But surely it was just a parochial piece of whimsy compared to an important movie like Barton Fink? "I hated Barton Fink passionately," she says. "That's one movie I would have liked to review. Everything in it is programmed in a nasty, smug way."
Okay, but Scorsese's new film, Cape Fear, that's a masterpiece isn't it? "I thought it was a spectacularly bad movie for Scorsese to have made. He thought he'd do a genre film like one he'd admired but it turned out all wrong. I don't think he's a hack but it turned into a piece of hack work."
What about The Silence of the Lambs ? Surely she couldn't find a bad word to say about that. "I didn't care for it," she says. "Silence of the Lambs is just a serial killer movie gussied up. It's basically such cheap stuff."
What did she like then? "I liked Dead Again a lot." Not exactly a British film, but a British cast and director. "I think The Fisher King didn't get it's due. I thought the performances in that were excellent." Terry Gilliam? He's sort of British as well isn't he? "And I loved Prime Suspect when it was shown on public television recently." A British drama series.
Either Pauline Kael-the most distinguished movie critic in the world-has lost her marbles or the British film industry is undergoing a miraculous renaissance.
Unfortunately for Juliet Stevenson, she has no plans to return to The New Yorker. "The prospect of having to sit through another Oliver Stone movie is too much," she says. Clearly, she still has her wits about her. In praising British films she is simply exhibiting the independence which has always made her such a dependable critic (John Updike described her as "unbuyable"). The 72-year-old Kael has given so much to movies-she's been writing about them for almost 40 years-she should be given the Distinguished Service Award at next month's Oscars. Alas, it will probably go to Kenneth Branagh.
Pauline Kael was born in Two Rock, California, in 1919 and brought up on a chicken ranch in Sonoma County. "Not the legendary West of myth-making movies like the sluggish Shane," she wrote in 1964, "but the modern West ... the ludicrous real West." In 1936 she was admitted to Berkeley but dropped out six credits short of graduation because she couldn't afford the $35 course fee. She went to New York, where she thought about becoming a playwright, but after three years returned to San Francisco and became involved in the city's art scene. She lived with avant-garde filmmaker James Broughton who fathered her only child, Gina James.
"Pauline was always getting into terrific arguments about art with the painters who came around, and they'd leave antagonized," he says. "She can be very sweet, the velvet glove-but jungle red underneath."
(This appraisal is shared by her friend James Wolcott, a columnist on Vanity Fair. "She's only five foot tall," he says, "but I've seen her reduce grown men to tears.")
Her first review, aged 33, was of Charlie Chaplin's Limelight, which she described as "Chaplin's sentimental and high-minded view of theatre and himself." Regular reviewing work led to a slot on KPFA, a public radio station, in which she'd take a group of friends to a movie then go back to the studio and discuss it over drinks. Ernest Callenbach, who as the editor of Film Quarterly published much of her early work, claims it was very popular: "She had a sassy, caustic voice and it penetrated your mind. It was powerfully attractive to some men, who called her for dates."
During the sixties she wrote for for a wide variety of magazines, including McCall's, Life, The New Republic, Vogue, Mademoiselle, The Atlantic and Holiday. She was notoriously unimpressed by the Hollywood PR machine-she called The Sound of Music "The Sound of Money"-and found it impossible to get full-time work. "I regard criticism as an art," she wrote in 1963, "and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde film artist." In her first ten years of reviewing she earned less than $2,000 and couldn't support herself as a critic until she was nearly 50.
Many regard her writing in this period, re-published in I Lost It At The Movies and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, as her best. At this time, most American critics thought European films like La Notte and La Dolce Vita were far more important than the homegrown product. Not according to Pauline Kael: "from the look of ... these movies, you might begin to suspect that soul-sickness is a product of the couturier." By championing films like On The Waterfront, Hud and Bonnie and Clyde, she persuaded a generation of filmmakers that American popular culture could be just as exciting as European "cinema".
Not that she endorsed the auteur theory. This held that the work of hack directors, like Val Newton's Cat People, was often superior to that of better known filmmakers because they had to struggle to overcome the limitations of their material. In her Film Quarterly essay 'Circles and Squares', Kael dismissed this as "intellectual diddling". "These critics work embarrassingly hard trying to give some semblance of intellectual respectability to a preoccupation with mindless, repetitious commercial products," she wrote. She didn't even consider them good judges of trash: "Moviegoing kids are, I think, much more reliable guides to this kind of movie than the auteur critics".
It wasn't that she disapproved of trashy movies, but unlike the auteur theorists she felt no need to apologise for her enjoyment of them by trying to eke out some crumb of intellectual nourishment. "It's a peculiar form of movie madness crossed with academicism," she wrote in 'Trash, Art and the Movies', "this lowbrowism masquerading as highbrowism, eating a candy bar and cleaning an "allegorical problem of human faith" out of your teeth." What she objected to in the auteur critics was the idea that movies-even B-movies-had to be made respectable before they could be appreciated. Such compulsive gentrification stemmed from the same self-improving ethic which led most American critics to prefer European films.
