Pauline Kael

Kael is good...fun to read...but she misses the point a lot. Style is repetitive, even more so than that of most writers. Her main contributions: prescient review of "Bonnie and Clyde"; review of "Nashville" before it was offically released. Liked Altman when it was cool to dismiss him (post-M*A*S*H). Also, in her piece on "Long Goodbye" (Altman's take on Raymond Chandler) she really demolishes Chandler as the high-class hack he really was...so all to the good...

Touchy, eh?

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2005/09/06/viewing_the_parcels_of_pauline/?page=full

Weekend
"Only the title of this extraordinary poetic satire is casual and innocent. The writer-director Jean-Luc Godard has a gift for making the contemporary satiric and fantastic. He begins with just a slight stylization of civilized living now—the people are more adulterous, more nakedly mercenary, touchier. They have weapons, and use them at the slightest provocation, and it seems perfectly logical that they should get into their cars and bang into one another and start piling up on the roads. The traffic jam is a prelude to highways littered with burning cars and corpses. As long as Godard stays with cars as the symbol of bourgeois materialism, the barbarity of these bourgeois—their greed and the self-love they project onto their possessions—is exact and funny. The picture goes much further—sometimes majestically, sometimes with surreal details that suggest an affinity between Godard and Buñuel, sometimes with methods and ideas that miss, badly. There are extraordinary passages, such as a bourgeois wife's erotic confession and a long virtuoso sequence of tracking shots of cars stalled on the highway, with the motorists pressing down with all their might on their car horns, which sound triumphant, like trumpets in Purcell. Though deeply flawed, this film has more depth than any of Godard's earlier work. It's his vision of Hell and it ranks with the greatest. As a mystical movie WEEKEND is comparable to Bergman's THE SEVENTH SEAL and SHAME and Ichikawa's FIRES ON THE PLAIN and passages of Kurosawa, yet we're hardly aware of the magnitude of the writer-director's conception until after we are caught up in the comedy of horror, which keeps going further and further and becoming more nearly inescapable, like Journey to the End of the Night."

Exorcist II: The Heretic
"Directed by John Boorman, this picture has a visionary crazy grandeur (like that of Fritz Lang's loony METROPOLIS). Some of its telepathic sequences are golden-toned and lyrical, and the film has a swirling, hallucinogenic, apocalyptic quality; it might have been a horror classic if it had had a simpler, less ritzy script. But, along with flying demons and theology inspired by Teilhard de Chardin, the movie has Richard Burton, with his precise diction, helplessly and inevitably turning his lines into camp, just as the cultivated, stage-trained actors in early-30s horror films did. Like them, Burton has no conviction in what he's doing, so he can't get beyond staginess and artificial phrasing. The film is too cadenced and exotic and too deliriously complicated to succeed with most audiences (and when it opened, there were accounts of people in theatres who threw things at the screen). But it's winged camp—a horror fairy tale gone wild, another in the long history of moviemakers' king-size follies. There's enough visual magic in it for a dozen good movies; what it lacks is judgment—the first casualty of the moviemaking obsession. With Linda Blair, four year older than in the first film and going into therapy because of her nightmares, Louise Fletcher as the therapist, and Max von Sydow, Kitty Winn, Ned Beatty, Paul Henreid, and James Earl Jones as Pazuzu."

The Fury
"Brian De Palma's visionary, science-fiction thriller is the reverse side of the coin of Spielberg's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS. With Spielberg, what happens is so much better than you dared hope that you have to laugh; with De Palma, it's so much worse than you feared that you have to laugh. The script (John Farris's adaptation of his novel) is cheap gothic espionage occultism involving two superior beings—spiritual twins (Andrew Stevens and Amy Irving) who have met only telepathically. But the film is so visually compelling that a viewer seems to have entered a mythic night world; no Hitchcock thriller was ever so intense, went so far, or had so many "classic" sequences."

A Clockwork Orange
"This Stanley Kubrick film might be the work of a strict and exacting German professor who set out to make a porno-violent sci-fi comedy. The movie is adapted from Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel, which is set in a vaguely socialist future of the late 70s or early 80s—a dreary, routinized England that roving gangs of teenage thugs terrorize at night. In this dehumanizing society, there seems to be no way for the boys to release their energies except in vandalism and crime. The protagonist, Alex (Malcolm McDowell), is the leader of one of these gangs; he's a conscienceless schoolboy sadist who enjoys stealing, stomping, raping, and destroying, until he kills a woman and is sent to prison. There he is conditioned into a moral robot who becomes nauseated by thoughts of sex and violence. Burgess wrote an ironic fable about a future in which men lose their capacity for moral choice. Kubrick, however, gives us an Alex who is more alive than anybody else in the movie, and younger and more attractive, and McDowell plays him exuberantly, with power and slyness. So at the end, when Alex's bold, aggressive, punk's nature is restored to him, it seems not a joke on all of us (as it does in the book) but, rather, a victory in which we share, and Kubrick takes an exultant tone. Along the way, Alex has been set apart as the hero by making his victims less human than he; the picture plays with violence in an intellectually seductive way—Alex's victims are twisted and incapable of suffering. Kubrick carefully estranges us from these victims so that we can enjoy the rapes and beatings. Alex alone suffers. And how he suffers! He's a male Little Nell—screaming in a strait jacket during the brainwashing; sweet and helpless when rejected by his parents; alone, weeping, on a bridge; beaten, bleeding, lost in a rainstorm; pounding his head on a floor and crying for death. Kubrick pours on the hearts and flowers; what is done to Alex is far worse than what Alex has done, so society itself can be felt to justify Alex's hoodlumism."

Charly
"Sometimes mawkish pictures (like DAVID AND LISA and TO SIR WITH LOVE & 1967 and this one) catch on with the public and are taken seriously; characteristically naïve, "sincere," and pitifully clumsy in execution, they are usually based on material that experienced directors are too knowing to attempt. CHARLY, which had already been a heavily anthologized short story ("Flowers for Algernon," by Daniel Keyes), a TV play, and a novel, has the kind of terrible idea that makes what is often called "a classic"—really a stunted perennial. In the movie, directed by Ralph Nelson and adapted by Stirling Silliphant, Charly (Cliff Robertson), the mentally retarded adult whose teacher (Claire Bloom) helps him get brain surgery, tries to rape her as soon as he gets some book learning. Rejected, he becomes a hippie and a Hell's Angel, but he soon goes back to his books and becomes a fantastic, computer-sharp supergenius, and he and the teacher have an affair. The scheming scientists didn't tell him, though: his genius is only temporary—he must go back to being a dummy. This cheap fantasy with its built-in sobs also takes the booby prize for the worst use (yet) of the split screen; it's a slovenly piece of moviemaking and it's full of howlers. CHARLY may represent the unity of schlock form and schlock content—true schlock art."

The Sound of Music
"Set in Austria in 1938, this is a tribute to freshness that is so mechanically engineered and so shrewdly calculated that the background music rises, the already soft focus blurs and melts, and, upon the instant, you can hear all those noses blowing in the theatre. Whom could this operetta offend? Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated in this way and are aware of how cheap and ready-made are the responses we are made to feel. We may become even more aware of the way we have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs. The dauntless, scrubbed-face heroine (Julie Andrews), in training to become a nun, is sent from the convent to serve as governess to the motherless Von Trapp children, and turns them into a happy little troupe of singers before marrying their father (Christopher Plummer). She says goodbye to the nuns and leaves them outside at the fence, as she enters the cathedral to be married. Squeezed again, and the moisture comes out of thousands—millions—of eyes and noses. Wasn't there perhaps one little Von Trapp who didn't want to sing his head off, or who screamed that he wouldn't act out little glockenspiel routines for Papa's party guests, or who got nervous and threw up if he had to get on a stage? The only thing the director, Robert Wise, couldn't smooth out was the sinister, archly decadent performance by Christopher Plummer—he of the thin, twisted smile; he seems to be in a different movie altogether."

West Side Story
"The film begins with a blast of stereophonic music, and everything about it is supposed to stun you with its newness, its size. The impressive, widely admired opening shots of New York from the air overload the story with values and importance—technological and sociological. And the dance movements are so sudden and huge, so portentously "alive" they're always near the explosion point. Consider the feat: first you take Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and remove all that cumbersome poetry; then you make the Montagues and Capulets modern by turning them into rival street gangs of native-born and Puerto Ricans. (You get rid of the parents, of course; America is a young country—and who wants to be bothered by the squabbles of older people?) There is the choreographer Jerome Robbins (who conceived the stage musical) to convert the street rumbles into modern ballet—though he turns out to be too painstaking for high-powered moviemaking and the co-director Robert Wise takes over. The writers include Ernest Lehman, who did the script, Arthur Laurents, who wrote the Broadway show, and, for the lyrics, Stephen Sondheim. The music is by Leonard Bernstein. The irony of this hyped-up, slam-bang production is that those involved apparently don't really believe that beauty and romance can be expressed in modern rhythms, because whenever their Romeo and Juliet enter the scene, the dialogue becomes painfully old-fashioned and mawkish, the dancing turns to simpering, sickly romantic ballet, and sugary old stars hover in the sky. When true love enters the film, Bernstein abandons Gershwin and begins to echo Richard Rodgers, Rudolf Friml, and Victor Herbert. There's even a heavenly choir. When Romeo-Tony meets his Juliet-Maria, everything becomes gauzy and dreamy and he murmurs, "Have we met before?" When Tony, floating on the clouds of romance, is asked, "What have you been taking tonight?" he answers, "A trip to the moon." Match that for lyric eloquence! (You'd have to go back to Odets.)"

tthere's a new URL for that dead Geocities page of 2800+ Kael reviews; I saw it this week but didn't save the addy. Anyone?

that's an invaluable resource. I was very sad when it went down.

http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20091026174320/http://geocities.com/paulinekaelreviews/

thx, but there's a new non-Wayback site.

cant find it, but i turned this up

http://thisrecording.com/film/2008/8/18/in-which-wes-anderson-tries-to-game-pauline-kael.html

my reaction to rushmore was similar to hers when i first saw it

It was included as the intro to the published Rushmore script eight or nine years ago.

Yeah, but Edelstein mentions that she was mortified when it appeared in the New York Times too.

OOH. I didn't know about this squabble.

I'm sure I've made it more than clear how much I love Kael, but I think she was completely wrong about Rushmore (to the extent that I can piece together her reaction from interviews, which seemed to be one of puzzlement). Just in general, I found I agreed with her less and less often towards the end. The quality of her writing was still great, but I found in terms of what she liked, she veered way in the direction of junk; it was almost like she discounted films that had any pretense towards seriousness. Her critics would probably say that that was always a problem with her, but at her best during the '70s, I think gave everything a fair look. I didn't feel that was true her last couple of years and in the interviews she gave after retiring. Obviously, there are exceptions--just a general observation.

I disagree. While it's true she reviewed more junk, the eighties and early nineties also produced more and more of it. Also, those 1500-word essays on forgotten junk like Club Paradise and About Last Night feature some of her best writing ever; it's as if she accepted the terms of the debate and relaxed.

'70s >>> '80 for movies, but State of the Art and Hooked are my favorites of her collections.

A bunch of junk from the '80s has aged a little bit better than many of the serious movies from the same decade.

Fat keeps.

I dont think you can say someone's 'wrong' to be puzzled by a movie - i sure as shit didn't know what to make of it (rushmore) at the time.

wasn't she famously a champion of de sica (as opposed to sariss' "male weepies") and rosellini? i didn't get the impression she eschewed seriousness

She had her blind spots (Bresson, Ozu, Mizoguchi), but so does every critic.

De Sica is sort of trash compared to Rossellini.

Oh wait, she liked Rossellini too? Color me surprised.

i thought i recalled several admiring bresson reviews...l'argent & ... joan of arc maybe?

i love all those guys

i didn't get the impression she eschewed seriousness

Early on, no--that was the point I was making. Being puzzled by Rushmore is fine; I think she's wrong not to think "Wow, that's an amazing film," but puzzlement is totally valid. I'm not a big fan of the '80s, so our thoughts on Kael are undoubtedly tied in to how we feel about the decade to begin with. At times, I thought she was amazing; her Casualties of War review ranks with anything she ever wrote.

Oh no way. The only one with which she (barely) connected was ...Country Priest. She despised Mouchette, Lancelot, etc.

xpost

that casualties of war review pissed me off because it got me to see that p.o.s. movie which i never would've bothered with otherwise

This is still a fantastic listen.

http://tsutpen.blogspot.com/2006/05/when-film-critics-gather.html

Especially because all three are so frequently ill-tempered and bitchy.

Plus, the eighties version of "seriousness" was often merely ponderous.

But maybe I should've known better anyway, knowing her history w/Depalma

xxpost (From the comments: "Kael sounds much as she did in other interviews I've heard, a sort of overly-didactic bedside nurse, explaining the symptoms of your disease with a dispassionate hauteur.")

I was about to say, "Many of those comments are typical."

Americans just hate smart people

(Plz to ignore my comment in that thread.)

thx, but there's a new non-Wayback site.

― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Friday, December 17, 2010 4:41 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

http://web.archive.org/web/20061022083014/www.geocities.com/paulinekaelreviews/

?

Mouchette
France (1966): Drama
80 min, No rating, Black & White

Robert Bresson has made several films of such sobriety that while some people find them awesomely beautiful, other people find sitting through them like taking a whipping and watching every stroke coming. MOUCHETTE, from a Bernanos novel, is about a lonely, mistreated 14-year-old girl who commits suicide. Cinematography by Ghislain Cloquet. In French.

that site just reprinted all the stuff in her 5001 nights at the movies book, right? Which is cool and all, but I don't think they transcribed her longer reviews.

god i'm enough of a fanboy that i shouldn't even look at this thread. any bet-hedge or tongue cluck about some movie she overrated or underrated just pisses me off unnecessarily.

yeah, those are all 5001 nights capsules. nice to have since i lost my copy, but...

I'm about to put on The Simpsons movie for my class, but in closing: no one inspires more commentary than Kael.

Richard Brody has a fairly vicious takedown of Kael on his NYer blog re: her Shoah review: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2010/12/shoah-at-25.html
I guess he's always had a problem with her, though now she can't answer back.

her shoah review was pretty brutal iirc

Is J. Hoberman's supposedly legendary response online anywhere?

I guess he's always had a problem with her, though now she can't answer back.

It's crazy how many people waited til she was dead to lash out. Like Sarris' whole "can't say I mourn her, she gay-baited me" thing.

Wonder what Molly Haskell thinks of that reaction.

Would be curious what anyone would think of their husband writing an obituary that starts:

The death of Pauline Kael (1919-2001) was announced on a local television-news program late on Labor Day night, as I was preparing for my first film class of the semester the next morning at Columbia. I can't say I was as saddened as I had been a few days earlier by the death of Jane Greer (1924-2001). Still, do not send for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee, and all that. Pauline was 82, and I am 72, and who knows when the Grim Reaper from Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal will come for me?

Andrew Sarris's Scenes from a marriage

that's some flaccid writing

Limp wrists, limp writing, stiff corpse.

Recess...I saw Molly Haskell introduce A nos amours a few months ago. She signed a book for me afterwards, and I asked about her husband. I've always had mixed feelings about Sarris, but I felt bad when she said he'd recently had a bad fall, which is obviously not good at his age.

she wasn't really someone whose taste i would ever trust but she was a good writer.

yeah, that's pretty much how i feel. really enjoy reading her stuff, but i definitely don't take her opinions as gospel.

I assume you guys mean Kael, not Molly Haskell.

I bet yr posts will suffer when you're 72.

I asked about the capsules in the first place cuz I saw she said Mickey Rooney's perf was the most 'daring' thing in B'fast @Tiffany's.

Yup--she loved Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's, just like (from all reports) she openly campaigned for Driving Miss Daisy over Do the Right Thing for the New York awards that year. When it came to race, either she was pure id or she loved to provoke; she was worlds away from the oncoming political-correctness freight train.

she was better pre-new yorker imo

You mean the radio stuff, and the notes she wrote for her rep theatre...Interesting; I don't think I've heard anyone make that argument.

State of the Art and Hooked are my favorites of her collections. (upthread)

For me, Reeling by a mile. I don't know anything about literary or art criticism, just film and music, but I can't think of any critic more in sync with a specific moment that Kael was over the course of Reeling. Last Tango, Mean Streets, Godfather II, Nashville--the book is just filled with monumental reviews. There are probably a number of music critics who did their best work during punk.

That she never even bothered to review a Fassbinder film makes me think of her as a crank, if an important one.

Fassbinder was a huge blind spot. I think I came across something where she made reference to him not being for her, or something like that; nonetheless, writing for something as high profile as The New Yorker, to me she had an obligation to at least review him semi-regularly. It'd be almost--not quite--like not reviewing Godard in the mid-'60s.

Dr. Morbius disapproves of cranks.

(No comment--I just want to kind of freeze that sentence in time.)

there's a review of one fassbinder film -- 'merchant of four seasons' -- in her collection of capsule reviews. perhaps inevitably, she declares that it "isn't likable."

there are probably a number of music critics who did their best work during punk.

are you comparing punk with seventies American film? It's fine if you do. I no longer think the seventies were the high watermark of American film (just like I'm not inclined to say the same about punk and music).

are you comparing punk with seventies American film?

No, although in terms of quality and excitement, that works for me; I was just comparing a critic being perfectly matched to a moment. (I realized I knew just enough about art criticism to say that Clement Greenberg and Abstract Expressionism is an example of what I mean.)

the essays in i lost it at the movies are incredibly well-argued -- there's a review of the movie version of 'billy budd' where she makes a really interesting argument about the 'point' of melville's story that i've never seen anyone else make -- and very tightly written. i think it's still her best book. 'circles and squares' is an incredible essay, in large part because she holds back on the put-downs and concentrates on argument.

her reviews never lost that sharpness, obviously, but her later attempts to write at essay-length -- all those pieces where she bemoans the cowardliness of the directors, or the boringness of the audience, or whatever -- just seem like a bunch of short reviews strung together.

i think kael's biggest weakness as a critic (i don't think she has many as a writer) was her unwillingness to revisit movies, which gave her a somewhat skewed perspective about a lot of older films -- i wonder if she would have been so quick to proclaim "the fury" better than all of hitchcock if the hitch films had been fresher in her mind.

"Circles and Squares" is a masterpiece--so devastating, that I kind of understand why Sarris still couldn't bring himself to let it go in his obituary for Kael.

Agree totally with you about her one-viewing-only credo.

She would have made a helluva literary critic. Her analysis of The Bostonians (which consumes more space than her review of the doomed Merchant Ivory film) is still one of the most cogent on Henry James I've read. Ditto her demurrals on Forster's A Passage to India

As many have pointed out, the irony of "Circles and Squares" is that with a few directors--De Palma and Peckinpah most prominently, but other people like Martin Ritt and Irving Kershner--she came close to being the ultimate auteurist.

uhhh not by the definition of auteurist that she's critiquing in "circles and squares." otherwise she would have thought body double was his best movie.

it's not like she was against discussing a director's career and having favorites

I always forget she's the Tarantino of critics on this board.
Sarris is only good for dotage jokes. 'tis pity.

I was going to add that she did still criticize those guys on occasion, Body Double being a good example. But she loved The Fury to a degree that far exceeds anything else I've ever read on that film, and, skipping forward, there was an interview I read where she praised Snake Eyes and Mission to Mars. Never saw MTM, but I've seen The Fury and Snake Eyes; to me, that's classic auteurist territory.

have you actually read circles and squares? because reading the fact that she liked less popular depalma movies as "classic auteurist territory" suggests you haven't

Are you really asking me that?

(Oops, the ILX stylebook--I need to add an "Um" or an "Uhh" to indicate disbelief.)

Um, are you really asking me that?

fyi sarris' three premises of "auteur theory"

1. that the technical competence of the director is a criterion of value
2. that the distinguishable personality of the director is a criterion
3. the "ultimate glory of cinema" is the "interior meaning" you get from the "tension between a director's personality and his material.

that kael liked movies you haven't seen anyone else like doesn't make the fact that she found the last two pretty absurd ironic at all.

In a nutshell:

1) One of the things she takes Sarris to task for is constructing a theory whereby you end up praising a director for his worst work;
2) She likes Snake Eyes;
3) Snake Eyes is, for me, a piece of junk;
4) Bingo.

Never saw MTM, but I've seen The Fury and Snake Eyes; to me, that's classic auteurist territory.

Unlike Sarris, though, Kael never defended a movie she herself acknowledged was trash simply because a director shows his "stamp."

From what I remember of Sarris' essay he did impressive rhetorical somersaults to defend a shitty Preminger film for nevertheless showing his personality.

also: admiring a director's work /= auteurism

Da Croupier: Before we get into some long-winded back-and-forth, there's a lot of stuff in "Circles and Squares"; you're approaching it from one angle, I'm approaching for another angle. To say that my angle suggests I haven't even read the piece is just...rude! (And so wrong.)

Unlike Sarris, though, Kael never defended a movie she herself acknowledged was trash simply because a director shows his "stamp."

She may not have said it--I wouldn't expect her to say, "Geez, Andy was right after all"--but that doesn't mean that wasn't what was basically behind her fondness for Snake Eyes. And unless you guys have a pipeline into her brain, I guess we'll never know.

Geez--I love Kael...

btw Sarris isn't useless. You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet is a pretty collection of essays about Old Hollywood.

*pretty good

i'm not approaching it from a different angle, clemenza. i'm pointing out that your "irony" is dependent on ignoring what auteurism actually meant when she critiqued it.

But it also meant what I said above--it didn't mean just one thing.

I'm hardly the first person to ever say this of Kael...

well i figured it was second-hand

Jesus...and I thought you were one of the good people around here.

Didn't want to walk downstairs to get my copy, but I made the trip. "It is an insult to an artist to praise his bad work along with the good; it indicates you are incapable of judging either."

If you think Snake Eyes is as bad as I do, then...Oh, I'm sure you can figure out the rest.

sorry, that was mean of me but "i'm not the first person to make this statement you're calling simplistic" is nagl. again, you're ignoring what a parlor game auteurism was at the time (one of the reasons its definition has watered down so much over the decades) to make a cheap "lol she liked crap too" joke.

Saying that she had a streak of auteurism in her really wasn't meant as a joke; it was just acknowledging something that I and many other people (Sarris included; clearly not you) find ironic. It doesn't make her a bad person. It's almost a mirror image of the irony that Sarris began by celebrating the Edgar G. Ulmers and Phil Karlsons of the world, but if you skip ahead to his recent Top 10s, they're heavy with the kind of stodgy quality films that he once despised. Which may just be age; maybe there's no irony there at all.

of course she had a "streak" of auteurism in her, she acknowledges as much as in the same book where she dares to say she enjoyed Snake Eyes. Anyone conscious of a director's presence enough to have favorites has a "streak" of it. Thing is that Sarris had constructed a whole playground of silly rules on top of this investment in movies as art - and that's what she was trying to dismantle.

And dismantle it she did. Remind me again of what we're arguing about.

You go back and re-read your ellipses, I'm bitter.

There's one very dead lady six feet underground somewhere enjoying this immensely. (Unless she's not: "One guy says auteurist, the other guy says not an auteurist, and I'm lying here thinking, 'Why I am listening to these two dumb fucks argue about whether or not I'm an auteurist?'")

B-b-but da croupier is always right!

Clever allusion to one of her Cassavetes reviews.

Raging Bull!

Where could I find her Bostonians piece?

For Keeps.

4 used from £53.95

clemenza, you should have been at Lincoln Center about 15 years ago when Sarris, Paul Schrader and some others were looking back on the auteur theory debate (Pauline couldn't make it as she was ill). Schrader said "I defy you to watch the output of any one of those golden years!" and "Who are the auteurs of today? Laverne, Opie and Meathead!"

Which I interpreted as him being a world-weary, aging and embittered auteurist rather than a turncoat.

btw Sarris isn't useless.

Missed that earlier. I hope I haven't given that impression; Sarris had a big effect on me too (not as big as Kael), and he's basic reading. My biggest problem with Sarris is simply that I don't think he writes as well as Kael (or Kauffmann, or Simon).

James: That sounds like a great evening. (Also: much appreciated.)

One reason discussions of Kael tend to cheese me off is, here's this person who wrote really long, thoughtful reviews - ones that go over films in so much detail that whether or not I share the same opinion of the film's quality is mostly irrelevant, and people tend to just point out which ones she gave a "thumbs up" to that they'd give a "thumbs down."

And one complaint I do have about her work (which I may have mentioned in another thread): she had a real tendency to use the second person to falsely universalize what were obvious her most personal of opinions. I don't know whether it was a house style or hers, but I prefer "Gunga Din moved me" to "Gunga Din moved you."

Maybe it seemed like that in the context of this discussion, but believe me, I would never reduce Kael to a checklist of what she liked and what she didn't. I've probably read her Raging Bull review a dozen times, and I couldn't disagree with her more about a film.

I should have said "the same opinion of the film's personal value" rather than "quality" - Kael was pretty terrific at accurately predicting the audience for a type of movie and acknowledging what others could get out of it, even if she had no time for it herself.

kael said in an interview that she used 'you' because she thought it sounded less pretentious than 'one.' i think she meant it to be taken in a very super-casual sense, like she was telling you an anecdote over lunch ("you can't believe this shit you're watching!").

not that it really worked all the time -- half the time i want to go "the end of paths of glory didn't make me uncomfortable, dammit!"

Whoa, I should sell my copy of For Keeps on eBay!

Yup--she loved Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's, just like (from all reports) she openly campaigned for Driving Miss Daisy over Do the Right Thing for the New York awards that year. When it came to race, either she was pure id or she loved to provoke; she was worlds away from the oncoming political-correctness freight train.

― clemenza, Friday, 17 December 2010 22:34 (Yesterday)

Gotta say I agree with her on DMD.

Eric, THANK YOU for that audio link! I've never heard Simon's voice before, much less in the same room with Kael. Makes me wish I'd seen any of these movies.

Xpost: DMD got a bad rap. Wrong film for the time.

103 New Answers for Pauline Kael? Was she really rough on Tron 2 or something?

finding this to be a pretty compelling thread considering i have never read any film criticism in my life, except for reviews in magazines and things dr. morbius writes about. also lol her name is kinda like a leafy green.

Ha ha. By the way, I really didn't mean to sound so confrontational seven years ago.

Just got the part of the audio where Simon says that from the point of view of a bird, The Birds might be a great film.

I've never heard Simon's voice before

not in his guest shot on The Odd Couple?

'circles and squares' is an incredible essay, in large part because she holds back on the put-downs and concentrates on argument.

See, this baffles me because I think it's shoddily argued. Like much of her work. For me, she's like Lester Bangs - undeniably brilliant writer but wrong wrong bullheadedly WRONG (although Bangs' praise for Metal Box's death disco suggests he might have reversed his rockism had he lived throughout the 1980s...he was listening to The Human League's Dare when he died - did it kill him or was he resurrected as John Leland?)! So wrong, in fact, that the use value of her writing pales in comparison to Sarris'.

Take, for instance, this passage from "Circles and Squares" which has always bugged the shit outta me:

"Movie-going kids are, I think, much more reliable guides to this kind of movie than the auteur critics: every kid I've talked to knows that Henry Hathaway's North to Alaska was a surprisingly funny, entertaining movie and Hatari! (classified as a "masterpiece" by half the Cahiers Conseil des Dix, Peter Bogdanovich, and others) was a terrible bore" (15).

Ok fine and zingy and well-written. But well-argued? "uhhh" where's the argument? As a unrepentant lover of Xanadu, I'm all for (occasionally) paying serious attention to the opinions of movie-going kids. And as a lover of both North to Alaska and Hatari!, I'm more than receptive to hearing about the merits of the former over the latter. But WHY is North to Alaska entertaining (and hence better?)? She doesn't let us know. And ironically, it's the word "knows" that gives it away - North to Alaska just IS more entertaining; Hatari! just IS a terrible bore. That's not an argument; that's merely ILX-style crankiness.

And that's not the only instance of this non-arguing in the essay. Check this out from the very same page:

"When Preminger makes an expert, entertaining whodunit like Laura, we don't look for his personality (it has become part of the texture of the film); when he makes an atrocity like Whirlpool, there's plenty of time to look for his "personality" - if that's your idea of a good time" (15).

Again, Whirlpool is an atrocity; it just is. Duh, everyone KNOWS that! And on and on with Renoir, Lang, etc. substitutions later on. It's as if "entertainment" were somehow self-evident, a quality all people recognize and desire. She claims the auteurists possess a "truly astonishing inability to exercise taste and judgment within their area of preference" (15). But where's the judgment in her essay? Also, this characterization of auteurists is flat-out incorrect. Sarris, for one, was very much able to make value judgments within an auteur's oeuvre, e.g., see his Ford entry in The American Cinema for his take downs of When Willie Comes Marching Home, The Fugitive, Cheyenne Autumn, etc.

Moreover, I suspect Kael's (and supposedly the world's) hatred for Hatari! stems from a rather bourgeois overvaluation of tight narratives, the three-act structure, three-dimensional characters, realistic dialogue, etc. In this, she's hardly less a philistine than the myriad Hollywood moguls who mangled countless films, say, Darryl F. Zanuck who always got nervous when Ford went off the narrative path with his genius diversions. What makes Hatari! such a stone cold masterpiece is precisely its dismantling of the frequently moribund conventions outlined above which, by the way, is extraordinarily "entertaining" (amongst sooo many other things) to some people. As with Ford at his best, Hawks here is less concerned with uncovering an enigma or racing towards a conclusion than with delineating a community. He doesn't say "let me tell you a story;" he says "let me show you how this community works." Forward narrative pull is simply not on the menu so you need another lens through which to grasp it. (No doubt this is why Dave Kehr called Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon "the only avant-garde film ever made about the importance of tradition.")

In fact, Dave Kehr is a perfect example of an auteurist critic who does an excellent job of explaining the value of a Ford or Hawks while being perfectly capable of recognizing when the masters fumble. And ultimately, Kehr and Sarris (and Rosenbaum and Hoberman and Fred Camper and Adrian Martin and...) provide me with more value than Kael because they speak to me as a cinephile. As with sooooo many ilxors, Kael evinces more joy in writing (or do I mean arguing?) than in cinema/[music].

And there IS value in that. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that she'd take the preceding paragraph as a compliment because part of her, shall we say, authorial voice inheres in a populism that takes aim at the pretensions of urbane, world-weary bohemia/intelligentsia, a category which subsumes cinephiles (although how she felt she escaped this milieu is beyond me, esp. given her notorious comments on Nixon voters). And I'll buy a ticket for that (not many boho types out there pumping Xanadu). But at the end of the day, I just wanna see lots and lots of movies! And auteurism and top ten lists, which Kael apparently never did (true?), give me the tools with which to do so (amongst other things, of course).

she was better pre-new yorker imo

― indian food 3: electric tandoori (history mayne), Saturday, December 18, 2010 12:36 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

You mean the radio stuff, and the notes she wrote for her rep theatre...Interesting; I don't think I've heard anyone make that argument....

"Circles and Squares" is a masterpiece--so devastating, that I kind of understand why Sarris still couldn't bring himself to let it go in his obituary for Kael.

Agree totally with you about her one-viewing-only credo.

― clemenza, Saturday, December 18, 2010 2:52 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah... 'circles and squares' is pre-new yorker

and if it's flawed ok, but it punches the crap out of sarris, who i think improved, but don't get much out of

think dwight macdonald also gave AS '63 a good drubbing that is worth reading

(im coming from the angle of not have a whole lot of time for ford, preminger, hawks, etc -- schrader otm)

Even speaking as a Kael acolyte, KJB's refudiation is great. (You've got to change your initials, though; I feel like I'm talking about John Malkovich with a bizarre Russian accent.)

That line about every-kid-I've-talked-to always bugged me, too, but not for cinematic reasons; it's more that I think she's just making that up for effect. Did she really go around surveying kids on what they thought of North to Alaska? Or, even weirder, did they start talking about other things--how's school, any plans for the summer, what do you want to be when you grow up, etc.--and the conversation always somehow ended up back at North to Alaska? My guess is that one kid was transformed into many kids. That's fine, writer's license--it does make me roll my eyes, though.

One really funny thing is Macdonald's review of Kael's first book. He starts out by praising her, realizes as he goes along how tough she's been on him in the past, and ends by basically saying, "Oh, hell--maybe I don't like her that much after all."

KJB, you take some of her asides too seriously. I don't expect a critic to always explain why a movie sucks.

Also: she loved Rio Bravo and lots of Hawks' more discursive films. If she disliked Hatari!, I'm not inclined to blame her "rather bourgeois overvaluation of tight narratives," but credit her for thinking this time Hawks went too far.

But at the end of the day, I just wanna see lots and lots of movies! And auteurism and top ten lists, which Kael apparently never did (true?), give me the tools with which to do so (amongst other things, of course).

Kind of ironic that you claim her writing is poorly argued (by pulling out tangents to the argument - and the sarris book you mention came out six years after the essay she's critiquing - but anyway), evidence that she wasn't a "cinephile" and then complain that she didn't make top ten lists. The reason she didn't isn't that she didn't want you to see lots and lots of movies, but because she thought it was a waste of time. Anyone reading her work can find recommendations left and right - announcing a club's criteria like Sarris did and trying to quantify artistic value are just games she didn't enjoy playing. I make lists sometimes because I find them fun, but I know they're not revelatory.

I'll totally admit her anecdotal grabs at populism are goofy, but they're fairly rare.

I'm an obsessive list-maker like Sarris; as much as I would have loved seeing year-ends from Kael, that's just a matter of individual preference. I don't hold it against someone for making Tops 10s, and definitely don't credit someone as being more serious just because they choose not to make them. (Kauffmann participated in a couple of the Sight and Sound polls, but he mostly avoided them too; ditto Simon.)

Here's a parlor game: try to fill out Kael's 2012 Sight and Sound ballot for her. Off the top of my head (no order): Nashville, [i]Godfather II, Fires on the Plain, The Earrings of Madame De, Shoeshine (that's the one she left crying after her break-up, right? or was it a different De Sica or Rossellini?), Weekend, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a Keaton film, an American comedy from the '30s, and a De Palma, either Casulties of War or Blow Out. I like lists so much, I even want to make them out for Pauline Kael.

Thanx for the kind words, clemenza (strong praise coming from you...for realz). I'm less concerned with Kael's ethnographic rigidity than with how she reads her sample (or "sample" because, right, I doubt she surveyed actual youngsters): even if she talked to a million young moviegoers, that doesn't prove once and for all the entertainment factor (or value?) of Hatari!. (Although I'd say the same of all enthnography bullies.)

And Soto, I don't expect a critic to always explain why a movie sucks either. But in such a supposedly well-argued essay, I do. And again, she repeats the non-arguing over and over again. This was her shot to take Sarris down and well, um...

P.S. Whirlpool rocks.

P.P.S. Did I tell y'all I got the Ford at Fox boxset for $100? And I'ma watch it ALL!!!!!

Her "argument" in the essay wasn't primarily with which movies Sarris thought rocked or sucked, but with the criteria Sarris says allow to the auteurist to deduce which movies rock or suck. But yeah, if you don't like writers who "love writing more than cinema," you might as well stick with the guys who at least try to make mathematical proofs.

an American comedy from the '30s

Or a musical perhaps. She adored Hallelujah, I'm a Bum!

Just got the part of the audio where Simon says that from the point of view of a bird, The Birds might be a great film.

Think that was Dwight Macdonald, not John Simon.

I like your close arguing Kevin, and I agree with you about her overuse of the self-evident, the implicit, and especially anecdotes about children, which seemed part of a reluctance to put her own fallible, subjective self out there more explicitly--ditto her not rewatching or making Top 10s.

That's the norm in criticism, I'm afraid. I also don't think these qualities made Kael a poor arguer. Even without remembering or re-reading the piece you're quoting, I can see and am persuaded by what she's saying short of accepting the particulars: I.e. there's a vast amount of pleasure to be taken in movies that goes unaccounted for in film criticism and theory.

Do you really think she was wedded to "realistic dialogue"? And this might be my Marxist literalism talking, but I don't see a connection between excessively valuing story and character and membership in the business-owning class.

This was her shot to take Sarris down and well, um...

matter of perspective really. think he took that fight to bed with him for a while.

idk, i've mellowed on kael over the years. she was a hell of a writer when on form, and that's kind of all i want from a writer.

I'm definitely to the point where I value control and organization in criticism less than intensity and blatant subjectivity (and I apparently have little use for Hawks unless Jane Russell is involved), so in the battle between Kael and Sarris, it's the former all the way. And Sarris may have gotten better at some point, but have you read him in the last 10 years? Whatever he had is irreparably gone. Even his capacity for taxonomy and hierarchies.

However, the last few times I've gone back to re-read some of Kael's more famous reviews on, specifically, De Palma, I'm sort of surprised how well some of them don't hold up. In the same sense that some movies are never as good as the first time you see them, some of her most enthusiastic writing only seems fresh and shocking when it's new and you haven't had time to turn the movie in question around in your own head.

There I go, using Kaelian second-person.

think a lot of yall will agree that ephemeral film reviewing is a tough racket, and putting it between hard covers is dicey. and her weekly reviews were pretty long. she made a big thing about only watching films once, but that's kind of going to be the reality for most reviewers -- unless you see it at a festival and then later before release. and tbh watching the same film twice in a week is rarely a good idea unless you're 16 and it's 'goodfellas'.

This is probably the opposite of Eric H's point, but as I get older myself, one thing I have come to appreciate about Sarris is his non-combative tone. I think that's why he was so wounded by Kael's piece; just the idea that another film critic would go after him with such intensity. (Which, if you read the Francis Davis book, seems to surprise Kael almost as much--that he would take such an attack personally. How could he not?) If you look at Kael, Sarris, Kauffmann, and Simon during that great period (and I know many people would take Manny Farber over any of them--not me--but in any event, he was writing in a different sphere), Simon was vicious, Kael was cutting, Kauffmann mostly wrote above the fray, and Sarris seemed like the one who least liked to get into personal sniping.

think a lot of yall will agree that ephemeral film reviewing is a tough racket

Would agree.

and putting it between hard covers is dicey

Wouldn't know. Wouldn't dare.

What's wrong with Farber? I hope it's not just differences in taste, because I think Antonioni is one of my favorite filmmakers of the '60s and Farber pretty much ripped him to shreds iirc.

macdonald's part of that era too, and im a big fan of his. capable of being very funny.

xpost

There's nothing wrong with Farber! (Why do I needlessly open up these doors...) All I'm saying is that he doesn't mean as much to me as Kael or Kauffmann.

Macdonald was great too. I think he wrote a little less regularly than the other four, and his political background maybe moved him a little outside the sphere of the other four.

I think that's why he was so wounded by Kael's piece; just the idea that another film critic would go after him with such intensity. (Which, if you read the Francis Davis book, seems to surprise Kael almost as much--that he would take such an attack personally. How could he not?)

this is odd to me. i can't remember the exact timeline, or whether he was that outspoken, but sarris aimed at the big beasts in his early criticism, mainly bosley crowther. he knew it was a blood sport. but i guess that was upstart 'film culture' contributor vs the new york times, and in that fight kael was more of an equal (can't even remember who she wrote for at that point). of course kael should have known it would hurt, though i do sometimes think: book reviewers have to mind their ps and qs a little because it's a small world and people share (or want to share) agents and publishers, and reviewers are writers too; whereas with film reviewing, you never think, will this hurt brett ratner's feelings?

xpost

d-mac was writing for esquire, so monthly i guess? in the 1960s. he'd written very important things about soviet cinema when andrew and pauline were in short trousers though.

I have such reverence for that whole era, I like them all. I even like the punch-line they all shared, Bosley Crowther, whose 50 Great Films was probably the first film book I ever held in my hands back in grade school (realizing now that he undoubtedly did actual harm in making sure a lot of small and/or foreign films never got a decent chance to find an audience).

Think that was Dwight Macdonald, not John Simon.

It was both, but Simon made the joke first. Somebody should make a short film about a movie theater full of birds watching The Birds.

Yeah, the timeline was a little different for Macdonald; by the mid-'60s, when Kael and Sarris are in ascension, I think that's when Macdonald started to move away from writing about film.

but sarris aimed at the big beasts in his early criticism, mainly bosley crowther

But I think that may have been part of why Sarris felt so ambushed. They all thought Crowther was a joke; for Sarris (I'm just guessing here), he may have felt an immediate kinship with Kael since they were both outsiders, and therefore was that much more taken aback by "Circles and Squares."

Here's a parlor game: try to fill out Kael's 2012 Sight and Sound ballot for her. Off the top of my head (no order): Nashville, Godfather II, Fires on the Plain, The Earrings of Madame De, Shoeshine (that's the one she left crying after her break-up, right? or was it a different De Sica or Rossellini?), Weekend, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a Keaton film, an American comedy from the '30s, and a De Palma, either Casulties of War or Blow Out. I like lists so much, I even want to make them out for Pauline Kael.

― clemenza, Saturday, December 18, 2010 10:35 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

i feel like she'd find room for some renoir

with film reviewing, you never think, will this hurt brett ratner's feelings?

I do. Which is why I sent him a Christmas card. And the I found out he was Jewish. Oops.

Also: in keeping with Sarris's civility, it was he who, a few years ago (can't remember where I read it), wrote some nice things about Crowther, and how he regretted reducing him to such a caricature.

Renoir--absolutely, missed that. Rules of the Game, probably. Another obvious one I missed: something from the Apu trilogy.

If Sarris was an exceptionally "civil" guy, was his pissing on Kael's fresh corpse (seriously - "the bells toll for thee, and all that") just crazily out of character?

yeah he aint that civil when he dislikes someone (like most of us). read him on bogdanovich.

Civil, minus anything to do with Kael, obviously.

Bogdanovich? I thought he and Sarris were good friends. Can you point me to a specific piece? He used to write very nice things about Bogdanovich.

actually i can!

voice, 15 may 1978. the voice is on google something-or-other.

I'm going to try to look that up.

Sarris' stunningly bitter obit in full: http://www.observer.com/node/44957

I know full well about the obit; I've linked to it myself. We're arguing in circles now--I'm saying he was basically a civil guy who was deeply wounded by "Circles and Squares," hence his extreme bitterness 40 years later.

Not having any luck finding the old Voice piece. I did learn that May 15, 1978 was the exact publication date of Nixon's memoirs. Now there's somebody who knew how to nurse a grudge!

Is a civil guy; he's still very much alive.

"Movie-going kids are, I think, much more reliable guides to this kind of movie than the auteur critics: every kid I've talked to knows that Henry Hathaway's North to Alaska was a surprisingly funny, entertaining movie and Hatari! (classified as a "masterpiece" by half the Cahiers Conseil des Dix, Peter Bogdanovich, and others) was a terrible bore"

pauldeej kael

Hm, didn't know about the Sarris/Bogdanovich beef either but I googled the names and got something in the first hit, from a book called Picture Shows: the life and films of Peter Bogdanovich by Andrew Yule: "Andrew Sarris, having in the spring of 1963 brought out an entire issue of the magazine Film Culture devoted to American film directors, was building up resentment. He believed that Bogdanovich had absorbed many of his opinions and was regurgitating them as if they had been freshly minted."

yeah that's what it's about, that and eugene archer, whom PB wrongly (sez andrew) credited with co-authoring the 1963 issue of film culture. i can't find it either, now, but i took screenshots ('Peter's insidious besmirching of my professional integrity'). there's a reference to it a few weeks later in a letter.

the article says there's no pretence of friendship now that AS has panned 'at long last love' and 'nickelodeon'.

I never knew about any of that--very interesting. Sarris seemed to have gotten over it for a time, anyway: he gave Targets a good review ("All in all, however, Peter Bogdanovich has joined the ranks of promising directors with his very first feature, a movie to which such adjectives as gripping and compelling are appropriate"), and The Last Picture Show was seventh on his '71 year-end. I'm not sure that panning At Long Last Love is proof of anything. I'll stand by my point that, Kael excepted, Sarris is not all that combative--not nearly as much as Simon or Kael used to be.

He also had They All Laughed eleventh on his '81 list.

of this bunch, Sarris wrote best about Buster Keaton.

Kauffmann has a great write-up on a Keaton festival in Living Images; I think he also may have written about either The General or Sherlock, Jr. in the "Reviewings" section of Before My Eyes (I don't have a copy, so I'm not sure about that).

yeah, I havent read Kauffmann in eons, can't say.

I also don't think these qualities made Kael a poor arguer. Even without remembering or re-reading the piece you're quoting, I can see and am persuaded by what she's saying short of accepting the particulars

Pete, first off, thanks for your kind words (extra special humbling coming from you). I don't think she was always a poor arguer; I don't agree with her take on The King of Comedy, for instance, but it's so beautifully argued that it gave me a platform from which to understand my own love of the film. But I do think "Circles and Squares" is poorly argued and more cranky than useful.

I.e. there's a vast amount of pleasure to be taken in movies that goes unaccounted for in film criticism and theory.

But see, that's where auteurism is much more useful. There's a lot of damn films in that Ford box! Sarris accounted for waaaay more films than Kael ever did even North to Alaska although he found it Lightly Likable (it's much better than that) and compared Hathaway favorably to Wellman (perhaps his largest blindspot - Track of the Cat damn near matches the best of Ford and Hawks and those early programmers are consistent knockouts).

Do you really think she was wedded to "realistic dialogue"? And this might be my Marxist literalism talking, but I don't see a connection between excessively valuing story and character and membership in the business-owning class.

Eh to be perfectly honest, that long post was an attempt to flush out some recent bourgeois intrusions in my life. Extraordinarily therapeutic in that respect! But really the fact of the matter is that she was wedded to those conventions/ideals when it came to Hollywood. A good Hollywood film to her was one that told a tight story, etc. But, thank gawd, the genius of the system was flexible enough to allow for films that did not rigidly adhere to those conventions. So even though they are undeniably Hollywood films and they do tell stories (sorta...not really...), you need to approach them from a different angle. And call me a snob, a cinephile (quelle horreur!), an anti-populist (ha!), etc., but it does help if you have some sort of affinity for the avant-garde (or at least, the insufferable art film...I'm perfectly cognizant of the fact that Man's Favorite Sport? can be just as difficult to slog through as L'avventura).

Oh it is, it is -- but it's my dad's favorite movie!

Ha! Such a dad movie!

So even though they are undeniably Hollywood films

They = auteurist films she hated like Hatari! or 7 Women (which she got freakishly wrong! it's my all-time fave Ford)

P.S. That Ford box is also ridiculously heavy! I lugged that fucker home on the bus! Cinephilia knows no pain.

I'm not a dad. But I love Paula Prentiss. In the best of all possible worlds, I would have enlisted Paula Prentiss to help me cross the threshhold into dad-dom.

A good Hollywood film to her was one that told a tight story, etc. But, thank gawd, the genius of the system was flexible enough to allow for films that did not rigidly adhere to those conventions. So even though they are undeniably Hollywood films and they do tell stories (sorta...not really...), you need to approach them from a different angle. And call me a snob, a cinephile (quelle horreur!), an anti-populist (ha!), etc., but it does help if you have some sort of affinity for the avant-garde (or at least, the insufferable art film...I'm perfectly cognizant of the fact that Man's Favorite Sport? can be just as difficult to slog through as L'avventura).

i don't see how you can think this and still dig sarris, who had NO IDEA about the avant-garde. but i think you're seeing things in hollywood movies that aren't really there. there wasn't that much space to depart from conventions. man's favourite sport is just a dull, uninspired movie by some guy a somewhere between twenty years and a quarter of a century past his best -- that's why it's a slog. and no i couldn't give you chapter and verse (long-ass time since i slogged through it) and no im not going to rewatch, there just isn't time.

think you're seeing things in hollywood movies that aren't really there.

so you retract your praise for The Fighter then

nope, not at all -- being cute, though, i'd rather overrate a current movie than a 60 y.o. movie

i think you're seeing things in hollywood movies that aren't really there.

Ha! That's sorta what Kael said about The King of Comedy. But man, you are the evidence queen to end all evidence queens.

man's favourite sport is just a dull, uninspired movie by some guy a somewhere between twenty years and a quarter of a century past his best

And the film he directed after that, Red Line 7000, is my vote for his greatest film. But I already knew we wouldn't be having tea.

You're right about Sarris, though. But if an affinity for the avant-garde isn't useful to appreciate Hatari! or, say, The Old Dark House (James Whale, 1932), then how about a disdain for tight narratives, the three-act structure, logical character motivation, etc.?

i'd rather overrate a current movie than a 60 y.o. movie

bigot

but i think you're seeing things in hollywood movies that aren't really there. there wasn't that much space to depart from conventions.

sorry but this is total bullshit and way crazier than anything kael ever said, ever.

I love reading film criticism of the so-called Golden Age. Even more revelatory is criticism of the critics. Does anyone know if Kael ever argued with or even acknowledged the existence of these contemporary critics?:

Renata Adler
Judith Crist
Rex Reed
Richard Schickel

just seeing her shoot a look at Rex woulda been priceless

Adler wrote an infamous attack on Kael, though much later on (sometime in the '90s, maybe? I have it in one of Adler's books). Schickel wrote a defense of Sarris in one of his books, documenting his shift away from Kael towards Sarris; I just read that fairly recently. Crist and Reed were--how to put this benignly--more mainstream reviewers who weren't really in the Kael/Sarris/Kauffmann/Simon mix, although I know Simon ridiculed Reed on occasion. (I think the first film book I ever bought was a paperback collection of Judith Crist's reviews: The Private Eye, The Cowboy and the Very Naked Girl...it influenced me! And I think there may have been a character modelled after her in Stardust Memories.)

Among other gigs, Judith Crist had a column in TV Guide for years on whatever films were network-broadcast that week.

A little bit about the Adler/Kael dust-up (can't find the actual piece):

http://www.slate.com/id/1005863/

That was the hook of the Crist book--that these were all films that you could now see on TV, I guess something of a novelty when the book came out. Actually, I think the TV Guide logo was on the cover.

big silly xpost

And the film he directed after that, Red Line 7000, is my vote for his greatest film.

HOLY CATS! You just don't through out something like that without further commentary, Senor Bozelka! Top five Hawks movies, plz!

Mine, cuz I have little imagination:

1. HIS GIRL FRIDAY
2. I WAS A MALE WAR BRIDE
3. ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS
4. CEILING ZERO
5. THE BIG SLEEP

through = throw

How odd is that mistake?

this is s.thing kent jones wrote the other day: "More importantly, who cares? There's such a mad obsession in film criticism with lists, rankings, how much "love" is shown for this underappreciated movie rather than that AFI-sanctioned classic. There is a vast amount of attention paid to what critics like and don't like, and precious little to what they write and what they think."

that's about right. so i mean, maybe 'red line' *is* hawks's best film, if you're able to offer a case for it.

Someone else we haven't mentioned: Parker Tyler. Simon ridiculed him, too. Simon ridiculed everybody.

parker tyler is a soft target... belongs to another age, really, before all this auteur horseshit came along. a more interesting read than most.

There was clearly some homophobia in Simon's attacks on Tyler and Reed, although: 1) again, he ridiculed everybody, and 2) pretty much everybody thought Reed was a joke.

I have an autographed first edition of Judith Crist's The Private Eye, the Cowboy and the Very Naked Girl. It reads, "to a fellow movie-lover... and antique lover" because the book was already old when she signed it.

The Crist book has year-end Top Ten lists for 1963 to 1967, plus little justifications for each inclusion. I find this quite handy for getting a picture of what was out there & what films impressed a smart but non-contentious critic at the time.

HOLY CATS! You just don't through out something like that without further commentary, Senor Bozelka! Top five Hawks movies, plz!

Well, this isn't the thread for it and my defense won't convince Miss Mayne (nor will anyone else's). But... It's a cliché for incorrigible auteurists like yours truly to fawn over an auteur's last (or near last) film and that's where I'm coming from with my love for Red Line 7000. The final films are a measure of how much room exists in their worldviews. So I see Red Line 7000 as an attempt to test how well Hawks' ideal of professionalism holds up in the face of a burgeoning feminism, e.g., The Feminine Mystique had been recently published. The film asks: can professionalism remain an ideal for the Hawksian hero when women are now competing for jobs and business ownership and money? This is much different from the occasional woman who became one of the guys by joining the team, say, in Only Angels Have Wings. Because in Red Line 7000, women are now the Hawksian heroes. And they're creating groups of professionals that are all women. So what happens when the male Hawksian hero encounters this, perhaps even looking at some very real material inequities? James Caan's character doesn't take it too well, for one. It's a film full of extremely intense conflicts almost from the very beginning, conflicts that force you back over Hawks' oeuvre to gauge the parameters of his worldview (which means you get to watch more movies!). And something similar occurs with Ford's 7 Women but with downright apocalyptic results. I can't think of an artist who dismantled his/her worldview so corrosively, so absolutely as Ford did with 7 Women. A non-cinephile friend sat in dumbfounded silence at the end of it and later wound up losing his cool with two putative cinephiles for not showing enough interest in tracking it down (!).

Other great things about Red Line 7000: its Pop Art tour of the American South; its art film-like formal rhyming patterns; and crummy racing footage (which some say Hawks didn't even film) bound to piss off boys who see this film only because they're race car enthusiasts

Top Five Hawks
1. Red Line 7000
2. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
3. Rio Bravo
4. Hatari!
5. The Big Sky

Top One Hawks:
1. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Well put.

Well, this isn't the thread for it and my defense won't convince Miss Mayne (nor will anyone else's).

Yeah - I slapped my head after I posted that; all in good fun, of course, but a silly post that probably deserved another place.

1 his girl friday
2 scarface
3 the big sleep
4 bringing up baby
5 twentieth century or to have and have not

i don't think i quite get the mystical auteurist appreciation of hawks (dave kehr: 'money business ranks with the best works of the american cinema') but he certainly made more great films than any other classic hollywood guy.

I know this isn't a Hawks thread--or wasn't, anyway--but doesn't Red River rank for anybody? I put it right there with The Big Sleep.

I was about to say, Red River's my #1.

I like Red River a lot, but I don't know how one compares it directly w/ His Girl Friday or The Big Sleep except in the most subjective "well, it makes me happier" way.

btw Kael called RR "a magnificent horse opera" AND wrote "a lot of it is just terrible."

I think she hated the "aw, shucks, let's make up and be friends" resolution. I'm just comparing it to His Girl Friday and The Big Sleep to the extent that they're all Hawks films--not quite sure what you mean.

Yeah I mean, I wouldn't argue that it's better than Friday or any of the other heavy hitters, it's just the one I'm fondest of.

Well Red River's brilliant, but Hawks made alot of brilliant movies, y'know?

Kind of near the bottom of the top tier of Hawks movies, I'd say.

The "who's got the nicer gun?" scene between Clift and John Ireland is just totally outrageous.

It's kind of like the textbook bit of "classic hollywood subtext" that's mentioned in every documentary.

kind of appreciate kjb's advocacy, but otoh you need to be interested in hawks's whole oeuvre to buy in. im not sure i go to major artists for a 'worldview' (but as you know i don't think hawks is a major artist), and my question was really about the film more than the plot

Other great things about Red Line 7000: its Pop Art tour of the American South; its art film-like formal rhyming patterns; and crummy racing footage (which some say Hawks didn't even film) bound to piss off boys who see this film only because they're race car enthusiasts

i mean the first half of this might interest me. the second half really doesn't -- reminds me of the 'deliberately bad' back projection shots cahiers critics would fawn over.

think 30s-40s hawks has the edge over anything later because it's faster, essentially

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IpEnsdXwFM

my question was really about the film more than the plot

?

Anyhoo, Fred Camper calls Red River the 4th greatest film of all-time. As much as I dig it, though, I've never quite gotten what he sees in it. Something about the film growing organically from the gestures of the actors.

well, you explained the plot (which makes it sound kind of like 'anchorman') but apart from the possible interest it has *as compared with other hawks films* im not sold that it's particularly distinguished as a film

but i haven't seen 'red line'

the idea that 'red river', which i have seen, is the fourth best film of all time is not one i can really entertain for a second

The story, you mean. Which is part of the film. And had R Baez not asked, I wouldn't have bothered. Come on - you know that detailing Red Line 7000's moderne editing patterns would have been wasted on you.

But fwiw Fred Camper is a rabid formalist (although he likes to deny this) so were he to waste his time defending any Hawks, he'd do so largely on those grounds.

Come on - you know that detailing Red Line 7000's moderne editing patterns would have been wasted on you.

not really, just think you're bluffing

i'd be interested to see a formalist cast for hawks, in a way

i mean shit, maybe it's a radical departure from everything he'd done before, but for 'moderne' in 1964 i'm going to need something pretty impressive, and you've already given away the race scenes as nothing much

My favorite Hawks:

Only Angels Have Wings
His Girl Friday
The Big Sleep
Bringing Out Baby

otm

I'm a little surprised OAHW hasn't been mentioned enough. Is it because Jean Arthur is so annoying?

i'm going to need something pretty impressive

And I'm going to need a sack of $$$ cuz your ass is trolling, sister. But nice try.

Soto, looooove Only Angels Have Wings but dude had tons of great films so something's gotta give.

Just for fun:

Top Five Ford (although I have a long way to go with him):

1. 7 Women
2. Wagon Master
3. The Long Gray Line
4. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
5. How Green Was My Valley

And wth

Top Five Preminger:

1. Angel Face
2. Fallen Angel
3. Bunny Lake Is Missing
4. The Human Factor
5. Daisy Kenyon

Who else was Kael cranky about that we can get list queeny over?

I'd toss in Advise and Consent.

Other auteurist bete noires of Kael's: Hitchcock way at the top, Capra, probably Ray and Sirk (don't remember specific digs, she mostly just ignored them altogether), and--he was only a favorite of Sarris's many years later--Billy Wilder.

Walsh, too, I think. For some of these folks, though, there'd be at least one film she loved almost without reservation: Notorious, His Girl Friday, and Stagecoach come to mind, although I'd have to check the last two.

Walsh is dicey "auteur" territory. He's like Wellman or Hathaway -- I'd never discuss him in the same breath as Cukor or Hawks.

Not with Hawks, no, but in The American Cinema, Sarris had Walsh in the same second-tier category as Cukor. And I think Walsh gets mentioned in "Circles and Squares."

I thought we already condemned Sarris' taxonomies to the seventh circle of the square.

I'm lost. My only point is, I think Walsh is absolutely considered an auteur in the original sense--by Sarris, by the French, by all the first-generation auteurists. Every bit as much as Cukor.

Her take on Midnight Cowboy II was pretty insightful.

Dr. Tongue!

From SCTV?

Yeah--there was this segment with Dr. Tongue and Woody Tobias, Jr. plugging their Midnight Cowboy sequel, and they had the woman who'd periodically do Kael (she wasn't all that great) critiquing it. Quite bizarre.

Hey, what do you know:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDdfD8nHbok

Oh wow--makes me nostalgic for Yonge St. circa 1979.

That 3D effect never gets old

kael was actually not 'cranky' about hawks, she loved all the classic ones and even praised some of them (like 'bringing up baby,' which i think she compared to restoration comedy) rather extravagantly. i don't think i'm the one to mount a formalist defense of his movies but the original 'scarface' has some great long shots, and is beautifully stylized right down to the performances -- definitely a lot there to talk about. the rambling, discursive, seemingly half-improvised nature of a lot of his movies appeals to me, and gives them a very distinctive flavor that you don't find in any other movies of the period. ('to have and have not' has basically the same plot and setting as 'casablanca,' but their tone couldn't be more different.)

Is it because Jean Arthur is so annoying?

To hell w/ you

I'm lost. My only point is, I think Walsh is absolutely considered an auteur in the original sense--by Sarris, by the French, by all the first-generation auteurists. Every bit as much as Cukor.

― clemenza, Monday, December 20, 2010 3:27 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah this was the starting point for 'circles and squares'. kael pointed out that all sarris had done was see a similarity between two mediocre (at best) walsh movies. i don't trust the first generation auteurists. they weren't good critics; they had a cloistered fanboy outlook on the world; and the movies they championed were frequently uninteresting unless you're tuned in to their obscurantist wavelength, which KJB is, i guess -- that or he's just challopping.

though historically important, during the silent period, walsh is hardly in the same rank, as an artist, as, well, david lean, to go for a random director they didn't talk about. or huston, who they hated. or elia kazan -- did they even talk about him?

perhaps if i saw all one hundred of his movies i'd disagree, but it's unlikely.

I detect similarities between Walsh, Lean, Huston and Kazan. I'm uninterested in all of them.

i like 1940s lean, some huston, some kazan... i think i've enjoyed some films directed by raoul walsh but there isn't the time to spend on him

glad you two could bond over the unimportance of Raoul Walsh; I will continue to neglect post-'50s horror shit.

I'm a big-tent guy. (In theory--in practice, I spend way too much time re-watching my favorite films to ever get to a lot of stuff I should watch.) I want them all in there: Hawks, Walsh, Preminger, Ray, etc., but also Lean, Zinneman, Kazan--especially Kazan--Huston, etc. Everything and everybody. Except costume dramas and Inland Empire--they get turned away at the door.

Eric, you sure are incurious about butch filmmakers for a guy who climbs rocks regularly.

(not a drug reference btw)

Kael was wrong about Capra and Sirk, but I don't think that was any reaction to auteurism, it was more her personality and what she perceived as sentimentality.

She liked several Capra movies though, and was at best tolerant of Sirk.

The only Capra I can think of that she liked was The Bitter Tea of General Yen--were there others? I know she recoiled from the big populist ones. She had that great line on Wonderful Life (paraphrase): "No one has Capra's gift for sentimentality--and you find anybody who does, kill him."

I had the general thrust of the line right, but the wrong film--it was Mr. Smith.

"No one else can balance the ups and downs of wistful sentiment and corny humour the way Capra does--but if anyone else should learn to, kill him."

The fate of the world depends upon clarifying this...Kael seemed to like Capra right up to and including Mr. Deeds (especially It Happened One Night); after that, not much at all. Don't know about You Can't Take It with You, though--no entry in 5001 Nights.

More Top Fives!

Hitch

1. Rear Window
2. Rebecca
3. Rope
4. Frenzy
5. Under Capricorn

Ray

1. Johnny Guitar
2. The Lusty Men
3. On Dangerous Ground
4. Rebel With A Cause
5. The Savage Innocents

Sirk

1. Imitation of Life
2. All That Heaven Allows
3. There's Always Tomorrow
4. Magnificent Obsession
5. Written on the Wind

Capra
1. The Bitter Tea of General Yen
and um maybe...
2. Dirigible?
Just don't get him.

Walsh I don't quite get either. Many of his films left little impression on me so his oeuvre is no longer a priority. But I dug:
A Distant Trumpet
Pursued
Me and My Gal
and I have a soft spot for the classic turkey The Horn Blows at Midnight

I don't even consider Walsh that important. He made a couple of good films.

3. Rope
4. Frenzy
5. Under Capricorn

Wow.

yeah i saw U/C under the best conditions, and it's a bust

couple nice camera moves

Poor Raoul Walsh. It's been ages since I saw They Drive By Night, but I remember it as being really good.'

Can't wait to see this director's cut of Rebel with a Cause!

frenzy is the weird R-rated british one with titties right

i feel like white heat is better than anything preminger or sirk ever did but w/e

not that ive seen everything preminger or sirk ever did!

Kev, thou iconoclast, dissing In a Lonely Place.

I remember The Horn Blows at Midnight being kinda funny! At least if you love Benny.

God--how could I forget White Heat? I think I'd take that over even my favorite Hitchcock or Hawks film, and way before anything by Ray, Sirk, or Preminger.

xpost Yeah I've talked about In a Lonely Place somewhere here before - saw it early in cinephilia and loved it, saw it later and couldn't access what I first saw in it. Maybe in another ten years, it'll hit me again.

Fwiw as much as I love me some auteurism, I've bumped heads with other, perhaps more hardline auteurists for pumping, say, Joan Crawford as an auteurist or for questioning the director as the ultimate/only source for what winds up on screen/in speakers. There's been tons of terrific work taking other personnel as auteurs, e.g., Christina Lane, "Stepping Out From Behind The Grand Silhouette: Joan Harrison's Films of the 1940s" in Authorship and Film, eds. David Gerstner and Janet Staiger (in fact, that entire collection is good for poking holes in the auteur theory). It's not the ONLY lens through which I view the entirety of cinema.

Also, the auteur theory shares a great deal with genre theory so I don't see what the big deal is apart from the fact that genre theory makes some people cranky as well. You approach the oeuvres Ford or Hawks or whoever as if they were genres, figuring out how the oeuvre/genre works (just like those Ford and Hawks communities!), looking for themes and variations, discovering ways to complicate the categories, etc. And genre theory means you get to watch even more movies!

The Roaring Twenties > White Heat

I'm much more inclined to think of "Joan Crawford pictures" than I am arguing whether Curtiz or Walsh are directors who deserve credit for their movies' successes.

haha Joan Crawford as an auteur, that should be

Joan wrote a very systematic analysis of William K Howard films for Modern Screen

I like White Heat, but might actually prefer High Sierra.

Joan wrote a very systematic analysis of William K Howard films for Modern Screen

Actual lolz. Had to look up William K Howard too. Ahead of her time, that Joan.

For the record, Joan thought Johnny Guitar was one of the worst movies she ever did.

She did indeed, most likely because she hated Mercedes McCambridge who received spontaneous on set applause after one of her scenes which sent Crawford into a clothes-ripping rage.

Crawford also hated Rain because it was her first big flop. But it's her greatest performance.

You know who hates <i?Johnny Guitar[/i]? Bogdanovich. When he spoke in Toronto recently, he ridiculed it no fewer than three times in an hour. I like the film, but his digs were actually quite funny.

I don't care for the film either, and I've watched it four times.

Just found out about this:

http://www.amazon.com/Pauline-Kael-Life-Brian-Kellow/dp/0670023124/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1309555150&sr=1-4

It comes out Oct. 27.

Struggling to see how it could be as entertaining as Sontag & Kael.

Also just saw LOA is releasing a Kael collection, and I guess I don't know how it could be that diff from For Keeps.

I liked Sontag & Kael a lot, but if the writer's good, I think this'll be great. It'll fill in lots that I don't know about her life pre-"Circles and Squares" (I know next to nothing), and, I would hope, would dive right into all the Kael/Sarris/Simon/Macdonald sniping through the '60s. I'm counting the days.

would prefer if Brian Fellows wrote a book on Kael

Dwight Garner's too brief reevaluation of Hooked, my second favorite Kael collection.

From the piece above: "wondering what she’d say if she were alive to weigh in on, say, Black Swan or The Social Network. (I suspect she’d have smacked both around, while finding things to enjoy about David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s work in the Facebook movie.)"

"What would Kael think?" follows me in and out of every movie theatre. I think the guy's right about The Social Network--my guess is she would have loved Timberlake most of all.

She would've said that Mara Rooney was like the new Roz Russell or something.

Todd McCarthy's review of the new bio (some dish about her early life via the book, and TMc's own).

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/pauline-kael-a-life-dark-243280

The Library of American edition is redundant if you already own For Keeps.

Even to close friends, Pauline revealed little about her early family life. Many did not even know she was Jewish

find this hard to believe!

doesnt sound like there's much new info in that bio

The comment by one "Terry" has made me curious about Penelope Gilliatt's crit; she wrote the Sunday Bloody Sunday screenplay.

okay well this i want to read more about: ... Penelope Gilliatt, whose drunken excesses are startlingly detailed.

I remember reading Gilliatt's reviews just as regularly as Kael's back then, but no idea what I'd think of them now.

Didn't know Pauline chased gay boys as a young woman.

curious to read more about her pre-NYer career (i've heard a few of her radio broadcasts)

xpost With a bat?

An interview with All About All About Eve wag Sam Stagg from '82:

http://books.google.com/books?id=olNSliMdOHYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=kael+conversations&hl=en&ei=3iCOTsuhO9GztwesxMimDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

* Staggs

She confronts the homophobe slur.

i have that book + was reading it on the can last week. she always had a minor blind spot re: this stuff - she was very sensitive about how jews were portrayed in movies, but tended to wave it off a bit whenever blacks or gays found something distasteful

the Staggs int'vw is not on GoogleBooks btw

It is. Click on "Bisset, Jacqueline" in the index.

books.google.com/books?id=olNSliMdOHYC&pg=PA91

I know. I think Kael abused gays no more severely than she did any other group.

for which I'm grateful

well except for the "ambiguous" Archie Leach

Never got through that specific article (little interest in the subject), but didn't she gush about how he was too, um, straight for anyone to accept "I just went gay all the sudden" as anything other than ludicrous?

She almost went postal watching I Was a Male War Bride.

The thing I remember most about Gilliatt's reviews (there was a collection I would look through at the library) was that they weren't even remotely like Kael's. That, and the plagiarism incident.

gilliatt's review of '2001' is readily google-able. it's excellent, and certainly engages with the film more interestingly than kael did.

Andrew O'Hehir discusses PK w/ Matt Zoller Seitz:

I appreciate what she represents and her influence on the craft and form of film criticism, mine very much included, is almost oxygen-like. But I’m not really on her wavelength. Even when I agree with her about certain movies or directors I often don’t see them the same way, and don’t really get what she’s talking about. I’ve honestly never known what she means by “humanist” movies, and I don’t understand her passion for, say, Brian De Palma or James Toback. Such weird and ultimately minor choices! And the way she uses the first-person plural or the second-person plural, to implicitly include the reader in her highly eccentric emotional response — that drives me nuts. It’s manipulative and a little creepy, like she’s saying all right-thinking people will have the same opinion about a motion picture....

As we’ve discussed, her definition (of film) excludes all kinds of things, from European art cinema to horror movies to a lot of crime films and other genre movies. What troubles me about her legacy is the anti-intellectual component you have mentioned, the idea that Kael provides cover for the persistent critical devaluation of movies that challenge her definition of “movies” because they do not set out to please or entertain millions of people, and may be unsettling or incomplete or unfriendly on purpose.

http://www.salon.com/2011/10/27/pauline_kael_hero_or_hack/singleton/

I really wish guys like him could appreciate her just as a writer. Who cares whether they share tastes?

Hero or Hack?

impossible choice let me think about it

i agree. i always read her for the writing. agreeing with her was beside the point for me. i don't agree with most critics about a lot of things.

but, you know, its fair game to criticise her for being blind to stuff or intellectually sloppy or whatever. but when people basically say: "she was too opinionated!" that seems silly. then again, by pointing out stuff that she didn't write about...i dunno, what's the point of that? maybe she thought she wouldn't write about them well or in an interesting way.

a lot of it is sexism too. if she had been a dude she would have been hunter thompson or something. posters of her in brainy dorm rooms. (i actually had a picture of her on my wall when i was like 19 lol nerd)

and that dude above saying that he didn't see things the same way when he watched a movie...that's kinda the point to me. how could you see things the same way? seeing things in different ways is the fun of critical debate, no? sorry, i'm being obvious. i mean, she bugs me too.

you guys should read the full piece. it's better than the piece morbz excerpted (more nuanced)

and to state the really obvious: none of the people i've read who have written about her is anywhere near as good a writer as her. which is why people still talk about her. and don't talk about pretty much any other film critic of her era. other than, like, james agee, would any other american film critic get a bio written about them? maybe whatshisface, manny farber. and maybe an ilxor will write the definitive ebert bio.

and by other writers writing about her i mean other critics that i have read. film critics and other kinds.

Completely agree that her writing is why to read her, not her taste. But her taste is interesting anyway, because she was smart and interesting and so even when she was "wrong" from your point of view, she's still wrong in interesting ways. Which is way better than being right in boring ways.

Also, am I wrong in thinking that she's increasingly little-known among people under 40? I've gotten a lot of "who?" looks from smart, educated people in recent years when her name comes up.

Very good piece:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/books/review/roaring-at-the-screen-with-pauline-kael.html?_r=1&mid=516298&ref=books&pagewanted=all

(xpost: "Ask moviegoers under 40 who she is, and you may draw a blank"!)

'film criticism' isn't very mainstream, I don't think it has anything to do with her personally. how many people in their 20s could name a book critic? an art critic? etc.

Ask moviegoers under 40 who Howard Hawks is, and you may draw a blank.

The progression of time: not always a bad thing.

tom carson's is the best review of the bio I've read so far

http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Reviews-Essays/Pauline-Kael-A-Life-in-the-Dark/ba-p/6021

there's a bit of "inside baseball" but that comes w/the kaelian territory

Like anything else, I think it depends on whether you're talking about writers or (for lack of a better term) the general audience. I'm sure that anyone in his or her 20s who writes about pop music is aware of, and has quite likely read, Christgau, Marcus, Bangs, etc.; those in their 20s who consume the music that the others are writing about, no. Ditto young film writers vs. film-goers.

yeah i think tom carson wins. that's a good one.

that thing about the second-person is true though, it is kind of pushy and she uses it all the time

Along the way Landberg and Kael married. It didn’t last long — “I soon found out that I couldn’t stand this woman,” Landberg says

lol

I think I already knew Kael's writing-as-sex act betrayed a largely uninteresting actual-sex life. Kindred spirit strikes again.

where can you find her old reviews?

Some stuff here:

http://rockcriticsarchives.com/links/paulinekael.html

Otherwise...

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=pauline+kael&x=0&y=0

hmm.. so complicated

I'll just ask siri to read her reviews to me

Needless to say, most of those Amazon prices are absurd. Used copies aren't as commonplace as they were 20 years ago, but I still see them around fairly regularly.

I liked the Siren's write-up of the bio.

Think I'm more interested in reading the Wolcott book than the Kael biography, tbh.

there's a bit of "inside baseball" but that comes w/the kaelian territory

uh yeah the contempt seems personal enough that I can't really take his dismissal of her Debra Winger and DePalma fanship seriously.

man kael really got some guys nuts in a twist, didn't she

i mean nothing will top sarris' eulogy but i'm amazed how desperate a lot of male critics are to send her ghost a condescending pat on the head

she was better. must hurt their ego. nobody ever ran home to read an owen gleiberman review.

nobody ANTICIPATED one of his reviews. or any of those other guys reviews.

Came away from Carson's piece realizing more than ever that cutting DePalma off at the knees is merely the simplest means for (I guess) rejected Paulettes to scrape what's left of themselves off of the bug zapper.

And that it's no doubt a lot easier to appreciate the material that pre-dates their own interactions with Kael.

(Still a good read otherwise.)

i read sarris for years in the voice when i was a kid and very little of it stuck with me. which is fine if you are just looking for a good movie to see on friday night.

Love it how SSS spells it out: "In between she pursued an ill-judged taste for relationships with gay men, and had a daughter, Gina, whose father refused involvement in her upbringing."

The mix of condescension and reign-resentment...it's like she was a cross between Marilyn Monroe and Stalin to these people.

xpost also, LOL at David E. in the comments: "Triumph of the Will & Grace marriage"

okay, i like that siren thing too. that siren person says everything i was thinking much better than i could. kudos to the siren. i never knew about the siren. now i know.

jesus, i mean we live in a world where david denby still writes film reviews. its just not fair...

For the most part, I stayed home in the apartment that I loved. And instead of going out, I entered in that summer of 1999 a dark and empty tunnel, an enclosure illuminated along the walls by a flash of naked men and women. I had discovered porn on the Internet. In the solitude of night, and in my little study at home, where mighty volumes of Plato, St. Augustine, Hegel, Montaigne, Nietzsche hardly my regular reading but a recent obsession loomed over the desk, the kneeling young women awkwardly turned their eyes to the camera. They often had long and beautiful hair that they must have laboriously cared for; they looked for approval not from their partners but from the camera, which I thought was the true object of their desire. They wanted to be seen. And the men, ugly and strong, sullen, tattooed some of them, thick-membered, concentrating on their erection and their orgasm, lest they lose either they were amateurs, not models, exercising the democratic art form of exhibitionism, with me as their willing audience. They all wanted to be seen, but I didn t want to be seen.

that should be his obituary.

i hope the times has that on file.

For a sec, I was sure that was David E.

Not as lengthy as everything linked to thus far, but a friend of mine posted something on the biography yesterday:

http://begonias.typepad.com/srubio/2011/10/pauline-kael-a-life-in-the-dark.html

It's not such a big deal that she demonstrated what Fassbindder meant to her by ignoring him altogether; it's more important that she defended Joseph Ruben thrillers.

*Fassbinder

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.

I wish this fucking "meme" will die.

like a lot of us, she recoiled from special pleading on behalf of a besieged minority.

Except when it came to James Toback.

haha. She was right about The Pickup Artist though; and I wish she was still writing when Two Girls and a Guy came out.

I want to the same of Tyson--which I thought was excellent--but I don't know. Thinking about how much she disliked Raging Bull, she may have recoiled from Tyson for some of the same reasons.

"want to say the same"

i always thought the paulette/acolytes thing was creepy tbh

I really wish guys like him could appreciate her just as a writer. Who cares whether they share tastes?

But her defenses of her taste were often imperious or just didn't make sense.

My fave quote of hers is still "If I had only known trash would become the only culture..." Which suggests to me that if she had written for another ten years, you guys would call her "morbsian."

also, Andrew Sarris was not a "consumer guide for your Friday night movie" critic, that kind of shit is insulting.

AND he didn't pretend world cinema didn't exist in the '80s.

lol

you flatter yrself, herr doktor

Sarris on Old Hollywood is invaluable.

you guys would call her "morbsian."

I would call you "presumptuous."

yeah. i'd trust Kael to actually see the movies she trashes.

i realize she would deservedly be insulted!

(if she lurked)

throw that meme in the garbage can, Guk

i'd loooove to read her pan of inglobius nasturds

deservedly feel insulted, i meant

That’s great! You tell me I’m wrong while denying you’re doing so, a very Kaelian tactic!

i'd loooove to read her pan of inglobius nasturds

― Dr Morbois de Bologne (Dr Morbius)

http://www.gifsoup.com/webroot/animatedgifs1/1884896_o.gif

lol, nasturds

omar otm

http://www.salon.com/2011/10/27/pauline_kael_hero_or_hack/singleton/

― Dr Morbois de Bologne (Dr Morbius), Saturday, October 29, 2011 10:41 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark

outlaw vern shoutout in there! vern is the man

kael's never been just about the writing for me, though she was a great writer obv, but i think her insights were often really top notch and the reason i read her was because she saw angles i didnt

lol @ omar busting out that gif

Seitz is otm about the level of insight in this Kael paragraph:

“If having ‘the right stuff’ is set up as the society’s highest standard, and if a person proves that he has it by his eagerness to be locked in a can and shot into space, the only thing that distinguishes human heroes from chimps is that the heroes volunteer for the job. And if they volunteer, as they do in this film, out of personal ambition and for profit, are they different from the chimp who might jump into the can eagerly, too, if he saw a really big banana there?”

So back to the new bio, who's actually read it? Is it worth picking up?

re James Wolcott, I knew him first as the TV critic for the Voice in the early '80s, where he properly enthused about The Uncle Floyd Show.

the kael para alfred quotes above abt the right stuff - which i loved as both movie and book - makes me want to read much more of her work, even if i disagree with it

Talked to Uncle Floyd's younger brother Jerry a few years ago at the 55 Bar, right before he and the other brother were going with Conan to LA to do the Tonight Show and he told me Floyd had some radio show out of Connecticut maybe playing old-time ethnic Italian music. Always amazed me that he was related to those two other guys.

Sorry, New Rochelle.

From his Wikipedia page:

David Bowie, a big fan of the show, recorded the song "Slip Away" on his 2002 album, Heathen, as a tribute. The lyrics mention Uncle Floyd and his puppets "Oogie" and "Bones Boy". When asked how Bowie learned of The Uncle Floyd Show he replied, "John Lennon told me about it."

Back to PK: sure her smart American vernacular prose reads easier than the as-if-translated-from-the-French style that some others might have lapsed into but if you give into the easy temptation of just adopting her tastes and prejudices lock, stock and barrel, as somebody more or less said about Nabokov on another thread, you'll end up missing a whole world of fun.

Most people don't though (including the "Paulettes").

Also, the criticism that Kael defended her favorites too strenuously is simply wrong. For every Altman film she loved there was another he panned. She hated every De Palma film after Blow Out. Coppola could not get a break in the eighties. And so on.

I'm not disputing your basic point--she was all over the place with virtually everybody--but don't forget that she loved Casualties of War. And in one of the interview books, she said nice things about Mission to Mars and Snake Eyes.

*there was another SHE panned, I should have written.

I should have attached a footnote re C of W.

Mission of Mars had some good stuff in it. Well at least one good scene of some zero-g choreography.

iirc she actually found the Untouchables to be fun, if slight. certainly didnt hate it

and mostly praised it based on de palma's contributions. and she let him off the hook for bonfire (probably rightfully, considering the level of studio interference)

I'm not sure she lets De Palma off the hook with sentences like:

"The picture grates on your nerves: you sit there listening to Melanie Griffith's metallic whine and you watch Bruce Willis fail at the simple task of playing a comic drunk. These are talented people -- what's happened to them?"

or

"De Palma, who showed a genius for sophomoric comedy in his youth, has already made his Bonfire of the Vanities. It was the daring race-relations jamboree, Hi, Mom!."

still, the damage had been done by then; she made him "imortant." Ye gods.

"important"

(Sunday morning)

James: I watched Mission to Mars with one of my science classes last year. I didn't hate it, but it seemed to be about half pilfered from 2001, half from Close Encounters.

i have to assume kael liked femme fatale. Can't imagine why she wouldn't have.

lol, except i'm an idiot who forgot she died before its release. whoopsie!

for some reason I though she died around 2005 rather than 2001

I just remembered how that Francis Davis book has a list of movies he likes to think she would have dug, with crazy no-way shit like Death To Smoochy on it.

By the way, da croupier, I noticed that Frank Rich said virtually the same thing in his column that you took me to task for a few months ago:

A fierce skeptic of all dogmas (including religion, feminism and liberalism) who made her name in part by knocking Sarris for promoting the auteur theory, Kael didn’t recognize that she had morphed into a dogmatic auteurist in her own right — lauding her pet directors no matter what.

I think he overstates the case, but you questioned at the time whether I had even read "Circles and Squares." Do you suppose Rich has read it?

He's misread it, at least. And as we've said, "lauding her pet directors no matter what" is straight up bullshit, so why should I be shocked he's wrong about the other half of the sentence?

half of the sentence fragment, I meant.

Good, I've made progress--you're ready to concede that I've misread "Circles and Squares."

That's some Maureen Dowd level "narrative"-humping Rich's pulling there.

Just curious: do you have any criticisms of Kael?

Forgot about that Francis Davis book. Also forgot about her only watching movies once thing which still seems crazy, but perhaps it is a mark of a vastly superior intelligence, like the one discovered by Don Cheadle on his Mission to Mars.

way too much second person. occasionally her euphoria for a film is a bit much, though that's usually just like a few paragraphs of an otherwise dense, worthwhile read. tastewise she's a little too in love with gunga din-ery.

xpost

curious how many of you have read any Molly Haskell.

I've noticed in this cycle of reevaluation that a couple of writers have taken her to task for having such ambivalence about mass taste, which is absurd: not only was she aware of it (and the ambivalence made her a better critic), but there's no way anyone as alert as Kael could NOT be ambivalent about mass taste.

Vincent Canby with more vinegar?

xpost

(xxxpost) Fair enough. In some of your posts above, you seem to strike out aggressively at anyone who criticizes her for anything. She's one of two writers (the other Bill James) who's influenced me more than any other, yet there are a number of things about her writing (especially during her last few years, which is admittedly a little unfair) that bother me.

i strike out aggressively, because I feel most critiques are pat, small-minded or misguided, and I usually say why.

def not denying i'm a huuuuuge kael stan

Even if you disagree with some of his points along the way, I think the Rich piece is fair, and anything but small-minded. And it leads to a final sentence that I think does justice to her: "If you want to understand what it was like to be in the audience during America’s thrilling, now vanished age of movies, you must begin with Kael."

Was just thinking about MH right before you posted, Morbius. I've only got the two books, would read more if I could.

phil, you should recall that d.c. is a rabid anti-auteurist and that on any film thread he likes to play Tom Wolfe to everyone else's radical chic.

look at that! Narrative writing going on in this thread!

"If you want to understand what it was like to be in the audience during America’s thrilling, now vanished age of movies, you must begin with Kael."

well, but this is boilerplate. It's as if I wrote, "If you want to understand what it was like to be in the audience during America’s thrilling, now vanished Camelot, you mus begin with Kennedy."

Also: like how Rich (inadvertently) appropriates Kael's "you."

I guess MH also wrote the memoir about when Andy S was sick and the Gone with the Wind book.

i grazed through the rich piece after reading your quote, clemenza. still pretty boilerplate (as al put it), but only that bit you quoted re: auteurism struck me as truly false and toxic. Will admit I'm wary to read the bio just because I don't know if I want to sweat her being an unpleasant person. Her "ethical lapses" tend to be overplayed by jealous types, I think. Though this Raising Kane stuff was news to me and, if true, genuinely unethical. I don't give a shit if she actually dared to hang out with these people rather than just kiss ass on press junkets, though.

Rich slipping into second-person (inadvertently or as a little joke, I don't know) is funny, yes. But some cliches are cliches because they're true (to use a cliche). If you wanted to get a sense of American film during the '70s, I don't think you'd read Sarris.

Picking on her for hanging out with directors -- a criticism hurled against her even in the early nineties when I discovered her -- always struck me as willful ignorance. Not even a writer with half of Kael's finesse could avoid turning out hackish prose for the sake of praising one of her drinking buddies.

I remember reading a review of For Keeps in The Atlantic which mentioned her falling out with Woody Allen after she flushed Stardust Memories down a commode, despite her love for things like The Purple Rose of Cairo, Judy Davis in H&W (this performance is pure Kael bait), and the romcom half of Manhattan Murder Mystery.

yeah i dunno if its blind rage over her dissing raging bull or incredulous to her loving...(actually, what movie is it shocking she dared to promote?) that makes people pretend she was just a groupie

I mean Blow Out is on Criterion, Nashville and Last Tango are pretty canonized, so what's the big "you're on your own, Pauline!" movie (can't be Casualties, that's way too late in her career)? I can't get behind her Temple Of Doom love but I wouldn't say she's a Spielberg worshipper, she just wishes he'd stick to offensive slapstick.

As a sign of how deeply they misunderstand women or simply don't give a damn about them, Biskind actually suggests in his Beatty biography that Kael's misadventure (at Beatty's behest) as a Hollywood adviser inspired her dismissal of Reds. I couldn't believe I read something so petty and misogynist in the 21st century.

o what's the big "you're on your own, Pauline!" movie (can't be Casualties, that's way too late in her career)?

Only small things like Mike's Murder (and I share her affection for Debra Winger), Music Box, and anything by the Taviani brothers.

Is Shoot The Moon any good? Her review of that is pretty over the top.

totally googling "tom wolfe radical chic", fyi

Thinking about the ebb and flow of her evaluations of Allen and Altman, she obviously didn't give any either of them a free pass. But I would still rather a critic not befriend people she write about. Maybe it sometimes caused her to overcompensate in the other direction--slam a film more harshly than she otherwise would have, as a way to check herself. I have no idea, but I have to believe it complicates any evaluation. (A rock-critic example: Marcus and Elvis Costello.)

It is actually, once you get past the incongruity of Diane Keaton and Albert Finney as man and wife.

It does happen, but she didn't oscillate wildly between poles either. She gave Zelig, Hannah and Radio Days grudging thumbs up, and thought Come Back to the Five and Dime (I haven't seen it) an awful play.

I don't think you have to get drinks with an artist to play the "I overrated your last thing so I'm gonna slam the next one" bit. It's pretty familiar in any critic who became a fan.

it's just the other side of the "I belatedly realized you're good so I'm overrating your new movie" deal

I know my friendship with Tim Powis has caused me to hold the Surfin' Tapeworms from Venus' surf version of the Chariots of Fire theme in too high esteem.

it's just the other side of the "I belatedly realized you're good so I'm overrating your new movie" deal

haha -- this is actually Christgau's trick.

her pan of The Shining is OTM ("the first pompous haunted-house movie")

as is the rave for Temple of Doom.

I know my friendship with Tim Powis has caused me to hold the Surfin' Tapeworms from Venus' surf version of the Chariots of Fire theme in too high esteem.

― clemenza, Sunday, October 30, 2011 10:29 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

lol

I liked the Ween redo.

scott seward, da croupier fully otm in this thread

also agree with tipsy that her taste was interesting. if o'hehir never understood what she was talking about maybe he's just not a very good reader.

I'm offended I'm not otm :(

haha you were also otm, scott + da croupier were just pushing my favorite "jealous dudes" angle. it's true!

You tried too hard for a nuanced approach
(xp)

haha it's true

nuance?! Kael's critics deserve beheading.

alfred completely otm

Now you're doing a John Candy as Orson Welles ham on rye performance (xp)

and Jessica Lange will play Madame Defarge.

does this bio have a comprehensive list of kael's reviews? i always had the impression there was a lot of stuff from the early pre-new yorker days that never made it into her books.

I have a yellowed paperback copy of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang I found on the street, and that's all pre-New Yorker! (Atlantic, McCalls, etc. And isn't that the second book?)

Has donna rouge mentioned if the Pacifica archives have her radio reviews?

Now you're doing a John Candy as Orson Welles

wait did this actually happen? was it some sctv thing?

if o'hehir never understood what she was talking about maybe he's just not a very good reader.

Not always so; her main objection to Goodfellas seemed to be that there's no 'hero' a la Cagney (or even Harvey Keitel, I guess). That makes no sense to me.

but it seems like o'hehir was saying she had no big insights beyond her surprising taste, which is just crazy talk to me.

she also hated gays.

Except those she let impregnate her.

unpublished photo of the kael household circa 1958

http://www.maniacworld.com/mommie-dearest-with-extra-slapping.jpg

My household on Fri night tbh.

morbs looks very pretty there

I do love the image of her changing the marquee at a rep house w/ Wild Turkey on her hip.

4-part interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtGCjGgecOs&feature=related

^^^ saw it last week. I love her comments on Paul Newman.

The famous first meeting between Kael and Sarris over a drink:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_wu6Z_RmeXD4/SyvfEcQmPmI/AAAAAAAAAeE/Jbet5NAS3xk/s320/robinson.jpg

"The far side of what? Oh, please."

It's been said before here -- Sarris took their "feud" way too fuckin seriously.

speaking of auteurs (this is for strongo)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_ehxdlAlHQ

I may have posted this another thread, I'm not sure. But if you skip ahead to the last minute, this brings Kael and SCTV together:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDdfD8nHbok

itt renata adler outed as a jealous dude

That Linehan guy who interviews Kael was parodied by Martin Short on SCTV, too.

boy he loves his consonants and sybillants doesn't he

Linehan is beyond legendary here. Short nailed him, especially the five-minute preface to every question.

anyway i finished james wolcott's memoir today. still digesting but there's a lot about pauline kael, sounds like wolcott was her screening sidekick for a good chunk of the 70s. i don't know, wolcott has some perspective on kael but the fairy dust still clouds his vision. for all his un-sentimentality about the 70s clearly wolcott never took the message of "kill yr idols" to heart

he's never been a Sonic Youth fan.

he name-checked lydia lunch and said he liked new wave, though

wolcott's portrait of pauline whet my appetite for the bio; guess i was surprised by how enamored - verging on gushy - he was. but hey, if martin amis took me under his wing when I was 23...

per the Frank Rich review, Kael making loud wisecracks and snorts during screenings should've elicited a "Cool it, auntie" imho.

don't most of us do that though???

hahaha - she does that multiple times in wolcott's book, including at a 42nd street porno

"we" don't do that

"we" just watch The Dark Nought without a thought.

don't most of us do that though???

not unless we want a clout on the head from me, no.

we'd be like the sinners trapped in ice chewing each other's heads, right

per the Frank Rich review, Kael making loud wisecracks and snorts during screenings should've elicited a "Cool it, auntie" imho.

― Dr Morbois de Bologne (Dr Morbius), Sunday, October 30, 2011 10:04 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

yeah that would be maddening if it was happening in a movie you were enjoying

Morbs: they do! She broke the news of her quitting there on the air without apparently warning anyone in advance (following her Lawrence of Arabia review). She had some pretty choice words for the 'liberals' there.

well, that's a trove that needs to be made available.

also, what megalomaniacal film kingpin named a villain in one of his late '80s productions after her?

lucas! in Willow iirc

in the digital remaster he's changed it to armond white

Armond actually said a few nice things about the Star Wars prequels tho.

haha, naturally!

of course PK's swooning over Newman and Olivier fits neatly with her Kinsey-scale track record...

well, who wouldn't swoon?

her finding Absence of Malice > The Verdict is bothersome.

Not really. He's much sexier playing a stock character in the former.

and she's right about that late seventies/early eighties streak of Newman's >>> the fifties and sixties

Older actors are generally better. Olivier didn't become a really good film actor til he was almost 50.

Too bad she retired before PN's crowning achievement, Nobody's Fool.

God, I just saw Rebecca again two weeks ago and was surprised anew by the absence of a character. He's jumpy, erratic, and irritable, like a man without a script, which makes sense -- Maxim isn't the killer that he is in the novel.

Older actors are generally better

Not hotter, tho, which is what I thought Alfred was referring to.

1998 interview in Modern Maturity:

Jim Carrey has practically kept movies alive the past few years. But most comedians lose it after a while. They go on trying to be funny and it becomes ghastly. If Carrey can sustain it, it would be amazing.

http://www.paulrossen.com/paulinekael/modernmaturity.html

posted this re: wolcott's book in the didion thread and no one seemed to care

http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/the-cordial-enmity-of-joan-didion-and-pauline-kael

kael seems like she'd be more fun to watch a movie with than didion.

The "suffering little girl-woman" as Evan Hughes calls it in max's link is a type that Kael attacked relentlessly over and over again. See her review of The Piano. Kael probably thought Didion was one herself.

it's not that i wasn't interested in that article, max, i just kind of don't want to read it because i love them both. i do think pauline kael would be more fun to go to a movie with. they seem to share a view of woody allen fwiw.

per the Frank Rich review, Kael making loud wisecracks and snorts during screenings should've elicited a "Cool it, auntie" imho.

― Dr Morbois de Bologne (Dr Morbius), Sunday, October 30, 2011 10:04 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

the WGA screening room in LA was awful for this reason. nobody would snort or wisecrack, but a certain 10% of the audience would editorialize with sighs and coughs and pointed, sharp, exhalations of breath, and irritate another 10% who would op/ed with the same tactics.

I wonder if Kael thought highly of Campion's The Portrait of a Lady, easily JC's best imho.

i just don't understand you dr. morbs. but <3

In a long New Yorker interview published in the summer of '94 (I remember the date because I'd just discovered Kael), Kael wrinkled her nose at The Piano; she disliked the sentimentality and the Holly Hunter character writing "New Age trills" on the piano.

yeah, I hated it too, which is why I'm wondering about TPoaL. (Yes, we know, 'unfaithful' to James etc.)

There's some movie where Matthew Modine keeps referring to that one as "Il Piano" by the guy who did Johnny Suede

it is a terrible adaptation of James but it's also just terrible. isn't it? don't make me watch it again.

i had a picture of joan didion up on my wall when i was 19 too. as well as pauline kael. i was pathetic. and frank o'hara! what was he doing there? and a scary picture of edvard munch. and a picture of winnie cooper from the wonder years. ah, youth...

I'm with morbs on portrait. Good, weird adaption.

Adaptation

it's not that i wasn't interested in that article, max, i just kind of don't want to read it because i love them both. i do think pauline kael would be more fun to go to a movie with. they seem to share a view of woody allen fwiw.

― horseshoe, Wednesday, November 2, 2011 12:36 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah i dont like hearing about them fight. i think i would choose JD in the end though.

the piece is not actually that good fwiw but the details about JD and PK are fun

Enjoy the writing of hers I've read (the essay on Kane, that was years ago now).

The notion (upthread) that you hould read a writer for solely writing can only go so far -- do want a writer to have some overlap w/tastes but I like to see the mind working through the writing, and if it gets too cranky (as seems to be implied here) then its not going to work.

well, i didn't mean you should read every writer just cuz they have a great style or have a great way with words. its certainly helpful if there is personality or a point of view that you can latch on to. or it makes a writer more enjoyable to read for a lot of people. probably a good reason why a lot of people don't read henry james! cuz they can't find anything to grab hold of. or something to identify with. despite the fact that he certainly had a way with words. and pauline kael wouldn't have been so inspirational to me if i hadn't wanted to go along on her ride with her. on the other hand, i've been reading christgau for decades and i admire his language and sentences and i don't agree with him pretty much 99% of the time about anything. its not a dealbreaker for me. to not agree with someone. if i think they are good at what they do. you can learn a lot from someone like pauline kael even if you violently disagree with her. is all i meant.

people want to agree with people, basically. in order for a lot of people to love a writer or artist, they like to agree with them in some way. i think. this isn't really a requirement for me. kael's hated oliver stone is a good example. i've found his images/imagery really compelling and exciting in a visceral way over the years and i don't care at all about his message/politics/ideas/writing. maybe being a metal fan helps.

just checked her bibliography on wikipedia and realised there may not be anything of hers collected in book form that i haven't read -- though i read the last two books-worth as it came out in the new yorker, and haven't traded up (the new yorkers are all lined up on a high shelf, and it's pretty much impossible to find anything in them)

louis menand wrote a pretty good piece on her in the new york review of books -- it made a bit too much, too glibly, of her link with postmodernism, but was good on her sceptical approach to any pre-coded theory of "what cinema is" (actually this is totally from memory: i'd have to dig it out to be more exact)

richard cook -- my main mentor as a writer and editor -- was a fan, which i guess is where i picked it up from: he always had a copy of "when the lights go down" in the office at the wire (he was still reviewing a lot of films in the 80s) (he was also imo one of the best british film critics of his time, totally forgotten now, and uncollected....)

My copy of the bio was in the mailbox when I got home today. Don't know if I've been happier to see something in the mail since I got my APBA tabletop baseball game in the late '70s.

i still have that great book of interviews. red cover. don't know how hard that is to find these days. it has to be out of print. i would think.

i'm not a huge fan of wolcott, tbh, but i think i have to read this

i was wrong. just looked. they still have it on amazon and elsewhere.

which great book of interviews, scott?

yeah i feel the same way. kinda got my fill of wolcott/kael with his vanity fair piece but now i think i do actually want to read it. i was also a really big fan of nyc in the 70's. kinda my favorite place to be in the 70's.

http://www.amazon.com/Conversations-Pauline-Kael-Literary/dp/0878058990

this one.

though amazon u.k. might be more your speeeeeed.

oh, never read that -- i see there's a francis davis "last conversation" also, think i have a kael binge coming on

I thought for sure I had that interview book, but I don't see it on the shelf, just Afterglow. I'll have to order that. I've got the Stanley Kauffmann book in the same series (probably why I confused them):

http://www.amazon.com/Conversations-Stanley-Kaufmann-Literary/dp/1578065666/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1320269083&sr=8-8

I highly recommend the Davis book. For reasons that baffle me, Greil Marcus hated it.

intra-paulette envy :)

where does davis write these days? he was a contributor when i edited wire but i lost touch with him when i left

Dunno. I did sit in front of him and TG at the Film Forum a while ago. He was still writing about jazz at the Voice last time I checked.

i used to talk to francis at a record store a friend of mine owned in philly. he lives in philly. i have to say, he didn't know me AT ALL, and he was extremely positive and really inspirational to me at the time. i had just started writing for chuck at the voice and he -francis- gave me some much needed confidence when i needed it. i read his books years before because of my dad the jazz cat.

Yeah, I used to know some guy who worked in that record store with him.

i have three of FD's books -- the great one on blues and two of the collections -- and i think that i feel that he's more acute and insightful on jazz than he is on film (where he always very eloquently seemed to be saying what other people were also all saying) (though that was somewhat a major problem in film-writing in the 90s, now that i think of it); he was lovely to work with, and i has editor-contributor lunch with him once when he was visiting london, though i don't recall a thing we talked about

s/b i can has editor-contributor lunch

That blues book was really good.

Scott - didn't mean to pick on you, btw, and I've been reading Raymond Durgnat this week so looking for more collected writing on film. Manny Farber is one of my favourite writers who was so open to everything (or at leats that is how Negative Space reads to me, although I am guarded about collections), and you go on a journey w/that book. One of my faves of all time!

I'm fine for people to be critical of things I like, but as long as they aren't cranky about it. Just the fact she wasn't open at all to some things does annoy. I want an angle (positive or negative) on something I've seen.

The Didion-Kael thing is funny, because I swear just a week ago or so I was wondering what they thought of each other. (I guess just prompted by them both being in the culture-press a lot the past month.) Not at all surprised by the enmity. They each seem like a kind of person the other would find irritating. Their writing, their approaches to the world, are so different.

Oh and while we're on the subject of Francis Davis, I'll just say I just bought and read one of his jazz collections and loved it. Have not read his film writing.

two complete opposite prose stylists yet they're both native californians of roughly same generation, fascinated by the movies

Yeah I was trying to think of the right metaphor to contrast them. Fire and ice is too cliché. Maybe something like, river and sand.

microwave oven and refrigerator

one's lou reed, the other is metallica

Mitt Romney and GOP primary voters.

skrillex and kode 9

it makes complete sense to me. her dissing of didion. kael was a foe of preciousness or what she saw as preciousness. which is different from a delicate touch which she could certainly be a fan of. and she had her own battle of the sexes going on too. there were definitely women who rankled her in a way that a lot of men (characters/types) didn't. i think i identified with her years ago in her distaste for what she might have considered unearned self-importance. (her disdain for cassavettes and bergman for instance) since that time i have reconsidered my own views in that i no longer feel that anyone earns anything ever and can fake or feign any damn thing they want and if it is compelling i don't care how they arrived at it or what path they took. i'm a big fan of spiritual short-cuts. it saves time. suffering is for the birds.

i was always a fan of didion's dead-eyed gaze and valium haze in fiction. but i was also a big fan of valium back then. and, for the record, though i saw her point, i always loved cassavetes because i would happily watch gena rowlands standing still for two hours and i would also happily watch peter falk stand still for two hours and for that matter i could happily watch john cassavetes stand still for two hours. and if they are actually moving i could watch them for four hours or more.

i was gonna say. peter falk, at least, should be muttering to himself for those two hours.

peter falk on stage alone in compete improv mode would have been top ten movie for me if it had happened. it should have happened.

oh man -- Kael is worth reading just for her head-scratching over Cassavetes films.

i just saw a crazy peter falk movie a couple weeks back that i'm sure everyone knew about already. now i can't remember the damn title. alan arkin was in it too.

this thread is definitely gonna drive me back to the well. gonna have to dig out the old battered paperbacks. but that's fine with me.

the in-laws?

I enjoyed Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club; he's the best of The New Yorker's house intellectuals. But the querulousness with which he approached her in that essay mark mentioned annoyed me; he was flabbergasted over the idiosyncrasies that every critic who's reviewed her in the last two weeks has lingered over.

or big trouble. the 80's movie.

Serpentine.

in big trouble you get to see cassavetes direct my hero beverly d'angelo.

Big Trouble is a fucking mess. I'm pretty sure Cassavetes hated it and possibly didn't even want to do it. It's not even given fleeting mention in that 3+ hour doc on the man that comes with the Criterion set.

I can't see a link above to this Allen Barra piece:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/11/01/pauline-kael-what-made-her-a-movie-genius.html

I don't think this is framed accurately: "...while the review collections of John Simon, Stanley Kauffmann, and, let’s say it, Renata Adler, are long forgotten." Don't know about Adler, but Kauffmann's and Simon's books were never as high-profile as Kael's. Are they forgotten by the people who did buy and read them? Not by me--as I've written many times, I value Kauffmann's books from the '60s through the '90s just as much as Kael's (and was influenced by him almost as much). My guess would be that most people who paid attention to Kauffmann and Simon then would still be inclined to group them together with Kael and Sarris. For the many more people whose sole connection to film criticism was Kael, then yeah, Kauffmann and Simon never existed, not now and not then.

I agree. I have several of Simon's and Kauffmann's collections, plus collections by Adler, Sarris, Richard Schickel, Judith Crist (signed!), Manny Farber, Dwight Macdonald, James Agee, and Rex Reed. Every one of these people has unique insights. Whenever I see a movie from the '60s or '70s I'll run through the indexes of my books and compare reviews of that movie. Sometimes Kauffman has the best review; sometimes it's Rex Reed. Simon and Reed are probably the funniest writers of the bunch. The Renata Adler book I have - did she do more than one? - covers 1968-69 when she wrote for the NY Times and is terrific & won't be forgotten by me.

"the test of time"

I appreciate some of Simon's insights but, boy, is he high off the crack of his ass. Also, I don't know whether to blame his learning English as a second language for the polysyllabic atonalities in his prose.

Looking forward to watching this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DGEMBaOBSU

The way Simon describes actresses physically has never made any sense to me.

Sometimes Kauffman has the best review; sometimes it's Rex Reed.

o_0

Renata Adler is in the tradition of Ellen Willis: a superb feminist writer. Her collection Canaries in the Mindshaft is one of my essential books.

Nastiness and pomposity above and beyond the pale are part of the package with Simon; if that makes you recoil, he's not someone you'll want to read. Sometimes those qualities make me laugh with him, sometimes at him--but I value his writing for other reasons. No such problem with Kauffmann; I think he's one of the greatest film critics ever.

renata adler is v brilliant but omg she hates everything. doesn't she? she's kind of a crank. i mean, so am i.

horseshoe, no!

your bills are 5-2, chin up crankypants!

I agree about Simon's sometimes clunky prose (usually because he tries to jam in laughably abstruse vocabulary); thing is, Sarris's is even clunkier.

i know; i think i am less of a crank than renata adler, at least. so is dr. morbs, for illustration purposes.

xp to omar

did you read Adler's essays on the Clinton impeachment? As essential as Didion's.

She also wrote the best dissection of Robert Bork's legal writings I've ever read.

i think i have read one of the adler essays on the Clinton affair. she is smarter than everyone ever, for sure.

i do really like pauline kael more now than i used to. probably years of reading shitty critics who are either too in thrall to the hollywood machine (your average mainstream writer) or too misanthropic/deadly writers (armond white) or simply cautiously treading a really boring non-committal line (most alt-weekly writers imo.) i really hardly agree with her or even when i do, we don't share the same reasons for liking the same things, but i find her really entertaining these days.

she is smarter than everyone ever, for sure.

well, no, she's not smarter than me.

Somebody got me to read her novel Speedboat once, but I remember nothing about it

Adler did sport Serious Long Greying Hair that was modish in the late seventies.

The way Simon describes actresses physically has never made any sense to me.

― Josefa

some of the most awkward complimentary prose i've read about beauty in women comes from film critics. and some of the nastiest, misogynistic disses.

otm

truth bomb-level, really

i love anthony lane's writing but i haven't completely forgiven him for his review of baby mama in which he went on and on (or so it seemed to me) about how the problem with the movie was that tina fey wasn't pretty enough to carry a lead role.

it's like there's a collective madonna-whore complex among most male movie critics.

never read that Baby Mama review. H8 that dude now.

Kael was excellent at writing about unconventional beauty in actresses: Streisand, Ellen Barkin (I think), etc. (There are other examples, I just can't remember any right now.)

she was excellent at writing about the role pysical attraction plays in film viewership in general. her "man from dream city" essay about cary grant is super-otm.

that reminds me of when ellen barkin was on piers morgan a few months ago and the dude was such a horny creep to her. i mean dudes who are writing about film or into film or dealing with actresses certainly feel they have carte blanche to make it known that they want to fuck them.

http://www.paulrossen.com/paulinekael/perilsofbeingpauline.html

Davis: There are a few other things I wanted to ask about you and Shawn. Everyone knows he objected to your use of what he considered crude language. But did he ever think that something you said about an actor or director was too cruel? Like when you described Dyan Cannon as “looking a bit like Lauren Bacall and a bit like Jeanne Moreau, but the wrong bits”?

Kael: Dyan Cannon roared over that one, I’m happy to say. She’s a very smart, very lively woman, and she was very sweet about it. I don’t recall if Shawn objected to that, but that was the sort of thing he often did object to. I sometimes gave in, because I thought maybe he was right. You know, sometimes you leave out things that seem part of the story you’re telling, because you don’t want to hurt people. That makes sense.

Yeah, Kael was best when she described how a star's sex appeal turned her on (i.e. Sean Connery).

Part of the frustration of her second-person usage is that when she drops the faux-universalization of her reactions, it's terrific.

I remember this old Tom Snyder Playboy interview where he said the only guest he ever openly drooled over was Liv Ullmann. Tom Snyder, highbrow cineaste.

btw you can find some long PK things including "Raising Kane" on that site:

http://www.paulrossen.com/paulinekael.html

In 1980, upon the release of her New Yorker colleague Pauline Kael's collection When the Lights Go Down, she published an 8,000-word review in The New York Review of Books that dismissed the book as "jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless,"[3] arguing that Kael's post-sixties work contained "nothing certainly of intelligence or sensibility," and faulting her "quirks [and] mannerisms," including Kael's repeated use of the "bullying" imperative and rhetorical question. The piece, which stunned Kael and quickly became infamous in literary circles,[4] was described by Time magazine as "the New York literary Mafia['s] bloodiest case of assault and battery in years."[5]

lol, i gotta read that

oh, its online!

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1980/aug/14/the-perils-of-pauline/#fnr3

i love kael, but i think that adler piece is kind of a masterpiece in its own right. i don't think i've ever seen any writer's quirks shredded quite so effectively. i gotta read more adler.

To the spectacle of the staff critic as celebrity in frenzy, about to “do” something “to” a text, Ms. Kael has added an entirely new style of ad hominem brutality and intimidation; the substance of her work has become little more than an attempt, with an odd variant of flak advertising copy, to coerce, actually to force numb acquiescence, in the laying down of a remarkably trivial and authoritarian party line.

adler otm

and christ, that allen barra piece is annoying as shit with his complaints about the biography 'second-guessing' some of kael's views. we get it, you knew pauline kael and you think she was right about everything. critics who don't just try to ape kael's style but also manage to parrot her every last opinion (charles taylor was a particularly awful offender) are so pukeworthy.

yes, taylor could be terrible and really adopted her nasty side

I used to love reading Barra on baseball in the Voice, but I found the Kael piece fawning too.

man i hadnt actually read that adler takedown until earlier this week. (i guess they put it up because of all the recent kael-related books?) she makes some good points -- the stuff not specific to kael, especially; the chunk about about the limitations and burn-out of "reviewing" versus writing essays was painfully (from a personal standpoint) otm -- but jesus what a windbag.

I think by her late work there was evidence of burn-out -- she was still fighting battles she'd long-ago won (haha except the general acceptance of the peerless awesome that is b.de palma etc) -- but some of her best writing and reviewing is in WtLGD, and Adler's "authoritarian" argument is a bit teenage. ("She strongly dissed a film I love, it's like HITLER WROTE THIS REVIEW!")

some of her best writing and reviewing is in WtLGD

I like her bits on Angela Lansbury and Ingrid Bergman playing grand dames.

trying to read that adler article and holy shit, paul stanley or lou reed could sum up those first few paragraphs in like a sentence

was adler being paid by the comma?

There may well be some good points in here, but it's hard to dig through the accusations of Kael being a columnist whore