Writing for The New Yorker from 1967 to 1991, Pauline Kael earned her reputation as the most famous film critic in history. Her writing was jazzy and colloquial, her insight peerless, her put-downs hilarious. Although she took up film criticism in middle age, young people loved her irreverence; no pretension was immune from her trenchant wit.
Not everyone was a fan. Most famously, Renata Adler attacked her in The New York Review of Books in 1980, saying that Kael's film collection "When the Lights Go Down" was "jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless." Her 1971 essay "Raising Kane" -- which elevated the contributions of screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz to the classic "Citizen Kane" and downplayed Orson Welles' role -- was attacked for possibly shoddy (and this biography suggests, probably purloined) research. Her review of Claude Lanzmann's 1985 Holocaust documentary "Shoah" was attacked as anti-Semitic, and her 1981 review of George Cukor's "Rich and Famous" fueled criticism that she was anti-gay.
But Kael was Jewish, although she was suspicious of all religions, and three of the key relationships in her love life were with men who were gay or bisexual poets -- Robert Horan, Robert Duncan and James Broughton (with whom she had a daughter, the artist Gina James, out of wedlock in 1948). Kael kept much of her personal life private -- so much so that her obituary in The New York Times said she'd been married three times, although her new biography confirms that she was married just once (to Ed Landberg, with whom she ran the Berkeley Cinema Guild in the 1950s). As biographer Brian Kellow quotes Landberg, "I soon found out I couldn't stand this woman."
Mr. Kellow, features editor of Opera News, has interviewed about 170 people for "Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark," and he presents a woman of paradoxes. She was a strong, feisty survivor who had no use for the feminist movement. She was a freethinker who despised political correctness. She had a brilliant, analytic mind but was naive enough to think that if she told someone the truth, no matter how cruelly, there would be no fallout or repercussions. She shrugged off many a destroyed relationship.
Born on June 19, 1919, Kael was the fifth and youngest child of Jewish immigrants from Poland who had a chicken farm in Petaluma, Calif., before they moved to San Francisco during the Depression. She was a philosophy major at the University of California at Berkeley but dropped out just a few credits short of a degree. She went to New York with the poet Robert Horan for three years, then returned to the Bay Area, where she took a series of "crummy" jobs.
She wrote her first movie review -- of Charlie Chaplin's "Limelight," which she dubbed "Slimelight" -- in 1953, then wrote freelance reviews, appeared on radio shows and ran the two-screen Berkeley movie house. When she was 46, her first collection of essays, "I Lost It at the Movies," became a best-seller.
Eventually editor William Shawn hired her at The New Yorker, for six-month stints in which she rotated with Penelope Gilliatt as film critic. The book chronicles Kael's contentious relationship with the gentlemanly Shawn, including her attempt to write a review of the porn classic "Deep Throat" in 1972.
Her rave of "Bonnie and Clyde" in 1967 (when most other critics dismissed it) cemented her reputation. During what Kael considered to be the "golden age of the cinema" -- the early- to mid-1970s -- she championed such movies as "The Godfather," "The Godfather: Part II," "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," "Shampoo" and -- most famously -- "Last Tango in Paris" and "Nashville."
She drew criticism for overpraising those directors she loved, including Robert Altman, Paul Mazursky and (especially) Brian DePalma, and for lacerating those whose work she hated, such as Stanley Kubrick and Clint Eastwood. Some of her reviews define hyperbole.
In 1979, when Kael was nearly 60, she spent eight months in Hollywood, working as a consultant for Warren Beatty and later for Paramount. The experience was abortive, and Kael rarely talked about it. This biography sheds light on her naivete in thinking that a movie critic was going to make a difference in what movies got the green light or how they were made.
In the late 1980s, Kael developed heart problems and Parkinson's disease. Her home in Great Barrington, Mass., frequently a gathering place for young film critics dubbed "the Paulettes," was where she died on Sept. 2, 2001. She was 82.
Library of America's new Kael anthology, "The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael," contains 828 pages of some of her best writing (although key reviews, such as those of "Shoah" and "Rich and Famous," are missing).
It has two assets: the essay "Movies, the Desperate Art," written in 1955 and published in 1959, and not collected in other anthologies; and the fact that unlike an earlier Kael anthology, the nearly 1,300-page "For Keeps" (1994), it probably won't be used as a doorstop.
First Published: October 30, 2011, 8:00 a.m.
