Pauline Kael

Early Life and Background

Pauline Kael was born on June 19, 1919, in Petaluma, California, the youngest of five children of Isaac Paul Kael and Judith Friedman Kael, Jewish immigrants from Poland who operated a chicken farm. The Kael family's agricultural life in Sonoma County was steeped in immigrant striving, and though the farm ultimately failed during the difficult economic climate of the 1920s, the experience instilled in young Pauline a keen sensitivity to hardship, ambition, and reinvention—themes that would echo throughout her later writing about American cinema and culture.

Following the collapse of the farm, the family moved to San Francisco, where Kael was raised in a bustling, opinionated household that valued argument and intellectual combat as a form of familial affection. It was in San Francisco's movie palaces and repertory houses that Kael developed her enduring love affair with film, one that would later distinguish her from critics who approached cinema with detached academic reserve. She attended Girls' High School in San Francisco before enrolling at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied philosophy and immersed herself in literature, aesthetics, and left-leaning politics. Though she left Berkeley without completing her degree, her time there sharpened the rigorous, argumentative intellect that would later characterize her criticism.

Career Beginnings

After Berkeley, Kael led an itinerant existence in the late 1940s and 1950s, working various jobs—including a period writing subtitles, working as a seamstress, and even briefly working in advertising—while raising her daughter, Gina James, born in 1952 from a relationship with filmmaker James Broughton. She never married Broughton and raised Gina largely as a single mother, a fact she rarely dwelt on publicly but which shaped her financially precarious years before achieving critical success.

Kael's break into professional film criticism came somewhat by accident. In 1953, she got into an argument about Charlie Chaplin's Limelight with a friend at a coffeehouse in Berkeley; the ensuing essay, published in the small journal City Lights, caught the attention of local readers and radio programmers. This led to a stint as a movie-review commentator on Berkeley's Pacifica Radio station KPFA, where her unpretentious, forcefully personal style of film discussion set her apart from mainstream critics of the day, who tended to treat cinema as either mindless entertainment or, at best, a minor art form.

Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, Kael also managed a repertory cinema, the Berkeley Cinema Guild, with her then-partner, further deepening her encyclopedic knowledge of film history. She began contributing to small magazines, and by the early 1960s, her essays were appearing in publications including Film Quarterly, Partisan Review, and eventually the more widely circulated McCall's and The New Republic.

Rise to Prominence

Kael's national reputation was cemented in 1965 with the publication of her first collection of essays, I Lost It at the Movies, a title as provocative and irreverent as the writing within. The book became an unexpected bestseller, remarkable for a volume of film criticism, and established Kael as a fresh, unapologetically personal voice willing to challenge both Hollywood conventions and the pretensions of the emerging auteur-worshipping critical establishment (epitomized by rivals like Andrew Sarris).

Her brief tenure at McCall's ended famously in 1966 after she was fired for panning The Sound of Music, a wildly popular film she dismissively critiqued as manipulative treacle—an incident that only burnished her reputation for fearless, populist-minded honesty.

In 1967, Kael published perhaps her single most influential essay, a rapturous 7,000-word review of Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde in The New Yorker, which she wrote on a freelance basis. Her passionate defense of the film's violent, morally ambiguous storytelling—at a time when many critics dismissed it as glorifying criminality—helped turn critical and public opinion in its favor and demonstrated her power to single-handedly reshape a film's reception.

The New Yorker Years

In 1968, The New Yorker hired Kael as a regular staff film critic, a position she held (alternating for several years with British critic Penelope Gilliatt) until her retirement in 1991, save for a brief and famously unhappy stint in 1979 working as a creative consultant for Paramount Pictures at the invitation of producer-director Warren Beatty—an experiment in Hollywood that ended badly and reinforced her preference for the critic's chair over the executive's desk.

During her New Yorker tenure, Kael became the most talked-about, feared, and influential film critic in the United States. Her prose was famous for its immediacy, colloquial energy, sexual candor, and willingness to render sweeping aesthetic judgments delivered with the conviction of personal experience rather than academic theory. She rejected the notion that criticism should be dispassionate or objective, instead insisting that a critic's subjective, emotional response was central to honest engagement with art.

Kael was an early and vociferous champion of the "New Hollywood" movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, championing directors like Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Brian De Palma. Her 1972 review of Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris—which she declared a landmark akin to the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring—remains one of the most famous (and hyperbolic) reviews in American criticism.

She was equally famous for her scathing dismissals, including her contempt for filmmakers she considered dishonest or overly calculated, and her often personal antagonism toward critics and directors she viewed as pretentious, including a long-running rivalry with critic Andrew Sarris over the auteur theory, and later disputes over her views on Stanley Kubrick and Clint Eastwood.

Major Works and Publications

Kael published numerous essay collections throughout her career, many compiling her New Yorker reviews, including:

• I Lost It at the Movies (1965)
• Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968)
• Deeper into Movies (1973), which won the National Book Award for Arts and Letters in 1974—the first time a film critic received this honor
• Reeling (1976)
• When the Lights Go Down (1980)
• 5001 Nights at the Movies (1982), a compendium of capsule reviews
• Taking It All In (1984)
• State of the Art (1985)
• Hooked (1989)
• Movie Love (1991)

She also wrote the long, controversial 1971 essay "Raising Kane" for The New Yorker, examining the authorship controversy behind Citizen Kane and arguing for screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz's central contribution—an essay that generated significant scholarly debate and accusations of inadequate sourcing, yet remains a landmark of film scholarship.

Awards and Recognition

In addition to her 1974 National Book Award, Kael received numerous honors throughout her career, including a George Polk Award for criticism. In recognition of her enduring literary significance, a broad selection of her work was published posthumously in 2011 as The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael, part of the prestigious Library of America series—an extraordinary honor for a film critic and evidence of her work's lasting status as American literature rather than mere journalism.

Personal Life

Kael was married and divorced three times, and had one daughter, Gina James, born in 1952, whom she raised largely as a single parent while establishing her career. She was known for her close, sometimes contentious mentorship of younger critics and writers—including James Wolcott, Michael Sragow, David Edelstein, and others—who became known, sometimes pejoratively, as the "Paulettes" for their perceived emulation of her critical style and sensibility.

She lived for many years in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in her later life, having relocated from New York after her retirement from The New Yorker in 1991, prompted in part by early symptoms of Parkinson's disease.

Legacy and Impact

Pauline Kael's influence on American film criticism is difficult to overstate. She helped transform film reviewing from a genteel, often dismissive sideline into a vigorous, intellectually serious literary form, arguing passionately that movies deserved the same critical attention as literature or painting. Her insistence on subjective, personal engagement with film—rather than detached theoretical analysis—reshaped how generations of critics approached their craft.

Her championing of New Hollywood directors helped shape the critical reception of some of American cinema's most enduring works, while her sharp, sometimes brutal dismissals of overhyped or pretentious films made her one of the most feared voices in the industry. Directors and actors alike, including Warren Beatty, Robert Altman, and countless others, acknowledged both her power and her genuine love of cinema.

The 2011 documentary and numerous biographies, including Brian Kellow's Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark (2011) and the 2018 documentary What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, attest to her continuing relevance in film culture and criticism decades after her death.

Later Life and Death

Kael's health declined through the 1990s as Parkinson's disease progressively limited her mobility and, eventually, her ability to write. She died at her home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on September 3, 2001, at the age of 82. Her death was widely mourned in literary and cinematic circles as the end of an era in which a single critic's voice could hold such singular cultural authority over how Americans understood and appreciated film.