What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael

(projector whirring) (soft orchestral music) (Pauline) The first time I saw a movie on my parents' lap in a little theater in Petaluma, California, I knew that was for me.

(child) How did you become a film critic?

(Pauline) I was lucky, I was able to write about movies in a way that people were willing to pay me for.

(child) What was the first story you ever wrote about movies?

(Pauline) It was a review of Charlie Chaplin's film Limelight.

It was a con, someone else wrote a review that was pro.

(child) How many books did you write?

(Pauline) Thirteen.

(child) What was your favorite story or book when you were little?

(Pauline) I loved the Oz books.

I loved all the characters, because they didn't have any message for us, they just were there for our pleasure.

(child) What big thing are you most proudest of?

(Pauline) That I survived!

The process is simply thinking, really.

I mean, writing is simply putting down what you think and to be paid for thinking and to know that you're doing something that may even have some value that some other people might enjoy that process and share it with you.

I mean, that's--that's a marvelous way to live.

I mean, I can't think of any better way to live.

(dramatic music) (woman) No!

People don't tend to like a good critic.

They tend to hate your guts.

-Was it something I said?

-If they like you, I think you should start getting worried.

(reporter) It's hard to talk seriously about movies without mentioning Pauline Kael.

Since 1968, Pauline Kael has written film criticism for The New Yorker.

(man) She is one of the first movie critics to achieve real influence throughout the movie world.

"Reading her," one reviewer said, "is better than going to the movies."

(man) TimeOut calls her "ludicrous."

(man) Miss Kael, why did you say, "I had just about given up hope that it was really possible to be a movie critic?"

(Pauline) There had been so much pressure from the movie companies that I wasn't allowed into screenings.

I'd pretty much been forced out of every job either by editors to cooperate with advertisers.

-You're fired.

-Reader pressure.

And I really had thought, "Well, maybe there's just no way to do it!"

(man) Something you want you ain't got, maybe?

(woman) Yeah.

(man) She was a woman coming into this boys' club and shooting from the hip.

(woman) She was writing when a film critic could create such waves.

(woman) She shaped that American New Wave as much as any filmmaker.

(man) And if she could make people mad, great.

She would say, "Tough ..." (Han Solo) Either I'm gonna kill her or I'm beginning to like her!

(man) Pauline Kael had a voice, and I understood her voice, and I related to her voice, even when I disagreed with her.

(Quentin Tarantino) We grew up reading Pauline Kael.

(Alec Baldwin) You know no critic has that kind of importance and relevance that Kael had.

(man) Pauline fell in love with movies and moments in movies and faces in movies and the way an actress might turn her head for just a second, and that's what it was all for.

(soft music) (man) Pauline was the first person that I was aware of that was making sense and celebrating these new movies that were coming out by these unknown directors.

(woman) Pauline made Scorsese with her review of Mean Streets.

She made Spielberg with her review of Sugarland Express.

(John) She brought a real exhilaration to the movies, and you bought The New Yorker every week to see what she had to say!

She turned the movie review, which is this kind of flimsy vehicle, it's a thumbs up or thumbs down endeavor, into this expressive art form.

I mean, it was as expressive as the short story or the sonnet.

(cheering and applause) (man) Pauline would write about something and you would not only love reading it, but then you would wanna see what she wrote about so you could argue with her or you could relive it with her, you could see it through her eyes.

(man) It would be hard to be as engaged with the world as Pauline was in terms of her energy, in terms of her intellectual curiosity, in terms of her capacity for outrage and love.

(orchestral music) (narrator) The modern West I grew up in, the ludicrous real West, the incongruities of Cadillacs and cattle, crickets and transistor radios, jukeboxes, Dr. Pepper signs, paperback books, all emphasizing the standardization of culture in the loneliness of vast spaces.

Our Sonoma County ranch was very much like this one with my father and older brothers charging over dirt roads and the Saturday nights in a dead little town.

This was the small-town West I and so many of my friends came out of, escaping from the swaggering small-town hotshots like Hud.

She remembered seeing silent films.

She could tell you what it was like to go to a cinema in the '20s, in the '30s and '40s, and see these movies.

(woman) Well, my mother had a great love of '30s movies, particularly, the tough dames.

I think she liked to emulate that a little bit, suggest that she had that in herself.

-I won't marry you.

-Is that a promise?

(narrator) In the '30s, the girls we in the audience loved were delivering wisecracks.

(man) I sort of like him.

-He's got a lot of charm.

-Well, he comes by it naturally.

His grandfather was a snake.

(narrator) They were funny and lovely because they were funny.

A whole group of them with wonderful frogs in their throats.

This is the fourth show in two months that I've been in of and out of.

They close before they open.

(narrator) The comic spirit of the '30s had been happily self-critical about America.

The happiness born of the knowledge that in no other country were movies so free to be self-critical.

It was the comedy of a country that didn't yet hate itself.

(woman) C'mon, let's get up and look for work.

I hate starving in bed.

There's a certain kind of colloquial voice that Pauline Kael had.

Back to Dorothy Parker, okay, there's kind of a snappish sound.

Ann Landers is an example of it, okay.

You know, "Wake up and smell the coffee."

Say, wise guy, stop trying to prove the hand's quicker than the eye.

(woman) She just had this great slangy, husky, breathy, Ann Sheridan voice.

Haven't you heard about throwing good money after bad?

(narrator) There was an unusual sequence in Christopher Strong, an arch, high-strung, sickeningly noble Katharine Hepburn movie back in 1933, but one of the rare movies told from a woman's sexual point of view.

Hepburn played a famous, record-breaking aviatrix who fell in love with a married man, but as soon as they went to bed together, he insisted that she not fly in the match she was entered in.

(Christopher) Give up this altitude flight.

For me.

(woman) All right, darling.

I'll give it up.

(narrator) It was clear that the man wasn't a bastard.

Nevertheless, the heroine's acquiescence destroyed her.

(woman) Only I'd rather die than hurt you.

(narrator) It is the intelligent woman's primal post-coital scene.

Probably it got there because the movie was written by a woman, Zo Akins, and directed by a woman, Dorothy Arzner.

I think I was the only girl on the labor board at Berkeley.

We were trying to get the minimum wage on the campus raised to 40 cents an hour.

(man) You women make me sick!

C'mon, c'mon, how much?

(slapping) (narrator) On dates, my enthusiasm would often be condescended to by the fella.

He would think it was his mission to straighten me out, and, you know, if you hold forth about why something's great with a guy who just wants you to calm down, it's a flattening experience.

You learn to shut up or you find another guy, or you don't.

-Just a minute, you can't-- -Shut up.

(man) Are you so drunk with your own importance you think you can make your own rules?

Well, you're a fake.

(Pauline) I think it's very difficult, for a woman particularly, to go out with a man that she disagrees with sharply in matters of taste.

Because it really does offend all his macho sense.

And particularly, say, 20 or 30 years ago, if he was buying the tickets, and if he was paying the date, even if he liked you to be bright and sharp and funny, he didn't like any basic disagreements.

Now, I broke up over West Side Story.

Because tonight is the real beginning of my life as a young lady of America.

(man) I don't think she was that wild about being a student.

They may have been formative years, but I think the forming was done on her own.

(narrator) When I got interested in an author, I always read everything of his I could get a hold of and everything about him I could find before I went on to something else.

I could live without movies much more easily than I could live without books, which would almost seem like a form of death.

(bright music) (man) Pauline didn't set out to be a critic.

Pauline set out to be an artist.

She wrote some plays.

I've read some of them, they're not very good.

(Lili) And it's wild to read them, because they're very stilted.

They are inert.

They're derivative, and they have none of that swing of her movie writing.

(narrator) I can't do it, I've tried, and I simply can't.

Does seem so absurd that I'd been so snooty about books for a very long time, and here I can't do this.

Tell me that I can play this game through, that I can be smart enough and attractive enough and good enough.

Besides the whole sex business, there's the past and there is New York luxury and money and dancers and sororities, and there's me and what I am.

No artist, no beauty, no nothing, no obscenity, absolutely.

(Craig) She worked as a nanny on Park Avenue, and she wrote 20 or 30 pages about that experience.

It was not a pleasant experience.

She was a poor girl working for rich people.

She had had to work as a maid or something, and as a seamstress.

(man) She worked writing copy, advertising copy.

(narrator) The day they were putting up the partition and putting my name on the door, I went in and quit in tears because I suddenly saw myself behind that partition for years, and I didn't want that.

I wanted to write.

The main thing is fighting off the successes that trap you.

(speaking in Italian) (narrator) When Shoeshine opened in 1947, I went to see it alone after one of those terrible lover's quarrels.

