41 Facts About Pauline Kael

Pauline Kael was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991.

Roger Ebert argued in an obituary that Pauline Kael "had a more positive influence on the climate for film in America than any other single person over the last three decades".

Pauline Kael's siblings were Louis, Philip, Annie, and Rose.

Pauline Kael's parents lost their farm when Kael was eight, and the family moved to San Francisco, where Kael attended Girls High School.

Pauline Kael had intended to go to law school, but fell in with a group of artists and moved to New York City with the poet Robert Horan.

Three years later, Pauline Kael returned to Berkeley and "led a bohemian life", writing plays and working in experimental film.

In 1952, Peter D Martin, the editor of City Lights, overheard Kael arguing about films in a coffeeshop with a friend and asked her to review Charlie Chaplin's Limelight.

Pauline Kael dubbed the film "Slimelight" and began publishing film criticism regularly in magazines.

Pauline Kael wrote "pungent" capsule reviews of the films, which her patrons began collecting.

Pauline Kael continued to juggle writing with other work until she received an offer to publish a book of her criticism.

That same year, Pauline Kael wrote a blistering review of The Sound of Music in McCall's.

In October 1967, Pauline Kael wrote a long essay on Bonnie and Clyde that the magazine declined to publish.

Pauline Kael remembered "getting a letter from an eminent The New Yorker writer suggesting that I was trampling through the pages of the magazine with cowboy boots covered with dung".

In 1970, Pauline Kael received a George Polk Award for her work as a critic at The New Yorker.

Pauline Kael continued to publish collections of her writing with suggestive titles such as Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, When the Lights Go Down, and Taking It All In.

Pauline Kael wrote philosophical essays on movie-going, the modern Hollywood film industry, and what she saw as the lack of courage on the part of audiences to explore lesser-known, more challenging movies.

Pauline Kael further alleged that Orson Welles had schemed to deprive Mankiewicz of screen credit.

Pauline Kael was defended by critics, scholars and friends, including Peter Bogdanovich, who rebutted Kael's claims in a 1972 article that included the revelation that Kael had appropriated the extensive research of a UCLA faculty member without crediting him.

Pauline Kael has great passion, terrific wit, wonderful writing style, huge knowledge of film history, but too often what she chooses to extol or fails to see is very surprising.

Pauline Kael battled the editors of the New Yorker as much as her own critics.

Pauline Kael fought with Shawn to review the 1972 pornographic film Deep Throat, eventually relenting.

In 1979, Pauline Kael accepted an offer from Warren Beatty to be a consultant to Paramount Pictures, but left the position after only a few months to return to writing criticism.

Pauline Kael said she would still write essays for The New Yorker and "reflections and other pieces of writing about movies", but over the next 10 years, she published no new work except an introduction to her 1994 compendium For Keeps.

Pauline Kael's was loping, derisive, intimate, gag-packed, as American as Lenny Bruce.

Pauline Kael panned some films that had widespread critical admiration, such as Network, A Woman Under the Influence, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, most experimental cinema, most student films, It's a Wonderful Life, Shoah, Dances with Wolves, and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Pauline Kael's reviews included a pan of West Side Story that drew harsh replies from its fans; ecstatic reviews of Z and MASH that enormously boosted their popularity; and enthusiastic appraisals of Brian De Palma's early films.

Pauline Kael was an opponent of the auteur theory, criticizing it both in her reviews and in interviews.

Pauline Kael preferred to analyze films without thinking about the director's other works.

Pauline Kael argued that a film should be considered a collaborative effort.

Pauline Kael strongly disliked films she felt were manipulative or appealed in superficial ways to conventional attitudes and feelings.

Pauline Kael was particularly critical of Clint Eastwood: her reviews of his films and acting were resoundingly unfavorable, and she became known as his nemesis.

Pauline Kael was an enthusiastic, if occasionally ambivalent, supporter of Sam Peckinpah and Walter Hill's early work, both of whom specialized in violent action dramas.

Byron, who "hit the ceiling" after reading the review, was joined by The Celluloid Closet author Vito Russo, who argued that Pauline Kael equated promiscuity with homosexuality, "as though straight women have never been promiscuous or been given the permission to be promiscuous".

Pauline Kael reinvented the form, and pioneered an entire aesthetic of writing.

Alternately, Pauline Kael was said to have had the power to prevent filmmakers from working; David Lean said that her criticism of his work "kept him from making a movie for 14 years".

In 1978, Pauline Kael received the Women in Film Crystal Award for outstanding women who, through their endurance and the excellence of their work, have helped to expand the role of women in the entertainment industry.

Pauline Kael had often reviewed Lucas's work unenthusiastically; in her review of Willow, she called the character an "hommage a moi".

Pauline Kael read her criticism voraciously while growing up and said that Kael was "as influential as any director was in helping me develop my aesthetic".

Pauline Kael later wrote to Kael, saying: "[Y]our thoughts and writing about the movies [have] been a very important source of inspiration for me and my movies, and I hope you don't regret that".

Pauline Kael's career is discussed at length in the 2009 documentary For the Love of Movies by critics whose careers she helped shape, such as Owen Gleiberman and Elvis Mitchell, as well as by those who fought with her, such as Andrew Sarris.

Rob Garver's documentary What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael was released in 2018.