anderson recounts taking Kael to see his film Rushmore.)

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Pauline Kael

• Salon Brilliant Careers: Pauline Kael
• Pauline Kael on Cary Grant
• Kael on 'A Passage to India'
• Pauline Kael on A Clockwork Orange
• The Pearls of Pauline from Brights Lights Film Journal
• Pauline Kael reviews, including the full text of Raising Kane
• Extensive list of links to commentary about Kael
• Extensive collection of capsule reviews by Kael