I came out of the theater and walked up the street no longer certain whether my tears were for the tragedy on the screen or the hopelessness I felt for myself.

My identification with those two lost boys had become so strong.

Later, I learned that the man with whom I had quarreled had gone the same night and had also emerged in tears.

Yet our tears for each other did not bring us together.

(soft music) (man) It was a very big deal in 1948 to be a single mother.

(narrator) Having a child made a difference because it made me want to make something of myself for my child's sake.

(Gina) I always felt that my mother had a great love for my father.

He was an absence in my life.

I'm not sure how she really explained that he wasn't there.

(lively violin music) (man) After going to see Limelight, she went to a cafe with the people she had gone with and they were arguing about it, and she was very forceful about how she didn't like it.

One of the people who was editing the City Lights Bookstore's journal came over to her and said, "Well, why don't you write this for us," and she did, and that was her first review.

(man) It's no use.

I'm finished.

Through.

(woman) You're too great an artist.

Now is the time to show them what you're made of!

Now is the time to fight!

(narrator) A storyline of the most self-pitying and self-glorifying daydream variety.

Calvero's gala benefit in which he shows the unbelievers, who think him finished, that he is still the greatest performer of them all, his death in the wings as the applause fades.

This is surely the richest hunk of satisfaction since Huck and Tom attended their own funeral.

(TV host) Chaplin doesn't get to you even in the-- (Pauline) I hate it when he gets to me.

I despised him when I was a child in things like City Lights.

I don't like to have tears pulled out of me.

I mean, that to me is atrocious, maudlin, comedy.

I like it when he's being a rather nasty, bawdy, drunken bum, then he's wonderful.

(Craig) She sort of fell into movie criticism almost by accident, and something just clicked.

What she couldn't achieve in art she was able to achieve in movie reviews.

(narrator) When I started writing for magazines in the '50s, I was dissatisfied with the academic tone of my first pieces.

I was trying for the freedom of an American talking about movies.

I worked to loosen my style, to get away from the term paper pomposity that we learn at college.

I wanted sentences to breathe, to have the sound of a human voice.

(Pauline) I may be a terrible blasphemer, but I writhed with discomfort during Hiroshima Mon Amour, and made numerous wisecracks.

(mellow music) The picture opened badly for me.

There were those intertwined nude bodies, and what was that stuff they were covered with?

Beach sand, gold dust, ashes?

Finally, I accepted it as symbolic bomb ash, but I wasn't happy with it.

Then the French girl said she had seen everything in Hiroshima, and the Japanese man told her she had seen nothing in Hiroshima.

Then they said the same things over again and again, and perhaps again, and I lost patience.

I have never understood why writers assume that repetition creates a lyric mood or underlines meaning with profundity.

My reaction is simply, "Okay, I got it the first time, let's get on with it."

My principle objection to this oddly confused film is that it aims to make you feel that if you love Hiroshima Mon Amour, you are somehow acting for peace, or to put it more crudely, but in its own terms, if you buy Hiroshima Mon Amour, you're buying peace.

As for the qualities of the film, that have been described as Proustian and its supposed destruction of time, I can only say that it certainly destroyed my sense of time.

I thought its 88 minutes were forever.

(dramatic music) We all know the obvious reason why the pictures have been so big.

Why they've been spectacles, and why they've been on cinemascope screens, because competition with television makes this necessary.

The big picture is almost necessarily the bad picture.

(Lili) Movies are the impure art.

I think she called them "the great bastard cross-fertilized super art."

She was writing those reviews that she was then speaking on the radio.

You know, performing her reviews.

And I think it freed something up in her.

She was able to cut loose and let it rip.

(narrator) It was hell in some ways, because I didn't have any money and they didn't pay at all.

They didn't even pay my way into movies.

(Brian) One of the people who hears her is a man named Edward Landberg, and she winds up being married to Edward Landberg.

I don't think it was really much of a romance ever.

They were really drawn together by their common interest in film.

(Lili) And my impression was that it was kind of a short-lived marriage and basically convenience.

I think he described it as a business arrangement.

(Gina) I think Ed Landberg was not treated with very much respect by people.

(soft orchestral music) (Pauline) I went around the house mumbling, "What am I going to talk about on the radio?"

The movies are all dull in different ways, there's nothing to link them together.

I've got to get an idea.

The only really good evening I had in the theater was at a play, The Dance of Death Part I, presented by the Actor's Workshop.

And there my enjoyment was almost wrecked by an audience so solemnly serious and uncomprehending that they turned disapproving looks every time I laughed.

I began to feel as if I were the only person in the audience who had ever been married.

(woman) Don't you see how everybody shuns us?

(man) Oh, what do I care?

-There's the answer.

-Oh!

(man) Oh, be quiet!

(Pauline) Is it possible that it's this kind of perception and expression that people still can't assimilate?

The comedy that grows out of carrying people's most deeply felt conflicts too far.

Is it that critics and audiences don't really understand what this kind of work is about or that they want to pretend that they don't?

(mixed chatter) (screaming) (mixed shouting) (woman) Apart from The Los Angeles Times, there was no film critic world in California.

(man) I think being from the West, it made her just more independent.

She didn't believe in just deference to authority.

Pauline was, obviously, a West Coast girl.

And she saw herself as that and that was one of the tools she used to maintain her feistiness and not part of their club.

(Pauline) Many people react to movies in terms of what they have read about it.

For example, if Bosley Crowther says that The Moment of Truth is a movie for bullfight aficionados, they go see it and they think it's a bullfight movie.

People don't see that it's an attack on Spain and an attack on bullfighting.

(soft music) (laughing) (Greil) Pauline is quarreling, fighting with, condemning, attacking.

And she loved to set up New York critics as straw men and then knock them down.

(Pauline) The world is really divided, I guess, between the people who get deep pleasure from doing a good job and the ones who are just trying to get through the day.

And there are a great many critics who are just trying to get through the day, who know they're second-rate and who are scared of their editors, and scared of their readers, and scared of the movie companies, and with some justification, but are never good enough to conquer their fears.

And so the point would be, really, to try to strengthen your own writing style and develop more courage, because then you're in a better position.

(orchestral music) (Andrew) The second premise of the Auteur Theory is the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value.

A director must exhibit certain recurrent characteristics of style which serve as his signature.

The way a film looks and feels should have some relationship to the way a director thinks and feels.

She had attacked him in that Circles and Squares article in a very personal and sort of almost slanderous way.

(narrator) The smell of a skunk is more distinguishable than the perfume of a rose.

Does that make it better?

Hitchcock's personality is certainly more distinguishable.

If for no other reason than because Hitchcock repeats his subject matter.

Often the works in which we are most aware of the personality of the director are his worst films.

When he falls back on the devices he has already done to death.

Jesus, help me.

-Help me!

-I thought she wrote a very unfair piece, but I enjoyed reading it because it was so beautifully written.

Pauline didn't believe in categories and she didn't believe in absolutes.

She was very much against a kind of snobbish arthouse cinema attitude towards film.

Up till then, criticism had been a rather stuffy affair.

And she embraced popular cinema.

Only bad critics impose an academic formula, and one does not need to rationalize one's instincts.

One's instincts are the sum total of one's mind and responses.

What Pauline called "the gentleman critics," which is a sort of distancing oneself and being amused by movies.

It's the opposite of the way that Pauline wrote.

She wrote as someone who, in order to see a movie, had to go to a movie theater, and pay to buy a ticket, and go in and find a seat and sit down.

When she writes about a movie, she also writes about the audience around her.

She writes as part of an audience, and she's listening to the catcalls and the wisecracks, the sound of boredom, or the sound of excitement and engagement.

And all that goes into her writing.

(applause) (upbeat music) (man) I think a lot of people who are funny, it's not that they sit down and go, "Now I'm gonna figure out how to be funny."

They just know how to say it and it's funny.

And I think that that was true of her.

(giggling) Just a masterpiece of satire is the "Come-Dressed-as-the- Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties."

What Kael was attacking were the films I adored.

All these foreign films with the people migrating from one bad party to another.

Pauline Kael, in her attack on those films, captures exactly what it was I loved about the films.

(narrator) La Dolce Vita, La Notte, and Last Year at Marienbad are all about people who are bored, successful, and rich.

Nothing seems more self-indulgent and shallow than the dissatisfaction of the innervated rich.

Nothing is easier to attack or expose.

La Notte is supposed to be a study in the failure of communication.

(narrator) But what new perceptions of this problem do we get by watching people on the screen who can't communicate if we are never given any insight into what they would have to say if they could talk to each other?

And there is the repeated view of Jeanne Moreau walking away from the camera.

What are we to make of this camera fixation on her rear?

