Pauline Kael--was she a good critic?

One of her best lines was when she said that the lyrics in "Man of La Mancha" sounded like they had been translated from Esperanto.

She was a clever writer with a good turn of phrase. I never turned to her to decide whether to go to a particular movie, but that's not the function of a critic (more of a reviewer, if that distinction makes sense).

I've read somewhere that she rarely saw a movie more than once before writing her reviews for The New Yorker. Given that it is a weekly rather than daily (and I would not expect her to see all movies more than once), I was a little surprised to read that, though her conversational approach to writing may have meant she wanted to go with her first impressions, which is not, in my book, the sign of a particularly good critic.

She tended to extremes. Last Tango in Paris "redefined cinema." Made for compelling, dramatic reading but undercut her validity.

I thought so. She was also caustic which is a DL plus.

Kael on Streep:

[quote]I felt more sympathy for Meryl Streep, the actress trying to put over these ultimate-horror scenes, than I could for Sophie herself. Streep is very beautiful at times, and she does amusing, nervous bits of business, like fidgeting with a furry boa— her fingers twiddling with our heartstrings. She has, as usual, put thought and effort into her work. But something about her puzzles me: after I’ve seen her in a movie, I can’t visualize her from the neck down…she in effect decorporealizes herself. This could explain why her movie heroines don’t seem to be full characters, and why there are no incidental joys to be had from watching her. It could be that in her zeal to be an honest actress she allows nothing to escape her conception of a performance. Instead of trying to achieve freedom in front of the camera, she’s predetermining what it records.

No.

A smart woman who saw the value in a certain kind of American cinema, but became spiteful and contrarian over the years.

My nominee for the silliest person who ever lived. How on earth could anybody take her seriously?

I didn't always agree with her, but she championed a lot of good directors and really helped to bolster the second Golden Age of American Cinema.

She despised clear Oscar bait movies but thought their was value in a commercial movie like Used Cars.

Her obsession with Streisand was a bit too much.

LOL at R5. Streep's response was that Kael was jealous of her WASP beauty or something to that effect. John Simon was another one who was never taken with Streep.

I must say I LOVED Pauline Kael for her writing even if I disagreed 100% some of the time. Compared to the other dingbats in the 90s-80s like John Simon, Judith Crist, Rex Reed, Vincent Canby, Frank Rich (yes, that Frank Rich), Kael was a gem. She could be a nut (see R9), but I loved reading her.

"90s-80s" s/b 60s - 80s

Her dislike of Kubrick is something I don't get. She is wrong about Last Tango in Paris--it is not erotic at all. At least not once the characters actually have sex. I do like her Altman reviews.

[quote]Instead of trying to achieve freedom in front of the camera, she’s predetermining what it records.

It’s statements like the above that show how deft Kael’s assessments of performers could be. That’s what stands out to me most about her reviews.

Who is this Kael woman of which you refer to?

whom

Kael could be very good when writing about actors, and also about the impact of films on culture at large. More than her notorious review of Last Tango in Paris (which is a bit over the top), she wrote an excellent early piece about On the Waterfront which perfectly captured Marlon Brando's impact on 50s America.

[R9] "Her obsession with Streisand was a bit too much."

That didn't last long. She gave a really negative review to Streisand in 'Funny Lady', and absolutely shredded her in 'A Star Is Born'.

This online critic makes the argument that Kael was one of the worst critics ever. Althoug he almost exclusively cites her reviews of Woody Allen. Thoughts?

Could barely get past the opening paragraph r18, with the grammatical errors and run-on sentences. That was some poorly written drivel.

R19, I guess his point was that Pauline was the type of critic who wouldn't really analyze the work in front of her, rather, she would be completely biased when reviewing. But he seems very bitter and he even calls Kael a "horrible human being".

Yeah, it was the personal insults right off the bat that set off alarms.

She painted herself into a corner as she narrowed her criteria for good movies to a select kinetic group of filmmakers. She became so anti intellectual that any movie with a pedigree was certain to be dismissed.

I always found it perverse that she pretty much dismissed all of Hitchcock early in her career and then championed DePalma as the 2nd coming. That sort of inescapable contradiction is symbolic of the casual way her whims were so inconsistent.

She was fun to read, but wielded far too much influence given her collective opinions were often at odds with general consensus.

She was an influence on a number of next generation writers who took her style but were more conventional in their tastes.

She never would have caught on in the RT age, for better or worse.

She published several great collections of reviews, and one very big fat definitive collection after or near retirement that I used to own but sold, stupidly, when I had to move cross-country and was purging everything. First edition, mint condition, I think I got five bucks for it from the "cool" bookstore in town.

Any of those old books are worth looking for. I didn't agree with all of her opinions, most of which were written way before I got a chance to see the movies years later, but damn the woman could write.

The only critic who ever counted. Loved her.

So many favorites but the one that comes to mind (and I will try to quote): "'Rain Man' is Dustin Hoffman humping the same note on the piano for two hours."

Her essay "Raising Kane," which was the introduction to a book publication of the original script and the shooting script of "Citizen Kane" was really good and led to a re-evaluation of the film and how much that had been thought to be Welles' creation was in Mankiewitz' original script.

A lot of her reviews, however, did have some of the problems pointed out here. As several have pointed out, she was a really good writer with some questionable opinions about specific films.

She's great to read even when one disagrees with her—the mark of a true critic.

Didn't she think "Exorcist II: Heretic" was better than the original? Unforgivable!

R22, I do think she could be anti-intellectual but she did like Kurosawa, Kobayashi, L'Avventura,etc. I love all of Antonioni's black and white trilogy but she only liked the first part. There were extreme limits to her taste. I will always be greatful that she championed De Palma though.

R27, she did and so did some other critics and even Martin Scorsese liked it better! Odd. But I did read somwhere that Kael wrote that if the Exorcist II was in another language aside from English, it would have been a classic.

Loved her so much. The research she did before seeing a film was also impressive. Best reviewer ever

She was one of the greatest of all critics. That doesn't mean she was right about everything, or didn't have blind spots, or wasn't above playing favorites. But no critic came close to her in her prime, especially when you read what passes for criticism today. She definitely rubs a lot of people the wrong way, and there are all sorts of crazed and hysterical take-downs of her work that bear little relation to what she actually wrote (most famously Renata Adler's piece in the New York Review of Books). People say she hated all of Bergman or Hitchcock. Look at the actual reviews - she loved many of their films. She was not so easy to pin down. I think what we miss most with her departure from the scene is that she was really exceptionally tough-minded about the kind of prestige movies that win all the critics' plaudits and the awards. She was eager to call bullshit when she saw it. There are countless movies in the last 20 years that seemingly no one dissents from blind praise of, but that she certainly would have.

R31, I would have loved to read what she had to say about Forrest Gump.

I always wanted to see what Kael thought of a movie. Even if it was a movie I loved and she hated, I often could respect her opinion. And if I hated a movie she loved (for example, she called "The Story of Adele H" a "great film",) I wanted to see it again because her writing compelled me.

[quote]She was eager to call bullshit when she saw it. There are countless movies in the last 20 years that seemingly no one dissents from blind praise of, but that she certainly would have.

And this, in a nutshell, is why I loved her writing.

Ms. Kael taught me three things: How to really watch a movie, and not just be taken in by it. Second she increased by vocabulary enough that I got a perfect score on my SAT exam. And she forever made a connection for me between film and other arts ( books, music, etc,). I am a well -read, well- cultured person due to her influence. And a lifetime New Yorker reader. But I use to disagree with her all the time. Her love for Bette Midler was undeserved. And she could be mean. But she was smart and witty, and she made me a better reader and film watcher.

[quote]She's great to read even when one disagrees with her—the mark of a true critic.

Exactly. My taste is actually pretty different from hers in a lot of ways - I'm a much bigger fan of the European art films (Antonioni and Resnais) which she could be so cutting about, and when I was first learning about movies I preferred Sarris. But I recently read her Library of Congress collection back to back, and I was surprised at how much fun it was. As soon as I finished one essay I couldn't wait to read what she thought about the next film. I do think the quality of her writing declined somewhat towards the end - I think Kael realized this as well, that she wasn't as inspired, which is why she sensibly retired.

*Library of America, oops

She and Susan Sontag were a sort of yin and yang of mid-century American criticism. Through their critiques, they both illuminated the truth of the era.

Her vocabulary is amazing - she was very good at coming up with just the right quirky word. Also, she could be totally hilarious.

[quote]I would have loved to read what she had to say about Forrest Gump.

I read an interview with her after she retired in which she clearly didn't like it much.

R35, actually, she blasted Midler for both "Outrageous Fortune" and "Ruthless People". In OF, she said Midler was playing the Three Stooges, all of them. However, she said she loved Midler's "Gypsy", which I completely disagree with but I would have loved to read her review of it.

Shortly after she stopped writing for the New Yorker, she said her three favorite actresses at the time were Blythe Danner, Vonetta McGee and Annie Potts, which shows that she certainly had a maverick spirit.

[quote]Pauline Kael is most likely the most significant name in film criticism from the past 50 years or so

Not at all.

He review of Last Tango in Paris shows how clueless she was.

I could always count on Kael to make me feel better when the world adored a movie and I just didn't get it. She never let me down when it came to treacle like "Field of Dreams:" and she was funny, to boot.

I would go over to a (late) friend's house in Laurel Canyon once a week and we'd read the New Yorker reviews out loud. A very different time and I miss it (and him. And Kael).

[quote]Didn't she think "Exorcist II: Heretic" was better than the original? Unforgivable!

She really hated The Exorcist. She pointed out how shallow and crass it was. How as an audience member you felt nothing for Regan and the torture she was going through. I remember being affected by the review--at least a bit--because I had always enjoyed the movie just for how scary I found it Her review just shredded the cheap thrill of it.

I loved her comment, and I paraphrase, about all the stage moms watching Regan from the audience and sighing, "That could've been little Suzie" or whatever. She found the whole thing perverse and disgusting. I bet she'd be having a field day with the current MeToo/TimesUp bullshit too.

[quote]I bet she'd be having a field day with the current MeToo/TimesUp bullshit too.

It's a real shame that both she and David Carr aren't here to cut through the bullshit.

R44, she was more exact. She was pointing to the scene where Linda Blair pees on the floor and it wasn't a blast at the stage moms but at the film for putting a young girl into that situation.

Those comments about The Exorcist remind me of something I really like about Kael's writing - she's able to communicate that there's a moral/ethical quality involved in the response to a film that goes beyond (or is inextricable from) the aesthetic. In her best reviews you felt that she was raising the stakes in a way that most critics or reviewers don't.

I actuallly completely disagree with her about The Exorcist, But I will say--although I think it's a great movie, I think Rosemary's Baby is more terrifying and better to my adult eyes.

Armond White, another so-called "contrarian" wrote a thoughtful piece on Kael for CityArts in 2012.

[quote]Mainstream criticism today misses an authoritative voice that can demolish sacred cows and build a case for unappreciated artists—or, maybe to put it another way, a critic who is respected rather than scorned for his or her idiosyncratic tastes. Attaching the contrarian label to Kael suggests a willful attempt to dismiss her judgments and criticisms as arbitrary; different just for the sake of being different. And in so doing, the reviewers avoid having to grapple with what she actually represented.

[quote]By concentrating on Kael’s fortuitous career path and her slangy wordplay, reviewers ignore her critical philosophy. “The new tendency is to write appreciatively at the highest possible pitch, as if the reviewer had no scale of values but only a hearsay knowledge of the peaks,” she wrote. “And everything he likes becomes a new peak.” Unafraid of the status quo, Kael called out the prevailing dangers: “[Film] executives don’t understand what criticism is; they want it to be an extension of their advertising departments. They want moviegoers to be uninformed and without memory, so they can be happy consumers.”

[quote]More than 40 years later, those words still define where we as journalists stand, what we should be wary of, and the principles that make a “contrarian” journalist a heroine.

[quote]“The new tendency is to write appreciatively at the highest possible pitch, as if the reviewer had no scale of values but only a hearsay knowledge of the peaks,” she wrote. “And everything he likes becomes a new peak.”

That is a near perfect summarization of Peter Travers' career.

R49, Armond White is FAR more contrarian than Kael. He just tries to start shit half the time, while the other 50 percent of the time, he is on point. I think he even heckled Steve McQueen.

Yeah, I have to admit - most of the time I think White is a perfect example of how so many of the "Paulettes" who followed in Kael's footsteps just aren't as good. Too often he seems driven by the compulsion to offer up outrageous opinions or pick fights with other critics. Kael usually had more substance behind her pugnaciousness.

[quote]LOL at [R5]. Streep's response was that Kael was jealous of her WASP beauty or something to that effect.

Yeah, I remember something like that. Streep believes Kael suffered from an inferiority complex, because she was Jewish and therefore was jealous of Streep for being a Vassar WASP. I'm going to see if I can find the quote.

Kael on Streep: "She can't take a bite of food without acting out Eating."

It's here—

[quote]The “abuse” Streep suffered at the pen-wielding hands of Kael had become such a large part of the actress’ legend that in 2008, seven years after Kael’s death, Streep finally fired back. “I’m incapable of not thinking about what Pauline wrote,” Streep admitted in an interview with The Guardian designed to promote Mamma Mia! “And you know what I think? That Pauline was a poor Jewish girl who was at Berkeley with all these rich Pasadena WASPs with long blond hair, and the heartlessness of them got her.”

So basically Streep is saying the only way Kael could possibly ever criticize her is because of misplaced feelings of inferiority? Okay, Meryl.

[quote]“I’m incapable of not thinking about what Pauline wrote,” Streep admitted in an interview with The Guardian designed to promote Mamma Mia! “And you know what I think? That Pauline was a poor Jewish girl who was at Berkeley with all these rich Pasadena WASPs with long blond hair, and the heartlessness of them got her.”

I think that's untrue, Meryl.

We are now jinxed, R56.

Kael liked Streep better in "Silkwood" (I did too, still one of her best) but even there didn't buy her physically. Love her comment, in regards to a moment when Streep takes a co-worker's sandwich and eats off of it, "Winger would've grabbed that sandwich and bit it with gusto" or something to that effect. Yes, she loved Debra Winger from minute one to the end.

"A major reason to go to the movies" re: Debra Winger.

I love that she hated Costner. "He's got feathers in his hair and feathers in his head" in "Wolves". And that his Indian name should've been Plays With Camera.

Meryl was ill-advised to say that, whole promoting "Mamma Mia," no less.

I adore both of them but have been disappointed by both too

[quote]his Indian name should've been Plays With Camera.

Few people could turn a phrase like Kael.

Blythe Danner was as much a WASP as Streep but Kael adored her.

R62, didn't she also like Bette Davis and Katherin Hepburn who are both WASPS to the max? Pretty clueless on Streep's part.

Yes, she loved Davis and Hepburn, so I think Streep's comment pretty much misses the mark. Oliver Stone once said that he absolutely adored Pauline Kael when he was young and coming up in Hollywood, and when he started making movies and she didn't like them, he was absolutely horrified, since he took her so seriously. I think that's probably what happened with Streep too--she was a smart girl who had been to Vassar and Yale, and probably read kael pretty reverently before she started appearing in movies, and was gobsmacked that Kael did not appreciate her intelligence.

