Pauline Kael - 100th birthday anniversary

[Le Chiffre]

Pauline Kael, one of the most celebrated film critics America has ever produced, was born 100 year ago today, on June 19th, 1919. She had a famous conflict with Welles when her 1971 essay, RAISING KANE, published in THE CITIZEN KANE BOOK, accused him of stealing writing credit from Herman Mankiewicz. Her accusation was subsequently proven wrong by Welles scholars, but some damage had already been done. Ironically, Kael had, three years prior to that, written ORSON WELLES - THERE AIN'T NO WAY, one of the most eloquent defenses of Welles. That article was also partly a review of Welles's then-latest film, CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, which she ardently lauded after the film's box office chances in the U.S. had been torpedoed by a vicious review in the New York Times by Bosley Crowther. What happened to Kael's attitude towards Welles between those two pieces?

Here's a tribute from The New Yorker, where she reviewed movies during her heyday during the 1970s, when she was one of the most famous, if not the most famous, critic in America:
https://www.newyorker.com/books/double- ... uline-kael

Here is the complete text of RAISING KANE:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1971 ... ing-kane-i

And here is Peter Bogdanovich's rebuttal, THE KANE MUTINY, published the following year in Esquire magazine. Bogdanovich now claims that this rebuttal was largely written by Welles himself:
https://classic.esquire.com/article/197 ... OS6ce-HppI

"In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising." - Pauline Kael

[RayKelly]

Kudos to Peter Bogdanovich for either writing The Kane Mutiny for Esquire in October 1972 or allowing his name to be used.

Also worth recognizing are two earlier rebuttals from Jonathan Rosenbaum and Joseph McBride:

Rough Sledding with Pauline Kael — Film Heritage, Fall 1971

I Missed It at the Movies: Objections to Raising Kane — Film Comment, Spring 1972 — https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2018/10/i-missed-it-at-the-movies-objections-to-%E2%80%9Craising-kane%E2%80%9D/

[tonyw]

This is one person whose centenary should not be celebrated. For Lindsay Anderson's reaction to her his NEVER APOLOGIZE collection of essays is worth consulting. He confronted her in person and in his writing.

[Le Chiffre]

He was probably angry about her negative review of "IF...", which she compared unfavorably to Vigo's ZERO FOR CONDUCT:
https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2018/03/0 ... line-kael/

“Pauline Kael is such a caricature of the journalistic bitch,” says Anderson, allowing a trace of pique to surface. “Her reputation as a critic of intellectual distinction is totally unmerited, and I’m simply amazed that no one has taken her on in print.”

[Le Chiffre]

Interesting statement from Rosenbaum's rebuttal:

Her basic contention, that the script of KANE is almost solely the work of Herman J. Mankiewicz, seems well-supported and convincing — although hardly earth-shaking for anyone who was reading Penelope Houston’s interview with John Houseman in Sight and Sound nine years ago (Autumn 1962).

He changed his mind later of course, but this shows that it was possible for leading Welles scholars to be taken in based on the available information at the time.


THE KANE MUTINY is a strong piece, no matter who wrote it.

Mank went off with Houseman and did his version, while I stayed in Hollywood and wrote mine. At the end, naturally, I was the one who was making the picture, after all—who had to make the decisions. I used what I wanted of Mank’s and, rightly or wrongly, kept what I liked of my own.

So there is a version that is entirely Welles?

*

National Review: "What strikes the reader of Kael today is how seriously she took her responses to the movies, and how she tried to understand the reasons behind her responses. She was a true intellectual. Like a true intellectual, she loved irony and opposed cant*, euphemism, and cliché."

The Perils and Pleasures of Pauline Kael:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com ... line-kael/

Just before leaving San Francisco for New York and beginning work on her first major book, she delivered this impassioned commentary on politics and the arts on one of the final broadcasts of her public radio show: “Do you really want to be endlessly confirmed in the opinions you already hold? Don’t you even want to hear a good case made for other points of view, so that you can test and sharpen your own theories?”

Those words of over 50 years ago couldn’t hold more significance today in our era of safe spaces, cancel culture, trigger warnings, and debate over free speech. Kael helped redefine popular arts and media criticism by insisting on taking American films and TV seriously as a cultural—and political—force.

Cant-
hypocritical and sanctimonious talk, typically of a moral, religious, or political nature.

[Florinaldo]

So there is a version that is entirely Welles?

