_On March 11th, 1991, every Hollywood hack worth his leather jacket (hack directors, hack actors, hack executives, hack scenarists, hack gaffers, et al.) mobilized in important Hollywood bistros and pubs to rub shoulders, slap backs, imbibe doggedly, exchange smirks, whoop!, swallow goldfish, and maybe even weep in relief ’n’ joy because their nemesis, the dark and insane Pauline Kael, had announced her retirement as movie critic from The New Yorker. It was now a time to relax or strut—bad movies could now be made without fear of some erudite chick in New York City with incomprehensible “standards” opining on this or that minuscule and irrelevant detail. These boys, finally, had beat her! They were more powerful! They made movies that made money and though this Kael used to pick on them constantly—thank God their mothers and girlfriends did not read The New Yorker—well, she was gone now, wasn’t she?

_Many people abhor Pauline Kael. And why not? I remember as a lad valuing The Sting as the epitome of super and then reading, years later, Kael’s review and feeling like a dolt for having thought my thoughts. She can be hard on the ego.

“Pauline Kael has such a loathing of self that she

takes it out on everyone else. If you don’t make the

movie she wants to see, she criticizes that rather

than the movie you made, and it becomes very

personal. And what you finally end up seeing is a

woman baring her own self-loathing to the public

at large.”

—Robert Redford

_Terrence Rafferty, her successor at The New Yorker, says, “Even the people who find themselves in opposition to her define themselves against her. Her opponents are obsessed by her.” 

It is also possible to point out that a sizeable number of Pauline Kael’s critics have a knack for misreading her.

Joe Queenan, in a startling piece he got published in the January-February issue of Movieline, is a recent example.

He claims that she “likes Martin Scorsese’s pathologically unpleasant GoodFellas” whereas, in truth, her review does not come to such an easy conclusion. Kael: “Is it a great movie? I don’t think so.” Scorsese “leaves the themes, and even the story, lying there inert.” “The picture has scope rather than depth.”

Queenan asserts just as knowingly that Kael “hates Mike Figgis’s pathologically unpleasant Internal Affairs’’ whereas what she wrote was, “Mike Figgis’s Internal Affairs is art-house sleaze. This label isn’t meant to be totally pejorative: the picture has a creepy, rhythmic quality that sucks you in and keeps you amused.”

Her critics occasionally rocket past simple misreading and land on lunacy. Queenan blasts her for having “managed to ingeniously repackage her columns into 11 different bound compendia” as if by bringing together her essays into book form (I think that’s what he meant by “compendia”) Kael deployed an unsavory and unprecedented trick in eleven seperate attempts to dupe her public.

His dumbest ruling, however, is that Kael “rattles on and on...as if it were still necessary, at this late date, to actually review anything starring Bill Murray.”

I say any movie critic who cannot appreciate Bill Murray as aspirited and very interesting actor, worthy of comment, is in the wrong house.

_Sadly, it is not only the dunces who turn in poor critiques. John Podhoretz’s essay in the winter 1989 issue of (the usually well-edited) American Scholar begins as a serviceable, and often penetrating, historical survey of Kael’s early career. But he falls into absurdity when he mounts an undeserved charge on the critic. Podhoretz writes that, in the seventies, Kael’s “penchant for violence in movies began to assume the nature of an obsession” and “it soon began to appear as Kael herself had a real appetite for violence” and “she seemed simply to enjoy the sight of destruction, human and otherwise.” It is so that Kael is on the record for having admired some, or a lot of, movies that had violence in them (sometimes a lot of violence). But to imply, ruthlessly, that she liked those movies solely for their violent content, and to neglect mentioning the myriad of violent movies that she did not like at all, is despicable. If she had a “penchant” and an “obsession” and “a real appetite for violence” why didn’t she like the Stallone flicks and the Freddy the 13ths and all the crude, hopeless horror shows that, by Podhoretz’s illogic, she had to like?

_I wrote to her after the Podhoretz essay appeared to commiserate. But I had to admit that his gripe that “by the late 1970s her prose came to seem a bit mannered” was one that I saw, alas, some merit in. (I was able, however, to write that “you are saying new and important things, though the style does come across as only offering familiar charms, and no surprises....the boneheads should be able to see, however, that beneath the old style there are great ideas still charging around.”) I can’t forget her response. She called to thank me for writing and then said: “You know I understand what you said about my writing style but what you have to understand is that it’s very hard to change when you get old.” I have not heard of many writers who take hard criticism gently or who admit to faults.

_Terrence Rafferty talks about reading her first book, I Lost It at the Movies, at age fourteen (he’s forty now): “It wasn’t like anything I’ve ever read. It was a completely fresh way of looking at movies. The writing was just thrilling—it sounded like a person speaking and a person thinking. In some senses it was the most influential book I’ve ever read. I was turned on to movies by Pauline’s writing. I imagined the possibility of being a movie reviewer through her book.” I know something of those feelings. In one of my letters to her I wrote: “I give your writing a lot of credit for improving my life. It sounds sappy, I know, but how else should I say it? When I first looked into your essays I was a lost teenaged soul, devoid of any interest in literature or good thinking. I did read a lot (corny baseball books and UFO stories) but I had yet to feel anything engage my brain. I thank God for the heavenly circumstances that bumped me into that unbelievable magazine.”

_You are not supposed to agree with everything Pauline Kael says. In fact, that would be cause for some soul-searching (do I dine out too much? do I smack my pets? do I run red lights?). She has missed the bull's-eye plenty of times (the inevitable result of writing over a long period). But who on this globe is perfect? And how many times has she hit the mark? Her reviews, at their best, have a breadth and precision that is rare, if not unique, for her field. She has often discussed movies profoundly. Those people who disregard all her achievements because she erred on The Grifters or FX or The Untouchables will never understand that.

— Marc Smirnoff

Oxford American:

In which way do movies most often fail ?