Kael had very decided tastes about things, and if your judgment of a critic was whether she agree with your own tastes, then that's a pretty thin criterion. What was illuminating for me about Kael was that she made you want to see the movies she really liked so you could see what she saw. There were a few times when she went into embarrassing fangurl mode ("Last Tango in Paris" was the most infamous, and she admitted later she sounded unbalanced in the review), but there were other times when her strong appreciations really made you take a movie more seriously than you might have or (if you agreed with her) really appreciate the ardent style of her review. Her famous appreciation of "Nashville" is a classic example.

I've worked through 5 different copies (!) of 5001 Nights at the Movies, because I've loved it to death--I always use it as a guide for watching old movies. Sometimes I love it most when she doesn't like the movie or the performers, because she could be so hilariously flippant. Her favorite performers to go off on were the actresses Kathryn Grayson and Irene Dunne (she could not abide prissiness--she didn't like Julie Andrews either, whom I adore), and it's fun just finding the movies they did in the index and then read how bitchy she can be about them in the reviews. But she's also great when there's someone whom she thinks is incompetent but whose she fully appreciates, like Sonja Henie and Ruby Keeler.

I agree that the infamous "Paulettes" (most of whom were gay men) have tried to adopt her unusual combination of smart-aleck observations and Olympian tone with very limited success. I don't think she's to blame for that anymore than you can blame a strong novelist with a distinctive voice (like Faulkner or Woolf) for the crappy imitations that come in their wake. Most attempts at takedowns that I've ever read of Kael (most infamously, the nasty one by Renata Adler) only make me even more convinced how much I like Kael.

Sadly, most film reviewers and even just average film fans of a certain age (about 10 years younger than me and below) were far more influenced by Roger Ebert than Kael.

Adler's takedown of Kael really is nuts, if you read it. It's so LONG. She really must have despised her.

She also loved Cybill Shepherd because she felt Shepherd showed the underside of being the gorgeous WASP. Like everyone, she went for the throat with At Long Last Love but turned around and wrote with great astuteness as to why she was so effective in Taxi Driver.

And let's not forget that many of her bitchiest lines are still quoted by DL. Any Lucy/Mame thread always quotes "decked out in Thea Van Runkle's abominations..."

Adler was once addicted to Another World. The storyline where Christine Jones was poisoning Mac Corey was must watch TV for her and when one of the characters committed suicide, she was "shaken".

"Heathers, where is thy sting?"

She loved Miss Faye as our favourite MOMMIE!

And NEVER FORGET she was one of the few who praised DL Princess Jessica Lange in "King Kong". Kael was way ahead of the curve at times and I always admired her for never jumping on any bandwagon, positive or negative.

Like other posters, I loved reading her even when I found myself in complete disagreement.

And she won me over forever with her assessment of Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest, a glowing, gobsmacked review of a performance that was almost universally derided and ridiculed by other critics.

I often disagreed with her, but I always liked her style. Her observations were usually interesting, even if I saw things a different way

R25 I never really got why she was hell bent on minimizing Orson Welles' contribution to Citizen Kane. I mean, it was his project.

I think the Citizen Kane thing happened because early on Kael had some well-publicized fights with auteurist critics like Andrew Sarris, so she wanted to emphasize the contributions of others besides the director. It was especially odd because Kael was one of the few critics to do justice to Welles' Chimes at Midnight, which was pretty much buried at the time.

She hated Tom Cruise. I remember her review of Top Gun where she made fun of how Kelly McGillis had to practically contort her body so she wouldn't tower over Cruise.

[quote] This online critic

Online critic = anyone with a blog or a website

didn't Kael really upset Streisand with her review of Nuts?

I think she said something like men don't pay top dollar for sex with women like Streisand.

And her review of Cruise in "Born on the 4th of July" which she hated: "He might as well be playing the captain of the tennis team."

I don't think Kael said that about "Nuts". Every OTHER critic in the world did though. Her best line about Streisand (again, paraphrasing, too lazy to look it up), one I reference all the time: "She looks like many girls coming home from work on the subway. She is both every woman and one of a kind and that is what makes a star."

P.S. Streisand wrote and told Kael she agreed with her pan of "Funny Lady" but I'm sure she hated what Kael said about her in "Star Is Born", a really funny mean review. "Barbra, apparently unaware of the concept of voice reproduction, runs around the house looking for him" (when she hears her dead husband on tape singing). And, better, at the car wreck when Kristofferson dies: "She looks like she wants to shove him into a sack and get on with her mourning." So true!

(I think it was "get on with her grieving", actually).

And she loved Bridget Fonda in "Scandal", said she was like a little teenage drag queen or something like that. Didn't go for Joanne Whalley-Kilmer as much though. One of those I disagreed on.

Great dig on Jack Lemmon in her review of "Short Cuts" too: "Every time I see Jack Lemmon tug at his collar, I groan at the thought of a lost evening."

Guess what movie this is: "You watch Bruce Willis fail at the simple task of playing a drunk and listen to Melanie Griffith's metallic whine (if it's her only voice, she'd better be careful how she is cast)... These are talented people. What happened?"

"Doesn't seem like the kind of (sex) a woman would get into. (Are we supposed to get turned on FOR her?" regarding Lattanzi's bare ass to camera in "Rich and Famous" with Jackie Bisset.

Because it was Cukor at the helm, Pauline caught a LOT of shit for what was perceived as a homophobic review (I disagree but whatever...) People still bring it up as a reason not to like her.

Any essayist (or blogger) proclaiming Kael a bad writer had better be prepared to back up such an assertion with iron-clad examples, delineated in faultless prose. The bitter dillettante linked at R18 failed to do anything like this.

I didn't always agree with her, and sometimes thought she was just plain wrongheaded, But she wrote more thoughtful, more engaging prose than anyone writing movie reviews today. Next to her, Roger Ebert was a sophomoric hack. (Well, next to nearly anyone, Ebert was a hack, but...)

Her later stuff was awful--meandering and often incoherent. Her major contribution was a willingness not to praise typical "critic" fare like prestige pictures, foreign films, etc. and she noticed new directors before her peers. But that was all early in her career--the critics who came later were far better thinkers and writers.

[quote] Any essayist (or blogger) proclaiming Kael a bad writer had better be prepared to back up such an assertion with iron-clad examples, delineated in faultless prose. The bitter dillettante linked at [R18] failed to do anything like this.

Do you really expect an in-dept analysis from a self-proclaimed "on line" critic?

Film criticism has largely died, because there is no audience for it.

R85 name them.

[quote] Adler's takedown of Kael really is nuts, if you read it. It's so LONG. She really must have despised her.

I always thought Adler loathed her so much because Adler belonged to the highbrow side of the NY literary world (as did Sontag) where you felt you had to exhibit your passion for "difficult" European film and modernist literature, and Kael just didn't care about that stuff at all. She was taken so much more seriously as a critic than Adler did, and yet she wasn't Ivy educated and she mocked the pretentiousness of the kinds of European filmmakers Adler approached hat in hand.

I don't think she was exactly anti-intellectual so much as pro-trash. I think when she loved a film, she could be very intellectual. Or when she really hated a film.

R87, I"m not R85, but I do think there are critics online who are as good as Kael, you will just never see them on tv. The primary one I'm thinking of currently is Ed Gonzalez for Slant Magazine. I also like Jonathan Rosenbaum but he can be hit or miss.

She was no Penelope Gilliatt in her Central Park West apartment.

Also, Adler is kind of nuts.

R2, how many times do you think a critic sat through a film? In the days of screenings, the projectionist ran the film once. The room would be used thoughout the day, so they could not say "Please run it for me one more time.". It was not like going to the movies with continuous showings. All critics saw films once before filing their review. In fact, even now with screeners, I bet most critics watch the film just once

I think you are trying to be cleaver because Kael famously did not rewatch films. Even if she saw it years before, she did not see any point to sitting through same film twice...even if she loved it.

There were times she didn't understand how "the gay" worked.

This is from her review for the film [italic]A Special Day[/italic] starring Sophia Loren & Marcello Mastroianni:

"When the housewife tenderly begins to make love to the homosexual and puts his hand on her magnificent melon breast, it's embarrassingly tasteful. Your first thought may be [italic]Pizza and Sympathy[/italic], but it's your next that's fatal. The man lies there politely, joyously; his face is drawn, tense utterly still. How can you have any feeling for man who doesn't enjoy being in bed with Sophia Loren?"

R15 it's who. Who is the subject pronoun -- who is at the door?

Whom is the object pronoun ---I will give the book to whom? To whom will I give the book?

Or Who do I give the book to?

And yes, this is correct.

Kael was a good writer but narrow minded and not knowledgeable.

I liked reading her stuff but then I also liked reading Dorothy Parker for the same bitchiness acerbic wit. They were both good writers but good critics? Depends whether or not you agree with their reviews, I suppose.

Quick personal anecdote...somewhere back in the mid 80s my brother was dating a woman who was friends with a fairly low level movie publicist in Chicago. Because of that we were invited to a lot of "private" (I'd say maybe 50 people) screenings for critics. Siskal and Ebert were notorious for showing up late and leaving early.

One of the most memorable was David Lynch's Blue Velvet. We went into it absolutely cold but S&E obviously went into it with prepared press packets and I'd be generous by saying they maybe watched half of the movie. Interesting to read their reviews though knowing they didn't actually watch the movie. Meanwhile we left scratching our heads and wondering WTF to make of the film. Was it brilliant (which it was visually) or totally incomprehensible?

I'm still not sure I know but interesting post r92. I can tell you for a fact that there is (or was) a private screening room in The Chicago Theater which was pretty cool but even in the mid 80s getting the critics to actually watch the entire film once was a hurdle because...deadlines you know. Repeated viewings in order to write a really thoughtful review? Not even back then.

R95 What is not to get in 'Blue Velvet'? It is very clear, certainly no 'Inland Empire'

One of her worst opinions was saying that the remake of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" was possibly the best film of its kind ever made, or some rubbish like that. I thought she loved it because it took place in San Francisco. I mean, there's no other explanation.

One of my students, about twenty years ago, wrote an analysis of the homophobia that runs through Kael's criticism (he was a very smart gay man, who has been successful in the business). I've never been able to read her with much pleasure since.

R97. The remake of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" IS possibly the best film of its kind ever made.

Aside from Pauline Kael and Jonathan Rosenbaum, are there any other film critics who books worth reading?

r100: James Agee's reviews are great and sometimes very funny, and Andrew Sarris's are excellent and were hugely influential in the 60s and early 70s.

Ebert is okay but feels half-baked to me. I swear, the only other one I loved (and would quote) is Libby Gelman- Waxner aka Paul Rudnick from PREMIERE magazine. His work was amazing, very of the time, lines like "Demi Moore may be the only woman who is using acting as a stepping stone to modeling" and the like.

There is one book/collection out there. "If You Ask Me" was the column.

One of Kael’s best early reviews was of ‘Victim’, the 1961 Dirk Bogarde movie about a married gay man who was being blackmailed. Kael pointed out that the film, which was supposedly “daring” and supportive, actually used very retrograde ideas about homosexuality. Bogarde’s relationship with his wife was shown as pure and real, while Bogarde’s relationships with men were physical, transitory. She was right, too. And this was a review written at the time of the film’s release, when gay sex was illegal in the US and UK. Kael could be crude and flip, and not all of her writing holds up, but I never bought her as a homophobe.

[quote]And she won me over forever with her assessment of Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest, a glowing, gobsmacked review of a performance that was almost universally derided and ridiculed by other critics.

I have to say I enjoyed reading Kael's review more than the movie itself. I know it's a camp classic, but I have always hated it.

John Simon's film reviews from the 70s are hilariously bitchy--as Spy Magazine once said, he 'could not stand women less pretty than he [was]," and so his reviews of the unusual looking female stars of the early and mid 70s (most preeminently of Barbara Streisand and Liza Minnelli) are just extended cruel rants about how unattractive he finds them. They are so over the top they become almost parodic.

Libby first edition and signed.

Simon famously said Sandy Dennis looked like "a stillborn calf". She hated him, needless to say.

Also "Sandy Dennis has made an acting technique out of post nasal drip."

Kael's reviews from the 60s and 70s read at first glance at homophobic because she uses the term "faggot" really easily--but remember so did a lot of other straight people in NYC trying to be hip at the time (there's of course the infamous video you can see of Barbra Stresiand whipping Harrison Ford on the set of an Indiana Jones movie when she visited one day and eliciting a laugh from the crew by saying, "What am I, a faggot?"--and this was done AFTER Kael had stopped using the term). Her husband, the father of her daughter, was a gay man, and many of her most beloved male friends and protegés were openly gay.

I've read a lot of her movie reviews. She wasn't a good critic. She said a lot of weird things. And she could not review a movie without mentioning other movies and other actors that had nothing to do with the movie she was reviewing.

[quote]John Simon's film reviews from the 70s are hilariously bitchy

I used to love reading his books for this reason. He had a collection of reviews of American films of the 1970s and maybe 5% of them were really positive. All of the classics people remember from that decade just got trashed. It's hard to picture someone like that holding a job today.

R107, that was Kael's observation of Dennis. Simon very correctly noted that Dennis pointed her finger more often and rudely than an Uncle Sam poster.

I think her first big impression on me was her review of Altman's Popeye. When she wrote something like "Shelley Duval seems woefully miscast in the role she was born to play" she had me. Up to then my experience with reviews was Leonard Maltin's big book that was updated every year.

[quote]I'd be generous by saying they maybe watched half of the movie.

I sat behind a local TV movie critic in a theater and he left before the film was even half over. Out of curiosity I watched his channwl that evening and he reviewed the film, which I knew he didn't really see. Ever since then I have never trusted any movie critic.

R95 is especially interesting because Ebert loathed Blue Velvet. I think he gave it a one star review, which I always thought was ridiculous.

[quote] I'd be generous by saying they maybe watched half of the movie.

Once someone accused George Bernard Shaw of doing the same sort of thing with his reviews. His reply: "One doesn't have to eat the whole apple to know that it is rotten."

R112, that wasn't Kael's take on Duvall in "Popeye" at all. At all.

She was a great critic, and the proof in that is how influential she was, how many imitators she had, and more than just her imitators, how many she personally inspired to become their own kind of writers--real writers, not mere imitations of her. The quality of her work, her writing style and her intelligence, and her generosity to those other writers, all far outweigh any of her detractors' potshots, which she never bothered to acknowledge. They weren't worth it then, and they're certainly not worth it here.

Simply, she had a certain talent as a writer, but with a marked disdain for both film, and the craft of filmmaking. She had no love for it, no affection. Her writing was as cold as she appeared to be.

A bit troubling that she’s remembered, even if vaguely, while a true giant like Andrew Sarris - with a true passion and love for film and writing - is sadly forgotten.

R118, the last word I would use for her writing is "cold". If she had a disdain for filmaking, I don't think she would have loved De Palma and Altman, two filmakers with LOTS of technique.