Robert Carringer's essay "The Scripts of Citizen Kane" reviews each phase of the very involved writing process. He was able to examine the surviving drafts and the various letters and memos that were generated; he identifies which contributions were from HM and OW respectively, as well as JH's input. As I recall the two main writers did work separately on the script, after HM had produced the first draft(s), in part because they were separated by geography. I don't recall one version wholly by Welles being mentioned, I may be wrong, but there were whole swaths which he brought into the evolving drafts, as well as extensively revising HM's work. And of course other changes were made afterwards during shooting.

The essay has been reprinted a few times (e.g. in Naremore's Citizen Kane: a Casebook or in the scarcer and pricier Perspectives on Citizen Kane assembled by Gottesman), and should not be too difficult to locate. It answers most, if not all, questions regarding the collaborative authorship of the script.

[RayKelly]

Someone posted a pdf of Robert Carringer's 1978 paper The Scripts of Citizen Kane on Scribd several years ago.

https://www.scribd.com/document/231563552/The-Scripts-of-Citizen-Kane-R-Carringer

The all important conclusion:

[Le Chiffre]

Thanks Ray. There are only a couple of pages from Carringer's article that are available to read without subscribing to it, but he does say this about the Bogdanovich rebuttal:

The more or less official reply was made in his behalf by critic-director Peter Bogdanovich ("The Kane Mutiny," Esquire, October 1972). Bogdanovich's case was based mainly on testimony by Welles partisans and Welles himself; judged strictly on the nature of Bogdanovich's evidence his argument was not much stronger than Kael's.

Interesting how Carringer's conclusions about the Kane script can be accepted as gospel by almost all Welles scholars when his conclusions about the recutting of Ambersons (in OEDIPUS IN INDIANAPOLIS) are reviled by most of the same Welles scholars.

Meanwhile, even after Carringer's piece had been published, John Houseman continued to trash Welles on the authorship issue all the way up to this 1987 South Bank Show:
https://vimeo.com/114983081

Welles told Bogdanovich that he thought Houseman's own contribution to the Kane script was worthy of a writing credit, "but for some reason, he's never wanted to take that bow. It gives him more pleasure to say I didn't write it."

Kael offered an apology of sorts in her book, 5001 NIGHTS AT THE MOVIES, when she described the Kane screenplay as being by Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles.

[tonyw]

Yes, "apology of sorts" but no retraction for the damage she did by her vicious writing. Look at the way she constantly denigrates Susan Clark in her reviews! She is a disgrace to film criticism as well as a blacklist supporter as seen in her earlier condemnation of SALT OF THE EARTH (1954).

[Le Chiffre]

Thanks Tony, I was not aware of her Salt review. Here's part of a writeup about it:

"As previously noted, contemporary critical reaction was mixed, but in most cases Salt received positive, often outstanding, reviews. Many commentators, while endorsing the film's gripping social realism, added disparaging remarks concerning stilted portrayals of management and alleged propaganda content. Among the skeptics, none was more outspoken than Pauline Kael. In an extended review, Kael, in 1954, blasted Salt as 'as clear a piece of Communist propaganda as we have had in many years.' Ridiculing the Left, she allowed that Salt could 'seem true for those liberals and progressives whose political thinking has never gone beyond the thirties.' For deluded leftists, she argued, 'Depression social consciousness' was an 'exposed nerve' which, if touched, became 'the only reality.' To Kael, the key danger in the picture lay in potential Communist exploitation of local grievances and principles that 'no thoughtful American' could reject. Communist propaganda, she assured her readers, 'captures the direction of groups struggling for status.' In short, Salt constituted 'shrewd propaganda for the urgent business of the U.S.S.R.' (qtd. in Lorence, pp. 195-96).

Although he professed respect for Kael's usually sharp critical faculties, Jarrico insisted that the renowned commentator had a blind spot on Salt that merely reflected the temper of the times. Jarrico was especially concerned about Kael's employment of 'parallelism,' a practice common among 1950s anticommunists. Her argument that Salt's themes of labor, minority, and women's rights were Communist ideas was flawed, he insisted. The reviewer's equation of these themes with Communist ideas, and her simple assumption that they were inserted because the Salt group included CP members, was, in Jarrico's words, 'not enough.' He argued that effective analysis now required a 'historical approach' that transcended one-dimensional charges of propagandist intent. (Lorence, p. 196)."