Pauline Kael:

Well, it’s so often almost impossible for writers and directors to get financing for any kind of vision they might have that they often compromise at just about every level. The book The Devil's Candy [by Julie Salamon] about the making of The Bonfire of the Vanities is awfully good because it shows you how the executives made the decisions that destroyed the movie and they did it trying not to be irresponsible, trying to be responsible to the money people. And the director, Brian De Palma, himself trying to be responsible and having had a couple of failures so he no longer had confidence in his own vision, went along with the executives and tried to be a reasonable man, and all the meaning was gradually drained out of the material, decision by decision. And that often happens on pictures. When you talk to a director afterwards, he’ll tell you how, step by step, everything went out of the original idea. On the other hand, a lot of directors never have an idea. They were hired to fulfill this idea that the executives have. You know, the executives will get some idea that something should be made on a subject that’s hot, and they’ll commission writers who’ll be rewritten endlessly, and the director will take the project and often there is just nothing there. Sometimes you’ll read a script, and you can’t believe that that’s actually going to be made because you’ve read dozens of scripts that were good that nobody will make, and this absolutely empty dog will go into production partly because some actor said, Yes.

OA: Why is there a lack of innovative movies?

Kael: You can feel a resentment in people, and you see it in the press. It’s as if they thought that any sort of experimentation was an insult to them, and if you look at the stuff that gets praised in the press, it’s very discouraging because you know that somebody who tried to do something different is going to get panned. I feel no affinity to most of the pictures that are big box-office winners. I mean I didn’t even go see Terminator II. Terminator I was enough—it was already a remake of a section of Westworld. If you go see, what was it? Backdraft, you think, this is inconceivable! It’s just a dressed-up version of the old James Cagney-Pat O’Brien stuff that was mildly entertaining in the thirties. And it’s done so heavily now with such elaborate special effects that all the fun it once had is drained away. It’s not a great period for movies. The only real surprises, I think have been those things that come out of places like Ireland, like My Left Foot and Eat the Peach, which was a lovely little film that hardly anybody saw, or England, where Mona Lisa was made by an Irishman. There are surprises, like Mike Leigh’s English movies, but from this culture the surprises have been, well, I’d say, the most interesting film I’ve seen this year is one that premiered on television: the one called Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse. It’s about Francis Ford Coppola and the making of Apocalypse Now. It’s fascinating because it’s about what happens to a director in the course of making an epic, and it’s about the manic-depressive cycles that Coppola went through making that picture. And it’s extraordinary because it is a truthful view of filmmaking. Most of it was shot and recorded by Eleanor Coppola at the time in the Philippines, and she got fabulous material. I don’t know if the young filmmakers who put it together and also added the interviews of the later material, fully recognized what that film revealed. But it’s a very scary, funny, remarkable movie. In many ways it’s far more interesting than Apocalypse Now was. It really is something.

OA: What directions are movies going? 

Kael: I don’t think anybody knows. It’s a mess, and you just hope that there will be some brilliant new people setting new directions, and that maybe somebody will go to the movies they make because sometimes brilliant people set new directions and nobody follows them. Ten or fifteen years ago I would have had a thought about that, but everything’s gone so backwards in moviemaking. Techniques seem more backward. Now you’re overjoyed if you get a halfway decent storyline. You no longer ask for innovation much because you just don’t get it. Things seemed to be really innovative in the seventies. In the eighties there were some wonderful movies but they just weren’t innovative, so you can’t guess on direction. Oh, it would be easy to say, they’ll come from third world countries, but I sort of doubt it. Some wonderful work came from Australia and New Zealand, but there aren’t populations big enough to sustain major moviemaking there, and so those directors come to Hollywood, and most of them are caught in the same traps, and even when their movies are awfully good they often don’t succeed. Fred Schepisi, who did The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and a lot of other terrific movies, has not had a major hit in Hollywood. The Russia House, which should have been successful, wasn’t. In some ways, it was Sean Connery’s best performance, and Michelle Pfeiffer was lovely in it. It had a nifty Tom Stoppard screenplay, and it was very cleverly done, but the audience didn’t go to it.

OA: There sure are a lot of gangster pictures being made.

Kael: Yeah, there are. That’s because it’s an easy subject to sell to the third world countries and to sell all over the world. Gangster pictures barely even need subtitles. They can be easily dubbed for Europe and Asia and South America and everywhere. They have such a natural appeal to sub-literate cultures. It seems awful to say, but some of our greatest directors work in genres that are really beneath their intelligence because there is an audience out there for them. And right now Americans are behaving like sub-literate audiences. That’s what they want to be. If you made something like The Terminator, you know you can sell it all over the world. If you make The Russia House, it’s going to take a very sophisticated audience to react to it.

OA: In the eighty-five movies you review in Movie Love, I counted thirty-three, if I am right, that you found enjoyable or better. That sounds like a respectably high figure. Was it a rich period for movies?

Kael: No, it was not a rich period, but it was rich in fine acting. I think so many people ignore the great acting in movies and this has been a terrific period. I don’t think American acting has ever been better than it is now. And you can go to a movie that doesn’t show much innovative filmmaking and still see, say, a great performance by Jessica Lange or Debra Winger or, say, Daniel Day Lewis. It makes the movie worth seeing, but there’s no point pretending that it’s great movie art. It’s great acting that’s on the screen. And a lot of it is from the comedians who developed in television—men like Bill Murray and Robin Williams have been bringing something new to the American screen: a funny, kind of hip personality that they adapt to their roles.

OA: And Tom Hanks?

Kael: Oh, yeah, Tom Hanks and Michael Keaton. There are a lot of them, fewer women than men, but there is, or was, Bette Midler.And there are people who haven’t quite loomed up the way they may, but who, in small roles, like Catherine O’Hara, do stuff you’ve never seen before, like what she did in Beetlejuice. I mean, she’s an amazement. I loved what Robin Williams did in The Fisher King which came out after the period I reviewed in the book. Have you seen it? The acting in it is really extraordinary. Almost everybody in the picture does well: Jeff Bridges and Michael Jeter and particularly Amanda Plummer, and Mercedes Ruehl, who gives a kind of physicality to her role that I don’t think I’ve ever seen on the screen before. And Robin Williams may be playing the holy fool, which he’s played before and which I found tiresome in Awakenings, but in The Fisher King I thought he was really great. I saw a movie last night that has an extraordinary performance—Frankie and Johnny. Michelle Pfeiffer is just astounding in some scenes. She’s so beautiful that I think people don’t want to recognize her full talent. She’s an amazing little actress.

OA: You say Debra Winger “is one of the two or three finest (and most fearless) screen actresses we’ve got.” Who are the others?