R100 - I agree with those mentioning Andrew Sarris' books. (Confessions of a Cultist and Politics & Cinema are the two books.)

I also strongly recommend Robin Wood. He's written a number of books on directors, including one on Bergman and a phenomenal one on Hitchcock. (For the Hitchcock one, get the revised Hitchcock's Films Revisited). I'd also recommend Wood's first-rate book Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. I think he revised that a few years later as well. I believe Wood is the first critic to come out as gay - IIRC, in the pages of Film Comment Magazine in the early 1970s.

Another book you might want to check out is A History of Narrative Film by David A. Cook. He starts at the very beginning, with explanations of such topics as the thumatrope & the zeotrope. Eventually it leads to an exploration of silent movies, movie genres, directors, moguls, technical & creative innovations, etc. It encompasses both Hollywood and international cinema. (For example the chapter on Orson Welles is wonderful.) The pictures that illustrate his point are outstanding. One two-page spread that stands out in my mind is the breakdown of the shot sequence of Hitchock's Sabotage. I learned more about film history and how a films works from having read this book than any other.

R120, thank you for the recommendations, I will check the narrative film book out!

[quote]there's of course the infamous video you can see of Barbra Stresiand whipping Harrison Ford on the set of an Indiana Jones movie when she visited one day and eliciting a laugh from the crew by saying, "What am I, a faggot?"

Where can one find this?

R73 and R74, I'll admit it has been years since I read the book with "Raising Kane" and the two scripts, but my memory is that she was mainly responding to what the original script, the shooting script, and the final film suggest. I remember the professor who taught my undergrad film course in the '70s and who was a believer in autour theory and lover of Welles' work. He said that the evidence supported the bulk of what Kael wrote, and he didn't like most of Kael's criticism.

[quote] Simply, she had a certain talent as a writer, but with a marked disdain for both film, and the craft of filmmaking. She had no love for it, no affection. Her writing was as cold as she appeared to be.

It sounds like you've never read one word of hers. She was all about loving filmmaking. One of her books is even entitled "Movie Love."

[quote] Where can one find this?

Shame on Barbra.

She could really turn a phrase: I have always remembered her description of Richard Gere in AMERICAN GIGOLO: "...he seems lost in his own placid beauty."

She never got to see Gere in "The Mothman Prophecies."

No way Kael said that stillborn calf line, R111. She thought Sandy Dennis was great and "quite beautiful" in "Come Back to the 5 & Dime..." Maybe Kael did the "post nasal drip" line, though. Who said the one about every line coming out and taking ten minutes to dodge cars on the freeway or something like that?

P.S. Threads like this are exactly why I love DL. Lots of smart informed cultural people on here, no matter how much the malcontents try to claim otherwise,

Had the imdb boards remained of this calibre, they'd never have been shut down. (Still a mistake, in my opinion).

R129, Simon said the stillcorn calf line, but Kael's post nasal drip line was so famous that Dennis admitted that she was right and worked to correct it. In fact, to show Kael's influence, the post nasal drip line was used in several of poor Sandy's obituaries.

I don't know the source but one critic said Dennis was the only actress who could put a pause in "Uh".

Simon's notorious review of Dennis in "The Fox". Hilariously bitchy.

Pauline Kael has aptly observed that Miss Dennis has “made an acting style out of postnasal drip." It should be added that she balances her postnasal condition with something like prefrontal lobotomy, so that when she is not a walking catarrh she is a blithering imbecile. She has carried that most repugnant of Method devices — taking one or two trial runs on every sentence, if not phrase, one utters — to the level of a tic: her every line of dialogue issues in triplicate ready to be notarized. Superimpose on this a sick smile befitting a calf's head in a butcher's shop, an embryonic laugh that emerges as an aural stillbirth, and an epic case of fidgets, and you have not so much a performance as a field trip for students of clinical psychiatry.

I love how Kael is being criticized for referring to other films and actors and for disagreeing with the mainstream.

Are they not things that make one a good and interesting critic?

This thread reminds me that I used to go to the movie theater to educate and challenge myself (thanks to critics like Kael), and now I go merely to be entertained. Huge difference.

One of the great things about her New Yorker work is that they allowed her to write as short or long a piece as she wished (or at least it seems so, reading them years later). She might do 500 words or 5,000, and the short ones were not always pans and the long ones were certainly not always raves.

There are few venues left that allow long essays in criticism. Even the New Yorker today, except for some occasional book reviews that become big explorations of cultural or historical themes, rarely allows more than a page and a half or two.

I remember Kael pretty much blamed the decline of Hollywood movies on Star Wars. I wonder how much truth there is to her assertion.

R136, actually, she blamed it on Spielberg (whom she loved and championed) and Lucas.

Thanks, R131 and R132 (same person?) I stand corrected and always laughed at Simon's take that Dennis's every line "issues in triplicate". I have that one blue book of his ("Something to Declare", I think, though my memory is getting less sharp on these things clearly).

I wonder how much truth there is to the notion that Kael retired early so that she wouldn't have to review Oliver Stone's "The Doors" because she thought it was "soooo bad." (She did get very sick for a while there, which she acknowledges in her review of one lesser Winger movie that was ignored. "Everybody Wins"? Jesus, I have waited too late to go on "Jeopardy" apparently. I used to know all of this stuff by rote).

A relatively recent VF article about Kael, her ill-fated attempt at Hollywood and her obsession with James Toback.

BTW, Kael was asked to read the screenplay of "Annie". She was appalled by it but pointed out that if a locket was halved it would be impossible to rejoin, which was an integral part of the story. The change was made to the movie.

Kael's take on Sally Field's notorious "You like me" speech was dead on. She said that in that moment, she revealed why she was such a painfully limited actress. She wasn't an actress to express herself or to be an artist. She was an actress so people would like her.

Did Shawn ever state why he created the bizarre situation where each of his film critics was only able to write for 6 months out of the year?

I love this thread.

It's sad that film criticism is pretty much dead. There is only one film critic i follow - Walter Chaw from filmfreakcentral. He is not well known, but i love his reviews. Sorry for offtop.

Not off topic, thanks for the recommendation.

Sally's book comes out in the fall and I will definitely read it. As I said elsewhere, she was the most tightly wired nervous actor I ever met/worked with. Really odd.

I like Pauline's review of "Punchline" and Field: "Her plaintive look is getting a bit scary."

R143, you should follow Ed Gonzalez too. I am attaching his list of top 10s here. Like Kael, I don't always agree with him (Steve McQueen is a glaring example) but he is an excellent writer and critic.

r137, what exactly did she say about Spielberg? I never knew she blamed it on him, I just thought she blamed Lucas.

What were her favorite films?

I very much liked Sheila Benson, formerly of the LA Times, now semi-retired.

Sometimes Pauline would not even bother with detail. Her total review of "Steel Magnolias": "Two hours of fingernails screeching on a blackboard."

"What were her favorite films?"

I don't think she had any. From what I recall she barely liked anything.

Bullshit. She loved "Nashville", "Last Tango...", "Shoeshine", "Shoot the Moon", "Crimes of the Heart", "The Elephant Man", what else...

Kael loved Citizen Kane and Singin in the Rain.

You know she would have loved Sofia Coppola.......

Maybe but I wonder if she would've found "Lost in Translation" whiney?

R152, I think she would have loved it.

She thought Aretha Franklin should have gotten the Oscar for "The Blues Brothers".

R12. I loved Premiere magazine, the print version.

R 12, sorry meant r102

"You know she would have loved Sofia Coppola......."

If that's true then that proves she was a piece of shit as a critic.

[quote]Bullshit. She loved "Nashville", "Last Tango...", "Shoeshine", "Shoot the Moon", "Crimes of the Heart", "The Elephant Man", what else...

Bonnie and Clyde (her rave is what got her the job at the New Yorker), Godfather I & II, Mean Streets, Melvin & Howard, Blow Out, Murmur of the Heart, Masculin Feminin, Z, The Battle of Chile, Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000...

But she also liked Jaws, ET, Cabaret, Singin in the Rain, Lady Sings the Blues so she was an everywoman.

She actually had fairly wide-ranging tastes. More than she's sometimes given credit for, I think.

What did she think of G?

Actually Vincent Canby was an excellent critic (certainly the best the NYT has ever had) and His tastes were not always predictable , just more even tempered. He had some contrarian opinions but it never seemed like he was being contrarian for the sake of it, which Kael often did.

Her entire review of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" remains amazingly perceptive about what the movie was and what it would usher in. The second review is of "Cattle Annie and Little Britches" and is in essence, a love letter to Amanda Plummer.

Didn't always agree with Pauline--she praised some pretty limp movies, but I always agreed with her about Streep. You can always see Streep acting and making choices. She's never just being the character like a more relaxed actress. That works on stage, which is an unnatural environment, but I find it distracting onscreen. I only really like Streep in films like The Devil Wears Prada where she's playing a character who's controlled and mannered. Could not figure out why (still can't) she got every good part that came along in the 80s. She wasn't as annoying as Gwyneth in her heyday, but she was overcast in the same way.

I think the real tell with Streep is that she has tons of awards and nominations, but, as others have pointed out, no great movies. The Deerhunter was probably as good as it got.

Love that she trashed The Sound of Music in the 60s.

Then there's Bonnie And Clyde. Bosley Crowther wrote a scathing review of B&C in the New York Times, and thought the violence was unnecessary. Kael praised the movie telling her readers that, effectively, this was a new era in cinema. Her review caused an about face and change of opinion by many critics who had originally panned the movie, including John Simon and Richard Shickel.

In her review of Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST, she said that Eva Marie Saint resembled an "albino Negro". It was funny and appalling at the same time. She's made other un-PC remarks about blacks and gays. Sorta like the Hannah Arendt of film critics. She too, was a cunt.

Read the review that R162 posted.

She is so vivid in presenting her insights about Raiders and her description of Cattle Annie is so rich that even though it is clearly a shit film, you want to see it so you can compare it to her review.

Speaking of other greats, J. Hoberman was someone I read regularly for his incisive and rigorous reviews of films which he often placed in their sociological contexts. After a distinguished 33-year career at the Village Voice, he was let go "for cost-cutting reasons," in 2012.

[quote]The economic factors that drove one of America’s best critics to become a blogger are not subsiding. When an observer looks at the creeping presence of entertainment and fiction into what used to be informative, the critic seems doomed. It sounds cliche, but it is clear that our entertainment and news have become increasingly sensationalized in the last decade (fake news, Trump’s twitter, glitzy superhero films). I fear that the hatchet job film critic, Mendelsohn’s “monomaniacal controversialist,” will only increase in popularity. In a world that values shiny objects over substance, the hatchet job has a place at the table of criticism. Will our great social critics, the people that can use our art to teach us about our society, ever get back their platform to comment on our society? Or has America stopped listening?

What did she think of G?

"What she's not is human." - but that was more a comment on the role in "Garp" than Glenn herself.

It must be hard for anyone of a certain younger age to imagine a world where studios actually catered to great critics like Kael in hopes of a rave review (why she got in a bit of trouble for reviewing a work print of "Nashville" and not the finished product. And Julia Phillips sneaked her a peak of "Taxi Driver" in hopes of her praise and got it). There is no critic alive now that merits that kind of attention -- or that anyone even looks forward to knowing what they think of a certain film coming out.

A very different time when film reviews were essays and the writing itself was what could impress. A long gone art. (Yet another one).

I'm curious as to why someone upthread thinks she would have loved Sofia Coppola's work. Do others agree that she would have?

[quote]Then there's Bonnie And Clyde. Bosley Crowther wrote a scathing review of B&C in the New York Times, and thought the violence was unnecessary. Kael praised the movie telling her readers that, effectively, this was a new era in cinema. Her review caused an about face and change of opinion by many critics who had originally panned the movie, including John Simon and Richard Shickel.

Yes, R164, Kael was prescient about Bonnie and Clyde, which opened the floodgates for graphic violence which still dominates movies, 50 years later.

[quote]A landmark movie, this account of the lives of the 30s outlaws Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) keeps the audience in a state of eager, nervous imbalance; it holds our attention by throwing our disbelief back in our faces. In a sense it's the absence of sadism-it is the violence without sadism-that throws the audience off balance. The brutality that comes out of the innocent "just-folks" Barrow-family gang is far more shocking than the calculated brutalities of mean killers. And there is a kind of American poetry in a stickup gang seen chasing across the bedraggled backdrop of the Depression-as if crime were the only activity in a country stupefied by poverty. - Pauline Kael

I can see her liking "Virgin Suicides" because of its lack of overt manipulation of emotions -- which pretty much applies to all of Sophia's work, for better or worse. I still think she would have scoffed at lines like "Here I am making a commercial when I could be doing a play" in "Lost in Translation". (It annoyed the fuck out of me, talk about White People Problems). But I bet she would have loved Murray since I am pretty sure she already did.

I bet she would've HATED "Mystic River" though and been right. And probably rolled her eyes at "Milk" too -- and, again, it would be a case where she would be wrong. But that's what I loved about her.

Of what movie did she say, "Beetlejuice would spit in this movie's eye"? (I wonder what she would have thought of "Birdman"?)

I also think Kael would have loved the streaming services like Netflix and their content.

One of her best observations about Streep was that she couldn't imagine her from the neck down. She puts so much emphasis into one element of her performance, i.e., the hair or accent or both, that the rest of her simply fades away. One of the reasons she mistrusted Streep was because she was so stagey. She thought she put so much thought and preparation into her performances that it allowed for no freedom and for Kael, freedom in front of the camera was the greatest performance.

For better or worse, at least Streep does attempt foreign accents, unlike too many American actors.

I also think Kael would have liked Sofia Coppola. I think she would have been especially taken with "Marie Antoinette" and "The Blind Ring," skewering as they do the exact kind of WASPishness that Streep elucidated.

The Blind Ring = The Bling Ring (!)

[quote] Bonnie and Clyde (her rave is what got her the job at the New Yorker), Godfather I & II, Mean Streets, Melvin & Howard, Blow Out, Murmur of the Heart, Masculin Feminin, Z, The Battle of Chile, Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000...

Well, if she liked those movies, that shows good taste. I've seen all but one on that short list, and all of them were excellent.

"For Jonah..." is a (forgotten?) gem. I would never have seen it if it hadn't been for a Film Studies class I took in college in the early 1980s (thanks, Prof. Thomas).

She was particular in her tastes, obviously. And maybe panned too many good or very good films. But she was never boring.

This is an old Geocities site that has several of her capsule reviews, if anyone's curiouis

Pauline Kael was right about Meryl Streep compare her portrayal of Julia child to that of Dan ackroyd he won hands down.

Pauline's review of Carrie, which I crossposted to the Carrie thread. It's interesting that she mentioned a Joyce Carol Oates story and some movie exec must have read it and commissioned "Smooth Talk" because of it.

Joyce Carol Oates is creepier than Stephen King, in some cases.

That indeed was how much influence she had. Very New York intellectual but still connected to the masses, just the kind of approval the studios needed.

