Influential Film Critic Pauline Kael Dies
September 4 -- NEW YORK (Reuters) — Pauline Kael, whose long and passionate movie reviews in the New Yorker mobilized and divided fans and filmmakers alike, died on Monday at her home in Great Barrington, Mass., a spokeswoman for the magazine said.
Kael, who was 82, had Parkinson's disease.
New Yorker editor David Remnick praised Kael for "obliterating the wall between 'high' and 'low"' in the criticism she wrote for the magazine between 1968 and her retirement in 1991.
"With her reviews of films like Bonnie and Clyde and Last Tango in Paris she shared her delight in both the sublime and the profane. She shaped American film criticism for generations to come and, more important, the national understanding of the movie," Remnick said in a statement.
A small woman with sharp opinions and a muscular prose style, Kael was born in Petaluma, Calif., on June 19, 1919. She grew up in San Francisco and studied philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. After a succession of modest jobs — cooking, sewing, and selling books, among other things — Kael began writing film reviews for small West Coast newspapers and magazines.
But her professional apprenticeship took place between 1955 and 1960, when she ran the Berkeley Cinema Guild and Studio and supplied detailed and outspoken notes on the movies she had programmed.
Going Against the GrainA brief stint as film critic for McCall's ended when she gave the women's magazine a devastating pan of The Sound of Music. She called the wholesome, hugely popular musical "The Sound of Money," and decried its "sickly, goody-goody songs."
Legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn then gave her work a new home — and an expansive one, since Kael wrote at length when a picture stirred her enthusiasm, employing punchy, colloquial language at odds with the magazine's (and her boss's) buttoned-down style.
Besides the trend-setting violence and romantic amorality of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and the sexual daring of Last Tango in Paris (1973), Kael also responded to the complex casualness of Nashville (1975).