Kael: Oh, two or three. That’s always dangerous because you wind up with four or five. Diane Keaton, Jessica Lange, and Anjelica Huston. And Michelle Pfeiffer is turning into one of them. There are others who when they get the chance can be. I mean, Christine Lahti, isn’t quite up there because she hasn’t had the roles. She’s awfully good, and whenever Kate Nelligan gets the chance, she’s quite something. Annette Bening is someone who does things that are surprising. I think there are probably more than two or three, but right up there at the peak, I would say, would be Debra Winger and Diane Keaton and Jessica Lange. Did you see Crimes of the Heart? There’s another case of a movie where the substance has a lot of mediocrity, but it had three performances by Diane Keaton, Jessica Lange, and Sissy Spacek that could not have been improved on. They really did something—they convinced you they were sisters.

OA: Who are the best actors?

Kael: That’s tougher. They’re a more dispersed group. Even though the roles in recent years have been much more men’s starring roles, they’ve not been very interesting roles, whereas the women, although they’ve not been in as dominating positions, have had more of a chance to show what’s in them. Who are the men? You can’t ignore Jack Nicholson, Nick Nolte, Tim Robbins, and Warren Beatty and some of the big stars. But the more interesting ones, I think, would be people like Michael Keaton and Tom Hanks and, I’d say, Bill Murray, who every time I see him astounds me, and I put Robin Williams there and...who are the other men? It’s hard to think offhand. Steve Martin in comedy. I don’t like him when he does serious acting, but in comedy or in Pennies from Heaven. What he did in Pennies from Heaven was quite extraordinary and Bernadette Peters, what she did in that was pretty extraordinary, too.

OA: With all these great actors around, America has chosen Kevin Costner as its current favorite. What kind of actor is he?

Kael: He wasn’t bad in Bull Durham. Maybe with a script and a director he can show something, but there is a basic emptiness in his work and I think it’s his lack of a voice which showed particularly in Robin Hood. In a period movie you need a voice because you’re automatically going to be compared to people who have a certain amount of flourish, and when he’s up there with Morgan Freeman, who has a great voice and great presence, and with Alan Rickman, who has a terrific voice and has a style, suddenly Kevin Costner is just a vacuum on the screen. I should have included Morgan Freeman on the list of great actors. He’s right up there. Sometimes he’s done work in those bad movies that leaves you breathless, particularly something like Street Smart. He played a pimp in it and he was just the most scary, brilliant pimp you’ve ever seen. Sometimes Denzel Washington is right up there too. A lot depends on the role.

OA: Has watching actors so much ever helped you in real life? Can you tell when people are lying?

Kael: No, acting is different. No, I don’t think in real life I’m any better judge than anybody else is. I think we’re all suckers in real life.

OA: Of the movies you reviewed in the new book you seemed most impressed by Casualties of War. Almost three years have gone by since it was released. Do you still think so highly of it?

Kael: Oh yeah. I do have friends who are very hip about movies who don’t like Casualties of War, who feel that it’s done on too grand a scale, that it has too monumental a feeling. I think it’s one of the films that tragically didn’t reach much of an audience when it opened in theaters and it will never be that good on VCR because the action is spread out over a very wide terrain and there’s no way to see the full film on VCR. So in some ways De Palma has lost twice. I think he has had a really brutalized career because his greatest work hasn’t reached an audience. I think Blow Out is just an extraordinary movie and hardly anybody saw it when it opened, and by the same token John Travolta lost out because people simply didn’t see some of his best performances. His work in Blow Out is first rate, and then to see him made fun of as if he was not a really first-rate actor is very sad. I don’t know what can be done about that. The terrible thing about a popular art form is that if it doesn’t reach an audience the first time around, it’s pretty damn hard. I’ve heard the television news saying to tune in at a certain hour and they would tell us what are the big new hit movies.They didn’t say what are the good new movies. A man who produces a good movie that isn’t a hit is a clown by ordinary standards and he’s going to be made fun of by everybody.

OA: A profile of Sean Penn in American Film magazine says that in Casualties of War “he is completely miscast and he has even a worse New York accent than Uma Thurman in Henry and June.” How wrong is this view?

Kael: On both counts. I thought Uma Thurman was wonderful in Henry and June. Accents don’t worry me that much. I thought Sean Penn was absolutely splendid in Casualties of War. I think he’s a much underrated actor, and it’s a pity that he keeps making announcements that he wants to direct instead of act because he has done phenomenal work as an actor. Some of the scenes in Casualties of War—his shaving scene near the beginning—were original and moving in ways you don’t expect a young actor to come up with.

OA: I’m still trying to figure out why you let The Untouchables off so easily. In an interview you called the script “square.” Then you said: “On the other hand that squareness did make it possible for De Palma to reach a big audience”—is that a rare copout?

Kael: I treated it as a commercial movie. I didn’t think it was a movie in the class of Blow Out, and I said so, but I thought for the kind of movie it was, it worked well. Sean Connery, in particular, is fun to watch. And at that point, even though Kevin Costner seemed a blank, he seemed sort of a plausible blank....David Mamet is just incredibly overrated and his screenplay has a dead quality about it. I think the picture got overvalued but I still enjoyed it. It was an entertaining film even though I didn’t think it was great De Palma. When you think about it afterwards, it’s Costner who bugs you. But I think it’s the way the role was written and conceived. The character is such a dumbo. I mean, I don’t think that’s particularly Costner’s fault because he showed in Bull Durham that he could read a line if he was given a line to read, but his scenes in The Untouchables with his wife were deadly. My God!

OA: I liked Blood Simple a whole bunch and I know you did not like it—

Kael: I didn’t, but I really liked Raising Arizona. I was quite shocked at Miller's Crossing and even more shocked by Barton Fink. It seems to me a misconception at almost every level. It’s a terrible picture. The Coen brothers’ sense of style is so limiting too. Very strange, arrogant conception of the past. An appalling movie. I thought the roles played by John Turturro in both Miller’s Crossing and Barton Fink were deeply offensive. I mean the idea of representing someone like Clifford Odets as a stupid man, almost retarded, is quite bewildering. I think I hated just about everything about that movie although I thought John Mahoney looked like William Faulkner and brought a certain elegance to his opening scene. And I loved Judy Davis. I think she’s one of the actresses I would list with the women I listed before. I think she’s absolutely marvelous but she didn’t get much of a chance in that movie.