And she never fell for hype. I felt so much better when, after I hated "Outrageous Fortune" upon viewing, she wrote, "All I can tell those who don't find it funny is that they are not alone." I was so sick of hearing how those awful Touchstone comedies like "Ruthless People" had such "perfect structure", a very ';80s bullshit term.

Oh, I'm she she "liked' some movies. But of her hundreds of movie reviews not many of them were very complimentary. One movie that she didn't like was "American Graffiti", which was almost universally praised by other critics. One of her criticisms were that the movie was chauvinistic; she found it offensive that the fates of the male characters were revealed at the end but not the female characters. And she said the worst parts of the movie were the ones with John and Toad; everyone I knew who saw the movie said that the scenes with John and Toad were the BEST parts. After reading her review for "American Graffiti", all I could think was how stupid it was.

She liked plenty of movies, and she was often effusive in her praise. She just didn't always like the movies everyone else liked. 'Network' is a good example of a movie I personally love but that she was very critical of. Her review is still excellent and thoughtful and makes you consider the movie from a different angle.

Come on r182, I think Marie Antoinette was more connected to the masses than she was. Very condescending and intellectual - the filmmakers were well aware that her reviews in no way translated to dollars.

Yeah, she hated getting "yelled at" by Chayefsky for over two hours.

I loved her review of "Deathtrap" where she talks about a man with an obvious Jewish last name turning in full close up, revealing the most ridiculous big nose in film history, as he says to Michael Caine, "Putz". "That's the Lumet touch", she said and I laughed my ass off because it was so damn true.

R183, was "everyone you knew" guys? And it wasn't Toad and John anyways. She said the scenes with Debbie and Toad were the worst staged in the movie, which is different than being the worst in the movie. She correctly noted that Toad was a total joke character but his reveal, that he was MIA in Viet Nam, meaning we were meant to take his character seriously.

Sorry to disagree, R185, but there was still a lot more "art" to the movie business then. After she retired, less and less so (part of why she gave it up). But in the height of the maverick film making in the ';60s and '70s, critics like Kael were a big part of the movement.

The "masses" may be pushing it (I meant more that her style was still accessible and fun to read) but the studios and filmmakers like DePalma really wanted (and courted) her praise. For dollars? Maybe less than for awards and for big ego strokes. Her opinion meant a lot and, as noted here, her praise was not a given -- unlike the current batch of said critics who just want their quotes in the movie ads. vomit.

Funny...at the time a lot of people took issue with her for being too indulgent with "pop" and "trash," and now she's too condescending and intellectual. I actually think that was one of her strengths, that she insisted on seeing movies as a mass art, but still thought they should be held to a high standard.

R189, Kael once was asked what movie she would recommend that the whole family would enjoy and she said "Cleopatra Jones." Could you imagine John Simon, truly a condescending intellectual, ever even seeing CJ, much less recommending it?

Critics, filmmakers and academics including Camille Paglia, David Edelstein, Brian Kellow, Geoffrey O'Brien, James Toback, and Todd McCarthy gathered to discuss the legacy of legendary New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael at this special New York Film Festival panel.

You lost me at Camille Paglia.

John Simon was famous for his mostly scathing critiques of the films he reviewed for over 50 years and he's apparently still going strong on his blog. Who knew? I wonder if anyone remembers him ever actually liking anything.

Simon was generally more positive about foreign films (especially Ingmar Bergman and, for some reason, Lina Wertmuller) than American ones. But even then there was a lot he didn't like.

I must be odd because the only Bergman film I've seen that I've liked is The Seventh Seal. Everything else he's done bores me to death.

R193, Simon's notoriety came, as noted above, for his incredibly bitchy and vicious comments about the looks of actresses and singers. In Taxi Driver, he said Cybill Shepherd looked like "Mussolini in drag", which is funny but not very relevant or accurate. Onstage, he savaged Zoe Caldwell in "Colette" and relished the negative attention he got from it. He said "Miss Caldwell is fat and unattractive in every area of her face, body and limbs thought I admit I have never examined her teeth. When she climactically reveals a sprawlingly uberous left breast, the sight was nearly enough to force the heterosexual third of the audience screaming into the camp of the majority. Colette had sex appeal. Miss Caldwell has sex repeal." Simon was always a homophobe and when Liz Smith revealed he said "I hope all these homosexuals in the theater get AIDS", he then fell over the first AIDS related play he could find to review.

Simon was/is a total fame whore himself. He once appeared on an SNL filmed sequence playing himself and he was totally pathetic. He had a long running feud with Jay Cocks of Time because he revealed to him that Simon's girlfriend was a drug addict.

Now, be serious, who in the masses would care about a movie being too purple or too cheesy? She appealed only to the snobbiest highbrow intellectuals!

You'd have to be a drug addict to sleep Simon--loathsome misogynist.

Just in case anyone was wondering if you can have a doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and still be an egregious, hate-spewing blight on humanity.

I remember Rex Reed saying Sean Penn was as ugly as a hamburger.

As a kid I didn't get it. (and still don't)

Who thinks hamburgers are ugly? Even the vegetarians and vegans have their own versions of burgers.

I just ran across an old interview with Dick Cavett, where Jerry Lewis is talking about Pauline Kael, among other critics, the other night on Decades. Starts at 3:20 in the linked video

I bet she would have liked The Master, since there was talk about films she would have liked.

She gave Lewis a rave in "King of Comedy" a movie she detested. "His performance has the weight of authenticity." An interesting pan of DeNiro in what she calls "a studied performance", the same thing she hated about Streep. She even turns on Scorsese, and is very clear about her reasons. I would have thought she would have liked Sandra Bernhardt but she calls her "a drag queen terrorist" and "the screaming gargoyle."

[quote]Simon was generally more positive about foreign films (especially Ingmar Bergman and, for some reason, Lina Wertmuller) than American ones.

Yeah I remember John Simon flying out to Rome to get Wertmuller and flying back with her when she came to NY around the time of Seven Beauties.

Speaking of Simon, he penned this gem re Liza Minnelli: "The nose always en route to becoming a trunk, blubber lips unable to resist the pull of gravity, and a chin trying its damnedest to withdraw into the neck."

On another note can someone tell me what channel decades is on in NY if you get spectrum.

I’ve been dying to find this.

Not sure it will help but it's 69.2 on regular antenna TV -- which I highly recommend in general. All the regular networks and a few other cool ones like this and doesn't cost a cent.

Thanks for posting that great clip - fascinating to see Jerry Lewis speak so intelligently, not to mention Cavett taking questions from the AUDIENCE!!

I'm wondering if the female critic he reviled so much was the idiotic Penelope Gilliatt. Had to be.

58 She loved Jessica Lange more.

or Judith Crist

I think Pauline was a great writer, but her judgment was often poor and she championed people or directors that now seem ... huh? She was clearly passionate about movies, but I would not rely on her for film recommendations

[quote]Pauline Kael has aptly observed that Miss Dennis has “made an acting style out of postnasal drip." It should be added that she balances her postnasal condition with something like prefrontal lobotomy, so that when she is not a walking catarrh she is a blithering imbecile. She has carried that most repugnant of Method devices — taking one or two trial runs on every sentence, if not phrase, one utters — to the level of a tic: her every line of dialogue issues in triplicate ready to be notarized. Superimpose on this a sick smile befitting a calf's head in a butcher's shop, an embryonic laugh that emerges as an aural stillbirth, and an epic case of fidgets, and you have not so much a performance as a field trip for students of clinical psychiatry.

I don't know if the above paragraph is typical of Simon's writing, but if so, I'm not impressed. The first sentence is mostly Kael; unfortunately for Simon, the remaining sentences highlight, by their contrast, what a skilled writer she actually was. The rest of the paragraph lacks Kael's economy, originality, and precision. Sure, it's bitchy, but he's trying far too hard. It's laboured, not funny, and not nearly as clever as he thinks.

r208 is an impostor.

I would never post without knowing how to refer to a previous poster properly.

[quote]Sure, it's bitchy, but he's trying far too hard. It's laboured, not funny, and not nearly as clever as he thinks.

I agree. It's so over the top.

Am I wrong or did Streisand have something to do with having the pompous rock villain in "What's Up, Doc?" named Simon because she too hated John Simon and his reviews so much? I swear, I remember hearing/reading that as a kid, long before I knew Simon's work.

Scorcese, OP?

You not only can't spell but you don't know that Kael was correct about the rapes in CLOCKWORK ORANGE having no sensuality. Audacity, you say? You lack capacity if you can't see that the precise point of the rapes was that they lacked passion. They lacked sensuality. They were cartoon/burlesque presentations to underscore the loss of humanity they detached hoodlums were experiencing. Kubrick, insufferable as he was, was always obvious in his motives. You're a sap there.

But not everywhere. Kael's film criticism was more organic than dogmatic. She prized "authenticity" as well as camp. She loathed conventional tropes in their usual places but loved them when placed in a hall-of-mirrors, self-conscious, movie-history way. She loved references, so long as they were subtle. She liked or didn't like players based on personal reactions. She changed her mind. She had passions on top of passion when it came to film. And she was sometimes inconsistent. But one didn't read her for her doctrine. She wrote with commitment and intelligence. I never expected her to be right all the time, but her strongest convictions about individual movies still are sensible and often aligned with my own feelings, even after many years. And she seldom went for ad hominem attacks or cheap shots, except with an overt pie-in-the-face exuberance.

Simon, however, was a lazy shit. He knew he could get attention from mean-spirited and irrelevant attacks on actors and, sometimes, other film professionals. This was unfortunate because he had the intelligence and experience to get a lot of things right. But his need to decorate his writing with overwrought garbage made his value harder to locate.

I especially liked Kael's unabashed girl crushes on actresses. Her invocation of Faye Dunaway's thighs in EYES OF LAURA MARS, her appreciation of Lange even in KING KONG, her dedication to Stanwyck at all times, her take on Helen Gahagan (Douglas) in SHE - this is a voice other film lovers could listen to and dismiss the times she went off a little.

sounds possible r214

ON the MTM show there is an episode where Murray writes a play and the critic hates hate. Mary looks up his old reviews and he hates everything. I think that character is called John Stimon.

R216, along the same lines, MTM did an episode with Eric Braeden as a critic and he was obviously based on Simon. At the climax, Ted Baxter pies him.

"She correctly noted that Toad was a total joke character but his reveal, that he was MIA in Viet Nam, meaning we were meant to take his character seriously."

Toad was the comic relief in the movie but he himself was a very sympathetic character; not a "total joke" at all. And his fate at the end was not to make him be taken "seriously"; it was simply what happened to him, and it was very affected. Anyway, I Kael was full of shit about "American Graffiti", as she was about many other movies.

I wonder what John Simon would have to say about Sara Holdren. The politically correct SJW that has his old job at what is left of New York Magazine.

After reading the PK biography a few years ago, it surprised me to read about the friendships she had with various name directors, Altman being one of them. I would have thought that would be seen as a conflict of interest.

My brother's favorite college professor knew Kael from her Berkeley days. Remember Kael's short-lived relocation to Los Angeles, when she gave film development and producing a whirl? (It was an epic fail). According to my brother, around this time Warren Beatty hooked up with Kael in exchange for her glowing review of Shampoo. Rumor or fact, I'm not sure.

R215, she changed her mind? When? She never changed her mind about a movie.

This is from Andrew Sarris. There was no love lost between them when she died.

Conflict of interest? By whom? There is no legal oversight of critics.

That said, she often gave bad reivews to her friends.

What about David Thomson?

"Thomson likes a good argument, and makes one well, but in this book, at least, he’s working more in the mode of a lively dinner party guest than a re-­education camp counselor; he’s not going to pummel you into submission the way Pauline Kael would.

Really, his agenda here, besides selling books, is simply to encourage or provoke you to see a bunch of movies. Louis Menand, writing in The New Yorker a few years ago, said of “The Whole Equation,” “Thomson’s subject is not, strictly speaking, the history of the movies”; his subject is “the history of caring about the movies.” I think that’s true in essence of most of Thomson’s work — he’s one of our great enthusiasts, a Julia Child for people wanting to get their hands dirty with Net­flix."

The answer to the rather silly question posed by OP is provided in over 220 posts, with almost everyone chiming in about the various ways Pauline moved them, made them laugh, challenged them and their assumptions--how they grew up reading her in The New Yorker. That's not a good critic. That's a great critic.

A great critic with inestimable influence.

Btw--Renata Adler wanted Pauline's job. She was out to get her and she failed.

I love Adler's novel "Speedboat." I've never read her Kael takedown, but her fiction was pretty influential.

Kael's friendship with Woody Allen was over after her review of "Stardust Memories". She later said she regretted losing his friendship but the movie was just so terrible. She did give a rave to "Purple Rose of Cairo" but was still estranged from Allen.

She was aggressively & casually homophobic. While she could rate highly masterful movies with gay characters, generally she was cunty. And she could be wrong — magnificently wrong, but wildly wrong. She reminds me very much of one of my cinema studies tutors who idiolised stuff like His Girl Friday and the Von Sternberg ouvre.

R228, and what's odd is that the father of her child is gay. Andrew Sarris said she would taunt him by insinuating that he was gay in the link I posted.

She was not homophobic--that's bullshit. She had many gay friends. One movie she praised was "Victim" (1961) which was a sympathetic portrait of a persecuted homosexual man in Britain before homosexuality became legal. It's a really a tiresome accusation.

You can have gay friends and still be homophobic. (see Alec Baldwin)

I've read more "cunty" homophobic remarks among gay men here than Pauline ever could come up with. Really it's the pot calling the kettle a cunt here.

Sure, r231. And she wasn't.

[quote]She reminds me very much of one of my cinema studies tutors who idiolised stuff like His Girl Friday and the Von Sternberg ouvre.

Wait, what's wrong with His Girl Friday and Von Sternberg? (Also, Von Sternberg is more Sarris' kind of thing.)

She was the ONLY critic that could literally make me change my mind about a movie after I saw it by reading her critique. Brilliant!!! So brilliant she influenced a whole generation of critics called "Paulettes".

Yeah, r228--I echo r234--what's wrong with them?

Any Sarris fans here? I love Pauline's writing more, but I feel Sarris is more intellectual and I actually find my tastes align much more with Sarris than Kael (although I like De Palma much more than he does).

Poor Andrew Sarris--destined forever to be in the shade of Pauline. She was a friend of Molly Haskell, who ended up marrying Sarris. When Pauline was invited to the wedding, she declined, saying, "That's okay--I'll go to Molly's next wedding."

Okay, that's funny.

Another forgotten critic in Kael's shadow was Stanley Kauffmann.

Ah, yes, was Kaufmann The New Republic critic? He was excellent.

I enjoyed Kael's reviews about the films from Hollywood's Golden Age, movies she saw when she was young. She always raved about Barbara Stanwyck, even managing to praise her while bashing Streep in Silkwood. She was particularly caustic about Joan Crawford, Irene Dunne and Norma Shearer, who she hated in most things but said she "almost resembled a human being" in Private Lives.

I remember she loathed The Women, calling it a hateful attack on her gender, but she loved "Freaks."

[quote]When Pauline was invited to the wedding, she declined, saying, "That's okay--I'll go to Molly's next wedding."