[JMcBride]

Kael was a political reactionary, as her assault on SALT OF THE EARTH
most glaringly demonstrates. Zelma Wilson, the widow of the film's
author, Michael Wilson, told me how damaging and hurtful Kael's
attack was on the later reception of this blacklisted film. The film
industry and US government did everything possible -- including
using violence, deportation, informants, and pressure on
the projectionists' union -- to stop the film in 1954. Zelma
Wilson, an architect, was blacklisted from her profession, as
was her husband (Frank Capra was one of those who informed
on him). She told me the filmmakers (who also included
blacklistees Herbert Biberman and Paul Jarrico) were most proud
of the feminist aspects of the film, which is also
pro-labor and pro-Latino/a. When I show it to my students,
they are astonished that such a film was made in the America of 1954.
(After I wrote the first volume of my biography of Capra, I realized
that the hero of the book and of Capra's life is Michael Wilson.)

[Le Chiffre]

I've always thought of her as pretty liberal, but that is a bit surprising to see her label SOTE as "Communist propaganda". I haven't read much of her writing from the 50s, but I couldn't find any mention the film at all in the 5001 Nights book.

She did say this about Nixon in the early 70s: "I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them."

[Colmena]

The real scandal of Kael on Welles is that in this essay where she reprimands Welles for ripping off Mank, she's ripping off Howard Suber!

How's this for hypocrisy?:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-book ... IK20111110

Also, somewhere I read Pauline saying that she only needs to see a movie once to "get it"-- something like that.
Can anyone help me locate that quote?
Thanks!

[Le Chiffre]

According to the article, Suber had no contract and he was paid $375 for his work. He claims he had some informal agreements made with Kael over the phone, but it's doubtful that would stand up in any court. It's also interesting that Kael refused to speak at UCLA until Suber gave her an apology. I'm not an expert on this issue, but what exactly did Kael steal from Suber that had not already been asserted publicly by John Houseman in the 1962 Sight and Sound interview cited by Rosenbaum?

*

Obituary for Kael, published in The Guardian, three days after her death (September 6th, 2001), decries her failure to do more for non-American cinema:
Exit the hatchet woman:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2001/s ... tsfeatures

Seeing a movie once and believing this was always enough - oh, infallible subjectivity! - had occasionally unfortunate results for Kael, like the time in Jeremiah Johnson when she thought Robert Redford gave the Indians the finger, when he gives them the peace sign.

Kael was also notorious for avoiding film festivals, with the result that her lamentations about the woeful state of world cinema can usually be demolished with the simple question: How can you know? This, allied to her heedless dismissal of so many foreign masterpieces (by Resnais and Antonioni, to mention but two), made for moments of nativist xenophobia. As John Gregory Dunne wrote in 1973, "She sniffs out fashionable 'anti-Americanism' like a lady from the DAR [the rightwing Daughters of the American Revolution], and God help the trendy foreigner or American living abroad who she thinks is spitting on the flag."

Waving the flag was more excusable in Kael's heyday because the 1970s were such a rich period in American cinema. But the long-term result of such an influential critic ignoring so much worthwhile foreign work is that just about every other mainstream critic has followed suit. This has dampened the desire of filmgoers to see foreign movies (since they rarely hear about them), with the upshot that distributors - who pay more attention to critics than you might think - are much warier of picking them up than they were in the 1970s. That recent movies by Antonioni, Abbas Kiarostami, Godard and Manoel de Oliveira have no American distributor is in tiny part attributable to the America-first mindset of Kael and her influential acolytes.

*

Jonathon Rosenbaum on THE AGE OF MOVIES, a selection of Kael's writings edited by Sanford Schwartz:
https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2011/ ... of-movies/

I also wonder if the pompous title given to Schwartz’s selection, The Age of Movies, was his doing; I can’t imagine that Kael herself ever would have tolerated it. Even when she appeared to share the provincial and land-locked notion that American film culture was automatically interchangeable with world film culture (or at least was the only film culture worth noting), her up-front subjective voice always clarified that this was her particular view, not some objectively arrived-at (mythological) given, which is the way it comes across here, in a tone of voice distinctly not her own: Kael-speak carved into monumental and “universal” stone.

[Wellesnet]

Happy Birthday, Pauline, by Charles Taylor
Pauline Kael was one of the great voices of American freedom. The road she opened for critics is simultaneously the most rewarding and the most difficult to follow:
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_ ... ay-pauline