What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael (2018) - full transcript

(projector whirring)

(slow instrumental 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 con, someone else
wrote a review that was pro.

[Child] How many books did you write?

[Pauline] 13.

[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?

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 a marvelous way to live.

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

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.

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.

[Man] 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?

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.

Something you want you ain't got, maybe?

Yeah.

She was a woman coming
into this boys' club

and shooting from the hip.

She was writing when a film critic

could create such waves.

She shaped that American New Wave

as much as any filmmaker.

And if she could make people mad, great.

She would say tough shit.

Either I'm gonna kill her
or I'm beginning to like her!

Pauline Kael had a voice,

and I understood her voice,

We grew up reading Pauline Kael.

You know no critic has
that kind of importance

and relevance that Kael had.

[Greil] 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.

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.

[Lili] Pauline made Scorsese

with her review of "Mean Streets".

She made Spielberg with her
review of "Sugarland Express".

[Man] 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.

(people applauding)

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.

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.

[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.

Well, my mother had a
great love of 30s movies

particularly, the tough dames.

I think she like 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.

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.

(hiccups)

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.

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,
kind of snappish sound.

Ann Landers is an example of it, okay.

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

Say wiseguy 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.

[Cynthia] 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.

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, Zoe 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.

You women make me sick!

C'mon, c'mon, how much?!

[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.

Shut up.

Are you so drunk with
your own importance

you think you can make your own rules?

Well, you're a fake.

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 disagreement.

Now, I broke up over "West Side Story".

Because tonight is the
real beginning of my life

as a young lady of America.

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.

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.

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.

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 a foreign language)

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.

[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.

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 it.

He wasn't there.

(lively violin music)

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 Citylights 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.

It's no use.

I'm finished.

Through.

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.

- Chaplin doesn't get to you even in the...

I hated 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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 One"

presented by The Actors' 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.

Don't you see how everybody shuns us?!

Oh what do I care?!

(loud tapping)

There's the answer!

(yelling)

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?

(screaming)

(screams)

Apart from the "Los Angeles Times",

there was no film critic
world in California.

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.

(women laughing)

Pauline is quarreling, fighting with,

condemning, attacking,

and she loved to set up New York critics

as straw men and then knock them down.

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.

[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.

(people applauding)

I think a lot people 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.

(giggles)

Just a masterpiece of satire is the

"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.

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 derriere supposed

to reveal her angst or merely her ennui?

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

and 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.

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.

Joyride.

Neon blinking traffic light.

Berkeley was a hotbed
of intellectual activity

and creative activity.

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, and et cetera.

Apparently, this was
like an open-door policy

everybody was here.

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.

[Carol] She always had
a cigarette in her month

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.

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 like 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.

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.

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 Do-Do,

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

[Carr] Some men you just can't reach.

Why at this point are you still having

to defend being a female?

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.

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.

I said to Mark Chaffey,
who was a colleague,

I said there's 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.

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.

[Woman] What's wrong
with a heroine being

good, happy and clean-minded?

She's the kind of girl I
pray my daughter would be

or my son would marry.

[Woman] Please take my
name off your mailing list

and use it to start a fund to have

Pauline Kael's head examined.

[Woman] Please, dear woman, give up.

[Woman] Her so-called
writing reflects no love

of nature, music, or feeling
of loyalty to country.

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.

(typewriter keys tapping)

[Man] 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
shit 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?

(laughs)

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 think you should
decide to do without sex.

(upbeat music)

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.

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.

The one review Pauline Kael wrote that

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 lines.

(gun fires)

It was like that is my
aesthetic right there.

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.

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 of 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.

Bosley Crowther just dumps on it.

Totally pans it in "The New York Times".

And I think the movie
would've just disappeared.

And then Pauline reviewed
in such a spectacular way

that it caused a counter reaction.

Newman had started
the American New Wave.

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.

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.

Ain't you ashamed

for 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."

(gun fires)

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 present 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.

Hey, isn't that Malcolm there?

I will never forget the
last line of that piece.

"By making us care about
these outlaw lovers,

"this movie has put the
sting back into death.

"Wham!"

(guns firing rapidly)

The movie ends in complete silence.

And the theater is left
in complete silence.

Everything you'd 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.

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.

[Man] It was a real jolt to a lot

of the 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.

[Man] 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.

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.

She would fight tooth
and nail not to weaken

or as she once said,
"Not to chop the balls off a piece."

