A look at a giant of film criticism
The rise of Pauline Kael as one of America’s most famous film critics would be unlikely today, considering the fracturing of film criticism on blogs and social media. Who really has that influence today? But really, it was pretty darned unlikely back in the 1960s.
Consider that in less than a decade, she went from writing program notes at Berkeley’s Cinema Guild and reviews for City Lights magazine in San Francisco to, with her role at the New Yorker magazine, unseating famed New York Times critic Bosley Crowther as the nation’s most influential critic. She came to national attention with a nowclassic book of reviews, “I Lost It at the Movies,” published in 1965 when she was 46 and writing for McCall’s magazine, and she was 48 when her watershed review of “Bonnie and Clyde” led to a career with the New Yorker, becoming a prime influencer into the 1980s.
Rob Garver’s engaging new documentary “What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael” is a must for any film fan. It not only explores the special talent of Kael and what made her famous, but it is also a snapshot of a volatile and exciting era of film history, when as the young guns of Hollywood dispensed with the old studio era — and the restrictive Production Code — once and for all. Bring a notebook to scribble down films you might want to see or revisit (there are a wealth of clips). Afterward, you might even want to buy a Kael book, many of which are still in print nearly 20 years after her death at age 82.
The doc, which opens Friday, Feb. 14, details Kael’s Bay Area upbringing, from her birth to Polish immigrants who ran a chicken farm in Petaluma to being raised in Depressionera San Francisco to her education at UC Berkeley and beyond. There’s even a tour of her Berkeley house, site of her famous parties in the late 1950s and early 1960s, that has Jess murals as interior decoration (they’re still there).
And, of course, it is packed with archival footage of Kael, a frequent guest on talk shows such as “The Dick Cavett Show” and others. There are archival interviews with filmmakers and actors talking about Kael (“Dirty old broad,” Jerry Lewis jokes); quotes from key Kael reviews (with Sarah Jessica Parker as the voice of Kael); and modernday interviews with directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, David O. Russell, Quentin Tarantino and Paul Schrader, and critics including Molly Haskell, Berkeley’s Greil Marcus and many others.
Garver shows how warm and engaging Kael could be — she had a wide circle of friends and a devoted following of critics influenced by her, dubbed “Paulettes,” which included former San Francisco Examiner film critic Michael Sragow, who is in the documentary. Her daughter, Gina, an assistant to her mother, shares several warm memories.
But Kael could also be harsh. One section of the film details the infamous incident when she went up to filmmaker David Lean and proceeded to tell him how much she hated his films. Lean had just taken a critical drubbing for his latest film, “Ryan’s Daughter” (1970), and he later acknowledges that the exchange sent him into a great depression, and he retired from filmmaking (“I always referred to her as ‘that ghastly woman’ ”).
Lean came out of retirement 14 years later to make what would be his last film, “A Passage to India,” but that a film critic could cause the director of “The Bridge on the River Kwai” and “Lawrence of Arabia” to quit underlines the often sensitive and volatile nature of artists and critics.
Kael was an early champion of Robert Altman and Brian De Palma, and would trash many of the popular and critically acclaimed films of the day (“2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Network”).
She even had a brief, failed stint in Hollywood, at the invitation of Warren Beatty, which Garver also puts into perspective.
And Garver is right to call his film “The Art of Pauline Kael.” As divisive and controversial as she could be, her reviews were often as entertaining as the movies she wrote about. She was a true artist with words, and it’s ironic that years after she sent Crowther into oblivion, she herself was supplanted as the movies’ top influencer by Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, who though they were wonderful writers became known for reducing a movie’s worth to “thumbsup” or “thumbsdown.”
If Kael were alive and writing today, who knows how many Twitter wars she would start? But something tells me she would have none of that nonsense.