This posting is part of the Pauline Kael blog-a-thon at The Cooler blogsite.

From 1967 through 1979, movie reviews didn’t suck because of Pauline Kael. I’m not saying that none of Kael’s reviews sucked; actually a whole helluvalot of ‘em did. But as a writer, she screwed brilliantly with the literary genre of film criticism and raised the bar for journo-crits everywhere.

You gotta understand what it was like back then…

As a teenager in the late 1960s who was searching desperately for knowledge about how movies were made, there were no resources. The bookstores had a lot of movie-trivia books which listed the films of certain stars, and some rancid as-told-to autobiographies of celebrities glutted the shelves, but there was very little else. One day I found a paperback of Kael’s KISS KISS BANG BANG, an anthology of her film writings nested in a psychedelic, kinda/sorta Peter Max paperback cover. The book was virtually epoxied to my hands for the rest of high school.

I hadn’t read many movie reviews because at that time they were lame…you can’t believe how lame: I mean, not a mention of the cinematography nor the editing or any awareness that a movie was actually put together by a batch of people. It was all about the movie’s stars and how they looked, and whether the script was humorous/thrilling/thoughtful or not.

As Pauline liked to point out, most critics and reviewers just didn’t get the movies that were being released in the 1960s.

Additionally, movie critics back then were so intellectually lazy, they wouldn’t challenge their minds or attempt to think about why movies were rapidly morphing into a new sphere of language.

A prime example and the review that made cineastes listen to her was her piece on Arthur Penn’s BONNIE AND CLYDE, a film so transgressive and rebellious that it was critically slammed, dooming it to obscurity. That is, until people noticed and talked about Kael’s review of the film.

Kael became a buzzword: in the opening shot of THE MALTESE FALCON, Humphrey Bogart sits at his desk with a large window behind him. Through the window in the distance is a neon sign for a radio station whose call-letters were KLVW. When I saw the movie in 1972, my buddy pointed too the call letters and said, “K-L-V-W?? Is that Pauline’s Volkswagen???”

My first year in college, I heard her speak and was embarrassingly overawed when I met her afterward. Later, I got to hang out with her at an academic’s soirée where she guzzled beer and swore like a sailor, and talked of why Godard had suddenly gone silent (a motorcycle accident), how her cat didn’t like Sam Pekinpah, and of her appreciation of The Godfather.

A year or two later I met documentary director Albert Maysles of GREY GARDENS fame, who (as a friend said that night) blew the lid on Pauline Kael. The conversation topic had moved to his Rolling Stones documentary GIMME SHELTER, and Maysles told of how Kael wrote a negative review having only seen a rough-cut of the film and not the final product. He called her editor at The New Yorker, who said Pauline was there in his office and invited her to talk it over with Maysles.

Kael refused to come to the phone.

Her credibility and morality came deeper into question in the mid-1970s when she would be hired as a script doctor on Hollywood movies, and then give the movies glowing reviews when released despite the huge conflict of interests.

For me the break came when I got to film school and really started to study and make films. The wisdom of filmmaking I had tried to extract from her writings over the years became a house of cards by the 9th week of the semester. I realized her strength wasn’t in her film knowledge but in her seamless writing. She didn’t so much go after the truth as she built air-tight arguments (her bachelors was in Philosophy from U. C. Berkeley). Her writing was frequently brilliant, and that was her strength: “It was the ride, not the destination, that counted,” as Alan Vanneman wrote about her in his brilliant tell-all essay, The Pearls of Pauline.

Like Bill O’Reilly’s rhetoric, she was legendary for reviews laden with character attacks on other critics and industry people, reinforced with both truthful and fabricated accounts. Just as Fox News inserts its agenda into the news by using the journalistically-reprehensible phrase “some people say” followed by their own prejudices, Kael allegedly invented remarks overheard in theatres and fabricated audience reactions to films as a means of driving home her points.

However, it wasn’t her unethical reporting practices that led to career derailment. It has been alleged that her hatchet jobs on the character of Industry bigshots that led to a vendetta consisting of a bait-and-switch job offer by Hollywood execs which prompted her to leave New York and The New Yorker. [Again, see the Vanneman article.]

After that humiliating experience Kael returned to criticism but times had changed and so had she. In 1979 the national syndication of the Gene Siskel / Roger Ebert TV show At the Movies inaugurated the second dumbing-down of movie reviews, where thought and argument were replaced by thumbs up and thumbs down. Then a serious film magazine in the 1980s published an article retelling the experience of going to a press screening when Pauline Kael was in the audience: her emitting of groans and tsk-ing, drawing the attention away from the screen and towards herself. And how after the lights came up, she told the filmmakers that the movie was too “droopy” in the middle, how that was the only adjective she could use, and how inarticulate Kael was when talking of film craft.

Around that time I was having a drink with a friend who was an M-G-M publicist. I was constantly on the road working on a TV series at that time, so I didn’t keep up with my past interests. I asked him if he had read any of Pauline’s works lately. He said she was in a bizarre place with her writing, extolling the violence of men to the point that in reading her essays you think she had a fantasy of being beaten up by a guy. (Interesting, since in the 1960s and 1970s one of her main instruments of character attack was insinuating a rival critic was Gay, and her writing would veer into swaggering homophobia by using plentiful phrases such as “mincing faggot.”) I put her out of my mind after that.

In 1990, the venerated experimental filmmaker James Broughton was my house guest. In the late 1940s Broughton had been roommates with Kael. However, in all the days we spent together, Pauline’s name was never brought up. A dead topic.

So what did Kael, despite her flaws, achieve?

She elevated American movie reviews to film criticism by bringing ideas about the medium and the society that produces them into the discourse. Due to her ability to see quality in (what she called) ‘trash’ movies, she realigned the approach and respect for low-budget / independent / B-movies. For example, traditionally big-city newspapers had a daily-columnist reviewer and a rookie stringer reviewer. Before Kael, the daily reviewer would tackle pieces on the mammoth epics and message pictures while the stringer would write about the movies playing at the drive-ins. By 1975 the stringer would be assigned the no-brainer epic and the daily columnist would attempt to find the merits in the latest slasher movie.

If it hadn’t been for Kael, there would be no cultural space nor interest for a blog such as this one.

Undoubtedly her finest work can be found in the back pages of KISS KISS BANG BANG: Pauline had managed an art-house cinema in the Bay Area and wrote audience handouts crafted to enhance the viewers’ appreciation of the movie. Here she showed her love of movies, and a good wit. She wasn’t out to castrate her competitors nor to dictate the direction of films. She was simply an enchanted, enlightened fan of the movies.

My early ardor for Kael has ghoulishly given me some pleasure later in life. Her word was such dogma for me as an early adult that most films she despised I never made the effort to see. However, in the last decade I’ve seen some of these films (e.g., West Side Story, John Schlesinger’s Darling with Julie Christie, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, John Frankenheimer’s All Fall Down, etc.) and found them to be great experiences.

However, a part of me feels like a purposefully disobedient child when I view them: after all, Mama Kael told me to keep out.

Doug / PoMo Joan

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