Damn, that's cold. Someone recently linked to something Molly wrote about Call Me By Your Name - nice to know she's still writing.

R241, I loved him too.

Talk of Stanley Kauffmann and no mention of "Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises"????

She’s wrong about Sally Field. Her blithe summation fails to take into account the plight of actresses in the industry and Field’s own challenging journey to break out of type casting and stereotypes to tell the kind of stories and do the kind of work she felt capable of doing. Don’t mistake Kael’s flippancy for meaningful insight.

R246 Oh jog on.

As far as Sally Field goes, Kael might have grown to be annoyed by what I also think became a kind of cloying quality Field sometimes had in movies. However, Kael did say about Field that she resented having to go out to see a movie the night the second part of "Sybil" aired on tv because "Sally Field's performance went way beyond anything I was likely to see."

So, r246, don't assume Kael didn't have meaningful insight and was only always flippant.

I’m just referring to the quoted remark about her notorious Oscar speech.

R245, I don't believe Kauffmann was a homophobe. Viewed in the context of the criticism of the time, Doug Arrell defends him nearly 40 years later in his essay, "Homophobic Criticism and Its Disguises: The Case of Stanley Kauffmann."

[quote]There is much that could be said in Kauffmann's defense. He no doubt meant well, and was unconscious of the extent to which he was perpetuating the viewpoint he sought at least to moderate; certainly, he was no worse than most other critics of his time.

[quote]"Sally Field's performance went way beyond anything I was likely to see."

Did she mean that in a positive way?

Yes, r251. She said she resented having to miss Sally Field's performance because it would be better than what she would be seeing that night in a conventional movie.

I liked how she was not as middlebrow as many American critics. She often just wanted the movies to be unpretentious and fun. Her actual preferences were not always mine but then again what fun would that be to read?

I liked how she noted that Field "doesn't seem to enjoy acting anymore." She got that from her performance in "Punchline". I wonder if Sally saw that and switched gears because she had a lot more better work afterwards.

Streep and her WASP beauty?! She is part Circassian(who are Muslims) and has distant Jewish ancestry. Streep didn't look like the typical WASP beauty.

r255, Streep does not have distant Jewish ancestry--any more than anyone without going so far back we'd all be considered Jews. Go to Jew/Not Jew and Streep is labeled Not A Jew. As for Muslim--huh?

Streep is English/Dutch/Protestant. As WASP as they come.

Why does the Muslim background of most Circassians matter? Circassians themselves are very fair, like Europeans. See image below. Circassia was in fact the land that the proto-Indo-Europeans came from.

Streep has claimed some Circassian ancestry on her mother's side, probably distant.

R256 Streep thought that she had Sephardic Jewish ancestry. She could pass for a Jewish woman. She was quite right in her role in Prime.

R257 She is also part Circassian, French and Irish. That is not as WASP as they come.

R258 It matters because Circassians are not Protestant Christians. The P in WASP is for Protestant not Muslim.

Here is Kael's complete thought on Field's Oscar speech. It is hardly flippant and even if you don't agree with it, she backs up her argument.

Film critic Pauline Kael told a San Francisco audience what she thought of Sally Field’s ebullient Oscar acceptance speech, in which Field proclaimed: “I can’t deny the fact that you like me! You like me!” Said Kael: “She made it clear that she was not an actress, say, like Vanessa Redgrave, who was acting for the expressiveness, for what she could bring to a role, for the pleasure of acting. She was acting because she wanted people to like her. That, I’m afraid, is why she’s so limited as an actress. That’s what you felt in her performance. You felt that shallowness of someone who wants to be respected, who wants to be liked for what she is doing. It was a terrible revelation. It was like an awful shock, as if some terrible burst of truth had come through on the Academy Awards. I think everybody was embarrassed by that revelation.”

r259, Streep thought she had Sephardic Jewish ancestry but it turns out she didn't. Passing for Jewish isn't the same as being Jewish, obviously.

She is a mix of many things, none of them Jewish. And she is definitely a WASP, as we have defined the term. Unless of course she's Catholic--I don't think she is. But Jewish--no. And Muslim as we know it? Hardly.

For Kael to characterize Steep as WASP is completely accurate, in terms of what we know WASPs to be. Unless you want to go back hundreds and hundreds of years, calling her anything else is really a stretch.

Streep's father Harry was of German and Swiss ancestry. Her father's lineage traces back to Loffenau, Germany, from where her second great-grandfather, Gottfried Streeb, immigrated to the United States, and where one of her ancestors served as mayor (the surname was later changed to "Streep").[12] Another line of her father's family was from Giswil, Switzerland. Her mother had English, German, and Irish ancestry.[12] Some of Streep's maternal ancestors lived in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, and were descended from 17th-century immigrants from England.[13][14] Her eighth great-grandfather, Lawrence Wilkinson, was one of the first Europeans to settle in Rhode Island.[15] Streep is also a distant relative of William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania; records show that her family is among the first purchasers of land in the state.[15] Streep's maternal great-great-grandparents, Manus McFadden and Grace Strain, the latter the namesake of Streep's second daughter, were natives of the Horn Head district of Dunfanaghy, Ireland.

For the love of God, Streep was never characterized as a WASP by Kael. That suggestion came from Streep herself when she was trying to justify why Kael hated her.

"And you know what I think? That Pauline was a poor Jewish girl who was at Berkeley with all these rich Pasadena WASPs with long blond hair, and the heartlessness of them got her.”

This is how a thread goes off the rails.

Well, I agree that Streep's bitchy remarks about Pauline's lack of appreciation of her as stemming from Pauline's sense of inadequacy show just how much Pauline's remarks got under ol' Meryl's white WASPY skin. How's that?

And now we're back to Pauline.

R265, and like Sally Field, I think it was a remarkable moment of self revelation for Streep. I don't think I've ever heard her say something this thin skinned or unprofessional. It was a completely emotional comment She also proved she can play the mean girl. I think if she showed that much spontaneity in her performances, Kael would have worshipped her.

Ebert was a better critic than Kael. She was much too much enamored with her own writing and had poor judgment

Kael didn't worship anyone, and I doubt anything Streep did Kael would have genuflected in front of. But I do think Pauline would have enjoyed much more Streep's later, comic performances. She always thought Streep was more pleasing in comedy, and she was right--again.

Oh, dear, r268. "Had poor judgment"? What a sweeping and inaccurate statement. But if you're wedded to it, far be it for me me to dissuade you.

Yes, poor judgment. She advocated for things like Cruising, and often was a petty contrarian. She tried to get in the movie business with Beatty, and completely failed. Wannabe poser

R270

Cruising is fucking awezome, i like her even more now.

To borrow from the late great Julia Phillips, Kael's inability to work in Hollywood "says more about the movie business than it does about her."

She couldn't stand the filmaking-by-committee thing that was already growing (now the norm). She wanted to work with brilliant filmmakers and let them have control and that wasn't how it was done, not even at relatively cool Paramount.

:"Ride the horse in the direction it is going." - Lynda Obst

Advocated for things like Cruising? Where did she do that? I don't remember that. I don't have an encyclopedic memory, but that you'd have to prove with her words in print. She pretty much hated Friedkin.

Poor judgment? Among the movies she loved--both GODFATHER movies, SHAMPOO, CABARET, NASHVILLE, STORY OF ADELE H, BONNIE AND CLYDE, most of Godard, a lot of Truffaut, some of Antonioni, the great silent movies of Lillian Gish and Buster Keaton, much of Orson Welles, Katharine Hepburn, Stanwyck...r270, nothing you say is borne out of the truth.

She also loved the Italian realists, DePalma, Debra Winger, Satyijat Ray, Kurosawa, plenty (not all) of Bergman. I could go on and on where her judgment and taste were flawless.

R270, there's nothing new about film critics being Hollywood wannabes.

Speaking of critics... I finally watched "The Disaster Artist" last night, after weeks of defending James Franco in general and anger that he lost his nomination -- and now I am starting to think he would never have gotten it anyway. I was actually surprised how little I liked the film and how I liked Franco even less. Lately, it feels like his big outbursts are for us and not the other character/s and they ring phony -- and he has a lot of them in this film. Maybe I just don't like him as a director as opposed to when other pros (like van Sant) direct him and tone him down.

Some nice moments, as Pauline would've pointed out (maybe she would have liked Dave who grounds it all somehow) but the whole thing felt... sloppy. Give me "Ed Wood" any day.

If James Agee and Jay Cocks and Truffaut and Godard and Bogdanovich are considered "wannabe" filmmakers, than what does that make the hacks who were there all along?

^That was for r275.

R269, I'm sure there were others, but Kael worshiped Shelley Duvall.

[quote]It matters because Circassians are not Protestant Christians. The P in WASP is for Protestant not Muslim.

So using your logic if a WASP is not observant, she's not longer a WASP.

my favorite critic ever

[quote]Am I wrong or did Streisand have something to do with having the pompous rock villain in "What's Up, Doc?" named Simon because she too hated John Simon

Never heard that before. But I will say that "rock villain" was a joke it took me a minute to get; the clumsy sloppy Hugh Simon of the film, played by that great character actor whose name escapes me, would have loved being thought of as Rock Villain.

Karl admired many artists intensely but she wasn't a worshipper. She didn't have idols. Sometimes she loved without reservations (De Palma, Debra Winger, Brando, a few others), others she had huge appreciation for (Demme, Altman, Coppola). But she was not a groveler. She always expected people to maintain the high standards she was used to from them. That's another thing a great critic does: keeps the bar high and approaches every new work from that standpoint.

*Kael admired

R283 her worshiping of Toback came at a huge price.

r285, that was one thing I never understood--her love of Toback. That was the only mystery to me.

Again, not worship but love.

Poor ghetto trash. Her Hollywood aspirations and inferiority complex were legendary

r288, you have nothing to offer here but hate for her. But you know that already. How boring you are.

And why do you worship such a flawed and sad person? Pauline was a hateful mess

Zzzzzzzzzzzz.

Her essay Raising Kane was based on lies and fabrication, which is well established now. It was a shameful piece of work and she knew it. The problem is, she had a very wide readership and huge influence and even after her lies were exposed the damage was done and irreparable, to the extent that some people clearly still believe what she wrote. She was full of shit.

She wrote 15 books, won the National Book Award (the only critic who has), is part of the Library of America, was the subject of a biography, countless critical studies and a documentary. And 17 years after her death, still influences, infuriates and is deeply admired. Too bad for you, r292.

"the damage was done and irreparablethe damage was done and irreparable..." Oh, Mary!

r293 You seem to be taking this personally :(

It's purely factual that she was full of shit, used extremely dubious journalistic practices and just ignored the fact she'd been exposed as though it didn't matter. It's indefensible.

Here's wiki:

[quote]Decades after the controversy over the essay, Woody Allen told Bogdanovich that he had been with Kael immediately after she finished reading "The Kane Mutiny" in Esquire. Kael was shocked at the case made against her—including the revelation that she had taken credit for the work of Suber, something Bogdanovich learned through his own connections at UCLA. Kael asked Allen, "How am I going to answer this?"

[quote]"She never responded," Bogdanovich wrote. He noted that Kael had included "Raising Kane" in a recent collection of her essays[32]—"untouched, as though these other people's testimony didn't count or exist, as though Welles's feelings or reputation didn't matter."

[quote]By the time of Kael's death 30 years after its publication, "Raising Kane" was discredited. Film historian Richard B. Jewell, chronicler of RKO Pictures, concluded that Welles deserved his credit as the screenplay's co-author and that Kael's arguments were "one-sided and unsupported by the facts." Largely forgotten since it was revealed in 1972, the story of Kael's appropriation of the research for "Raising Kane" became news again after it was included in a 2011 biography.

[quote]Reviewing Kellow's biography for The New York Times, critic Frank Rich remarked on Kael's "sloppy professional ethics" and the fortuitous omission of the essay from the 2011 anthology, The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael. "'Raising Kane' was omitted from the Library of America volume for reasons of space … but Kellow's account suggests it should have been eliminated in any event for its improprieties."

I'd say you're the one with the agenda. Nothing will take away from her ultimate greatness as a critic. If her influence is still felt (and it is), if her books are still in print (not all are, but many) and if she's loved (she clearly is), whatever controversy there was over Welles (and I know all about it, so please don't try to educate me) inis not nothin--but it doesn't define her--except to you.

I repeat: sorry for you.

inis not nothin=is not nothing

r295 You seem to have great personal and emotional investment in Kael. Which is great. But consider the fact that you feel so compelled to defend her name against charges which are long proven and accepted facts; and against basically a nobody (me) on an obscure online forum. Now imagine that you feel that emotional about the work of Orson Welles and you're not arguing against a nobody online, but the lies and smears of a highly influential and world respected film critic.

You're right, it isn't nothing and it shouldn't define her... but it does speak of someone who wasn't above openly lying and stealing the work of others to unfairly smear a great artist who she disliked. I too admire the quality of much of her writing. I have a copy of Reeling by my bed and read it often. But Welles is my hero. And he didn't deserve what she did to him.

Disliked Welles? Apart from writing an essay that many took exception to and felt downplayed his contributions to a movie she called one of the greatest movies ever made, she consistently praised Welles. I just perused three reviews: Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons and Chimes at Midnight, and they're full of praise for him as well as for his performance in The Third Man. I suggest you reread them.

she had a hot ass, but I guess she couldn't live forever

[quote]Disliked Welles?

You think she'd write a smear piece on him full of lies and fabrications if she liked him? Raising Kane was written with one clear agenda and she didn't care if the facts contradicted her central thesis, she merely ignored them or invented new ones. While stealing another writer's research and claiming it as her own.

She may have praised Kane, Ambersons and Chimes but I can't think of many critics who didn't. That's a different thing entirely. She had many other objectionable qualities, of course. And did lots of other shitty things. Her homophobia is a matter of record. And the way she treated David Lean had a lasting impact on him and his work, unfortunately. But the worst of all is that crappy essay she wrote on Kane. And not just because of the effect it had on Welles's reputation, but also the fact that it revealed what a reprehensible and morally/factually dubious writer she could be.

Well, r300, there you go. No matter how much praise she heaped on Welles in those films it's not enough for you. And it isn't enough she didn't worship your hero Welles. And apparently David Lean was so powerless that even though he made huge movies and had huge budgets and was praised (and overpraised) by the entire movie industry, he was, according to you, irreparably wounded by Kael. It's all so laughable--attributing to her so much power.

I wish you well in your delusions, and your opinion of her are certainly your own. Many people--myself included, obviously--think she was a lot more than you say, and absolutely not what you accuse her of being. We see all the qualities that so many others see, that ultimately gave her a place in the pantheon of The Library of America. And that wounds you terribly.

Sorry for you.

[quote]No matter how much praise she heaped on Welles in those films

Well, she later wrote a long essay claiming the most famous of those films was by and large the work of someone else. You keep claiming that my points are delusional but they're all accepted facts. She wrote that essay about Kane and it has been completely discredited. The fact she plagiarized someone else's research has been proven beyond all doubt. If she truly liked and/or admired Welles, she would have recanted her lies after they were exposed. But she continued to ignore the facts and allowed that piece to be reprinted again and again, without corrections or fair attribution for the research she used and corrupted. Her homophobia is a matter of record and there's even a section on her wiki page about it, it's so well known.