OA: One of the things I found pleasing about The Fabulous Baker Boys was that we did not have to watch Jeff Bridges and Michelle Pfeiffer having sex. The audience was permitted to understand that the two made love as most people do—in bed without their clothes. Are too many sex scenes put into movies out of a knee-jerk response to pandering and selling out?

Kael: I think they’re put into movies out of the feeling that people will put down the

movie if it doesn’t have them, and I agree with you they have become extremely banal. For a number of years the couples rolled over each other endlessly, and now, I mean, the scenes work so hard to try to give you some new angle, and they’re just not very good. There just isn’t much way to photograph those scenes and do anything with them. I don’t know whether, if they went all the way, whether they’d be any better. I doubt it. We’re so aware that we’re watching actors playing lovers that it’s very uncomfortable. I find it tedious. I saw a movie the other day with such a long love scene that I could feel the audience getting bored during it. And I’m sure that the filmmakers thought they were being honest. It’s in The Prince of Tides, and suddenly, after a certain number of scenes, there’s a culminating love scene between Nick Nolte and Barbara Streisand and it’s the most boring scene in the movie.

OA: Those scenes all look the same.

Kael: It might be better if they kept their clothes on. We could at least get some texture from the clothing.

OA: Well, that’s what they did in Baker Boys, and it seems to me it just kept you on the edge all the time.

Kael: That’s a wonderful movie. It wasn’t a success which is very mysterious. Sometimes movies which you would think would be big box-office successes just don’t attract the wide audiences, either because of the way they’re promoted or because the audience is just drawn to Terminator and Lethal Weapon and doesn’t relate to the nuances of something like Married to the Mob or The Fabulous Baker Boys. I just assumed Married to the Mob would be a big success because it’s such a charming comedy, and it seemed like popular movie making, but there was nobody there, and when I saw Frankie and Johnny, which isn’t nearly as good as those movies, but still has a moderate appeal, I was quite surprised. There were six people in the theater. It’s almost a miracle when a movie that really has charm like Beetlejuice draws an audience. It becomes a fluke when a film that really has any originality wins an audience. I thought it was amazing that Drugstore Cowboy did as well as it did, and it by no means was a big success. It’s bewildering. It’s as if there was some way you were going to be penalized for doing something halfway intellgent. It's scary, isn't it?

OA: At least three movies based on books by William Faulkner—Intruder in the Dust, The Reivers, and The Long Hot Summer—are all pretty good. Does that mean that Faulkner has been treated well by Hollywood?

Kael: Not really. They’ve been changed enormously. I think Intruder in the Dust was the most faithful one and of course he was present during the making of that. The others had been pretty well turned into very different material from what he had in mind. But he hasn’t fared as badly as some people. Hemingway has probably been done worse even though Hemingway has been filmed much more than Faulkner. In many ways the closest to Faulkner’s spirit to get on screen is in something like Thieves Like Us which isn’t Faulkner at all. It’s the Altman Southern film that’s just beautifully made and it has something of a Faulkner spirit to it.

OA: What kind of effect have VCRs had on Hollywood?

Kael: You simply don’t get the full picture, and you don’t get the size and intensity. You lose all the detail if you look at a movie that is particularly visual—a movie by a great film director on a big screen—and then look at it on television. You almost want to weep because it’s just no longer the great movie you saw. What you’re getting is essentially the narrative and the acting but you’re losing almost everything else and you’re losing the emotional resonances which come from the full image. It’s heartbreaking to think of the work of the greatest directors being known by people only from television images. On the other hand, I’ve exposed my grandson to the early films on VCR because that’s the only way he’s going to see them. I didn’t want him to feel that Home Alone was the only kind of movie there was, so he has seen Buster Keaton and the Sabu version of The Thief of Baghdad and The Crimson Pirate, the Burt Lancaster film, and dozens of adventure classics and early comedies. The only way I could make it possible for him to see them was on a VCR. So it’s better than nothing. It’s certainly better than nothing. But the tragedy is that people aren’t going to theaters often when a terrific movie opens like, say, Enemies or The Unbearable Lightness of Being, because they feel they’ll catch up with it on VCR later. If your standard of a good movie is, say, The Terminator there’s no particular reason to see it on a big screen. You can get the same kind of dumb kicks at home and have a beer with your friends at the same time. But this may change. You can’t be too long in the face about it. Things may change in a couple of years. A couple of big movies may make the difference—you can’t tell in a popular art form. Things change very quickly. I could never have predicted that the audiences who seemed so hip in the seventies would accept the kind of movies they accepted in the eighties. It still bewilders me that people who really enjoyed The Godfather movies and Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and a lot of very hip movies by Altman, could then accept what they accepted later on. I didn’t think that there was a way that the culture would go back. We’ve had a strange cultural regression and it’s dumbfounding. I could not have believed the people would accept the Gulf War the way it was accepted and the same kind of thing has happened at the movies.

OA: Where do you find the MTV influence on movies?

Kael: It’s in movie editing a lot, in showing off. It’s in sort of empty cuts. MTV doesn’t have much to offer movies, but you do see a lot of fast cutting in movies as if they were afraid of boring the MTV generation. But the MTV generation I think is bored by MTV.

OA: Most soundtracks sound hideous, what’s wrong with them?

Kael: You mean because they’re loud and vulgar, and the music is appalling? Well, the music is used to pad out the meaning of the movie, and it’s used to goose up the movie, to give it a kick that it didn’t have. Every once in a while you’ll get an interesting soundtrack. There have been a couple in recent years. The sound was quite marvelous on Altman’s Vincent and Theo, and there was a fascinating soundtrack by Peter Gabriel for Scorcese’s Christ movie. These are about the only two really interesting soundtracks I can think of. That’s pretty incredible, isn’t it? Godard did wonderful work with sound, and it looked as if he was going to revolutionize the way people treated sound in movies, and now it’s going back to the most conventional kind of padded out stuff. Now they’re not even doing rock very much. Now it’s an attempt to reprise the old banal orchestral violin score in the big emotional moment. It’s really an insult to the audience, but the audience basically doesn’t know it’s insulted. I shouldn’t put it that way. Let me put it: The audience may even enjoy being insulted.

