Pauline Kael
“The words Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies. This appeal is what attracts us, and ultimately what makes us despair when we begin to understand how seldom movies are more than this.” Pauline Kael was America’s most prominent film critic at the time when American movies were growing up, championing a new generation of filmmakers, including Robert Altman, Warren Beatty, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorcese, and Steven Spielberg. Born in 1919, Kael went to the University of California, Berkeley, and stayed there to run an art movie house, with her first husband, from 1955-1960. She also began to write movie reviews as a freelancer for magazines. In 1965, her collection of reviews and essays, I Lost It at the Movies, became a best seller. She was fired from her job as movie critic at the women’s magazine McCall’s because the editor felt she panned every commercial movie. (She wrote that everyone knew the right name for The Sound of Music should be The Sound of Money.) She then quit writing for the New Republic when editors changed her writing without her permission. However, she found the right publication, and the right platform, at the New Yorker, where she stayed reviewing and writing about movies from 1968 until 1991, when the effects of Parkinson’s disease prevented her from working consistently. Her collected writings can also be found in the books: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968), The Citizen Kane Book (1971), Deeper into Movies (1973), When the Lights Go Down (1980), 5001 Nights at the Movies (1982), Taking It All In (1984), Movie Love (1991), and For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies (1994). Kael died in 2001.
