Pauline Kael

I always felt alienated by the whole Kael vs. Sarris thing, since I was never crazy about either's prose style or critical tastes, and both seemed largely irrelevant to the greater film discourse (whatever that is) by the 1980s. Farber would be my pick from that 60s-70s "golden age of film criticism", although if I was to choose a favorite from that era who actually wrote on a more regular basis, it would be Roger Greenspun, who was just as much the auteurist as Sarris but more eclectic in his enthusiasms and incredibly even more of a horndog. I mean, guy actually got turned on by a Straub-Huillet film, which has to be some kind of accomplishment.

I eventually gained an appreciation for Sarris' 1960s columns, where he was restrained from his worst impulses by limited space and the fact that it was pretty much just Mekas and him covering *everything*. The piece he did on watching Madame X as an in-flight movies is one of the more affecting pieces of film criticism I've read.

And one of the aspects of Sarris' writing that always irritated me - his inability to get over Kael's criticisms in Circles and Squares long after Kael had moved on - made a bit of sense when I realized he was getting bashed in print not just by her, but Macdonald, Simon, even Farber, all around the same time (didn't make his obsession with it any less tiresome though).

I will never understand Kael's whole "only see a film once" thing. Felt happy to learn that at least she played her favorite records many times.

suspect that position made more sense as an expression of populism back when the average filmgoer was defined by their lack of access to movie history rather than by their star wars blurays

embracing movies as essentially ephemeral being part of embracing them as "trash"

Walter Hill's spectacle takes its story from Xenophon's Anabasis and its style from the taste of the modern urban dispossessed--in neon signs, graffiti, and the thrill of gaudiness. The film enters into the spirit of urban-male tribalism and the feelings of kids who believe that they own the streets because they keep other kids out of them. In this vision, cops and kids are all there is, and the worst crime is to be chicken. It has--in visual terms--the kind of impact that "Rock Around the Clock" had when it was played behind the titles of BLACKBOARD JUNGLE. It's like visual rock, and it's bursting with energy. The action runs from night until dawn, and most of it is in crisp, bright Day-

Oops:

-Glo colors against the terrifying New York blackness; the figures stand out like a jukebox in a dark bar. There's a night-blooming, psychedelic shine to the whole baroque movie.

I vaguely remember liking The Warriors at the time, but looking at the trailer now it looks bad

saw it for the first time a few months ago: it's good.

will have to see it again

I remember being put off by a scene of an attempted rape in which I felt that the film's sympathies were with the perpetrator, rather than the woman, but I saw the movie long enough ago that I'm fuzzy on the exact details.

Walter Chaw (my fave current film writer) has a book coming out on Hill, so I feel like I'm due for a deep dive into the man's filmography.

The film doesn't dedicate much time to examining the sexual-social elements of its milieu, but it definitely makes clear that womens' safety is precarious.

when I see it again I'm going to ignore the gang names

It's a pretty good, offbeat 'junk' genre film. The Driver is much more my cuppa tea.

(did she review it?)

yes, a capsule review at least, I don't know if there was more. alfred posted it above

The Driver is something I want to see

I was surprised to see that Kael liked Loving (the George Segal/Eva Marie Saint film) so much, as it seemed like exactly the kind of upper-middle-class angsty thing that she routinely dismissed (I'm thinking of her pan of Ordinary People), I just watched it this morning and found it meandering and occasionally interesting: the scene with the divorced older couple was great, but I haven't decided how I feel about the gimmicky conclusion. Kael's point that the film doesn't judge any of the characters is curious: Segal is so repulsive that I found it hard not to see it as taking a stance against him, but I suppose the early 70s might have been more sympathetic towards embodiments of white, male, upper-middle-class privilege.

