Celebrity Deathwatch: Pauline Kael, Movie Critic, 82

["Deathwatch Central" <cdw@slick.org>]

http://www.cnn.com/2001/SHOWBIZ/News/09/03/kael.obit.ap/index.html

Kael, grande dame of film reviewing, dies
September 3, 2001 Posted: 8:09 PM EDT (0009 GMT)


GREAT BARRINGTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- Movie critic Pauline Kael, a brash,
witty champion of artistic quality who thrashed both facile commercialism
and self-indulgent pretense from her lofty perch at The New Yorker, has
died. She was 82.

Kael, a resident of Great Barrington, suffered from Parkinson's disease.
Perri Dorset, a spokeswoman for the magazine, said Kael died Monday at her
home.

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, said that Kael broke down barriers
between low and high cinema in her reviews, delighting in both the sublime
and the profane.

"She shaped American film criticism for generations to come and, more
important, the national understanding of the movies," Remnick said.

She turned "The Current Cinema" into a leading fixture in The New Yorker,
one of the most influential magazines among the nation's cultural elite.

Physically petite but headstrong in her opinions, she became one of the 20th
century's most important and recognizable film critics. She called the
movies "our national theater" and helped establish the reputations of such
filmmakers as Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman and Steven Spielberg.

Her 1969 essay "Trash, Art and the Movies," written for Harper's magazine,
was named in 1999 as No. 42 on a New York University survey of 100 examples
of the best journalism of the century.

She wrote her first review in 1953 for a San Francisco magazine, panning
Charlie Chaplin's "Limelight" as "Slimelight." Over the years, her work
appeared in Film Quarterly, Mademoiselle, Vogue, the New Republic, and
McCall's. She began writing her punchy, conversational, sometimes slangy
prose for The New Yorker in 1967.

Larry McMurtry deemed her the "Edmund Wilson of film reviewers." Writer
Martin Knelman once said she packed such diverse personal, social,
commercial and artistic insights into her writings that they were often more
entertaining than the movies she reviewed. She was endowed with a prodigious
memory and knowledge of cinema, able to accurately report plot and dialogue
despite not taking notes during screenings.

Her views often defied popular taste. She left McCall's after sounding off
about "The Sound of Music" in an article headlined "The Sound of Money." She
thought "Rain Man" a "wet piece of kitsch." She dismissed "Dances With
Wolves" as a "nature-boy movie" and famously mocked director-star Kevin
Costner as "having feathers in his hair and feathers in his head."

But she equally disdained what she saw as pretension masquerading as high
art. She had contempt for movies like "Last Year at Marienbad" and
"Blow-Up." Of the latter, she wrote that director Michelangelo Antonioni
"loads his atmosphere with so much confused symbolism and such a heavy sense
of importance that the viewers use the movie as a Disposall for intellectual
refuse."

A tireless polemicist, she did not shy from flogging people or ideas that
she found foolish. She tore into the trendy "auteur" theory of film that
exalted a director's stylistic and thematic fixations, instead of plot or a
movie's individuality. Her attacks led to an often bitter feud with fellow
critic Andrew Sarris.

"What she loved ... is an appeal of motion pictures that is ultimately a
primitive one ... that goes back to the role of motion pictures as sheer
entertainment. She did not subscribe to the notion that movies had to be
good for you," said Annette Insdorf, a film professor at Columbia
University.

Ms. Kael deeply admired such contemporary films as "Bonnie and Clyde,"
"Weekend," "The Godfather," "MASH," "The Garden of the Finzi Continis," and
"Mean Streets." She likened "Last Tango in Paris" to "Rite of Spring,"
calling it "a departure from everything we've come to expect at the movies.
... the most powerfully erotic movie ever made, and it may turn out to be
the most liberating movie ever made."

She also loved older films such as Jean Renoir's "La Grande Illusion," D.W.
Griffith's "Intolerance," Preston Sturges' "Unfaithfully Yours" and the Marx
Brothers' "Duck Soup."

Although she ridiculed the auteur theory, she was a longtime admirer of many
directors, including Renoir, Orson Welles, Robert Altman, Jean-Luc Godard
and Satyajit Ray. Marlon Brando, James Mason, Barbra Streisand and Jane
Fonda were among her favorite actors.

Consistently, she defended artistic creativity, subtlety and refined
craftsmanship. In an Associated Press interview in 1989, she lamented, "You
can't get college kids interested in going to any sort of daring movie now.
They're perfectly willing to sit through the same old crap, a larger version
of what they've seen on television all their lives. They may even resent it
if they go to a film that has subtitles, or that has any kind of
complexity."

She also wrote more than 10 books, including her breakthrough 1965 work of
collected reviews, "I Lost It at the Movies," and "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang." Her
"Deeper Into Movies" won a National Book Award in 1974. In 2000, she
received a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle.

Born in Petaluma, California, she lived on a farm during her early years.
Her father was a movie fan, and she developed into an avid reader and movie
enthusiast.

She studied at the University of California at Berkeley from 1936 to 1940,
majoring in philosophy. She did not earn her degree at the time but later in
life was granted an honorary doctorate.

For a time, she tried experimental film-making, writing plays and managing
film houses. She sometimes did odd jobs to survive.

During Ms. Kael's career, her personal life sometimes suffered. She had
multiple marriages and divorces.

She retired from The New Yorker in 1991 and had returned to her rural roots
at a home in Great Barrington, a Berkshire Mountain resort town. Her health
had been failing for several years.

Copyright 2001 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may
not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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