OA: The Star Wars soundtrack set us back.

Kael: Star Wars set us back in a lot of ways. Even though I thought the second film in the trilogy was really quite good, as a commercial phenomenon it set us back. And the Indiana Jones movie added to that even though I like the second one of that series also, but what they represented in terms of moviemaking was that the studios realized that the audiences didn’t mind being treated like kids at a Saturday afternoon serial.

OA: As a fan of musicals, how do you view the state of movie musicals? What was the last good one?

Kael: It’s an almost nonexistent genre now. I’d say the last really spectacular musical is the MGM Pennies from Heaven. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the reviews panning that movie. It’s very sad that Herbert Ross having done that amazing movie, should have gone back to making stuff like Steel Magnolias and made money at it, when he failed commercially with Pennies from Heaven. It is hard to know how people can do things that are ambitious or large spirited when their worst works succeed and their best work fails. But there have been movies that you couldn’t really call musicals like The Rose, the Bette Midler film. There have been movies that used a lot of music and some of them have been pretty good, but it has not been a popular form. I can’t believe it in some ways. I can’t believe Aretha Franklin was used so sparingly. Except for The Blues Brothers she never really got a chance to show on screen what she could do. There have been so many tremendous performers who just haven’t had a chance to be part of a great musical conception.

OA: What about James Brown in a musical?

Kael: Oh sure, it seems unbelievable that a great American art form that seemed to have every opportunity to expand and to adapt with the times got lost and buried. The whole age of rock is not represented by a single important movie.

OA: I’m quite interested in your five months of employment in Hollywood in 1979.

Kael: Well, it actually went very well. I had a very good time. The papers were determined to make it sound, and the magazines were determined to make it sound, as if it had been a terrible blow up, and yet there was nothing of the kind. Newsweek printed an item saying that after a couple of weeks, or something, I had managed to alienate everyone in Hollywood. And that item came out before I had started because when I left The New Yorker I had a commitment to go to the hospital to have some minor surgery so before I got started they had printed that I had been this incredible fiasco, but that’s sort of, you know, par. There’s a great deal of hostility towards critics in general and toward a woman critic in particular, and an independent-minded one, and so you read an awful lot of stuff about yourself that isn’t true.

OA: What exactly was your position?

Kael: It was just executive consultant and it was a very flexible position and I talked to anybody who stopped by and wanted to talk to me or any executive who wanted to discuss some of his decisions. An awful lot of the time in Hollywood was spent mulling over the same things because you talk to people and two days later they come back and talk over the same problems and I got very impatient. It’s hard not to show it. It’s hard to keep your mind open enough to consider the problems as those people face them. I was offered other positions afterward. But I really wanted out, I didn’t want to go on in a different capacity because writing is, really, if you grew up as I did, the highest thing you could do and so the jobs where you make more money or wield executive decisions don’t compare to the freedom of writing. It’s the freedom that’s fun.

OA: I’m interested in that whole term because when you think of your exalted position at the time and—

Kael: “Exalted” is putting it kind of strong.

OA: Well, as being the most important voice in movie criticism. There is a lot of significance in your trading movie reviewing for moviemaking.

Kael: Well, remember I did have a good position in that everyone in L.A. was incredibly nice to me, and they either respected me or feared me, or feared I was really there to write something nasty about them —which I would not have done. What [Warren] Beatty felt when he suggested the position was that what I did in my reviews in pointing out where a movie went wrong, I should be able to do before the movie was made, and so I should be very valuable in the industry. I think to some degree there was something to that but, really, the only thing that went wrong was I missed writing. I loved writing and I loved writing about movies and I had felt at the time—I was turning sixty—that maybe I was written out and that I was saying the same thing over and over again. But after I was there a few months and I read the reviews of other critics, I began to sort of hit the ceiling because people were panning movies that I saw merit in and they were panning performances that I thought were wonderful. I missed having my voice. No one was saying the things I wanted to say and so I arranged to go back to The New Yorker. I went back with sort of a renewed head of steam because I knew I really had more to say. I think I did some of my best work during those ten years after returning from Hollywood. I know that people who review me often say that my first book, I Lost It at the Movies, is my best work. I think they say that because it had a more original impact on them. I think my sensibility was fresher to them, but I think I knew more about movies in these last years. And I think I’m a better writer than I was then. I think some of the writing in the last couple of years...I’m not ashamed of. I don’t feel I fell apart too much. There are places over the years where I think I got too wordy and too descriptive maybe, but it’s partly in order to change. As a critic, as you get older you can’t write the way you did. You have to find new approaches to movies, you can’t tackle them the same way, and so you try to look at them differently and try to write with a different voice sometimes. You’re trying not to be a repetitive drag and so I can understand if they like the early work, which was more hatchetlike, but I think there’s more understanding of the movie process in the later work. Oddly enough when I retired earlier this year, I had the same reaction I had in ’79 of, God, nobody’s saying the things I want to say! It’s driving me crazy, particularly when they pan things that I feel are good, but I know now I can’t return. I’m not physically strong enough to go on with going into New York and waiting in lines and going to see the movies, so it’s tough. But you have to recognize that you’ve reached a point. If I haven’t said it now, I can’t say it. But I still see movies and think, Why hasn’t somebody pointed out this marvelous performance in the corner of this movie?

OA: Some people maintain that absolute power corrupts. In many ways—at least as a link between Hollywood and the audience— you are absolutely the most powerful voice in movieland. Of your Hollywood months you said: “People treated me as if I were a High Priestess!” It must have been hard—

Kael: You say very abrupt four-letter words when they do. You have to cut through that crap. I’m pretty good at being rude and cutting through it using rude language because I don’t like being fawned on. I’m not built for people to fawn over, as they discover after a while.

OA: But you were in a position where people did fawn over you all the time—

Kael: Some did. But you can cut through that.

OA: Was it hard?

Kael: You can reveal that you’re a person, not an eminence, and you know I never took to wearing capes or turbans.

OA: Was it a struggle ever? I would just think hearing praise over and over has got to be—

Kael: You hear a lot of ugliness too. You know there are people who are very hostile and that gets through to you too. Any number of male friends of mine have had to defend me against guys who wanted to beat me up and, in one case, a woman who wanted to.

