Kael, Pauline

Kael, Pauline (1919-2001), influential American film critic. She was born in Petaluma, California, to a Polish/Jewish farming family, and went to high school in San Francisco. From 1936 to 1940 she studied philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley; she did not complete her degree, but later received an honorary doctorate. In her 20s, she wrote plays and made avant-garde films.

Her first review, for a San Francisco magazine, caustically entitled “Slimelight”, slated Charlie Chaplin’s last film in the United States (Limelight, 1952). Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Kael worked as a radio broadcaster, cinema programmer, and university lecturer, and wrote for magazines such as Film Quarterly, Moviegoer, Sight and Sound, and Life. In 1965 a collection of her criticism I Lost it at the Movies became a bestseller, and after a typically outspoken review in which she branded The Sound of Music (1965) “a sugar-coated lie” led to her being sacked from McCall’s magazine, she moved in 1967 to The New Yorker, where she remained as a columnist until 1991. In between, in the late 1970s, she spent a short-lived and little-enjoyed period as a consultant for Paramount Pictures. Her many books of collected criticism also include Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968) and Deeper Into Movies (1973).

She was an advocate of the cinema as entertainment and did not suffer gladly those films or film-makers whom she regarded as sentimental, shallow, or pretentious. The films she disdained included Blow-Up (1966), Rain Man (1988), and Dances with Wolves (1990); among those she celebrated were Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Godfather (1972), and Last Tango in Paris (1973); she championed the careers of Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, and Robert Altman. She was an opponent of the auteur theory (which proposed that the director was the author of a film) and raised hackles when she sought to attribute the authorship of Citizen Kane (1941; Orson Welles) to screenwriter Herman J Mankiewicz in her 1971 essay “Raising Kane”.

Her reviews were incisive, funny, and opinionated. She believed that, right or wrong, criticism should be subjective. This could lead to remarks that seemed offhand or prejudiced, but it was this brashness that made her writings compelling.