Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark

Relentlessly outspoken, unafraid of challenging idols and embracing the lowbrow and the overlooked, New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, who died in 2001, proves a formidable, however natural, subject for Opera News columnist Kellow (Ethel Merman). He handles this difficult, unsympathetic personality with an admirable evenhandedness, considering that Kael cultivated as many detractors as admirers with her honest, gut-provoked reviewing. Born in 19TK to Polish Jewish immigrants who tried their luck running a chicken farm in Petaluma, Calif., before moving to San Francisco, Pauline was a crack student, deep reader, and eventual philosophy student at Berkeley, her early critical skills honed in the fledgling Berkeley Renaissance of the 1940s, with critics R.P. Blackmur and James Agee as early influences. From a stint as codirector of the Berkeley Cinema Guild with her then husband, Edward Landberg, Kael segued naturally into radio (KPFA) and freelance journalism, championing the New Wave and attacking the fashionable “auteur theory.” Her first book, I Lost It at the Movies (1965), established her reputation as the “saltiest” reviewer around, leading to her opening salvo at the New Yorker with an enthusiastic review of Bonnie and Clyde (1968). The old guard, like editor William Shawn, never warmed to her, but the young and iconoclastic loved her. In his fluent, immensely readable study, Kellow fairly represents Kael’s tendency to hyperbole (writing of Barbra Streisand or Last Tango in Paris) as well as hurtful ad hominem (George Cukor’s Rich and Famous; Shoah). (Oct.)