[Narrator] As Henry Moon
Nicholson keeps working his mouth

with the tongue darting
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] 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.

In fact, she said so.

She'd say, oh Bill's
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."

She conducted a debate
between filmmakers and herself.

We were all under surveillance

and she kept us on our toes.

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 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 drop on everything if it's

saying not as great as Eisenstein,

when the important thing is to see

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.

(gun fires)

[Vincent] You must see it with

your own eyes to believe it.

(moaning)

[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.

[Man] Stupid, stupid!

Just what is it that you want to do?

Well, we wanna be free!

And we wanna get loaded.

[Crowd] Yeah!

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 shit has come to light.

[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 lie.

Say it, say it!

It's a man!

You ain't gonna do shit.

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 anticip...

...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.

Does anybody ever call you or write

to you and say thank you?

I learn from you, I'm an actor...

They also say a lot of other things.

[Interviewer] No, I assume that.

But does anybody ever say I
learned from you Pauline Kael?

Yes.

I also get a considerable
amount of hate mail.

[Interviewer] Have you ever
gotten a death threat?

Yes, people have described exactly

how they're going to cut me up

and what they're going to
do with each part of me.

There are time 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, I'm not
quite sure what they call

themselves, but it's a critics circle.

[John] New York Critics Circle invited

David Lean to come for lunch.

They're very good with their tongues.

And I was there for about two hours

and Pauline Kael is pretty sharp-tongued.

And she just let into him.

Why did you make this movie?

And the poor guy thought he'd come

for a sort of social meeting,

and 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

and in black and white.

And Pauline Kael said that
no you can have color,

and that's the end of it.

She took him apart.

It really quite had
an awful affect on me

and I thought, why on
Earth am I making films?

I don't have to.

And I didn't for a bit.

It shakes 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 bullshit
detector of anyone around.

She pointed out this huge
fraudulent aspect to the story

that you had just glided right by.

And the thing that made you mad

is she just kind of
destroyed the movie for you

because she pointed out something

that was obviously there.

[David] As soon as you thought,

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.

Kubrick's storyline
accounting for evolution

by an extra terrestrial
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.

I agreed with her position on "2001".

It's all subjective.

And that's the best opinion
you can have about movies

is that it's subjective.

[HAL 9000] My mind is going.

A critic should stimulate you to develop

to develop your own opinion.

You're not there to be converted
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.

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 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 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)

[Narrator] It's about
American life here and now

and it doesn't look like an American movie

or feel like one.

Hey, there ain't nothing
wrong with me, my friend.

I'm feeling fine.

[Man] Keep your mouth shut.

You tell me that in
front of this asshole.

[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?

C'mon, asshole, come over
here, come over here.

I'll put this up your ass.

[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.

You dirty, two-faced, fucking fag,

don't ever hit me again!

[Narrator] He seems
to spring up full-blown

and whirling and you watch the fireworks

and feel crumbly cautious in your sanity.

(bomb explodes)

[Controller] Hello, Houston,

the Endeavor is on station with cargo.

[Man] As the 70s
evolved, this incredible

period of moviemaking took off.

(man yells)

[Man] It was a tsunami of films that

suddenly started coming.

And 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 that piece

against auteurism, one of her greatest

impacts was in making Sam Peckinpah,
Martin Scorsese,

Coppola, Brian De Palma into heroes

of cinema for young people.

She wasn't some witness
of the American New Wave.

She wasn't just some chronicler of it.

She was riding the New Wave.

That was her.

That was her, too.

[Man] She could make
people's lives and careers.

[Man] That's when she
became the go-to critic.

[Man] Opinion is divided
to say the least of it.

[Man] The best respected film critic.

[Man] America's most formidable
and acerbic film critic.

[Man] Her collected movie
criticism reads

as a history of popular culture.

After three books, Miss Kael's fourth,
"Deeper Into Movies",

was a winner of the National Book Award.

Soon, she'll publish her fifth collection.

[Man] I think she was
dazzled by Brian De Palma.

I think she was in love with the sort of

sensuousness of his style.

[Jaime] I think with De Palma,

all this color from the
blood and everything,

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.

(laughing)

(beeping)

(laughing)

This is nuts.

She drew a lot of
readers to "The New Yorker".

No, no!

(car explodes)

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.

[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 a 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.

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.

Really just sitting there
and kept this little pencil

and paper and writing.

