Pauline Kael

Her parents ran a chicken farm in Petaluma, among a colony of Jewish poultry ranchers out of Poland by way of New York, and they lost it when she was eight. The family moved to San Francisco. She entered Berkeley in 1936 to study philosophy, literature and art, dropped out in 1940 without a degree, and spent the next 15 years on whatever paid — advertising copy, manuscript editing, sewing, cooking, teaching violin, a laundry and tailoring business off Market Street — supporting herself and, after 1948, the daughter she raised alone. In 1955 she married the owner of a two-screen Berkeley repertory house, took over the programming, and wrote the capsule notes that patrons began to collect. She was 36. The job that made her name was 13 years off.

The New Yorker took her on staff in 1968, after William Shawn ran a Bonnie and Clyde essay The New Republic had refused. She wrote there until 1991, at first alternating six-month stints with Penelope Gilliatt. First person, present tense, unashamed about pleasure and gut reaction, contemptuous of solemnity — she wrote as though arguing with you in a bar. Her fight with Andrew Sarris over the auteur theory began in Film Quarterly in 1963: movies are made by many hands, and treating the director as sole author was a romantic error. Sarris said later that they had made each other.

In February 1971 The New Yorker gave two consecutive issues to the longest thing she had ever written. "Raising Kane" argued that Herman Mankiewicz had written Citizen Kane almost single-handed and that Orson Welles had schemed to keep his name off it. Peter Bogdanovich answered in Esquire in October 1972, disclosing that Kael had used the research and interviews of a UCLA scholar, Howard Suber, without crediting him. In 1978 Robert Carringer worked through all seven drafts and concluded that Welles's contribution was "not only substantial but definitive." On the specifics, Kael lost. She had by then a following of younger critics, the Paulettes, whom her detractors said she controlled. In 1979 she took a consulting job at Paramount at Warren Beatty's invitation. Nothing came of it, and she was back at the magazine within months.

Renata Adler devoted 8,000 words in The New York Review of Books in August 1980 to Kael's collection When the Lights Go Down, calling it "jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless." Kael never replied. Parkinson's disease and a conviction that she had nothing new to say ended it: she announced her retirement in March 1991, wrote almost nothing more, and died at her house in Great Barrington on September 3, 2001. What survived is the sentence. The Library of America collected her in 2011, and a generation of American critics still writes in a voice she invented for arguing about movies out loud.

Pauline Kael's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Circles and Squares article
  The attack on Andrew Sarris and the auteur theory, in Film Quarterly 1963
• I Lost It at the Movies book
  Her first collection and a surprise bestseller at 150,000 paperbacks 1965
• The Frightening Power of Bonnie and Clyde article
  Refused by The New Republic, run by The New Yorker, and effectively her audition 1967
• Raising Kane article
  Two New Yorker issues, then the introduction to The Citizen Kane Book. Its central claim did not hold up. 1971
• Deeper into Movies book
  Won the National Book Award in Arts and Letters the following year 1973
• 5001 Nights at the Movies book
  Capsule reviews — the form she started writing for a Berkeley cinema programme 1982

• 1927 aged ~8 Her parents lose the Petaluma chicken farm She was eight. The family moved to San Francisco.
• 1940 aged ~21 Drops out of Berkeley without a degree She had read philosophy, literature and art there since 1936, and had meant to go to law school.
• 1953 aged ~34 Publishes her first review, a pan of Chaplin's Limelight City Lights editor Peter D. Martin had overheard her arguing about films in a Berkeley coffeehouse the year before. She retitled the picture Slimelight.
• 1955 aged ~36 Takes over the Berkeley Cinema Guild and Studio She married its owner, programmed both screens, and wrote the capsule notes patrons collected.
• 1965 aged ~46 I Lost It at the Movies sells 150,000 paperback copies She was 45, and it was her first book.
• October 21, 1967 aged 48 Her Bonnie and Clyde essay runs in The New Yorker The New Republic had declined it. William Shawn took the piece, and then took her.
• February 20, 1971 aged 51 Raising Kane begins in The New Yorker It ran across two issues and drew rebuttals for a decade.
• August 14, 1980 aged 61 Renata Adler calls her work worthless in The New York Review of Books Eight thousand words on When the Lights Go Down. Kael did not answer it.
• March 11, 1991 aged 71 Announces her retirement from regular reviewing Parkinson's disease, and the sense that she had nothing new to say.

• Orson Welles 1915–1985
  Director, actor, and broadcaster whose innovations in film, radio, and theater reshaped American visual and dramatic storytelling. challenged
• Martin Scorsese b. 1942
  Director and preservation advocate whose films and institutions have shaped both American cinema and understanding of its history. championed
• Roger Ebert 1942–2013
  The first film critic to win a Pulitzer, half of the most famous thumbs in America, and a writer who kept working after cancer took his voice. influenced