And it's easy to dismiss the effect she and her friends had on David Lean after they savaged him for Ryan's Daughter, but again it's a matter of public record that he was so shaken by it that he stopped making films until Passage to India many years later. You can hear him talking about it here, if you're interested...

She wrote a great review of Chimes at Midnight basically lamenting the fact that Hollywood wouldn't finance his pictures, and that when they did somehow get made, nobody would properly distribute them. She wasn't anti-Welles.

As for Lean...was she supposed to pretend she thought Ryan's Daughter was a good film? Most critics agreed with her.

r302, are you also r292/r297?

Her alleged homophobia is not "public record," like a murder or a sex offense. It's a matter of opinion based on things she'd written. She also praised "Victim," a movie sympathetic to its gay character and made in 1961. What is on the record is an interview she gave in a gay magazine in which she tried to set the record straight, so to speak. Many of her closest gay friends discounted the charge as well.

As for David Lean, a grown man who made dozens of movies over over 40 years and who continued to make movies into his 70s--was undone by Kael and her insidious "friends"? If he felt wounded by her that's one thing, but again, he was a big boy in a business that was nothing if not cut throat and she was a critic, not a producer holding the purse strings. Give me a fucking break.

Sheesh! Her pussy stank, just like all the other ones, especially Rex Reed's.

David Lean, according to Omar Sharif, could be quite the tyrant himself. But the director of Lawrence of Arabia couldn't stand up to mean ol' Pauline and her "friends"?

And yeah, Ryan's Daughter sucked, as did Dr. Zhivago. Maybe that had something to do with it.

[quote]it's easy to dismiss the effect she and her friends had on David Lean after they savaged him for Ryan's Daughter, but again it's a matter of public record that he was so shaken by it that he stopped making films until Passage to India

Well that kind of shows how influential she was. Lean must have respected her opinion or else he wouldn't have cared that she panned Ryan's Daughter (a film I never ever heard of, though I love other David Lean movies).

Shouldn't he have just kept working, not taken such a huge break? Or were bad reviews just his excuse for not working for so long?

He often took years in between making movies, especially later. Blaming it on Pauline is pretty pathetic. Maybe it prevented him from making more shit like Ryan's Daughter and made Passage To India actually a good movie. He should have thanked Kael.

r304 Have you read her piece on VICTIM? It's mentioned in the homophobia section of her wiki page (and not in her defense):

[quote]In response to her review of Rich and Famous, several critics reappraised Kael's earlier reviews of gay-themed films, including a wisecrack Kael made about the gay-themed The Children's Hour: "I always thought this was why lesbians needed sympathy—that there isn't much they can do".[56] Similarly, her criticism of the 1961 British film Victim was that the film sought to treat gay people "with sympathy and respect—like Negroes and Jews"

Hardly the words of an enlightened mind. I've written every post that's signed r292. Kael described Kane as "a shallow masterpiece," btw. r307 It does show how influential she was, yes; but that doesn't make her cavalier attitude to filmmakers she disliked any less reprehensible. She described Lean's work as "Humorlessly meticulous, his pieces have no driving emotional energy". Whereas Martin Scorsese, who knows far more about movies than she ever did, said of Lean:

[quote]His images stay with me forever. But what makes them memorable isn't necessarily their beauty. That's just good photography. It's the emotion behind those images that's meant the most to me over the years. It's the way David Lean can put feeling on film. The way he shows a whole landscape of the spirit. For me, that's the real geography of David Lean country. And that's why, in a David Lean movie, there's no such thing as an empty landscape. Thank you, David.

But I'm sure it was fun for Pauline, wielding such power and acting the influential iconoclast, slaying dinosaurs she disliked.

r309, so you admit to being r292, who said, "I too admire the quality of much of her writing. I have a copy of Reeling by my bed and read it often." And then you do nothing in every other post but call denigrate her, insult her, say she's full of shit, and much worse. Are you schizophrenic? Maybe it's more than Pauline Kael that's your problem.

[quote]so you admit to being [R292],

I've signed every post the same, dear.

[quote]that doesn't make her cavalier attitude to filmmakers she disliked any less reprehensible

This is just ridiculous. I can't think of a single critic I like and respect who doesn't dislike some major filmmakers, sometimes vehemently. Jonathan Rosenbaum has always hated Woody Allen, David Thomson trashes several prominent figures (John Ford comes to mind) in the Biographical Dictionary of Film, etc. Criticism isn't advertising and promotion. Scorsese comes at film from the position of an enthusiast - that's great, he's very good at it, and I appreciate him documentaries about film history. He's not a critic.

Okay, dear, r311, it just seems like you're writing in different voices, much like Sybil. Or hearing them.

"Scorsese comes at film from the position of an enthusiast - that's great, he's very good at it, and I appreciate him documentaries about film history. He's not a critic."

Exactly, r312.

[quote] Jonathan Rosenbaum has always hated Woody Allen, David Thomson trashes several prominent figures (John Ford comes to mind) in the Biographical Dictionary of Film, etc.

No, I think Kael was different. She seemed to go after people she disliked, not just criticize them but to actually go on the attack. And she supported the people she did like even when the films in question didn't deserve it. In that sense, fabrication was the basis of her criticism. I think she had her view regardless of the facts or actual qualities of the work and she wrote to support that view. The problem with that is that it's then an easy path, if you're unscrupulous enough, to end up writing an entire essay which completely disregards all facts in order to smear the work of a great artist. It's shame because that piece will forever be a smear on Kael's reputation, far more than it is on Welles.

R315, no that was John Simon.

Totally not true, r292/r315. Altman once felt so aggrieved by a review she got from him that he said he wanted to punch her. And she loved Altman. Hell, she helped make him. So you're wrong. I could name others she loved and later panned--Demme, Coppola...

Add to that list Streisand.

DeNiro. Pacino.

More on Kael's homophobia:

[quote]And there was also a homophobic strain to a lot of her writing on films with gay characters and themes, which was by no means unique but certainly contrasts poorly with her very advanced, matter-of-fact writing about films with black and Hispanic characters.

[quote]The new Pauline Kael biography by Brian Kellow gets into this a bit, and it's not flattering to Kael at all. At one point he quotes Kael's review of the 1968 film "The Sergeant," starring Rod Steiger as a tormented military officer who develops a damaging crush on a private. She writes, "There is something ludicrous and sometimes poignant about many stories involving homosexuals. Inside the leather trappings and chains and emblems and Fascist insignia of homosexual 'toughs' -- [check out those ironic quotes!] -- there is so often hidden our old acquaintance the high-school sissy, searching the streets for the man he doesn't believe he is. The incessant, compulsive cruising is the true, mad romantic's endless quest for love." You can feel her going for empathy and understanding in that passage, but it's really condescending.

And everything that's been said above by a few of us, r292? What about all that?

I saw Ryan's Daughter at MOMA many many years after its critical and commercial disaster and except for that fucking song that Liza sang to death it is a goddamn great film with the final storm one of the greatest sequences ever put on film like something out of a silent masterpiece.

It was just so unlike the films fashionable critics were supposed to like at the time they roasted it.

And Robert Redford was asked out for drinks by Kael which he found not only inappropriate but strange. He declined and claimed he never got a good review from her again.

She could be quite the star fucker. And Stardust Memories is a fabulous film. She probably didn't like the portrayal of the female film programmer or critic. It's so long since 've seen the film.

And for the person who only likes The Seventh Seal how could you not like Smiles of a Summer Night one of the few perfect films?

To set you straight, r322:

She often got "gifts" sent to her at The New Yorker from filmmakers which she promptly returned. That's mentioned in her biography.

She LOVED Smiles of a Summer Night: "Ingmar Bergman achieves one of the few classics of carnal comedy: a tragicomic chase and roundelay that raises boudoir farce to elegance and lyric poetry."

And the gay film Victim: "This pioneering attempt to create public sympathy for homosexuals and publicize the English laws that put them in jeopardy is ingenious, moralistic, and moderately amusing."

Kael's mid-60s capsule review of Lean's OLIVER TWIST:

[quote]Fagin, the master pickpocket, is Semitic, and pressure groups objected to such a low Semitic character .... Possibly, the group that should have protested was the Mattachine Society: Fagin comes across as a malignant old faggot.

And so he did, r324. And I'm gay.

[quote]And I'm gay.

Exactly. You're not a highly influential and widely read straight woman writing in the mid-60s. Can you not understand the huge difference? And do you not agree that a writer who supposedly had her gift could have written about homosexuality with more sensitivity? There are so many examples of her awful attitude towards gay men throughout her writing that I'm surprised any gay man would try to argue otherwise. She apparently later apologized for her earlier homophobia and said she was just trying to be hip and witty at the time. That says a great deal about her, unfortunately. She wasn't above throwing gay people (along with Welles and Lean and countless others) under the bus to make her mark.

Oh, please don't try to educate me and tell me how I'm supposed to think. She was also writing from a generational standpoint and was allowed to evolve. People like you who hate her lump any conceivable "crime" against her as an excuse to write her off completely.

Now I'm asking you, quite seriously, based on your comments in r297 ("I too admire the quality of much of her writing. I have a copy of Reeling by my bed and read it often.") what exactly you like and admire, rather than relentlessly tearing her down?

R232 The anecdote of Redford is true(as long as he's not lying) and she was obsessed with DeNiro(until he got fat for Raging Bull and permanently ruined his good looks which she bemoaned in print) and Beatty.

Also concerning Smiles I was asking that question of the poster who said Seventh Seal(indeed a great film) was the only Bergman film he liked.

Interestingly from that massive tome of mini reviews doesn't she have nice things to say about our Julie in MP and TMM or am I imagining this? Of course her Sound of Music review is a great classic and I love the film! And read her review of West Side Story. Ouch! She doesn't even leave the score one of the masterworks of American music unscathed.

And she did seem to be depressed towards the end of her life because of the turn popular movies were taking due to the incredible influences of Spielberg and Lucas. She also was very open about her depression due to the debilitating affects of old age and illness. She said something to the effect that 'there are advantages and joy to be found in old age' were bullshit. But she was ill so of course that doesn't help. There are happy elderly people.

she was a fabulous bitch.

unlike todays critics who are paid off by the studios, kael spoke her mind and don't give a fuk who she dissed.

I love this. One of her final writings:

"The young writer Chuck Wilson reports that his earliest movie memory is of his mother and aunt taking him, when was six, to see "Funny Girl", and as he recalls, '"In the final scene, when Barbra Streisand, as Fanny Brice, sings, "My Man", it seems to me that I grew taller, yes, I leaned forward, some part of me rose up meet the force coming from the screen. . . I was rising to get closer to the woman I saw there. But I also rose to get closer to myself."'

An avidity for more is built into the love of movies. Something else is built in: you have to be open to the idea of getting drunk on movies. (Being able to talk about movies with someone---to share the giddy high excitement you feel---is enough for a friendship.)

Our emotions rise to meet the force coming from the screen, and they go on rising throughout our movie-going lives. When that happens in a popular art form---when it's an experience that we discover for ourselves---it is sometimes disparaged as fannishness. But there's something there that goes deeper than connoisseurship or taste. It's a fusion of art and love."

r328, she wasn't depressed (except perhaps by the shitty state pf movies), she had Parkinson's.

You don't think Redford lied? It's inconceivable a movie star wouldn't make up something about a critic who was tough to leverage against any possible bad review? The fact stands: she returned gifts all the time.

[quote]She was also writing from a generational standpoint and was allowed to evolve.

There were great film critics writing at the same time and even long before who didn't have to resort to homophobia to make a point. Manny Farber's review of STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, for example, written over a decade before Kael's vile bit on Fagin, is a fascinating critique on the negative associations given to Bruno's "travestied homosexuality". And as mentioned, she was writing "from a generational standpoint" when it came to issues of race, too, but she didn't resort to racism quite as much as homophobia, I guess because she couldn't get away with the former kind of "wit" and throwing words like "nigger" around at the time. Face it, gay men were an easy target and homophobia is "what everyone did", right?

r292/r297, my question to you in r327 stands. After all, it's easier to tear down than praise, as she herself said. Why don't you rise above yourself and answer my question in that post?

r333 Why do you keep trying to divert the discussion away from her obvious homophobia?

No she did make some sort of remark in an interview about old age being a bitch with there being nothing good about it. And as I pointed out and you did as well her illness probably had something to do with it.

That's beautiful, r330. And of course there's this that she wrote:

“A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense. Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, in the past or future, who react as you do. And because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have, these reactions can seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable."

R332 No. Faggot in 1969 was not the same as faggot in 2018. No matter how much you want to be able to label her as a homophobe, it doesn't make it the case. To compare it to the word "nigger" just shows you're full of shit. You know it isn't the same.

r337 I'm sorry, but if you're trying to argue that the word "faggot" wasn't a vile and homophobic slur in the 60s then you've completely lost all connection to reality. I'm not sure what else to say. You may as well argue that Kael wasn't a homophobe because homophobia doesn't exist.

R336 Love that.

Again, while I don't agree with some of her opinions, I love reading her writing. And her understanding of the place movies have in our culture and in our lives was next to none. She really described it eloquently.

r297, are you there? r327 still asks you respond. I know it's against your agenda but give it a shot and answer r327.

Jule Styne hated hated hated the My Man ending of Funny Girl. He sure wasn't feeling any exaltation or connection to the image on the screen.

He claimed because it was completely phony and a lie as to who the real Fanny Brice was. She was never one to openly revel in self pity.

Or was it simply because he didn't write the fabulous song which made such a smashing ending?

But the Music That Makes Me Dance is nothing to sneeze at.

A good movie is like a rainbow. All the colors of the rainbow are there in its slow globe light of beautiful things that take you out of your boring everyday lives, the lives of boring everyday people and maybe someone, somewhere in the theater with you right now, is as special as you are. Rainbows! Beautiful things! Light in the dark. Movies!!!

r341, there was no self-pity in her singing of "My Man." Her defiance and determination to carry on belied the lyrics of the song. It was incredibly powerful.

r340 Why do you keep trying to divert the discussion away from her obvious homophobia?

R338 that's exactly what I'm saying. I was around in the '70s, and it just didn't signify the kind of hate it does now. It was mild. Streisand using it in that Indiana Jones clip is a perfect example.

She was way more gay-friendly than most people her age in that era. To make a big deal out of one line she wrote just seems like you have some kind of idiotic, boring agenda. YAWN!

r292, you wrote in r297: "I too admire the quality of much of her writing. I have a copy of Reeling by my bed and read it often." Why are you diverting away from my request you elaborate?

R341 the end product of Funny Girl had very little to do with who Fanny Brice was. Styne was upset that his song wasn't used. I understand why he'd be upset. Music that Makes Me Dance was a good song, too.

I think the ending of Funny Girl was perfect myself. So did Pauline!

r292/r297, are you writing your elaboration of what you admire about Kael as we speak?

[quote]Why are you diverting away from my request you elaborate?