OA: Did you have any preconceptions about working in Hollywood that materialized into reality?

Kael: Oh, I knew so much about it. I’d read so much and heard so much over the years. I felt a freedom in not having deadlines. I could stay up half the night talking to people, which was fun because I’m a very gregarious person, and when you’re writing to deadline every week you don’t have much time to socialize. No, it wasn’t bad. I enjoyed it, but I enjoyed writing more. I felt as if I wasn’t using my full brain.

OA: Do you enjoy going on movie sets and watching movies being made?

Kael: I’ve only done that a very few times. It’s excruciatingly boring because they do the same thing over and over again, and mostly you’re standing around waiting for the lighting to be arranged for the next shot. No, I really only did it for any lengthy period when I was doing the piece “The Making of The Group” and it’s very boring. I mean, I don’t know who has the patience to stand around movie sets. It’s fun to drop in and see what the locations are like and talk to the people briefly, but the director’s always busy as hell.

OA: A movie I saw a few times because I liked it was David Lynch’s Elephant Man. I understand you urged the right people to help get it made.

Kael: I did. They had passed on it. They had turned it down. I had never met David Lynch and I had no connection with the movie, but I had read the script. I did not think it was a particularly good script, but I thought the idea was such a good idea for David Lynch. I did know his earlier work and I urged them to make the movie, to commit some money to it. I was very excited when I saw the movie because I felt that Lynch had overcome the weaknesses of the script. I was very sad that more reviewers didn’t respond to what went on in that movie because I thought the kind of Victorian sensibility that he brought to it was fascinating. I think people wanted to see it as simple sentimentality whereas I think it had a kind of Dickensian grandeur.

OA: I find it hard to picture you attending the Academy Awards but—

Kael: I’ve never been there. So your instincts were right.

OA: They always award and neglect the wrong movies.

Kael: Almost always. Sometimes there’s nothing to give it to. They tend to go for certain kinds of pictures, and certain people, and others are just systematically neglected. I’ve rarely agreed with the choices but you get used to that. It’s like books on the bestsellers’ list—when are the books you really like up there?

OA: How did your obsession with movies begin?

Kael: I don’t think it’s really an obsession. I know it seems that way, because people have made it sound that way, but I was just as interested, really, in books and theater and music and painting. I mean, I was almost equally interested in all the arts. Somehow I think that I was able to write on movies in a way that, perhaps, I couldn’t write on other things because all the arts came into play in them. I don’t think it’s really that I had that much of a stronger involvement in them than a lot of other people do. But somehow, because I have been writing about them most of my life, it may seem like an obsession.

OA: You report that after college you “wrote plays fairly extensively for a number of years.” Did you ever try to write a screenplay?

Kael: I was just never drawn to it as much. I really got into criticism fairly early, and once I’d gotten into criticism, I realized I could say what I wanted to say. I can make contact with people more directly that way. I’m too direct to be a screenwriter. I would be expressing myself rather than developing character.

OA: So even out of experiment’s sake you never tried, since you began reviewing, a story or a screenplay?

Kael: I’ve played with it a couple of times, but I really love criticism and I think it’s an honorable estate. For at least thirty years people said to me, Why don’t you do something besides criticism?—as if criticism was something inferior. I think they’re terribly wrong, and I think I can be more expressive as a critic than in other forms. I don’t think people realize how much they enjoy reading criticism. I think people take it for granted because there are columns in the papers everyday.

OA: It is said that you never had to see a movie twice before writing about it. This is amazing because your reviews—by dint of their all-inclusiveness—always seem to be the result of more than one viewing. Did you ever have to see a movie twice to get a handle on it?

Kael: No, not to get a handle on it, but a couple of times I’ve gone to see a movie again because I wanted to be sure I was quoting a line accurately or was placing a bit of business in the right scene. I went to see Godfather II after I’d turned in my copy and it was in type, just to make sure there were no inaccuracies in it. I went to see Casualties of War after it was set up in type for the same reason, and Nashville I saw two nights in a row as a fluke. Most of the time, once is enough. I’ve got no great desire to see a movie again.

OA: Well, when you saw those three movies a second time did you pick up anything you had missed in your first viewing?

Kael: I wish I could be humble and say, Oh many things. Let’s leave it at that.

OA: How should a person go about educating himself about movies?

Kael: Oh God, if he has to go about educating himself, forget it. I think that popular culture is something you pick up. It seeps into you. It’s in the environment. I’ve heard of people getting jobs as movie critics and then watching ten classics to get educated in movies. The whole thought makes me want to throw darts at them. If you haven’t picked up an education in movies from what’s available in your area, from television and from VCRs, what’s the point? You can never catch up. Sure, you can pick out some of the great ones to go see, but that’s not the same thing as seeing what the great ones spring out of, which is all the crap. Part of getting to know movies is sorting out the great ones from the crap for yourself, seeing all those lousy Warner Brothers movies, out of which the really good ones came, and there’s no way you can educate yourself in that.

OA: I’ve heard a few people say that they have stopped reading you because you have made them feel stupid at times for liking something they shouldn’t. Have you ever—

Kael: Tough.

OA: I take it then that you never tried to tone down your criticism.

Kael: Sometimes simple humanity makes you do so. Oh sure, there are times when I’m not nearly as rough on a performance as I feel because it’s just cruel. I mean, the person can’t help being incompetent. There are a lot of actors or a lot of writers and directors who are just very bad and if you pan them once that seems to be enough. I try not to pan the same person over and over again. If I’ve panned somebody’s work very harshly and then see another movie that’s lousy in the same way, I don’t review it because it’s ugly to pan somebody over and over again. It’s vicious. What can you do? Most of these people can’t help it. It’s much more to the point to try to spot who has talent in the movies than who doesn’t.

OA: Has a critic of your work ever caused you to change?

