Book Review: Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark by Brian Kellow

Abstract

Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark. Brian Kellow. New York, NY: Viking Books, 2011. 360 pp. $27.95 hbk. $18 pbk.Pauline Kael has been described as the preeminent film critic of the twentieth century. If this is hyperbole, it is right in synch with her style, both personal and on the written page. With the ranks of film critics being decimated, as they frequently are among the first to be cut from the editorial staffs of struggling publications, Brian Kellow's illuminating biography, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark, seems almost like a relic of a distant age. It is also an irresistible read.It was one of those harmonic convergences of luck and timing (and more than a little talent) that brought Kael to The New Yorker in 1967, at a time when American movies were crawling out from under the strictures of the Production Code and into a renaissance of filmmaking that lasted until the conglomerates, which now owned the studios, brought in a new and for the most part soulless age to motion pictures.Although Kael had written for other publications, her career really got rolling with a long takeout on the film Bonnie and Clyde running in the Oct. 21, 1967, issue of the magazine. She never looked back. The New Yorker might not have been her first choice of publications, but editor William Shawn gave her the one thing she truly craved: space, and lots of it. Shawn's editorial policy included his non-interference with his writers, and Kael's reviews ran as long as she cared to make them. And she wrote and wrote and wrote. Kael had a consuming passion for the movies that lasted until she died. In fact, it seems to have been the one consuming passion of her life. Although she had one daughter, Gina James, she never married, and many of her relationships were with homosexual and bisexual men, one of whom was Gina's father.A film critic, and one as controversial as Kael proved to be, might seem an outre subject for author Kellow, who is the features editor for Opera News, and whose previous books include biographies of Ether Merman, Eileen Farrell, and the acting Bennett family. But his treatment of Kael is even-handed and his writing is fluid and comprehensive. She was, after all, a diva. In his acknowledgements, he cites almost 150 interviews and the bibliography lists over ninety books, including all thirteen of Kael's own.The book is organized chronologically, beginning with Kael's childhood on a Petaluma, California, chicken ranch, where her Polish immigrant Jewish parents figured they could make a life for a growing family. Just before the stock market crash in 1929, her father lost the ranch and the family moved to San Francisco. Her West Coast roots never lefther and provoked in her a kind of intellectual defensiveness and a reflexive dislike of the New York publishing establishment, even though her career and influence were solidified at that most East Coast establishment publication, The New Yorker.In her reviews (and in conversation), she could be arrogant, self-serving, mean spirited, and in print as scatological as the proper gentleman editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn, would let her be. In fact, her taste for the audacious and trashy and her desire to goad Shawn led to shouting matches between them that lasted for decades. She was a bully, but unlike most bullies, she never backed down. When she found directors she truly admired (Robert Altman, Sam Peckinpah, Paul Mazursky), she would turn them into drinking buddies, often offering advice on scripts and casting, essentially trouncing the accepted boundaries of the critic-filmmaker relationship. But she could as easily turn on them and cut them out of her life either for some perceived personal slight, or the seeming loss of that director's particular gifts. She had favorite actors: Streisand, Debra Winger, Michelle Pfeiffer, Brando, DeNiro, but was also quick to write exactly what she thought of them when they failed to live up to what she thought their performances should be. …