(did she review it?)

yup, c.1500 words, march 5 1979, collected in when the lights go down

(or did you mean the driver, sorry)

Loving is a bit more atmospheric and offbeat than Ordinary People (tho I agree it has its problems). Plus OP was part of her Redford vendetta; also they were suburban WASPs, and George Segal isn't.

yeah i meant The Driver, mark

http://www.geocities.ws/paulinekaelreviews/#B

Morbs:

This gangster picture, which failed commercially here and is also an aesthetic failure, was Walter Hill's second film as a writer-director. (It was made after HARD TIMES and before THE WARRIORS.) Hill attempted to stylize gangster characters and conventions, and although he succeeded in the action sequences, which have a near-abstract visual power, the stylized characters, with their uninflected personalities, flatten the movie out. In trying to purify the gangster film, he lost the very element that has made gangster movies so enjoyable: the colorful lowlifes and braggarts, with their own slang. (Instead, the characters stare at each other in silence.) And in exalting "professionalism"-in setting forth a neo-Hemingway elitist attitude for judging people on the basis of their grace and courage-Hill shows such a limited perspective that the film is comic-book cops-and-robbers existentialism. Ryan O'Neal, with his soft voice, gives the central role a strange, callow quality that's very effective, but as his adversary in the police department, Bruce Dern is at his mannered worst. As a woman of mystery, Isabelle Adjani drops her voice down to a Dietrich level and never varies it-or her expression: she's as blank-faced as a figure at Mme. Tussaud's. With Ronee Blakley, who looks more vividly alive than anyone else but gets killed off fast, and Joseph Walsh.

xxp

Yeah, I'd forgotten about her Redford thing; just meant that in general she seemed to have an aversion to "whiny white guy" movies (which may have been a more accurate way to put it).

she also recoiled from genre films that aspired to art

ie Goodfellas

but yet loved Mean Streets

Hill shows such a limited perspective that the film is comic-book cops-and-robbers existentialism.

this is what he was after, PK

she pulled the same "Where is Cagney?" thing with Goodfellas.

She's not wrong for disliking Goodfellas but ...

she pulled the same "Where is Cagney?" thing with Goodfellas.

The movie had Joe Pesci.

she loved The Grifters, disliked The Silence of the Lambs.

That Geocities archive is such a nice relic from the old internet.

except i have freq gotten virus warnings from it.

I read and probably linked to this piece at the time (republished yesterday). I think it's excellent--although I continue to be perplexed by the idea that the Brian Kellow book was unsympathetic (and anyway, it's a biography--is it supposed to be sympathetic?).

http://www.vulture.com/2019/06/remembering-pauline-kael-film-critic.html

there's a nice appreciation of Kael by Farran Smith Nehme in the current Sight and Sound followed by an edited Q&A she gave at the NFT in London in 82. If anyone is very keen I do have a pdf of it I could share.

she says this about Lynch:

Eraserhead [1977] has been one of the
most extraordinary films of the last few
years. Can you say something about
American avant-garde film and is it
coming into the major studios?
Eraserhead is an amazing film, because as clearly as you can figure at what you’re seeing – even though the pacing is monstrous and it takes too long – it has a quality I don’t think I’ve ever seen in another film, which was about men’s anxiety states on dating,
and their terrors of their wives, and their children and parents-in-law. I mean, that man is every adolescent boy’s image of himself
on a date. It is a really hair-raisingly scary movie. I quite love it, and I do think David Lynch is a remarkable talent as he showed again with The Elephant Man [1980], because that script was absolutely zilch, and he turned it into something quite marvellous.
There are images in Eraserhead that stay with you the way images from The Blood of the Poet [1932] or Un chien andalou [1929] do. The image of that man and the hooker from across the hall; when they’re on the bed making love, and they deliquesce into the bed itself, and finally you see they disappear except for the woman’s long hair floating on the bed. That is a pretty scary, powerful erotic image. The whole film has a strange erotic feeling to it; you can’t quite put your finger on what’s going on at any given moment that’s holding you there, but you’re being held. Considering that he’s using pasteboard sets, it’s a wonderful piece of work. He’s
a phenomenally gifted filmmaker.