In 1967, she was enticed on to The New Yorker by editor Willaim Shawn who promised not to edit her copy. She became the magazine's film critic for six months of the year, with Penelope Gilliat filling in for the other half. "At first I didn't fit in," she says. "You couldn't even say a word like 'constipation' because it would make people think of shitting! But gradually things turned around so that people associated me with the magazine."
Going Steady, her third book covering the years 1968-70, was something of a disappointment after the shock-treatment of the first two. It was a little bit sedate, a little-dare one say it-genteel. "I internalized a lot of the pressures at The New Yorker in those early years," she says. "There was no external pressure but I censored myself."
But in her next book, Deeper Into Movies, she really took off. "I think I was beginning to feel my freedom then," she says. During the seventies, Pauline Kael's unique sensibility came to fruition. Rather than peer at a movie from on high, she wrestles with it, tries to articulate the seemingly elemental experience of her "primitive moviegoer's soul". Her responses are visceral, pasionate. She never exhibited the cool, analytical detachment film critics were supposed to have (she described them as "a destructive bunch of solidly, stupidly respectable mummies".) For her, movies have all the reality of lived experience, which is perhaps why she only ever sees them once.
Some have unkindly suggested this is because she has no other life. "She's only real, if she's real at all, in that movie theatre," says James Broughton. This implies there's something peculiar about her reaction to films. But when we read her we recognise our own experience as well, as in the following description of The Godfather: "The tension is in the meetings in the underworld darkness; one gets the sense that this secret life has its own poetry of fear, more real to the men (and perhaps to the excluded women also) than the sunlight world outside."
Indeed, it is the primitive sensuality of movies which, according to Kael, made American intellectuals so reluctant to accept them. "Probably movies weren't culturally respectable for a long time because they are so sheerly enjoyable," she wrote in 1976. "In a country with a Puritan background, the sensuality of movies was bound to be suspect." But it's this expressive quality that she has always responded to and it accounts for her apparently ecclectic taste. In 'Notes on the Nihilist Poetry of Sam Peckinpah', she admits to feeling "closer to [Pechinpah] than I do to any other director except Jean Renoir". (Peckinpah returned the compliment by declaring her "good to drink with".)
Pauline Kael's greatest period coincided with what is pretentiously known as "the renaissance" in American movies. "The Vietnam War seemed to stimulate people into thinking a bit," she says. "The seventies were quite brilliant." Her column in The New Yorker became the pulpit, the intellectual heartbeat of the movie generation. She sang the praises of films like Mean Streets, The Godfather, Part II and Nashville with an almost evangelical zeal. (In You'll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again Julia Phillips reveals that Kael offered to write an open letter to Columbia if Martin Scorsese felt it would strengthen his hand in a censorship battle with the studio over Taxi Driver.) "A few decades hence," she wrote in the introduction to Reeling, her fourth book, "these years may appear to be the closest our movies have come to the tangled, bitter flowering of American letters in the early 1850s."
Some complained that she became too powerful (even today she is sometimes barred from previews by nervous press agents). She was accused of cronyism-a great crime in America-and a group of young critics, including James Wolcott, David Denby, David Edelstein and Joe Morgenstern, were at one stage dubbed the "Paulettes". (There is something cheap about this epiphet-after all, followers of F.R. Leavis were not known as "Frankites". The implication is that there is something cissy about allowing yourself to be influenced, intellectually, by a woman.) They were even accused of voting in unison at the National Society of Film Critics awards!
In as far as there is anything in this, it probably has more to do with people's reluctance to disagree with her rather than any active empire-building on her part. The chief pleasure in flipping through her books is in seeing whether her opinions coincide with yours. When you come across a film you disagree about-like RoboCop, which she hated-you feel something close to panic. Paradoxically, because she's so independent-minded you feel inclined to assent to her judgement.
In 1979 she took a leave of absence from The New Yorker and went to Hollywood. "I was planning to work for Beatty's company," she says, "but I changed my mind and took an executive consultancy at Paramount. I decided Beatty's way of going about things was too slow for me. He was very nice about it though. He helped me get the executive consultancy."
She is irritatingly coy about this period, refusing to reveal which films she had an input on. "I worked on a great many projects," she says, elusively. Presumably, most of them were clunkers. Nevertheless, she had a good time, staying up half the night talking to young writers. "I was surrounded by people there who'd been reading me for years who were surprised to find that I wasn't an ogre in the flesh," she says.
She returned to The New Yorker after five months and wrote up her experiences in Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers. "I missed writing terribly," she says. "There were so many movies that I wanted to write about, that I felt people weren't saying the right thing about. It's an awful feeling when you like a movie and you can't say anything about it. I'm having that problem now."
The conventional wisdom is that she has declined somewhat in her later years, but the remarkable thing is the extent to which she's remained completely on the ball. Most grandmothers wouldn't be able to make head or tail of Top Gun. She summed it up in one line: "Top Gun is a recruiting poster that isn't concerned with recruiting but with being a poster." Some of the reviews in Movie Love are as good as anything she's done before, such as her roasting of Dances With Wolves: "Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head." It's not Pauline Kael whose declined--it's the pictures that have got smaller.
The Guardian, 1991
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