Obviously, we're supposed to be interested in her thoughts and feelings while we look at her from the back.

Is the delicate movement of the derrire supposed to reveal her angst or merely her ennui?

(Greil) I was reading Pauline long before I knew who she was or cared.

I was reading her program notes to the Cinema Guild where my wife and I would go two, three times a week to see every conceivable classic film in these little rickety theaters that she had on Telegraph Avenue.

So you felt, if you weren't seeing whatever was playing that night, and there were always two or three or four movies playing, you were missing something.

(Craig) Her program notes start to be pinned to the refrigerators of people all over the Bay Area.

(Gina) She kind of threw herself into it in an all-consuming, very passionate, devoted way.

She made sure the films were picked up, she did all the communication with the distributors, and then she wrote about the films.

The theater phone rang in our house.

It was usually my mother, but often I had to do it, too.

I'd have to give the showtimes.

And of course, because people realized it was a person who really knows something, then people would start asking her about the movies, too.

Many of the people that she employed in the theater she became friends with.

(man) She had a young man.

My fantasy was that she liked me, because she wanted me to go to bed with her, but that was my own fantasy.

But she really liked young people.

(man) Joyride, neon blinking traffic light.

(woman) Berkeley was a hotbed of intellectual activity and creative activity.

(jazzy music) This was not the drug age, this was the cigarette and glass of wine age where people gathered and talked and discussed politics and poetry and art, et cetera.

Apparently, this was like an open-door policy, everybody was here.

(man) The living room was set up and she had black-out curtains on all the windows so she could show movies constantly -in the living room.

-She always had a cigarette in her mouth, and her eyes were always just gleaming.

(Steven) And it's bobbing up and down, and the ashes are falling all over, and the smoke is getting in her eyes, and she's weeping, and she's talking a mile a minute.

(Chester) The living room wasn't that large, but she invited a lot of people, and she knew a lot of people knew her, and so she had a record player and we danced to music for hours.

(Ortrun) When Pauline got here, the walls were probably-- had already started to crumble.

This was a good project for Jess to take on.

He had already done five other homes in the area, but this one happened to be the only one that's still intact.

She loved Jean Renoir.

On the ceiling as you come up the stairs is a wonderful painting of an image that looks like a sand painting.

A Jean Renoir movie, The River.

The other one taken from the film The Golden Coach, starring Anna Magnani, is in the back bedroom.

Beautiful carnivale patterns.

(Gina) My mother had a deep love and responsiveness to art, to music, to theater.

When I was growing up, she had a lot of jazz and blues.

She liked gospel music and listening to Mahalia Jackson, and the countertenor Russell Oberlin singing Handel.

She was a great lover of many kinds and forms of beauty.

(soft music) (Ortrum) Sometimes the kids working at the theater came to help babysit Gina.

I understand that life was pretty tough for Gina here with all these adults running around.

(Gina) For me, in terms of growing up with a critic, making judgments, being judgmental, she couldn't not be critical.

She was always criticizing.

(Pauline) Today, or most Valentine's Day, seems a good time for something I've never done, a full half hour of listeners' letters.

Here is a letter from a manly man.

"Dear Miss Kael, Since you know so much about the art of the film, why don't you spend your time making it?

But first you will need a pair of b-- blank, blank, blank, blank."

End quote.

Mister Dodo, you don't have to lay an egg to know if it tastes good.

(man) Some men you just can't reach.

(TV host) Why, at this point, are you still having to defend being a female?

(Pauline) In the arts, women are accepted, they've always been accepted in the theater.

But criticism, since it involves analytic intelligence and the rational use of one's intellect, that hits exactly where men have always wanted to believe that women were less gifted.

It's one thing to show sensitivity and talent.

I mean, men like that in women.

But it is very, very difficult for men to accept the idea that women can argue reasonably.

Lawrence of Arabia is the most literate and intelligent and tasteful, and the most beautiful of the modern expensive spectacle films, and I wish it had never been made.

I want my T.E.

Lawrence back.

The Lawrence I first got interested in from R.P.

Blackmur's essay in The Expense of Greatness, and whom I then followed through his writing, especially his extraordinary letters.

I came to know Lawrence from his books.

So, I assume, have the filmmakers.

But their image of him is so different from mine, and now I'm not sure I can keep mine.

Already I feel I must restore it by rereading the books, trying to dislodge their images.

These are men of immense talent.

Why couldn't they just have written a story about the desert and filmed it?

Why must they muck up the past, oversimplify history, and use their post-Freudian insights to turn a great leader of men, and a great writer into a narcissist and sadist with a Christ complex?

To the listeners, I say goodbye as a guest of this station.

If they pay me, I'll be back.

If not, not.

After a million words for love, I think I should turn professional.

This is my last free broadcast.

I no longer care to have a cup of coffee with the management.

If they want me back on the air, they can pay me.

(Gina) The last few years that we were in California, my mother, I believe, was very, very frustrated.

She really did not have places to publish.

We were very, very short on money.

And she really, I think, she needed to make a change.

(bright music) (woman) I said to Mark Chaffey, who was a colleague, I said, "There is a book coming out called, I Lost It at the Movies.

It would make a terrific paperback book."

And Mark went out to Berkeley and met her, and we bought the book.

And so Pauline came to New York, and we became great friends.

(narrator) In 1965, it took a lot of writing to pay the rent.

That year I was on a plane going to give a lecture, and a husband and wife were sitting across the aisle from me.

She was reading me in Mademoiselle and he was reading me in Holiday, and then they swapped magazines.

It was very cheering.

(Brian) Gradually, Pauline began to be noticed.

She was offered a job at McCall's, a very, very widely-read mainstream women's magazine.

But the editors decided that she was out of step with their readership.

She was just not in sync with mainstream taste.

(narrator) Wasn't there, perhaps, one von Trapp who didn't want to sing his head off?

Or who screamed that he wouldn't act out little glockenspiel routines?

It's the sugar-coated lie that people seem to want to eat, and the phenomenon at the center: Julie Andrews.

Sexless, inhumanly happy.

The sparkling maid, a mind as clean and well brushed as her teeth.

The success of a movie like The Sound of Music makes it more difficult for anyone to try to do anything worth doing.

Nothing could be safer, nothing could be surer.

Whom could it offend?

Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated -in this way.

-Whee!

(triumphant music) I got dropped.

Suddenly there was an ad for McCall's listed in the New York Times, and they had a list of their writers for the next issue, and I wasn't listed, and that was how I knew I was finished.

(typing) (James) Then, she got another job with The New Republic, but she got very angry with them because they were rewriting her copy.

She would do pieces, and then she'd see sentences she hadn't written, word substitutions made without consulting her.

She really had the--had the ... kicked out of her.

(narrator) I quit the magazine in some despair and had no idea what to do.

I had come to the conclusion that it was just about impossible to make a living as a movie critic.

While American enthusiasm for movies has never been so high, American movies have never been so contemptible.

-How do you like that?

-Oh!

(narrator) In other parts of the world, there's been a new golden age.

Great talents have fought their way through in Japan, India, Sweden, Italy, France.

Even in England there's been something that passes for a renaissance, but not here.

American enthusiasm is fed largely by foreign films, memories, and innocence.

If you want to stay with your husband, then I-- I think you should decide to do without sex.

(upbeat music) (narrator) Godard is the F. Scott Fitzgerald of the movie world, and movies are to the '60s a synthesis of what the arts were for the post-World War I generation.

Rebellion, romance, a new style of life.

Godard holds his cards face up to the audience.

(mellow music) The most gifted younger directors and student filmmakers all over the world recognize his liberation of the movies.

They know that he has opened up a new kind of moviemaking, that he has brought a new sensibility into film, that, like Joyce, he is both kinds of master, both innovator and artist.

There is a disturbing quality in Godard's work.

His characters don't seem to have any future.

They are most alive just because they don't conceive of the day after tomorrow.

(clicking) (Tarantino) The one review Pauline Kael wrote that, um, ended up meaning something to me in a big way was for A Band of Outsiders.

She said it was as if a bunch of movie-mad young French boys had taken a banal American crime novel and translated the poetry that they had read between the line.

(gunshot firing) It was like, "That is my aesthetic right there.

That is--that's what I hope I can do."

(Pauline) All those kids who used to go into the other arts, the brightest kids in America, the ones who used to become the architect, and the writers and the poets, they're now going into movies, and I think they're going to bring new, more complex kinds of sensibility into movies.

Look, watch.

I've seen an awful lot of movies in my life, and I love the excitement of something new.

(contemplative music) (clicking) (Robert) She created a tremendous amount of attention both to herself and to Bonnie and Clyde with her review, which changed the face of reviewing.