Because this is a gay forum and the obvious and persistent homophobia of this famous writer is more important than yet another masturbatory eulogy in a thread that's already overflowing with them. So, back to that homophobia. You haven't replied to the points made in posts r320, r326, and r332

But r292/r297, you say you admire this "homophobe." I quote you again: "I too admire the quality of much of her writing. I have a copy of Reeling by my bed and read it often."

R350 I'm not the person from that discussion.

By the way, she didn't even write what you're saying she did. I've found a review of Oliver! from her. I can't find any instance of her having reviewed Lean's Oliver Twist.

Why are you making shit up?

Are you refusing to giving her praise after you said that, r292/r297? By the way, many gay men here are rejecting your accusation of Kael's homophobia. You're losing the battle.

“Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.” ― Pauline Kael

Here's what she ACTUALLY wrote:

"In a later period, the film would probably have been protested by gay activists as well, because Fagin comes across as a malignant old homosexual."

R350 Go away. You've been exposed as a joke.

[quote]I was around in the '70s, and it just didn't signify the kind of hate it does now. It was mild.

Yes, that's why Larry Kramer used the word in the late-70s. Not because it was shocking and confrontational and he was reclaiming it, but because it was a mild pleasantry that everyone used!

r355 And where's your source for that? It's a later edited version. The original is quoted verbatim upthread. Honestly, why are you going out of your way to excuse such clear and vile homophobia?

R356 You've been exposed. Nothing you say is to be taken seriously. You added the word faggot, and took out the first part of the sentence in question to make it look bad. Just like that Parkland high school pro gun dad with an email.

Mods, please red tag this moron.

Case: closed.

Thanks for uploading that, r357.

r357 Vito Russo took her to task for her repeated use of the word "faggot". I haven't added anything. Her homophobia has long been a matter of record. Instead of scanning copies of her work which have been edited in hindsight, why not read the early works in question and see for yourself. Jesus. Is there an Anita Bryant thread on here, too, with hysterical fangirls defending her as "speaking from a generational standpoint" and that her homophobia was really mild, in fact most gay people agreed with her! etc etc?

r357 Vito Russo took her to task for her repeated use of the word "faggot". I haven't added anything. Her homophobia has long been a matter of record. Instead of scanning copies of her work which have been edited in hindsight, why not read the early works in question and see for yourself. Jesus. Is there an Anita Bryant thread on here, too, with hysterical fangirls defending her as "speaking from a generational standpoint" and that her homophobia was really mild, in fact most gay people agreed with her! etc etc?

Oh dear, r359 is so flustered she's repeating herself!

In a later version of himself at r297, r292 writes: "I too admire the quality of much of her writing. I have a copy of Reeling by my bed and read it often."

[quote]Oh dear, [R359] is so flustered she's repeating herself!

Pauline Kael lives! No wonder you're a fan, r361. So witty!

r362 Do you get this hysterical when someone dares to criticize all of your heroes or is Pauline a special case? :(

No, I'm just pointing out what your refuse to address, r292: that as r297 you wrote: "I too admire the quality of much of her writing. I have a copy of Reeling by my bed and read it often."

The quality of which you now won't acknowledge, r292/r297.

R358 my pleasure.

Sometimes, the motives of these trolls are hard to figure out. I'm guessing this is one of those alt-right wackos who's out to prove that famous liberals we admire ACTUALLY hated us! I bet he's one of the idiots who's constantly posting anti-Muslim shit here, saying that Donald Trump should be looked at as a gay hero because he he wants to kill the anti-gay terrorists.

Exactly the kind of people that are ruining this site.

The only person being hysterical here is the one comparing Pauline Kael to Anita Bryant.

Also kinda funny that the whole point of that Oliver Twist comment is that Lean's conception of the character might be seen by modern audiences as homophobic, when one of her original sins was that she dared transgress against one of his lesser films.

Girls! Its all about Rotten Tomatoes. Time to die, erudite dinosaurs.

r365 And I've told you if you want unquestioning praise there's plenty for you to wank over in the thread already. Now, back to her homophobia. You still haven't addressed the points in posts r320, r326 and r332. Or are you going to continue to ignore them or, bizarrely, claim that homophobia didn't exist in the 60s and everyone referred to us as faggots?

Kael wasn't a "good" critic. She was a weird critic, a controversial critic. I've read a lot of her reviews and she has an odd way of looking at things, which some people find interesting. But I rarely found her reviews insightful or accurate and her view point always seemed off the wall. Her stance was always this is MY opinion and it's the right one. But it wasn't the "right" one. It was just hers.

Hundreds of posts from these 2 tiresome cunts.

You've lost the battle, r370.

If you don't like them, r372, do fuck off and go to another thread.

People hold her ecstatic review of 'Oliver!' against her.

It's as if she praised Sound of Music to the skies. I prefer SOM though I cried at the end of Oliver! when I was a boy.

[quote]You've lost the battle, [R370].

The fact you think it's a battle is oddly telling. I just thought it was an interesting point of discussion, seeing as this is a gay forum and her homophobia is so widespread and well-known, and yet it goes virtually unmentioned in this long thread. And then after pointing it out I'm accused of having an agenda and even being an alt-right poster. Because we all know that alt-right loons are famous for persistently calling out blatant homophobia, don't we? As I say, very odd. I never realized that criticizing Kael would cause such an emotional reaction. I suppose if one were to try and look for positives, then that reaction speaks well of her writing and how a certain type of person can still be so moved by it. It's a shame that her homophobia has to be ignored or excused but, as has been pointed out, in this day and age she is no longer an influence so her homophobia is only really an unfortunate stain on her fading legacy.

A while back, on “old format” DL, there was a thread about Kael that turned into someone’s obsessive discussion of her “homophobia.” That person clearly has a resentment of Kael that is never going to die.

r376 And that person is me? And I must have written all of the articles online about Kael's homophobia, as well as her wiki page that has a whole section on it and I must also be Vito Russo who took her to task for her persistent use of the word "faggot", etc. I'm also alt-right and a Russian troll! I have an agenda! Homophobia never existed in the 60s! Everyone said "faggot"! Why can't I say something nice!!? etc etc

R375 you took a quote of her's and changed it to suit your bizarre agenda.

You have no credibility. Why are you even still responding?

[quote][R375] you took a quote of her's and changed it to suit your bizarre agenda.

No I didn't. As I've already pointed out, she persistently used the word "faggot" to the point that Vito Russo criticized her for it. I added nothing to the original copy and the idea that I put that word in her mouth to paint an unfair picture of her is ludicrous on the face of it. Why do you feel the need to go out of your way to excuse or even deny her homophobia? That's truly bizarre. It's possible to acknowledge her considerable flaws while still admiring her writing.

Getting back to Sally Field, Pauline said she gives you one emotion at a time, full throttle and all out, but she doesn't excel at layering them.

The titles of all of Pauline's books of her reviews had thinly veiled sexual overtones: Reeling, I Lost It at the Movies, Kiss Kiss! Bang Bang! Going Steady, When the Lights Go Down, etc.

You want a critic's homophobia?

Read the otherwise wonderful William Goldman's 'The Season.'

Jesus you'd think that homosexuality never existed except on Broadway in the mid 20th Century.

And avoid the men's room at the Palace when Judy's there!

Allen probably hated Kael because she not only read him but also foresaw his future. In "Stardust Memories" she wrote: "Allen's character is superior to all those who talk about his work; if they like his comedies, it's for freakish reasons, and he shows them up as poseurs and phonies, and if they don't like his serious work, it's because they're too stupid to understand it. He anticipates almost anything that you might say about Stardust Memories and ridicules you for it."

She ended with one of her most quoted lines: "What man in his forties but Woody Allen could pass off a predilection for teen-agers as a quest for true values?”

The NY film critics awards were heavily influenced by her. You could get a good look at the years she was a critic and who won what to get a good idea of what she thought was the best.

Burt Lancaster thanked her when he won the award for Atlantic City. Faye came in second for Best Actress that year for the Crawford film, the only place she came close to winning an award (other than the Razzies) for that.

"how a certain type of person can still be so moved by it. It's a shame that her homophobia has to be ignored or excused but, as has been pointed out, in this day and age she is no longer an influence so her homophobia is only really an unfortunate stain on her fading legacy."

Oh, nice try, r375/r292/r297. "How a certain type of person can still be moved..." Condescending. "It's a shame that her homophobia..." Beating the dead horse. "She is no longer an influence...fading legacy." Yes, that must be why The Library of America put her in its pantheon--her fading legacy and all.

You're so transparent.

See how fast 292/r297 abandoned his hero Orson Welles (who he was so indignant on behalf of) when he realized Welles was a very weak bludgeon to use against Kael (because nobody cared) and thought (mistakenly) "homophobia" would work so much better to beat her with. Except it didn't work--people didn't buy it.

So sorry, 292/r297.

[quote] Except it didn't work--people didn't buy it.

If people didn't buy that she was blatantly homophobic then the accusation wouldn't have followed her round for decades and it wouldn't still be spoken of in countless articles. And she wouldn't have later apologized for it. And Vito Russo wouldn't have taken her to task for her persistent use of the word "faggot".

For someone who claims to be a fan of a respected writer such as Kael, you do seem oddly dismissive of outright facts when they don't fit your preferred narrative. Oh, wait...

The Library of America! That bastion of relevance and home to writers who are in no way treading a steady path into oblivion. Good for her! Seriously, most people in this country don't even know who Greta Garbo is. They certainly never heard of, nor will they ever read Pauline Kael. But who cares? If you get enjoyment out of her writing, isn't that enough? Why does whether or not she's still somehow important (which she clearly isn't) matter in any way?

Yes she was bitchy and contrary and negative, but she was a great writer with a passion for movies and her opinion mattered. She wrote and incredible essay on behalf of "Bonnie and Clyde" when every other reviewer panned it, including Newsweek to the New York Times panned. She made everyone pay attention by basically explaining that there's a new kind of movie out there, Americans are too stupid to know it, so everybody needs to PAY ATTENTION. It worked. Newsweek's reviewer was forced to RE-REViEW it and then called it one of the best films of the year. It's now an American classic. THAT'S power.

r388 Roger Ebert also wrote a glowing review of the film. And Joe Morgenstern wasn't forced to re-review the film. He realized his error after seeing the film again with an enthusiastic audience and decided to write a new review admitting his mistake...

[quote]“On Monday morning, I went into Newsweek and wrote a six-column review,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1997. “It began with a description of the previous review, and then I said, ‘I am sorry to say I consider that review grossly unfair and regrettably inaccurate. I am sorrier to say I wrote it.’”

[quote]“That night I met Pauline Kael at a Chinese restaurant and she said, ‘I read your review and you really blew it,’ ” he told the Times. “And all I could say was, ‘Wait until you see the one next week.‘ ”

The idea that Kael was the sole champion of the film and she single-handedly shaped the consensus is a nice one, but it's revisionist.

What r388 said. Kael was the champion of Bonnie and Clyde before anyone else, and Beatty knew he had her to thank, which was the beginning of their friendship.

[quote]Kael was the champion of Bonnie and Clyde before anyone else

Apart from Roger Ebert. And Robin Wood. And I'm sure a few others.

Manny Farber wrote a very good piece about Faye Dunaway's performance in the film, comparing it unfavorably to Burt Lancaster's performance in THE TRAIN. It's spot on and very funny. Now there was an idiosyncratic and intelligent writer.

Kael's championing it led to her friendship with Beatty. There was no friendship between Beatty and Ebert or Beatty and any there critic because of that movie. Rewriting history again, 292/r297.

It's in the Kael bio.

*any other

[quote]There was no friendship between Beatty and Ebert or Beatty and any there critic because of that movie.

The fact that Roger Ebert and Robin Wood wrote glowing reviews of the film is a matter of record. Are we ignoring that fact as well now? Because Beatty formed a friendship with Kael but not the others? The claim she championed the film before anyone else or even that she was the only influential critic to champion the film is verifiably false.

[quote]It's in the Kael bio.

The same bio that talks at length about her troubling homophobia, quoted at r320?

That only you are obsessed by, and can sell no one else on. Quoting yourself is a sad business, 292/r297/r320/r396.

r397 I'm quoting a biography of her, dear. Roger Ebert's review of the film was published on September 25th, 1967, btw. Almost a month before Kael's piece appeared in the the New Yorker.

The movie was considered a failure and was barely being seen, so Ebert's review didn't have much effect, no discredit to Ebert.

r399 No, Kael mentions in her review of the film that the audience was "alive to it" and Morgenstern wrote in his second review about the enthusiasm of the packed theater he saw it in. The film's initial success was due to word-of-mouth despite largely poor reviews, not Kael or Ebert or Morgenstern's reviews.

If you read the history of the film Bonnie and Clyde it was not a failure. A number of critics gave it rave reviews when it first opened including Penelope Gilliatt in the New Yorker two months before Kael's review came out.

Also Warner Brothers called it before Kael's review its most successful film since My Fair Lady.

It was neither a hit when it came out or appreciated except by Kael and ebert.

The film was controversial on its original release for its supposed glorification of murderers, and for its level of graphic violence, which was unprecedented at the time. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times was so appalled that he began to campaign against the increasing brutality of American films.[33] Dave Kaufman of Variety criticized the film for uneven direction and for portraying Bonnie and Clyde as bumbling fools.[34] Joe Morgenstern for Newsweek initially panned the film as a "squalid shoot-'em-up for the moron trade." After seeing the film a second time and noticing the enthusiastic audience, he wrote a second article saying he had misjudged it and praised the film. Warner Bros. took advantage of this, marketing the film as having made a major critic change his mind about its virtues.[35]

[quote]It was neither a hit when it came out or appreciated except by Kael and ebert.

And Robin Wood, Joe Morgenstern, Penelop Gilliatt and God knows how many others. And if it wasn't a hit, why did WB say it was their most successful film since MY FAIR LADY, as r401 points out? The idea that Kael single-handedly changed the fortunes of the film after all the kids eagerly read her review in the New Yorker and rushed out with their friends to see it is a nice one, but it's absurd.

R292

I like you! Great discussion here.

All the youth in '67 had subscriptions to The New Yorker. I'm sure it was in all the high schools and college dorms.

Especially at Penn State and the University of Michigan.

Her legacy is intact, and her inclusion among some of the greatest writers in The Library of America, speaks for itself. But most particularly her body of work is all that matters. She's loved and appreciated. No among of tearing her down has had any traction here.

You have failed, 297. Your credibility has been called by others here as well. I repeat: no one cares about your hate for her.

So sorry for you.

r406 As has been pointed out ad nauseum, her homophobia has been highlighted and criticized for decades, her shameful conduct and questionable journalistic practices on "Raising Kane" alone are well accepted and a matter of public record (and that brings all her work into question, sadly), and the fact her legacy is fading is true of all film critics whose best work was written 50 years ago. Trying to dismiss these assertions of fact as "hatred" is intellectually facile.

A huge collection of Manny Farber's film criticism was published a few years ago to great fanfare. Like Kael, he's still highly thought of in film circles. But that doesn't change the fact that his legacy is fading, very few people have heard of him and far fewer will ever read him. So what?