I couldn't be bothered fixing the formatting, sorry.

someone posted her entire pan of Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet here

https://letterboxd.com/notpaulinekael/film/romeo-and-juliet-1968/1/

100 today. Wherever she is, complaining about the state of movies.

Sight & Sound centerpiece: https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/pleaures-pauline-kael-film-critic-legacy

happy 100th pauline! even though i'm not sure i'd want to read your pan of a hard day's night.

here's charles taylor's tribute:

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/happy-birthday-pauline

Don't think I ever knew that about A Hard Day's Night--where was that published, J.D.?

She didn't like Head either...

uh

nice

it's mentioned in the sight and sound article as one of the reviews she did for mccall's, and i've seen it referenced a few other places. i always had the sense that a lot of her early work was never reprinted -- i don't think i ever saw her pan of lawrence of arabia either. but i'm sure i would've remembered reading a pan of AHDN.

XP Knew that would happen...get yr mind outta the gutter Soto

she folded remarks about those films into others. I've read her assessments of what O'Toole accomplished and got a sense that she both jeered at and was relieved by Omar Sharif.

From Taylor's piece:

I remain convinced that the reason for this view of Pauline is misogyny. There’s never a problem when a group of men share a sensibility, no automatic assumption that they speak with one voice.

Thankfully, I think we're finally reaching the point where the second sentence here is actually not true, and it's a very good thing.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang contains only a passing reference to A Hard Day's Night which reads as somewhat favorable. She did not like Help!, which she compared to TV commercials. It seems as if she preferred the Dave Clark Five film Having a Wild Weekend aka Catch Us If You Can to both.

The only bit of the Taylor piece that lost me was the feminism paragraph.

Sorry to mention this on her centennial, but I just happened to be reading the 2nd edition (2016) of Movie Journal: the Rise of the New American Cinema 1959-1971, which is a collection of Jonas Mekas's film columns for the Village Voice, and it contains an unusually harsh takedown of Kael that goes on for several pages in the introduction, written by the book's editor, Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker. Sample:

Kael was no cultural conservative, but her criticism lacked substance. She dismissed the debate over culture under the guise of irreverence and wit. Kael mocked the kinds of concerns that could unite two so different critics as Mekas and Dwight MacDonald about the enrichment of culture. Film was purely about entertainment. By embracing this position, Kael could dismiss the entire discussion about the relation between film and culture as elitist.

There's much more like that.

Film was purely about entertainment.

She never avowed anything like this. It's not just a lie, it's an insult to liars.

I thought the Adler critique quoted in the S&S piece was also kind of hilariously reductive: “She has, in principle, four things she likes: frissons of horror; physical violence depicted in explicit detail; sex scenes, so long as they have an ingredient of cruelty and involve partners who know each other either casually or under perverse circumstances; and fantasies of invasion by, or subjugation of or by, apes, pods, teens, bodysnatchers, and extraterrestrials. Whether or not one shares these predilections – and whether they are in fact more than four, or only one – they do not really lend themselves to critical discussion.”

You can level the charge of "criticism lacking substance" just as much at Mekas, whose responses to films were among the most completely subjective that I can think of, and that's often what I loved about his writing ("a syllogism: Barbara Rubin has no shame. Angels have no shame. Therefore Barbara Rubin is an angel.").

As for Adler, puh-leeze. Probably one of the worst critics to ever write for a major outlet. My favorite is when her review of some B-movie just consisted of a couple of lines of kvetching about having to review such trash a few days after the RFK assassination. Greil Marcus takedown of her is priceless: "Throughout, [Adler's book] Pitch Dark made me think of a useful cultural test: upon acquaintance, how long can one who has gone to Harvard or Radcliffe refrain from mentioning the fact. I have met people who have lasted several years, though several hours is generally considered laudatory. Adler (Harvard, MA, 1960) does not make it past her third page."