You hear little notes all the time.

We could feel her rolling her eyes.

[Woman] She would kind of
sometimes (clears her throat).

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.

(chuckles)

They didn't like the movies she liked.

You could not be good friends.

She had fantastic recall.

She could remember scenes
going back 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.

Her daughter Gina would
type what she had written up

then Pauline would go through it again

and make penciled corrections,

and 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 it 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 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".

I thought it was a very,
very cruel, mean-spirited

and essentially destructive job.

I think the thing was a perfectly clear

attempt to assassinate Orson.

He can't do this to me.

The piece I wrote "Raising Kane"
was the introduction

to the publication of the script

and so, naturally, I wanted
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 Hearts, himself,
had worked for a time.

Almost like short story writing,

inserting Herman Mankiewicz into this

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 a 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.

[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.

No male critic has 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.

She often used the sexual metaphor

in the titles of her books.

But I had the feeling like
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."

- [Dick] Who else is good in the...?

Pauline Kael.

[Dick] Yeah.

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

That dirty old broad.

(audience laughing)

But she's probably the most
qualified critic in the world

'cause she cares about film

and those that are involved in it.

"Last Tango" was surely
gonna be provocative.

It's a movie like "Breathless",

the film is still wet.

It's still fresh out of the camera.

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.

[Narrator] Bernardo Bertolucci's
"Last Tango in Paris"

was presented on the closing night

of the New York Film Festival,
October 14, 1972.

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.

[Narrator] That date should become a landmark

in movie history
comparable to May 29, 1913,

the night "The Rite of Spring"

was performed in music history.

There was no riot and
no one threw anything

at the screen but I think it's fair to say

that the audience was in a state of shock.

Because "Last Tango in Paris" has the same

kind of hypnotic excitement as "The Rite".

The same primitive force
and the same thrusting,

jabbing eroticism.

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.

I don't know.

Don't open it.

I don't understand why she
went to the mat for that film.

To this day, that movie
was horrible, okay?

I thought it was so artificial, forced,

calculated, ugly, unerotic.

I was recently on a big talk show

and the host told me on the air

how appalled he was by my review

and how 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.

She got me into UCLA in the fall of '68,

and then, she got me a job at the

L.A. 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 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 got get behind this movie.

Whenever a particular film came along,

that she felt we should
get behind, she would call.

You say, "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 an Andrew Sarris-ite.

I reject that term violently.

I am not a Paulette, I'm a Paulinista.

Meaning that I have
learned from her approach

and attempt to apply it in my own work.

And 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 all Pauline

and not these individual people.

And I thought that was
unfortunate and destructive thing.

I was at "The Village Voice"

and she invited me to
visit her at "The New Yorker".

Now that was very problematic

because at "The Village Voice" I was writing

alongside Andrew Sarris who

had this long-standing antipathy.

And in fact, I had several
colleagues phone me

and say you really wanna
keep your distance.

A, she'll eat you alive

and B, you don't wanna be

branded as one of her circle,

getting opinions from her from on high.

And I thought about it and I thought,

fuck 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 did you come here for?

Well, I heard you had
the fanciest whorehouse

in the whole territory up here.

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

The studios aren't so short of money

that they're throwing
pictures into theaters

now without enough advance publicity

and one picture that
got thrown in this way

about 10 days ago was a film
called, "McCabe & 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.

You're the best looking woman I ever saw

and I ain't never tried to do nothing

but put a smile on your face.

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.

And I think in this
case, Robert Altman has

done something really innovative,

and I think it's the fact
that his approach is different

that is throwing the press off.

Pictures like "Nashville",
"The Long Goodbye",

and "McCabe & Mrs. Miller",

nobody has ever made movies like those

with that kind of
technique and perception,

and with that deep affection
for people in them.

[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.

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 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.

(gun fires)

(crowd screaming)

(screaming)

(screaming)

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.

(banging on the door)

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 knock over.

I haven't taken to sneakers yet.

[Interviewer] Oh, you're so vain.

(laughing)

[Gina] In New York
there'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.

(loud knocking)

[Girl] Mother!

Mother!

[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.

I think Pauline Kael, for
example, needs an enema.

(audience laughing)

- I did not read her review, did she...

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 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 crouch level?

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.

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.

(audience laughing)

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.

You couldn't have
known that ahead of time.

[Norman] Of course, I would.

How, 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 and want to talk.