The first reviews for the movie were so bad everywhere that you just thought, "Well, that's it for this movie."

(man) It's smothered in the cradle as soon as it comes out.

(Lili) Bosley Crowther just dumps on it, you know, totally pans it in the New York Times, and, um, I think the movie would've just disappeared.

And then, Pauline reviewed it in such a spectacular way that it caused a counter reaction.

(Lili) Newman had started the American New Wave.

I mean, I think it was his movie, it was Bonnie and Clyde, but it was also her review, which was a sensation and phenomenon on its own.

(Greil) Even if you've seen the movie, it's like you haven't seen the movie.

You're seeing it for the first time as you're reading the review.

(mysterious music) Ain't you ashamed?

Trying to steal an old lady's automobile?

(narrator) During the first part of the movie, a woman in my row was gleefully assuring her companions, "It's a comedy, it's a comedy."

(ringing) (gunshot firing) After a while, she didn't say anything.

Bonnie and Clyde needs violence.

Violence is meaning.

But, because of the quality of American life at the time, perhaps there can be no real comedy without true horror in it.

This is in the middle of the Vietnam War, where people are becoming inured to death, to carnage, to blood.

(Bonnie) Hey, isn't that Malcolm there?

(Greil) I will never forget the last line of that piece.

By making us care about, uh, the--these outlaw lovers, this movie has put the sting back into death.

Wham.

(screaming) (gunshots firing) The movie ends in complete silence, and the theater is left in complete silence.

(rustling) Everything you've been watching on the news every night from Vietnam has suddenly been made unreal by this movie.

That's the great inversion that happens in art, that happens, and that criticism can help make happen.

(David) Her review was rejected by The New Republic, because it's against the tide.

And then, The New Yorker publishes her review of Bonnie and Clyde, and then she gets hired to be The New Yorker's film critic, and she was the major voice there for a long time.

When she finally was offered the job at The New Yorker, that was heaven to her.

Having some success was really, really good for her.

I think she looked better, she thrived on it.

(Brian) It was a real jolt to a lot of readers of The New Yorker, who were used to this rather gentile, rolling prose.

She didn't want her sentences straightened out.

She didn't want them made more elegant.

You'd get to the current cinema, and it was like a jet taking off.

William Shawn was a very old-school gentleman.

He came from a time when publishing in New York City was really a gentleman's profession.

She had a great deal of respect for him, you know, and I think it was mutual love hatred.

They saw how brilliant the other one was, and at the same time it was like, philosophically, they came from very different points of view.

Shawn was the bane of her existence, and he was also her benefactor.

(George) She would fight tooth and nail not to weaken, or as she once said, "Not to chop the balls off a piece."

(pensive music) (narrator) As Henry Moon, Nicholson keeps working his mouth, with the tongue dangling out and dangling lewdly.

He's like a commercial for cunnilingus.

(William) This has to come out.

We can't, or won't, print it.

(narrator) The cinematographer, Victor Kemper, makes every interior look like a cold latrine.

(William) Here we go again.

After all, the world is full of things other than latrines.

Why, why?

She provoked him on purpose, I'm sure of it, and in fact, she said so.

She'd say, "Oh, Bill is really gonna love this."

(narrator) I remember getting a letter from an eminent New Yorker writer suggesting that I was tramping through the pages of the magazine with cowboy boots covered with dung, and that I should move on out with my cowboy boots.

A lot of mail that came to me in the first years at The New Yorker was, "Why don't you get a job on the sports page and learn how to write?"

(John) She conducted a debate between filmmakers and herself.

We were all under surveillance, and she kept us on our toes.

(Paul) We're not talking about film criticism here, we're talking about Pauline Kael, and in the end of the game, what Pauline Kael promoted wasn't film, it was--it was her.

I think all art and cinema are subjective, and I think she was a master of contradiction, and the films that she spoke about were filled with contradiction, and often her tastes were full of contradiction.

I think some people make a mistake of wanting to-- to drop on everything if it's saying not as great as Eisenstein, when the important thing is to see how-- how movies are used by people, and what needs they satisfy.

Some of the greatest pleasures I've had have been from pretty terrible pictures.

(gunshot firing) You must see it with your own eyes to believe it.

(heavy breathing) (narrator) I don't trust anyone who doesn't admit to having, at some time in his life, enjoyed trashy American movies.

Seeing trash can liberate the spectator.

We might as well relax and enjoy it freely -for what it is.

-Stupid, stupid!

Just what is it that you want to do?

(man) Well, we wanna be free!

(whirring) -And we wanna get loaded!

-Yeah!

(Tom) Trash, Art, and the Movies was highly influential to me.

I knew the difference between what was art and what was trash, but her distinction between what is good trash and bad trash, populist movies that are done really well, but do not aspire necessarily to be art, are still to be cherished and tried for.

It's what the business of the studio is, and you don't have to do it by pandering to the lowest common denominator.

You can do it well without necessarily making art.

I've got information, man.

New ... has come to light.

(groaning) (whirring) (narrator) The movie doesn't have to be great.

It can be stupid and empty, and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line.

-Say it, say it!

-It's a man!

(groaning) You ain't gonna do ... .

Do you have to use so many cuss words?

(narrator) A dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock innocent face.

I see you shiver with antici-- ...pation.

(narrator) And the world makes a little bit of sense.

The world doesn't work the way the schoolbooks said it did, and we are different from what our parents and teachers expected us to be.

Movies are our cheap and easy expression.

The sullen art of displaced persons.

Because we feel low, we sink in the boredom, relax in the irresponsibility, and maybe grin for a minute when the gunman lines up three men and kills them with a single bullet, which is no more real to us than the nursery school story of The Brave Little Tailor.

(interviewer) Does anybody ever call you or write to you and say, "Thank you, I learned from you.

-I'm an actor," or-- -They also say -a lot of other things.

-No, I assume that, but does anybody ever say, "I learned from you, -Pauline Kael"?

-Yes.

Uh, I also get a considerable amount -of hate mail.

-Have you ever gotten -a death threat?

-Yes.

People have described exactly how they're going to cut me up, and what they're gonna do with each part of me.

There are times when people will tell me something that she said to them, and I think, "That's impossible."

And then, I realize they couldn't have made it up, because it is just shocking.

Pauline could be very combative and very provocative, and she could be cruel for no reason.

There's a kind of, um-- I'm not quite sure what they call themselves, but it's a-- it's a critics circle.

(John) New York Critics Circle invited David Lean to come for lunch.

(David) They're very good with their tongues, and I was there for about two hours.

(contemplative music) And, uh, Pauline Kael has got-- is pretty sharp tongued.

And she just let into him, "Why did you make this movie?"

The poor guy thought he had come for a sort of social meeting, and it was--it was anything but.

She got up and trashed his films, and he was shattered by it.

And in the end I remember saying, "I don't think you ladies and gentlemen will be satisfied until I do a film in 16 millimeter in black and-- in black and white."

And Pauline Kael said, "No, you can have color."

And that was the end of it.

She took him apart.

It really quite had an awful effect on me, and I thought, "Well, why am I making films?

I don't have to."

And, um, I didn't for a bit.

It, uh, shake's one's confidence, you know, terribly.

(narrator) It's a bad, bad sign when a movie director begins to think of himself as a myth maker.

(man) It has been said of Pauline that she had the greatest ... detector of anyone around.

She pointed out this huge fraudulent aspect to the story that you had just glided right by, and, like, the thing that made you mad is she just kinda destroyed the movie for you because she pointed out something that was obviously there.

(growling) (David) As soon as you thought, "Ah, I know she's gonna like this movie," she would just pull the rug out from under you.

(narrator) And this limp myth of a grand plan that justifies slaughter and ends with resurrection has been around before.

(ambient music) Kubrick's storyline accounting for evolution by an extraterrestrial intelligence is probably the most gloriously redundant plot of all time, and although his intentions may have been different, 2001 celebrates the end of man.

(beeping) (David) I agreed with her position on 2001.

You know, it's all subjective.

That's the best opinion you can have about a movie is that it's subjective.

(Hal 9000) My mind is going.

(Camille) A critic should stimulate you to develop your own opinion.

You--you're not there to be converted to the--to the critic's viewpoint.

(narrator) 2001 is a celebration of a cop-out.

It says man is just a tiny nothing on the stairway of paradise.

There is an intelligence out there in space controlling your destiny from ape to angel, so just follow the slab.

(Greil) For Pauline, everything was a conversation.

She always wanted to know, first off, "What did you think?

Have you seen, did you hear, did you read?"

Pauline had a reaction to everything, and she expected other people to have a reaction to everything, because it might make her think of something she hadn't thought of.

It might give her an idea.

It might outrage her, because it was so obviously wrong-headed.