Kael: It’s hard to change. I’ve tried different things because of objections. Once a reviewer claimed I used the “I” form exclusively and so I didn’t used the “I” form for a solid year, and the only person who noticed was a friend of mine who said, “Your work has become impersonal lately.” But he didn’t notice why and nobody else noticed either. I thought, He’s right, it is becoming impersonal—it’s losing something that was valuable there. So I went back to the “I” form. A lot of people have objected to my using the “you” form and they don’t seem to realize it’s a simple way of trying to be an American and not being a Britisher and saying, One thinks that. I hate the Anglicisms that have crept into critical writing. I loathe that “one” that you read all the time. You think, Who is that goddamn “one”? And so I try to write the way Americans talk and they use “you” very flexibly and so I use it even though I get rapped for it all time. I’d say among the things I get rapped for the most that’s probably number one and number two is my praise of Brian De Palma.

OA: We say “Y’all.”

Kael: Sure, that’s a way of getting away from “one” also. “Y’all” is sort of nice. It has a soft, easy quality. “One” formalizes everything.

OA: Is there a service in warning people away from vile movies?

Kael: Normally what I’m interested in writing about are the movies that I don’t think get the praise that they deserve, but I do think it’s important to use the destructive function of criticism. Sure, and I think that the thing is, if people aren’t warned off certain movies they’re not going to trust you on certain good ones. But I’d like to have gotten more people to go see a few oddball pictures that have opened. I’d love to have written about Hearts of Darkness. I really felt very strongly about that but I thought if I start writing about something I’ll finish myself off in no time.

OA: There’s a constant argument going on whether you should see the movie first or read the book first.

Kael: Well I don’t think there’s any question but that you should read the book first because the movie fixes its images in your mind so that you couldn’t read the book afterwards without seeing it in the movie’s terms. It would wreck a great book as in the case of The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence. It would be heartbreaking to read it in terms of the actress [Sammi Davis] who played the leading role, because she was totally inadequate to it, and you would never see the dimensions of the character on the page. In any kind of honor to the book of a great writer you must read the book first because the movie is almost inevitably going to diminish the material.

OA: How would you describe The New Yorker?

Kael: I think it has been the best literary magazine in the country and I think most writers recognize that, but that doesn’t mean it’s anywhere near as good as it should be. It has been, though liberal, extremely conventional in many ways, and I think my column shocked regular New Yorker readers. The first few years I got very hostile responses from the readers and from a lot of the staff because the writing was colloquial and direct and deliberately so and deliberately crude in many ways. I felt the only way of being honest and writing about a popular form like movies was to try to write about them in the terms in which we actually experienced them instead of using the language of the classroom, which was more commonplace in film reviews then. In The New Yorker they expected a more genteel treatment and more respect for foreign films, and of course the first movie I reviewed for it was Bonnie and Clyde and that was sort of the opening shot of the new generation in movies. I had written the Bonnie and Clyde piece for The New Republic, where I was working at the time, and they had refused to print it. The arts editor of the magazine actually quit in disgust when the publisher refused to print the Bonnie and Clyde piece. He was deeply upset because he loved it and felt something new was happening in criticism and he just couldn’t stand the publisher saying no to him. So I wasn’t alone at least. And I had built up a certain following by then. I had been writing for various magazines for sometime, but that piece coming out of The New Yorker was a jolt to a lot of New Yorker staff people as well as readers. I don’t think you would know the atmosphere of the times. The movie had been panned as an insult to the audience, as bloody and offensive, by just about every major critic in the country. And so the praise of it coming out in The New Yorker was quite a shock to people. And I do have a fairly strong voice, it’s not a timid voice and that, coming from a woman in particular, added to the shock so that I remember getting a letter from an eminent New Yorker writer suggesting that I was trampling through the pages of the magazine with cowboy boots covered with dung and that I should move on out with my cowboy boots. William Shawn showed a lot of courage in sticking by me in those early years because I would get letters all the time saying, Why don’t you get a job on a sports page and learn to write? People were more used to movies being treated in a magazine like The New Yorker as something a gentleman might condescend to now and then but wouldn’t take very seriously. I felt that the truth of how we respond to movies, and the sexual aspects of movies, were far more important responses than critics wanted to acknowledge and so all that came out in the reviews too. But once people started getting used to me, the mail started changing. But I got angry responses whenever I panned anything that was liberal in intention or virtuous or European. European films have a respectability in this country that is way out of proportion to their merit.

OA: But The New York Times likes every European movie.

Kael: Over the years I’ve disagreed with so many of my colleagues that the public often gets confused, particularly when The New Yorker and The New York Times are so distant from each other. The New York Times shows more taste than most newspapers in the country and people in the East, in particular, want to regard it as some sort of exemplar of culture. And I think in general its critical press is really fourth rate and in movies it has not been a shining example of what it might be. The Sunday paper covers just about every foreign film as if it were an important cultural entity and people read all the praise of these incredibly terrible movies and go see the movies and can’t disagree with The New York Times and so it’s a shock to them to pick up The New Yorker and find the movie panned and so you have to deal with that over the years.

OA: You said The New Yorker is not as good as it could be. What do you think it needs to be better?

Kael: I think a certain Anglophilia crept into it very early on—when it was founded really. It started out with a sort of English tone and a kind of elite sophisticated Manhattan tone which was fake English. Even though it became political and much more democratic, and took very useful political stands during the Vietnam War years, it never got rid of that polite English tone. And it’s too much a magazine that seems directed toward an educated reader. It never seems to invite people in. It’s a magazine that could stand a little dose of multiculturalism in the fullest sense of that. It needs to be more open, less of the same circle of short story writers endlessly repeated. You get tired of the same words, all those long words Updike uses. It’s great to have Updike but they should have a lot of people for whom words don’t multiply so easily.

OA: I have trouble with The New Yorker ignoring the crime in the city.

Kael: That’s part of the problem. It’s not been very realistic about what went on in the city. It’s as if it wanted to maintain a sort of elite tone even when the city had deteriorated and that tone was no longer in any way relevant to the city.

OA: In almost every one of your books you give thanks to William Shawn. How would you describe him as a person and an editor?