I mean, actors, directors, writers.

(soft piano music)

[Steven] 1,000 reviews later you are

the only writer who understood "Jaws".

[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 Roy Hill] Listen, you miserable bitch.

You didn't like the sound say so

but cut out that bullshit about how you

know where it was done
and where it was made.

[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 Miss 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 the way you do.

Hope we can get together for lunch.

If a director had completed
and he wanted her to see it,

this is 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 send it in and he published it.

When it came out, it was
a surprise to everyone

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 who she liked.

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.

[Woody] 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.

And 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 is
intelligent, is vulnerable,

and somehow by his
intelligence he triumphs.

What do you want me to say?

I don't want to 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.

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.

This is 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.

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.

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.

[Interviewer] 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 would
get a more honest call.

And it killed her, she was furious.

That was one picture she wanted
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, 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 Wertmüller'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 just whenever

they saw it they
would refer to "Seven Beauties".

And 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"
by Richard Wagner)

[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've felt that too
but he couldn't supply it.

His film was posited on great

thoughts arriving at the end.

Horror has a face

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.

[Bill] I love the smell of napalm
in the morning.

[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 & Money"

the second feature of Jim Toback.

[Pauline] I 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.

What happened was 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.

(screaming)

Warren Beatty, a rather sly fox,

literally paid for her and was
putting her up in an office.

[Man] And she was a virgin who

was very happy to be seduced.

And also, 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 everyday

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.

And she'd be reporting
to Head of Production

Don Simpson.

Nobody embodies the 80s
more than Don Simpson.

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.

I don't think he was gonna let anything

she suggested get through.

Except for David Lynch's "Elephant Man".

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, and
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.

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 extra terrestrials.

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 thinking.

I felt that Renata Adler
was being a little mean.

Who is 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

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.

She did not respond in print.

She did not reply or refer to it ever.

She rubbed a lot of
people the wrong way.

They want 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.

She was so fucking wrong.

She was wrong to do that.

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

Yeah, 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 and then she'd

find a weakness and angle
and go right in at it.

"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 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.

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 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.

(speaking in a foreign language)

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.

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.

In her essential argument,
in her "Shoah" piece,

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 theater
seat for a film

as full of dead space is 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.

The outcry, I thought, was mystifying.

[Craig] There were attacks
by Jim Hoberman.

Hoberman actually used
the word antisemitism.

[Lili] She got a lot 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.

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.

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 theater you'll probably

find that you're not
ready to talk about it.

You may also find it hard
to talk about anything.

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 lifelike defeat is
central to the movie.

One hot day on my first
trip to New York City,

I walked passed 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've
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 otherworldly, lacerating.

It's the supreme violation.

(guns firing rapidly)

I hear that baby's cries
after almost 50 years.

It's an interesting
question to think about how

her work would be received
today in the critical community

in so far 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.

[Daniel] Nobody, I think,

could hold down centerfield

so to speak, the way that she did.

Even "The New Yorker" is not as culturally

central as it used to be.

It can't be.

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

- I am Andre and this is my...

Hello.

(people talking)

[Michael] People just hit Rotten Tomatoes

and they'll see some
compilation of critics maybe.

I always think that
she would've been 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.

(upbeat music)

[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...

Is your invitation to spread

a little fertilizer still open?

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's 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.

[Child] What was your
favorite movie your entire life?

[Pauline] In my entire life?

Well, there's a French movie,
"Ménilmontant".

It was a silent movie by Kirsanoff.

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.

When she retired from "The New Yorker",

I, of course, wrote about it as though

the athlete had hung up his number.

[Pauline] I think we're
getting too much noise.

Let me see if I can control

my Parkinson's hand better, just a minute.

[Gina] Pauline expressed
an almost child-like naivete

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.

(people 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."

(people laughing)

- A couple of 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 she 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.

(soft instrumental 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 man laughs)

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 bear... "

[Man] We should explain
these are letters

in reply to a piece you wrote on the film

in a prior issue of "Perspective".

Go ahead, I'm sorry.

[Pauline] You know this
is the new Victorianism.

Do you remember in 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.

[Man] Or go to the movies.

[Man] I really don't
think we're gonna have

that feminism in Chicago, though.

I don't think we're gonna
have that feminism in Chicago.

(Pauline laughing)

Aren't you really deep in underestimating

a great portion of the audience...

[Pauline] 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
out there somewhere.

(soft instrumental music)