It might lead her somewhere else.

Even the angry mail, uh, is interesting, because you know you're touching a nerve in some way.

For example, on the film Mean Streets, which I love, which did not do terribly well, but the--but the critical response to it helped Martin Scorsese get going in his career.

That film, which I felt was innovative and was doing something, and wrote about with great enthusiasm, a number of people were very hostile to, and that response tells you something.

It tells you that there's something interesting in that movie.

(laughing maniacally) (narrator) It's about American life here and now, and it doesn't look like an American movie or feel like one.

(Johnny Boy) Hey, there ain't nothing wrong with me, my friend.

-I'm feeling fine.

-Keep your mouth shut.

(Johnny Boy) You tell me that in front of this ... .

(man) All right, all right, we're not gonna pay.

(narrator) Johnny Boy flouts all the rules.

He just won't behave.

I don't have the guts?

Come on, ..., come over here, come over here.

I'll put this up your .... (narrator) He's fearless, gleefully self-destructive, cracked, moonstruck, but not really crazy.

When you're growing up, if you know someone crazy, daring, and half-admirable, and maybe most of us do, you don't wonder how the beautiful nut got that way.

(Johnny Boy) You dirty two-faced ...!

-Don't ever hit me again!

-He seems to spring up full-blown and whirling, and you watch the fireworks and feel crumbly cautious in your sanity.

(blasting) (controller) Hello, Houston, the Endeavor is on station with cargo.

(upbeat piano music) (man) As the '70s evolved, this incredible period of moviemaking took off.

(screaming) (man) It was a tsunami of films that suddenly started coming in, films like we had never seen before.

-His will be done.

-People whom she felt had talent that was not necessarily fully appreciated by other critics, she would champion them.

(man) Ironically, since she had written a piece against auteurism, one of her greatest impacts was in making Samuel Peckinpah, Martin Scorsese, Coppola, Brian De Palma into heroes of cinema for young people.

(Lili) She wasn't some witness of the American New Wave, she wasn't just a chronicler of it.

You know, she was riding the New Wave.

That was her, that was her, too.

(man) She could make people's lives and careers.

(man #2) That's when she became the go-to critic.

(man #3) Opinion is divided, to say the least of it.

-The best respected film critic.

-America's most formidable -and acerbic film critic.

-Her collective movie criticism reads as a history of popular culture.

After three books, Ms. Kael's fourth, Deeper Into Movies, was a winner of the National Book Award.

Soon, she'll publish her fifth collection.

(solemn music) (man) I think she was dazzled by Brian De Palma.

I think she was in love with the-- the sort of sensuousness of his style.

(Jaime) I think with De Palma, all those colors and the blood and everything, it was really a turn-on for her.

(woman) You know, she was the one who discovered him.

(narrator) The visual poetry of The Fury is so strong that its narrative and verbal inadequacies do not matter.

He has such a grip on his technique that you get the sense of a director who cares about little else.

The finale is the greatest finish for any villain ever.

One can imagine Welles, Peckinpah, Scorsese, and Spielberg still stunned, bowing to the ground, choking with laughter.

(screaming) (beeping) (laughing) (blasting) This is nuts.

(blasting) (dramatic music) She drew a lot of readers to The New Yorker.

No, no, Apollonia!

(exploding) (Gina) But, if she had a film that she really cared about, like The Godfather films, then she couldn't wait to write.

Let me say that I swear on the souls of my grandchildren.

(elegant music) (narrator) The role of Don Vito allows Brando to release more of the gentleness that was so seductive and unsettling in his braggart roles.

The rasp in his voice is particularly effective after Don Vito has been wounded.

One almost feels that the bullets cracked it, and wishes it hadn't been cracked before.

His Don is a primitive, sacred monster, and the more powerful because he suggests not the strapping, sacred monsters of movies, but actual ones.

Those old men who carry never-ending grudges and ancient hatreds inside of frail frame, those monsters who remember minute details of old business deals when they can no longer tie their shoelaces.

Don Vito's son Michael, the young king, rots before our eyes, and there is something about actually seeing the generations of a family in counterpoint that is emotionally overpowering.

It's as if the movie satisfied an impossible but basic human desire to see what our parents were like before we were born, and to see what they did that affected what we became.

The whole picture is infused with such a complex sense of the intermingling of good and evil and of the inability to foresee the effect of our love upon our children.

(Carrie) She seemed to notice everything.

Going to movies for Pauline was a very social thing.

(man) She made so many noises, they almost asked her to leave.

She was sighing very audibly.

She's really just sitting there, and got this little pencil and paper, and writing her little notes all the time.

We could feel her rolling her eyes.

(woman) She would kind of sometimes, "A-hem."

The most intimidating part was afterwards, when she asked you what you thought about it.

That was one of the reasons that she tended to get her own screenings.

Didn't like the movies she liked, -you could not be her friend.

-She had fantastic recall.

She could remember scenes going 50, 60 years.

They would just anchor themselves in her mind.

I remember when I showed her the recut of A Touch of Evil, she knew exactly where it had been altered, and she hadn't seen the movie in 30 years.

(George) Her daughter Gina would type what she had written up, then Pauline would go through it again, and make penciled corrections, then Gina would retype.

My mother always wrote in longhand her whole life.

She never learned to type, and she was having such trouble rounding up typists.

I decided I would just learn to type because I was there and it seemed like something that needed doing.

I didn't realize that then I would end up continuing to do that for many, many years.

I knew the way her mind worked so well.

I could tell if she hadn't quite said what she meant to say.

(George) She wouldn't rewrite, she would press for clarity.

(Lili) The Current Cinema column was not Pauline's alone, not initially--she shared it with Penelope Gilliatt.

Six months on, six months off.

The New Yorker was not paying her a living wage, so she had to supplement her income.

Lectures, speaking engagements, and other essays, including "Raising Kane," which I think was her finest piece of writing.

(David) She loved the film, and I-- I don't think she intended to rile people the way that people were riled.

(announcer) "Raising Kane," a two-part article about Orson Welles and the writing and filming of Citizen Kane by Pauline Kael, appearing now in The New Yorker.

Yes, The New Yorker.

(contemplative music) (Peter) I thought it was a very, very cruel, uh, mean-spirited, and essentially destructive job.

I think the thing was a perfectly, uh-- a perfectly clear attempt to assassinate Orson.

(Kane) You can't do this to me.

(Pauline) The piece I wrote, "Raising Kane," was the introduction to the publication of the script, and so naturally I wanted to know who had written the script, and going back over it, it became clear that Mankiewicz was the important force in the writing.

(narrator) Mankiewicz's script, in large part, was an adaptation of the material of Hearst's life.

His life was so full of knavery and perversity that Mankiewicz simply sorted out the plums.

Mankiewicz had been a reporter on the Pulitzer Paper, where Hearst himself had worked for a time.

(Tarantino) Almost like short story writing, turning Herman Mankiewicz into this, uh, almost character out of a novel.

(Paul) You know, her argument was against the grain of what everybody was saying.

In critical history, it was a turning point for Welles being discussed again.

I really think I did justice to Welles, who I have enormous respect for as a director and as an actor, and I love the movie and I love his work.

I love his other movies, but here's this great historical figure who had been lost sight of who wrote the script.

(rattling) (shattering) (interviewer) Why have North Americans become so violent in their reactions to Last Tango in Paris?

(Pauline) The film was compared to hardcore pornography, which I don't think was true in any sense.

(Molly) No male critic had as much testosterone as Pauline.

So, this is what I think was sort of always shocking and kind of sexy about her writing, that nobody else could get away with writing that way.

I was in awe of it.

(David) She often used the sexual metaphor in the titles of her books, but I had the feeling like, you know, she could be having sex with the movie, as it were, and enjoying it, and at the same time sort of providing a running commentary on it, like, "Oh, that's good, that is really good."

-Who else is good in the--?

-Pauline Kael.

-Yeah.

-She's never said a good thing -about me yet.

-But, you like her?

(Jerry) That dirty old broad.

(laughing) But, she's probably the most qualified critic in the world, 'cause she cares about film and those that are involved in it.

(creaking) (John) Last Tango was surely gonna be provocative.

It's a movie like Breathless, it is still-- The film is still wet.

It's still fresh out of the camera.

(David) I saw the movie, and obviously it was pretty exciting.

Went to the head of the New York Film Festival, and I said, "I will give you Last Tango in Paris, Bernard's movie, which will probably be X-rated, to open the New York Film Festival on one condition."

He said, "What's that?"

And I said, "Nobody will screen this picture and see it before opening night."

(dramatic music) (narrator) Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris was presented on the closing night of the New York Film Festival, October 14th, 1972.

(David) Pauline had bought a ticket, because they didn't give out tickets to critics.

She bought a ticket and she was in the audience, we had no idea she was there.

Her review became the campaign for the movie.

Double truck, two pages, spread across the Sunday New York Times.

They were lined up from the morning of the first day.

(Jeanne) I don't know, don't open it.

(Camille) I don't understand why she went she went to the mat, you know, for that film, I just--to this day-- That movie was horrible, okay?

I thought it was so artificial, forced, calculated, ugly, unerotic.

(Pauline) I was recently on a big talk show, and the host told me how-- on the air, how appalled he was by my review, and how, you know, it was a very poor movie, and how could I say those things.

And in the commercial break, the producer came over to me and whispered he loved the movie, he's just afraid to say so.

She was influential to other critics, and I think her ideas were picked up by other critics, and of course, you know, the Paulettes, as they were called, the critics who followed her slavishly.

(Paul) She got me into UCLA in the fall of '68, and then she got me the job at the LA Free Press as a critic, because she was collecting a group of young critics at that time.

She wanted to expand her influence, and she got to know editors at all the different papers so that she could-- if Paul Schrader, or Roger Ebert, or somebody was up for a job, she would try to get them in a place where she could then get in touch with-- or, "Hey, we've gotta get behind this movie."

Whenever a particular film came along that she felt we should get behind, she would call and say, you know, "La Chinoise, great film, we gotta get behind it."

Even if you were on the fence, you owed it to her to get behind it, maybe you could disagree once or twice, but if you disagreed all the time, those calls would stop coming.

There was, like, a first generation of Paulettes, and a second, and a third.

My attitude from the beginning was, "Well, I'd rather be called a Paulette than a, you know, Andrew Sarris-ite."

I reject that term violently.

I am not a Paulette, I am a Paulinista, meaning that I have learned from her approach and attempt to apply it in my own work.

Movie opinions at the time, you have to understand, these were the late '60s, early '70s.

They were very important, and there was a huge change in the industry coming, and she was sort of -presiding over it.

-If you did agree on a film, the support was somewhat undercut because it was seen as being, you know, all Pauline and not these individual people, and I thought that was an unfortunate and destructive thing.

(David) I was at The Village Voice, and she invited me to visit her at The New Yorker, and that was very problematic, because at The Village Voice, uh, I was writing alongside Andrew Sarris, who had this longstanding antipathy, and in fact, I had several colleagues phone me and say, "No, you really wanna keep your distance, you know, you don't-- A, she'll eat you alive, and B, you don't wanna be branded as, you know, one of-- one of her circle, getting opinions from her from on high."

And I thought about it, and I thought, "..., it's Pauline Kael.

I'd love to hang out with her."

She's on everybody's radar, because when she would pick somebody like Robert Altman, those people whom she felt had talent that was not necessarily fully appreciated by other critics, she would champion them.

-What'd you come up here for?

-Well, I heard you had the fanciest whorehouse in the whole territory up here.

Gee, it's been so long since I had a piece of ass.

(Pauline) The studios are so short of money that they're throwing pictures into theaters now without enough advance publicity, and one picture that got, you know, thrown in this way about 10 days ago was a film called McCabe and Mrs. Miller, that I think is a beautiful film, and I don't think the good reviews will have time to catch up with it.

(McCabe) You're the best-looking woman I ever saw.

And I never tried to do nothing but put a smile on your face.

(Pauline) You have to feel your way into it, and it takes a while.

But if you go with it, I think the rewards are much richer.

Right now, it may die because of such strange things as an attack by Rona Barrett, and an attack by Rex Reed.

Gossip columnists attacked it for obscenity.

People whose own livelihood is based on prying into other people's affairs are the first to defend American morality.

(Pauline) Nobody's ever made movies like those, with that kind of technique and perception, and with that deep affection for people in them.

(calm music) (narrator) I have never seen a movie I loved in quite this way.

I sat there smiling at the screen in complete happiness.

We float while watching because Altman never lets us see the sweat.

He can put unhappy characters on the screen and you don't wish you didn't have to watch them.

You accept the unhappiness as a piece of the day.

For the viewer, Nashville is a constant discovery of overlapping connections.

The picture says, "This is what America is, and I'm part of it."

(John) You'd make a fine governor in this state.

(narrator) Nashville arrives at a time when America is congratulating itself for having got rid of the bad guys who were pulling the wool over people's eyes.

The movie says that it isn't only the politicians who live the big lie.

The big lie is something we're all capable of trying for.

(Robert) Very few people have had as much influence in my life as Pauline had.

Whether she took a shot at me, or whether she praised me really was incidental.

(people screaming) (gun firing) (screaming) (scary music) (Pauline) Horror films have reached this kind of rut.

I don't enjoy them anymore.

Partly, that's because eight years of living in New York makes you so fearful and nervous anyway that horror films just really scare the hell out of me.

I can't stand them anymore!

(chair scooting) (indistinct screaming) (banging on door) (tense music) I mean, I don't want anything to add to the nightmare atmosphere of New York where you're afraid you're not gonna make it home safe anyway, particularly a middle-aged, dumpy little woman who's just perfect for somebody to somebody to knock over.

-I haven't taken to sneakers-- -Oh, you're so vain!

(laughing) (Gina) In New York, it's this oppressiveness, this kind of claustrophobia, just always feeling surrounded by buildings.

But I think we both had some urges to get out.

She bought her wonderful, huge house in Great Barrington for not very much.

She and Gina spent a long time refurbishing it.

She would come down to New York for a week, and then she would go back to Great Barrington for a week.

(narrator) I'm naturally gregarious as all hell.

Living in the country calms me down.

In the country, I can have a house and spread papers out.

I don't have to clear the work away in order to set the table for dinner.

Everything seems simple when you get outside New York City.

(Regan) Mother!

Mother!

Mother!

(screaming) (narrator) For many years, some of us alarmists have been saying things like, "Suppose people get used to constant visceral excitement.

Will they still respond to the work of artists?

How can people who have been pummeled and deafened be expected to respond to a quiet picture?"

Hits like The Exorcist give most of the audience just what it wants and expects, the way hardcore porn does.

The hits have something in common, blatancy.

They are films that deliver.

(William) I think Pauline Kael, for example, needs an enema.

(audience laughing) (Johnny Carson) I did not read her review, did she, uh-- (William) I mean, her review is, her reviews always are so full of personal poison, attacks upon the makers of films.

What do you say about a woman who, who thinks that Psycho was a playful film?

I mean, this is a serious study for psychiatrists, I think.

(interviewer) Do men in film take your criticism as though it had been aimed at crotch level?

(Pauline) Uh, sometimes they do.

I think Mailer did on my review of his book.

He reacted as if I were some sort of cat waiting to scratch him.

(Norman) You know, Pauline Kael said it was a rip-off with genius, which I considered about as attractive as most of the things that Pauline says.

But I couldn't take true offense 'cause after all, I had once called her Lady Vinegar.

And I also did call her the first frigid of the film critics.

(Dick) That's right, aren't you ashamed of the way you talk?

No, 'cause I knew she was gonna call me a bum, and arrogant, and cold-blooded, and a liar.

(Dick) You couldn't have known that -ahead of time.

How?

-Of course!

Do you have clairvoyance?

Well, I know Pauline.

And I don't go to the publicity shebangs where stars will be, so the people I do meet are the ones who call me after my reviews are out who want to talk.

I mean, actors, directors, writers.

(lighthearted music) (Steven) 1,000 reviews later, you are the only writer who understood Jaws.

(crushing) (Jessica) Perhaps you can understand how anxiously I awaited your review of King Kong.

I will always treasure your kind words.

(Carol) I just want you to know your review was on the nose.

I'm grateful for your support.

(George) Listen, you miserable bitch, you didn't like the sound?

Say so, but cut out that ... about how you know where it was done and where it was made.

(screaming) (Gregory) You may well have cost me good roles during the productive years of my career.

I suppose one day we shall meet.

We may have a civil exchange, or not, I will make that determination.

(Marlene) Dear Mrs. Kael, please help me to receive The New Yorker here in Paris.

I am quite lost without your opinions on films.

(Kevin) Sorry you didn't find Footloose more enjoyable.

I hope you like the next one better.

(Woody) Nobody does a labor of love like you do.

Hope we can get together for lunch.

If a director had completed a film, and he wanted her to see it-- this was after she had stopped working-- he would send it out to Great Barrington to be screened for her.

She was very generous.

She was probably one of the most generous persons I've ever known with young people, people she wanted to encourage.

(Gina) When she read something that she liked, she would immediately pick up the phone and try to track down the author to let them know.

It was a very generous impulse on her part, though it has come to seem, to some people, controlling and masterminding.

But I think she knew how hard it could be to make a living and to get published.

(tires screeching) I got published in Film Comment because she encouraged me to send a piece there.

She had read it and helped me to shape it.

And she called the editor.

I said, "Yes, please, thank Pauline for me."

And sent it in, and he published it.

When it came out, I was surprised.

I went to visit her once, and Pauline had made copies of the essay, and anybody who came through the door, she would give them copies.

She liked to really promote her friends and people whose work she liked.

(Gina) And she made a valiant effort to wade through enormous quantities of material, of letters, of screenplays, of stories, and novels that were sent to her over the years.

And if she said she would do something, she always did it.

(interviewer) Would you go with her to see one of your own movies?

I would, sure, oh, sure!

We've agreed and disagreed on my own movies, as well as other films.

Sure I would!

(narrator) Woody Allen appears before us as the battered adolescent, scarred forever, a little too nice, and much too threatened to allow himself to be aggressive.

He has the city-wise effrontery of a shrimp who began by using language to protect himself, and then discovered that language has a life of its own.

I'm a philosophy major.

(Miles) Are you?

That's a wonderful subject.

-Yeah, yeah.

-That's a wonderful thing.

What is the meaning of life and death, and why are we here, and everything?

You like Chinese food?

(narrator) We felt if we stuck with him, failure could succeed.

All I'm doing when I make a film is try and make a film that I think is funny about subjects that interest me personally.

I think his comic character is enormously appealing to people partly because he's the smart urban guy who, at the same time, is intelligent, is vulnerable.

And somehow, by his intelligence, he triumphs.

(Sandy) What do you want me to say?

I don't wanna make funny movies anymore.

They can't force me to!

(narrator) In Stardust Memories, Woody Allen degrades the people who respond to his work and presents himself as their victim.

These pushy fans who treat him in such an over-familiar way are gross, or big-nosed, and have funny Jewish names.

(woman) I especially like your early funny ones.

(narrator) They're turned into their noses.

They leer into the lens, shoving their snouts at Sandy Bates.

(woman) My friend Libby, she thinks you're a genius.

(narrator) If Woody Allen finds success very upsetting and wishes the public would go away, this picture should stop him worrying.

(David) She was hard on him.

He had a distrust of some of his own gifts at his peak.

And she felt he was moving in the wrong direction, and she wrote about it.

(Robert) I cannot just make films that will appeal to everybody.

I make films that appeal to me and hope everybody will like them.

And I will not compromise.

That's why, when I spend that long on a film, and I get blasted, it hurts, I can't deny it.

But from some people, it hurts, and from some people, it doesn't.

There are critics that if they blast me, I couldn't care less, such as Pauline Kael.

I couldn't care less whether she blasts me or not.

-Why not?

-Because she's totally a subjective reviewer.

And she, many years ago, wanted to see Gatsby.

And her time-- they split at The New Yorker-- it ends March 15th.

Penelope Gilliatt reviews for six months, and Pauline.

And Gatsby was opening March 14th, and I refused to let her see the picture so Penelope could review it.

At least I thought I'd get a more honest call.

And it killed her, she was furious.

That's one picture she wanted to close her season out with.

I didn't let her do it.

(Francis) Yes, I did meet her a couple of times before I tried to make Apocalypse Now, and I remember very vividly that she warned me to not use the Wagner Ride of the Valkyries for the helicopter battle because it had been used also in Lina Wertmuller's film, Seven Beauties.

And she said that it was so effective in that that you'd be making a big mistake to use it because people will just, whenever they saw it, they will refer to Seven Beauties.

And I said, "Well, you know," I said, "I don't know, maybe, but it depends.

If it works as planned, then when they think of it, they'll think of Apocalypse Now."

(Ride of the Valkyries playing) (narrator) Part of the widespread anticipation was, I think, our readiness for a visionary, climactic summing-up movie.

We felt that the terrible rehash of pop culture couldn't go on, mustn't go on, that something new was needed.

Coppola must have felt that too, but he couldn't supply it.

His film was posited on great thoughts arriving at the end.

Horror has a face.

(calm music) And you must make a friend of horror.

(narrator) A confrontation and a revelation.

Trying to say something big, Coppola got tied up in a big knot of American self-hatred and guilt.

And what the picture boiled down to was, "White man, he devil."

(explosion) (Lt. Kilgore) I love the smell of napalm in the morning.

(beatboxing) (Lili) It was always mysterious to me, that episode in her life.

In 1979, she leaves The New Yorker to go to Hollywood, and it's at the behest of Warren Beatty, and it's to produce Love and Money, so the second feature of Jim Toback.

(Pauline) I've agreed to do a series of movies for Beatty, and the first one will probably be a film that I've had a hand in writing.

She left off reviewing for a while to work on the production side of the movie business with Warren Beatty and with Paramount Pictures.

(Pauline) What happened was that I was facing another six months off from The New Yorker, and I'd become a little fed up with the weekly reviewing because the pictures were so bad.

(crashing) (screaming) Warren Beatty, ever the sly fox, literally paid for her and was putting her up in an office.

And she was a virgin who was very happy to be seduced.

(Lili) And also, you know, she was never getting paid a living wage by The New Yorker.

You have to be willing to smash heads together.

You have to be willing to argue every day to get things right.

And I saw that it was going to be months of fighting ahead of me.

(woman) She thought her role with Warren was going to be different than it was.

And I think she felt that she couldn't be a free person.

I withdrew before the picture got into production and turned to consulting instead.

(percussive music) (Lili) And she'd be reporting to Head of Production, Don Simpson.

Nobody embodies the '80s more than Don Simpson.

You know, movies that you can sell with a tagline that look like rock videos.

(woman) That's pretty crazy.

If they put her together with Don Simpson, they wanted her to fail.

(Lili) I don't think he was going to let anything she suggested get through, except for David Lynch's Elephant Man.

(John) Mr. Treves, why do you help me?

(man) I think she was instrumental in getting that up and going.

She was a huge fan of David Lynch.

She kept saying that she missed writing.

She was unhappy.

I just still look back on that with admiration.

She took a flyer, she took a real chance.

I guess it was July 1980 because I remember it being incredibly hot.

I remember having read a Renata Adler piece in The New York Review of Books that was a surgical strike on Pauline.

She took it very hard.

It was a very hard piece.

(Renata) It is, to my surprise, not simply jarringly, line by line, without interruption, worthless.

It turns out to embody something appalling and widespread in the culture.

She seems, at times, to have a form of prose hypochondria, palpating herself all over to see if she has a thought and publishing every word of the process by which she checks to see whether or not she has one.

It is also equally true that she can hardly resist any form of hyperbole, superlative, exaggeration.

(upbeat music) She has, in principle, four things she likes: versions of horror, physical violence depicted in explicit detail, sex scenes--so long as they have an ingredient of cruelty and involve partners who know each other casually, or under perverse circumstances-- and fantasies of invasion or subjugation, of or by apes, pods, teens, body snatchers, and extraterrestrials.

The pervasive, overbearing, and presumptuous V, the intrusive U, the questions, the debased note of righteousness... Hey!

(Renata) ...the whole verbal apparatus promotes, and relies upon, the incapacity to read.

The writing falls somewhere between huckster copy -and ideological pamphleteering.

-My life has value!

(Renata) Denouncing exhortations, code words, excommunications, programs, threats.

I know what you're thinkin'.

I felt that Renata Adler was being a little mean.

Who was really out of touch, Renata or Pauline?

She was trying to out-Pauline Kael Pauline Kael.

(Pauline) There are a lot of purists like Renata Adler on the New York Times now, who says that, "The critic's role is not propaganda."

Well, I think she's basically mistaken.

Every good critic has always been a propagandist.

There's no other way to play the game.

(Gina) She did not respond in print.

She did not reply or refer to it ever.

(Craig) She rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.

They wanted, somehow, to believe that she was a bad person, not simply that she was a critic that they really disagreed with, but there was something morally and ethically corrupt about her.

(Ridley) I'm still angry that she destroyed the film in three and a half full pages of The New Yorker without mercy.

And I think, "You know what?

I'll never read another piece of criticism about me."

I've never read press since.

And she was so ... wrong.

She was wrong to do that!

Also, what's wrong about critique is I can't reply.

(Paul) You know, she was famous for lying in wait on her reviews.

She never really wanted to be the first one out for something.

She'd sit back and figure out which way the reviews are gonna go.

Then she'd find a weakness, an angle, and go right in at it.

(intriguing music) (Craig) Shoah came out, and it was a nine-hour movie about the German death camps, and it got a lot of press.

It was very impressive in many ways.

And the Final Solution, you'll see, is really final because people who are converted can yet be, in secret, Jews.

People who are expelled can yet return.

But people who are dead will not reappear.

(Craig) She happened to be out in San Francisco to give a lecture, I believe.

And I saw her after the lecture, and she was fit to be tied.

She was quivering.

Pauline quivered a lot.

She said, "Shawn is holding my Shoah review."

And she was very, very angry.

He was, uh, he was freaked out about it because Pauline really had disliked the movie.

She didn't think it was a good piece of filmmaking.

(narrator) Claude Lanzmann's nine-hour documentary epic, Shoah, is made up of interviews with people who have knowledge of the Nazi extermination.

I ask the forbearance of readers for a dissenting view of a film that is widely regarded as a masterpiece.

I found Shoah exhausting right from the start.

(David) There was uniform praise for this film.

People reviewed it on their knees.

The greatest use of film I've ever seen in the sense of the good that it does.

There, I agree with you, Gene.

(David) And it was great that there was somebody who was looking for something different in documentary.

And she didn't feel that she was wrong or that she had made a mistake.

(Lili) And her essential argument in her Shoah piece is that a movie's subject matter doesn't make it sacrosanct, right?

It's not outside the bounds of criticism.

When she said it, I disagreed with certain things she said.

(narrator) Sitting on a theatre seat for a film as full of dead spaces as this one seems to me a form of self-punishment.

Okay, it was a little insensitive.

(narrator) Lanzmann is not very fussy about the subjects.

In some of the passages, he seems to be conducting the interviews at Woody Allen's convention of village idiots.

But what doesn't seem valid is the significance that the film confers on them.

The lack of moral complexity in Lanzmann's approach keeps it from being great.

The film is exhausting to watch because it closes your mind.

(David) The outcry, I thought, was mystifying.

(Craig) There were attacks by Jim Hoberman.

Hoberman actually used the word antisemitism.

(Lili) She got a lot of grief for that review, and I think she was called a self-hating Jew.

(Craig) And the attacks were really unfortunate.

(Lili) You know, and I loved that review.

She refused to be intimidated.

I mean, she wasn't gonna back down because this was a movie about the Holocaust.

(Pauline) Well, what else does a critic work with, if he's honest, but his own response?

The other thing is academic opinion or consensus opinion, which means letting other people tell you what you think, which means you're a damn fool and serve no purpose whatsoever.

(Stephanie) I think if I had to choose one favorite Pauline Kael review, it would be her review of Brian De Palma's Casualties of War.

Pauline saw it, she came out for it in this way that was very bold and definitive, and passionate.

(narrator) This new film is the kind that makes you feel protective.

When you leave the theatre, you'll probably find that you're not ready to talk about it.

You may also find it hard to talk about anything.

(Stephanie) She approached it in this really intensely human way.

That's what she was about at her best.

(narrator) We in the audience are put in the man's position.

We're made to feel the awfulness of being ineffectual.

This life-like defeat is central to the movie.

One hot day on my first trip to New York City, I walked past a group of men on a tenement stoop.

One of them in a sweaty sleeveless t-shirt stood shouting at a screaming, weeping little boy, -perhaps eight months old.

-Ha!

Ha!

(narrator) The man must have caught a glimpse of my stricken face because he called out, "You don't like it, lady?

Then how do you like this?"

And he picked up a bottle of pink soda pop from the sidewalk and poured it on the baby's head.

Wailing sounds, much louder than before, followed me down the street.

What makes the movie so eerily affecting?

Possibly, it's the girl's last moment of life, the needle-sharp presentation of her frailty and strength, and how they intertwine.

When she falls to her death, the image is other-worldly, lacerating.

It's the supreme violation.

(gun firing) I hear that baby's cries after almost 50 years.

(somber music) (people murmuring) (intriguing music) (Dan) It's an interesting question to think about how her work would be received today in the critical community insofar as it exists.

First of all, it's been fragmented, as everything else has been by the internet.

So, people are weighing in every different way from every different angle.

There's a strange feeling that everything's available, which then weirdly leads to the feeling that you don't really pay attention to anything.

(Dan) Nobody, I think, could hold down center field, so to speak, the way that she did.

Even The New Yorker is not as culturally central as it used to me, it can't be.

Yet more proof that video games don't translate well to movies.

(overlapping speaking) (Michael) People just hit Rotten Tomatoes, and they'll see some compilation of critics, maybe.

I always think that she would have done great in this era because she could write these really short descriptions of movies that were stripped to their atomic weight, but told you everything that you wanted to know about a movie.

(Pauline) I shall always be grateful to Stanley Kramer for either intentionally or unintentionally including that beautiful moment when Gregory Peck, after spurning Ava Gardner's advances, returns to find her in a wheat field and asks... (Cmdr.

Lionel) Is your invitation to spread a little fertilizer -still open?

-Oh!

(Pauline) Without critics, you have nothing but advertisers.

So it's the job of a critic, in terms of a social function, to try to alert people and interest them in anything that's really new or innovative that spells the future of an art form because without a few critics doing that, the advertisers will keep everything stagnant.

Because if they can sell anything, if there are no dissenting voices, movies will not advance in any way.

Critics are forced to mute their criticisms of the goose that lays the golden egg in the movie business.

And there are very few critics who have the guts, and have the conviction, and have the ethic to go out there and write an honest review of a bad movie 'cause the business has sent you a signal.

"Just don't say anything bad."

(reflective music) (child) What was your favorite movie-- (Pauline) In my entire life?

Well, there's a French movie, Mnilmontant, it's a silent movie--.

I was absolutely mad for it.

(child) What is your favorite treasures?

(Pauline) My daughter and my grandson.

(child) What was your favorite time of your life?

(Pauline) Now.

And that week when I quit, I hadn't planned on it, but I wrote up a couple of movies, and I read what I'd written, and I was so discouraged.

It's very hard to have so much emotional investment in praising people, that when you have to pan the same people a few years later, it really tears your spirits apart.

And I thought, "I've got nothing to share from this."

(Carrie) When she retired from The New Yorker, I, of course, wrote about it as though an athlete had hung up his number.

(Pauline) I think we're getting too much noise.

Let me see if I can control my, my Parkinson's hand better.

Just a minute.

(Gina) Pauline expressed an almost child-like naivet and hopefulness that her health would have to get better.

And even when it did seem impossible to her, that movies would also somehow get better.

(crowd laughing) (Craig) She was funny and lethal right up to the end.

One day, when she was near death, and I was at her bedside trying to divert her with chatter, I said, "It never ceases to amaze me how many people who call themselves writers actually can't write."

And she said, very weakly, "Yes, they say things like, 'It never ceases to amaze me.'"

(crowd laughing) A couple weeks before my mother's memorial, which was scheduled for November of 2001, I decided that I wanted to say some words myself.

I felt compelled to say something.

I wasn't sure what it would turn into.

Pauline's greatest weakness became her great strength, her liberation as a writer and critic.

She truly believed that what shed did was for everyone else's good, and that because she meant well, she had no negative effects.

This lack of introspection, self-awareness, restraint, or hesitation gave Pauline a supreme freedom to speak up, to speak her mind, to find her honest voice.

She turned her lack of self-awareness into a triumph.

(narrator) Perhaps no work of art is possible without belief in the audience, the kind of belief that has nothing to do with facts and figures about what people actually buy or enjoy, but comes out of the individual artist's absolute conviction that only the best he can do is fit to be offered to others.

(Lili) Pauline's mistake was in believing that she needed the movies.

But the movies needed her.

(lighthearted music) (man) Pauline Kael.

(Pauline) As my last word, I'd like to revert to that question of do I believe in progress?

I see in the Perspective issue here of letters to the editor, a gentleman writes that, "People should shed a tear for her," that means me, "who spews the pulp of sour grape -to stain an empty--" -I think that we should, we should explain.

These are letters in reply to a piece you wrote on the film in a prior issue of Perspective, go ahead.

(Pauline) You know, this is the new Victorianism.

Do you remember the Victorian period?

Women were not supposed to think.

They were supposed to leave the thinking to the men.

In the Neo-Freudian period, if women do any writing or speaking in public, it is supposed to demonstrate that they are sexually deprived.

They have an empty bed.

If their bed were full, they would not bother to care about movies.

-Or go to the movies.

-That's right.

(man) I really don't think we're anti-feminist in Chicago, though.

I don't think we're anti-feminist in Chicago, Pauline.

(laughing) Aren't you really deep in underestimating a great portion -of the audience-- -I hope that's true.

But you see, if I really didn't believe in the audience, I wouldn't go to the trouble of trying to address it either in print or on the air.

I mean, I have some feeling that perhaps one can reach somebody up there somewhere.

(energetic music)