From this week’s New Yorker article on Pauline Kael: “In 1970…Kael conned a UCLA assistant professor, Howard Suber, out of publishing an essay on Citizen Kane: she promised a collaboration, vanished with Suber’s proprietary research, and ultimately used it for an extended piece of her own, ‘Raising Kane’ (1971). It’s seen today as one of the defining works of her career.”
She will knock you down...
Kael is great fun to read. She was wrong about a lot of films, but she often wrote about them in a way that was at least half-convincing, if only for the bon mots circling those convictions. Never a fan of Streep, her take on her in The Deer Hunter at least doesn’t confuse the character with the actor: “It’s a testament to Meryl Streep’s heroic resources as a mime that she makes herself felt–she has practically no lines.” And she’s fair in puzzling over why Diana Ross never became a bigger movie star: in reviewing Mahogany, she laments the film’s use of old showbiz tropes and outdated melodrama, and flat-out says that Ross “deserves better than white hand-me-downs.” Her essay, “Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, the Numbers” from 1980 seems sadly parallel to the demise of the book business. (I try not to read it too often.)
I have a battered copy of her For Keeps: Thirty Years at the Movies, which I bought from the remainder shelf of Borealis Books in Ithaca years ago, so I may not go in for any of the books that are about to come out in this fall’s Kael revival. But I do have high hopes that we’ll get film critics with renewed interest in her as more than just a figure in their background (some reviewers would do really well to just read her).
If it trickles over into book reviewing, all the better, since so much of it is flat and uninformed. Maybe if you come to a reading some day, dear reader, I can tell you about a particularly lazy one–the rehash of the publicity material that was sent out with the galleys and re-edited as an “interview,” just by adding “said”! And she got paid for it! It’s a great story…
