A GIFT FOR EFFRONTERY | PAGE 1, 2
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Fans have their favorite Kael pieces -- her 1963 gutting of the auteur theory, "Circles and Squares"; her acutely nuanced 1975 profile of Cary Grant; her devastating 1980 polemic "Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers." (My own choice would be "Fear of Movies," her 1978 polemic castigating both timid movies and timid moviegoers: "There's something repressive in the atmosphere. [People] are rejecting the rare films that could stir them, frighten them, elate them." "Audiences hiss at the sight of blood now," she wrote, "as if they didn't have it in their own bodies.")

Foes, too, had their own favorite Kael pieces. She was mocked as being ignorant of moviemaking when she suggested that "Citizen Kane" was as much the creation of its scenarist, Herman J. Mankiewicz, as it was of its director-star, