Pauline Kael

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/

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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.

Great find!

Woody and Kael are really interesting together. I don't think I've heard anyone else able to match her energy so well.

Thanks for posting that...I just barely started, but I always wonder when Kael says things like young children are responding to Sleeper--is her sample size her own grandchild? Was she moonlighting in a daycare center at the time?

I used to get on Chuck Eddy, too, when he'd make broad statements about Nirvana and teenagers (or whatever)--who have you been talking to besides your own two kids? I'm sure I've been guilty of the same with regards to students of mine.

Let the record show that I'm the first person in the entire history of the world to have laser eye surgery performed while wearing a Pauline Kael (Going Steady) T-shirt.

(Minor preventative stuff--thought I was just there for a consultation, but the doctor said let's do it now.)

When was that?!
Seems like Chuck Eddy is now or soon will be in his third decade of raising teens, so maybe any references are or will at some point be more credible---Kael could be v. selective about honoring kid feedback, judging by David Denby's account of turning up at her place w equally halcyon Paul Warshow after seeing The Graduate, talking about how much they enjoyed it. Kael said, "Oh no. You didn't," or something equally denialist.

Laser eye surgery with a Pauline Kael T-shirt on was this afternoon (played tennis later); haranguing Chuck was late '90s, right around the time when he started at the Voice. I think Linus was probably a teenager.

Love the bot.

French artists are so narcissistic about their lost innocence. (1967)

— pauline kael bot (@paulinekaelbot) August 25, 2024

I read that she doesn't like Megalopolis.

Richard Brody seems to be working out his Kael problems on a therapist's couch the last few weeks:

For Kael, the “aura” of movies, its material essence, wasn’t in the original camera negative or in the film print—it was in the theatre itself. Her generation, formed in movie theatres, possessed, she thought, cinematic antibodies that protected them from TV, whereas the generation that got many of its movies from TV risked being infected with TV itself. Just as movies were undergoing an epochal shift—a shift that she herself discerned when writing about the films of Godard and about “Bonnie and Clyde”—Kael was looking backward to an earlier, unspoiled cinematic era that had been definitively lost. Thus even her ostensible narrative of progress through what she would come to consider the golden age of the seventies was fundamentally a narrative of inevitable decline, of pessimism for the future of the art as the collective and popular medium she understood it to be. Even if young filmmakers might manage to cultivate a sophisticated taste in movies amid the baleful influences of new media, she suggested, young viewers wouldn’t, and so the filmmakers would hardly have audiences to support their art. On this last point, at least, Kael may have been right.

Doubt a Brody bot would be worth anybody's time.

Aha Brody IS a bot! A humorless machine at that

She liked the sequel to the Exorcist?

Even the madness of EXORCIST II is of a special sort: the picture has a visionary crazy grandeur (like that of Fritz Lang's loony METROPOLIS). Some of the telepathic sequences are golden-toned and lyrical, and the film has a swirling, hallucinogenic, apocalyptic quality, (1978)

— pauline kael bot (@paulinekaelbot) October 31, 2025

Yup. She loved Boorman.

I should give it a re-watch.

I like it a lot! When I finally saw it I was like wtf this rips, what is everyone’s problem — then a little later in the film I was like hm ok I kinda get it. Not everything works (and I think there was some studio interference) but it’s a trip and it’s insane that ppl call it one of the worst films ever. The hypnotic regression scene alone (that set!)

Quite a few people will argue that the sequel is better believe it or not. Scorsese at least defended the sequel as worthy of the original (maybe even better but I can't recall if he actually specified that) and here's Dave Kehr's original review for the Chicago Reader:

Everybody seems to hate this movie, and not without good reason. But John Boorman’s 1977 follow-up to William Friedkin’s shocker is a much more interesting film than the original, and Boorman deserves credit for trying out some new ideas, even if most of them backfire. Visually, it’s fascinating—sort of a blend of Minnellian baroque and Buñuelian absurdity—but the dialogue is childish, the story is incomprehensible, and the metaphysics are ridiculous. Still, an audacious failure is preferable to a chickenhearted success. More than worth a look, if only out of curiosity. With Richard Burton and Linda Blair.

And a quick search reveals that yes, Scorsese did indeed prefer the sequel too:

The picture asks: Does great goodness bring upon itself great evil? This goes back to the Book of Job; it's God testing the good. In this sense, Regan (Linda Blair) is a modern-day saint — like Ingrid Bergman in Europa '51, and, in a way, like Charlie in Mean Streets. I like the first Exorcist, because of the Catholic guilt I have, and because it scared the hell out of me; but The Heretic surpasses it. Maybe Boorman failed to execute the material, but the movie still deserved better than it got.

Something I'm almost positive I didn't know (searched ILX and no mention of it--I would have posted about it myself, I'm sure): Brian Kellow, who wrote the Kael biography a few years ago (also one on Sue Mengers that I read), died in 2018.

https://www.wqxr.org/story/brian-kellow-obituary/

I interviewed him after the book came out; very nice guy who, when I sent him some of the contentious ILX back-and-forth about his book (there's a long thread on here where I'm arguing with da croupier), seemed genuinely upset that anyone would view his book as a hatchet job.

Trying to remember what da croup's take even was

Thought about getting Kellow's Sue Mengers bio when it was on sale but I passed for some reason.

(xpost) Exactly that--that the book was a hatchet job. Made no sense to me then, makes no sense to me now.

Makes total sense to me, given his proclivities.

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