[quote]A huge collection of Manny Farber's film criticism was published a few years ago to great fanfare

By the Library of America, no less!

Decades ago, I heard "critic" David Denby on a talk show putting down Kael fans and calling them "disciples," like they were mindless followers of a no-talent writer. Later he got the job at the New Yorker. Then, and and in his prior job, it seemed to me like he was trying to emulate Kael as much as humanly possible in his reviews. He was demoted to a lesser job at the New Yorker a few years ago. OT - Denby lost all his money in an investment scam years ago - mostly due to his stupidity.

I just looked up and read Kael's Bonnie and Clyde review and Roger Eberts review. Both were great, but Kael's is so long and passionate, it's more like an essay. She's practically begging the reader to go see it.

When visitors would come to her place, she'd open the door say "what did you think of Godfather 2? If you didn't like it, fuck you".

Ebert was at the very beginning of his career back then. His review wouldn't have had anywhere near the impact Kael's did. I mean, obviously she wasn't the only critic that liked or defended Bonnie & Clyde, but she was a master at polemics and was able to turn it into a battle between the old guard (Crowther) and the new, which she won.

I was always surprised she would go for Keaton in that, especially her histrionic "It was an ABORTION, Michael!" bit.

She did NOT like DL favorite "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" (much as she loved Keaton in general), said it was like having an old person tell you a story about "She was a nice person" and then two minutes later tell you again "She was a nice person" over and over. And she said the cockroaches with the popsickle looked like big jellybeans. And, one of those where I think she is wrong, she really REALLY hated both Gere and Berenger. Liked Tuesday though.

She didn't like her early on. She felt she was likable but not funny enough in things like Sleeper.

And she REALLY hated Bruce Dern's casting in "Coming Home", thought it actually ruined the movie.

"It's in the Kael bio," is my new riposte to...basically anything.

Kael was actually in Dealey Plaza on November 22nd, 1963. And she can clearly be seen on the Zapruda footage standing on the grass between Elm and Main streets as the cavalcade drives by. She's wearing a headscarf, like a Russian babushka lady.

No fucking kidding, R417? Did she write about it?

She also escaped from World Trade Center Tower 1 before it came down.

[quote]A huge collection of Manny Farber's film criticism was published a few years ago to great fanfare. Like Kael, he's still highly thought of in film circles. But that doesn't change the fact that his legacy is fading, very few people have heard of him and far fewer will ever read him. So what?

Not really sure what the point of this is. Most people won't read any old books, or read much at all beyond scrolling through texts and social media. Library of America obviously published collections of Farber's and Kael's work (as they did with James Agee) because they thought it would have some lasting value. To people who are interested in film history or reading old film critics, obviously. For that matter, I wouldn't even say that Farber's legacy is "fading". He was always a cult figure.

I love Kael and she was generally progressive. Did she have a hang up in some areas that everyone in her generation had? Maybe. Did she often overcome it with empathetic or complimentary comments? Absolutely.

She was a human being. All this "She used a VILE term and can never be forgiven!!!" grandstanding is so much horse shit. Especially when the idiot writing it was exposed altering a perfectly fine quote of hers by putting the word "faggot" in it. I can't believe he continued to post after that.

Thanks for derailing a really good thread, idiot.

The trolls are easy to spot. Instead of just stating their case and agreeing to disagree with those who repudiate their claims they engage in badgering and bullying behavior which exposes them as unbalanced extremists with an agenda. No how to get respect on an otherwise thoughtful, intelligent thread.

**Not

[quote]She was a human being. All this "She used a VILE term and can never be forgiven!!!" grandstanding is so much horse shit.

This is hilarious. Her homophobia has been highlighted and criticized for decades. Vito Russo called her out for it. It's even got a subsection on her wiki page. This is a gay forum. Largely populated by gay men, talking about gay history, culture and men presenting hole. One would assume her homophobia would be of particular interest here. Yet I dare to talk about it and somehow it's horseshit or I'm a troll with an agenda?

[quote]Decades ago, I heard "critic" David Denby on a talk show putting down Kael fans and calling them "disciples," like they were mindless followers

What a shocking notion.

The gay subtext in "Bonnie and Clyde" was not lost on moi...

R422 right. When you're arguing a point because you believe it, you argue it normally. When you're arguing a point because you have an agenda, you start to engage in rhetorical tricks like the ones you mention. You also overstate your case and use words like "VILE" and caps and explanation points. And, of course, you try to make the person your arguing with seems morally deficient ("How could you FORGIVE her BLATANT HATRED of GAYS?? YOU MUST HATE GAYS TOO!!")

It's all so fucking boring.

*exclamation points, that should read (!)

Denby himself was one of these "disciples" who later turned on her, R409. She was known to be ruthless when judging the writing of others, even friends, and didn't hesitate to say when she thought something or someone wasn't good enough. Pretty sure that's what happened with Denby.

[quote]When you're arguing a point because you have an agenda, you start to engage in rhetorical tricks like

Smearing the other person as a troll? Or claiming the other person has an "agenda" (without ever actually stipulating what this ludicrous agenda might be)? And completely ignoring the fact that every claim I've made has for decades been regarded as accepted wisdom?

[quote]And, of course, you try to make the person your arguing with seems morally deficient

Like continually claiming you feel "sorry" for me? And acting like the fact any gay man who is concerned by Kael's long documented homophobia and wants to call it out on a gay forum is somehow pitiable? You asked me what I liked about her writing. I'd really like to know what you admire about her writing, because you don't seem in any way intellectually curious.

Anyway, let's get back to Pauline. Did you guys know that GONE WITH THE WIND was a total flop until she wrote a glowing review of the film in the Sacramento Bee? All the cool kids read The Bee back in 1939 and the film became the highest grossing movie of all-time quite literally overnight as a result of the 20 year old Kael's use of staggering words which she placed in a breathtaking order. As a token of gratitude to Kael for her altruism and her genius, Hattie McDaniel became a life-long friend and even wanted to play Kael in the film of her life, LEGS AKIMBO AT THE FLICKS, but she ultimately lost the role to Abe Vigoda. It's all in the Kael bio.

Has anyone here read Kael's review of BADLANDS? That is fascinating. My feelings about Malick are closest to David Thomson's, who described his debut as maybe "the most assured first film by an American since Citizen Kane" but he felt that Malick quickly went astray and his imagery descended to the "thunderous and stately". Of THE THIN RED LINE he says, "I can think of few recent American movies in which so many critics and viewers hoped to find glory and excellence. What happened?"

But Kael absolutely hated BADLANDS. She says she "found its cold detachment offensive". She describes the naive voiceover as an "easy laugh for the audience" and the classical music on the soundtrack as "a heightened form of condescension to the culturally dim, frigid lovers". The last bit of her review is interesting, because what she describes--which, to me, is not true of BADLANDS--became more pronounced in his later films:

[quote]And there's a basic flaw in Malick's method: he has [italic]perceived[/italic] the movie - he's done our work instead of his. In place of people and action, with metaphor rising out of the story, he gives us a surface that is all conscious metaphor. Badlands is so preconceived that there's nothing left to respond to.

I know that, R428. Could be that Kael went after Denby and it hurt his little feelings.

She adored Griffith and that's good enough for me.

But wouldn't she go so far as to break off a relationship if she disagreed with someone strongly over a film? I don't think Fuck You! was enough for her.

I remember reading somewhere that after she retired someone remarked to her about her disciples known as the Paulettes. She was like 'What the hell influence did I have?! They liked The Piano!!'

Yeah, she mentioned in an interview that she hated "Piano", especially when Holly smacks away the hands of men trying to help her. She thought it was completely a "what the fuck" moment in terms of message.

And I always hated "Badlands" too, especially the way they shrugged off Kit's killing (that poor young couple in the tornado shelter, for one). It seemed like the work of a bloodless sociopath with a good eye. And Sissy seemed retarded in it too.

The first time Pauline Kael wrote about Steven Spielberg:

"The Sugarland Express is like some of the entertaining studio-factory films of the past (it’s as commercial and shallow and impersonal), yet it has so much eagerness and flash and talent that it just about transforms it’s scrubby ingredients. The director, Steven Spielberg, is twenty-six; I can’t tell if he has any mind, or even a strong personality, but then a lot of good moviemakers have got by without being profound. He isn’t saying anything special in The Sugarland Express, but he has a knack for bringing out young actors, and a sense of composition and movement that almost any director might envy. Composition seems to come naturally to him, as it does to some of the young Italians; Spielberg uses his gift in a very free-and-easy, American way—for humor, and for a physical response to action. He could be that rarity among directors—a born entertainer—perhaps a new generations’ Howard Hawks. In terms of the pleasure that technical assurance gives and audience, this film is one of the most phenomenal debut films in the history of movies. If there is such a thing as a movie sense—and I think there is (I know fruit vendors and cabdrivers who have it and some movie critics who don’t)—Spielberg really has it. But he may be so full of it that he doesn’t have much else. There’s no sign of the emergence of a new film artist (such as Martin Scorsese) in The Sugarland Express, but it marks the debut of a new-style, new-generation Hollywood hand.”

(Pauline Kael The New Yorker, 3/18/1974)

One of my favorite things. The ending to Pauline's review of "The Exorcist":

"Somewhere in the publicity for the film is an item about William Friedkin’s having looked at five hundred little girls before he chose his Regan, and indeed, Linda Blair is a sparkling, snub-nosed, happy-looking little girl, who matches up perfectly with Ellen Burstyn. I wonder about those four hundred and ninety-nine mothers of the rejected little girls, or about the hundred and ninety-nine, if that’s a more reasonable figure. They must have read the novel; they must have known what they were having their beautiful little daughters tested for. When they see The Exorcist and watch Linda Blair urinating on the fancy carpet and screaming and jabbing at herself with a crucifix, are they envious? Do they feel, 'That might have been my little Susie—famous forever?'"

(Pauline Kael, The New Yorker, 1/7/74)

Another film Kael spotted was Saturday Night Fever, which was getting mediocre views. Kael saw why it was a stand-out movie and why John Travolta was a new star. There's a lovely description of his walk in the opening.

Did she review DL classic "Valley of the Dolls"?

No.

Another beautiful and insightful review of one of her favorites, "Shoeshine":

"Vittorio De Sica's lyric study of how two boys betrayed by society betray each other and themselves. It has a sweetness and a simplicity that suggest greatness of feeling, and this is so rare in films that to cite a comparison one searches beyond the medium. If Amadeus Mozart had written an opera set in poverty, it might have had this kind of painful beauty. The two young shoeshine boys sustain their friendship and their dreams amid the apathy of postwar Rome, but they are destroyed by their own weaknesses and desires when they're sent to prison for black-marketeering. Cesare Zavattini wrote this study of the corruption of innocence; it is a social-protest film that rises above its purpose."

And 25 years later, her words on De Sica's "Garden of the Finzi-Continis," one of his other great films, are equally eloquent ad definitive:

"When the Finzi-Continis have been arrested, Micol and her grandmother are herded into a room with other Jews from the town, and the bewildered old lady tries to smile sociably and keep her composure. The anxious face of the dignified old lady, who a moment later crumples in tears on her granddaughter's shoulder, is one of those faces lit from within by the director's love."

Thumbnails don't do justice to her reviews but here is the abridged version of Fellini's "Nights of Cabiria".

Possibly Federico Fellini's finest film, and a work in which Giulietta Masina earns the praise she received for LA STRADA. The structure is a series of episodes in the life of Cabiria (Masina), a shabby, aging, dreamy little Roman streetwalker--a girl whose hard, knowing air is no protection against her fundamental gullibility, which, we finally see, is her humanity and her saving grace. A famous actor (Amedeo Nazzari) picks her up and takes her to his luxurious villa; she goes to a cheap vaudeville show, and when the magician hypnotizes her, the innocent dreams of her adolescence pour out; a young man in the audience (François Périer) meets her and proposes to her, etc. Though the film seems free and almost unplanned, each apparent irrelevance falls into place. (It was the basis for the Broadway musical--and the movie musical--SWEET CHARITY.) In Italian.

One thing I've consistently noticed is that she seemed to have a particular fondness for Italian and Italian-American directors - De Sica, Bertolucci, Bellocchio, the Tavianis, Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma...

Kael was partial to Catholics: From 1975:

It's a notion that takes some growing used to, but Pauline Kael makes her case persuasively: "Almost every interesting American movie in the past few years has been directed by a Catholic." And then she names the three directors she feels are making the most exciting movies right now: Francis Ford Coppola, an Italian-American; Martin Scorsese, who grew up in New York's Little Italy with a Sicilian background; and, above all, Robert Altman, a German-American Catholic from Kansas City.

"Perhaps the Catholics are more in tune with the new mood in America, and the Protestants aren't," she suggests. "Watergate showed us we're no better than others, and the heroes in the new American movies reflect that sensibility, that view of life after the collapse of the Protestant Ethic."

But there's something more, something else the hot new directors may have absorbed with their Catholicism, and Kael believes it may be "a certain sensual richness in their backgrounds" -- a richness, she implies, that may have come partly from the traditional ritual of the Church in the years before Vatican One and Two, and partly from the ethnic and cultural vitality that surrounded them during their childhoods.

R444, yes, there is avideo on youtube where she talks about how Italy is a very visual culture which is why their films are so visually appealing, unlike, say, British films since in Britain everything is grey (and which makes them better writers).

I find grey British films from the 30s to the early 60s very appealing. In fact romantic. The early Hitchcocks, early Lean, the Ealing comedies, the black and white Powell, the kitchen sink realism.

[quote]Her stance was always this is MY opinion and it's the right one. But it wasn't the "right" one. It was just hers.

And yet, isn't any good critic going to take the same position? What would literary criticism, or art criticism, or reviews of music or film be if critics tried to go for the "right" opinion, rather than their own?

Or should they couch every opinionated review with some waffle like "others may disagree.?"

She took positions and wrote what she believed, as far as I can tell. Far from faultless, she was a great writer. I am sorry to hear she wasn't as progressive about LGBT characters or plot lines as we would now expect; but she was no bigot. It is obvious she loved film and became hugely influential. Good for her.

We were often 180 degrees apart on films but I always enjoyed reading her enormously even when I knew I didn't plan on seeing the film no matter how much she loved it. I was like boy am I going to hate this one.

I always found it amusing she used 'we.' We feel this way, we feel that way, we see this, we see that.

Pauline who is this 'we' you were always referring to?

r448, she frequently used "you."

What did she write about Isabel Adjani?

I seem to remember 'we.' But I could be wrong it could have been 'you.' Or did she use both?

Whatever. But despite her intelligence I found Gilliatt a bore and always looked forward to Kael's return.

I never liked her reviews. I rarely agreed with anything she said.

r450, Kael loved Adjani in "Adele H":

"You can perceive why Truffaut...has said that he wouldn't have made this 'musical composition for one instrument' without Isabelle Adjani...Isabelle Adjani has been a professional actress since she was fourteen...one French director says that she's James Dean come back as a girl. Considering how young she is, her performance here is scarily smart."

Her review of "Story of Adele H" is particularly wonderful and incisive.