Kael: Well, he gave me a shot at something. He knew I was trying to do something different and he gave me a chance at it. I’m not sure that any other editor would have stuck by me the way he did, and he was a wonderful editor in the sense that you knew he wanted you to write your best. He was always interested in what I was saying, and if he liked a piece particularly, and didn’t have a chance to tell me so at the office he would call me at night. He might call at midnight to argue about a comma, and I mean, it seems absurd, it is absurd, and yet you can’t help loving and respecting someone who cares that much about the magazine and wants your writing to be as clear as possible. He made me clarify my thinking simply by his devotion to meaning. And he didn’t care how long something ran. Sometimes I think he was wrong. There were a few times when I wanted to trim what I turned in and he said, No—he thought it was better at the full length. I’m not sure he was right, but the very fact that he felt that a writer had a natural phrasing and a natural length, and that a subject could be treated at a natural length, that you didn’t have to cram everything into a half column, gave you a sense that you were doing mattered. That’s a very unusual editor, especially in New York in a glossy magazine on a weekly schedule.

OA: When The New Yorker was sold you were quoted as saying: “What could endanger the tradition [of editorial integrity at The New Yorker]—and would probably destroy the magazine—would be the appointment of an editor from the outside to succeed William Shawn”. Of course that is precisely what happened. William Shawn was ousted and Robert Gottlieb, an outsider, was put in. How has the magazine fared?

Kael: I think what I said was fundamentally true. I think the magazine has changed in some ways, some for the better, but a lot for the not so good. I do think certain traditions have been broken down. There’s an awful lot of sloppiness in the writing in the front of the magazine in the “Goings On” section, a lot of careless writing that sounds like advertising copy. And I don’t think the critical departments have fared very well. I think in some ways the fiction may have improved. Gottlieb has more open taste than Shawn did and is much less restrictive about the language and theme and that has been good for the magazine. But I think, in general, he has hired poorly in the critical departments. There are still wonderful people. There’s Arlene Croce, who is simply a magnificent writer, and there are many fine writers who are posted in spots around the world and do wonderful writing, but I think the weekly critical columns are really part of the lifeblood of the magazine, and when those become mediocre, the magazine is in trouble. You don’t open the various critical columns now with the excitement that you should. He has not hired people, say, of the stature of Harold Rosenberg or some of the others who held those posts. I find myself reading the critical departments with disbelief often. Shawn read very widely, periodicals and books, and tried to get the best person in the world for any kind of opening he had. I don’t think Gottlieb puts the same kind of effort and care into his selection of people. The worst failure, I think, of Gottlieb’s regime, is that the book department is so bad. Everyone assumed that coming out of publishing he would bring life to the book section and it’s deathly. It’s so rare to read a review that you really want to go all the way through or to read a new writer, read a new critical approach and feel, God, he’s got somebody hot on this. You just don’t feel any heat in the book section and that could be an important part of the magazine. There’s an incredible staff of people and having seen their devotion and their intelligence and what they want to do, I’m often disappointed they don’t get a chance to get at livelier subjects in “The Talk of the Town.” The title of it is an embarrassment. What’s in it is so rarely the talk of any town.

OA: Do you think Mr. Gottlieb has tried to maintain the tradition? The look at least has not undergone too many changes.

Kael: I think the covers are better, not necessarily aesthetically, but they have a little more vitality. They’d gotten to the point where you couldn’t tell one week’s from the last week’s. I do think Gottlieb has opened the atmosphere some, I just don’t think he is as dedicated as Shawn was. I think he has other things in his life besides the magazine. He isn’t thinking about it all the time and reading and seeing if there’s a new voice somewhere that he should go after. That was the great thing about Shawn, that he would go after new voices. Let me put it this way: I think Gottlieb wants to put out the best magazine he can. I’m not always sure he’s as daring in what he prints as he might be and that holds particularly in the book section. There are old fogey voices in the book section much too often.

OA: You are a TV news junkie. Isn’t it kind of depressing to see the way politicians, or candidates, get away with so much?

Kael: Yeah, but it’s fascinating to see what they get away with and how much. I don’t understand people who say, There’s no point in reading newspapers because they all lie. Teenagers say that or: There’s no point in watching the news—they don’t tell you the whole truth. That seems to assume that you can’t piece anything together or learn anything, and of course you can.

OA: Are you working on anything now?

Kael: I’m making notes on something. There’s been a lot of stuff to clean up. I was behind on correspondence. I hate not answering things promptly, but things have piled up on me, and a lot of mail has come in, so I’m behind on that. I feel that I should clean up the mail before I sit down to write—which is silly. I’ll never clean it up. There are a couple of subjects that I want to write about but I don’t want to talk them to death before I write about them. The other thing is, I don’t have the energy I used to have. I used to be able to count on just being able to go all night and day. You know, sometimes I wouldn’t see the movie I wanted to write about until the night before my deadline at the magazine, but I knew I could stay up all night and write the piece and I’d be in the clear. I just can’t count on energy like that anymore.

OA: Have you cut back on going to movies since your retirement?

Kael: Yeah, there are a lot of stinkers, at least I assume they’re stinkers on the basis of what they’re about and who’s made them, that I figure I’ll wait for and watch on TV, or on HBO. But generally when they turn up, they’re such stinkers that I don’t have the interest in watching them on HBO anyway.

OA: Sounds like a sort of retirement gift.

Kael: Yeah, it is a gift. If you have any brains at all, you can’t watch the mediocre movies all your life. I mean, there has to be something else going on in your head. There are a lot of things I want to do. It’s more fun to be with people than to watch some stinky movie.

OA: Is a person lucky to be a movie critic?

Kael: It really is a wonderfully exciting field to write about when the movies are good. When they’re not so good, it’s to despair. The really bad movies you can write about with some passion and anger. It’s the mediocre ones that wear you down. They’re disgusting to write about because you can feel yourself slipping into the same mediocrity and stupidity. And you feel you’re boring the readers and yourself. When you start falling asleep while you’re writing a review, you know how dull the movie is. The danger for criticism is that people will want to become critics in order to become television celebrities, rather than enjoying the pleasure of writing and the excitement of trying to define and describe what you’ve seen.

OA: Do you miss writing reviews?

Kael: Yes, but I know I’ve got to adjust to it. That’s part of adapting to getting older. You’ve got to recognize that the time for certain things has past and, I’m not an idiot, I know I would not write at my best if I went on. You know, you start repeating yourself— you write the same phrase, you write the same descriptions. I’ve already had the problem of working on a paragraph that I thought was pretty good and looking up what I said about that director’s work the last time I wrote about him and finding out it was almost exactly the same paragraph. Well, you know, it’s time to quit.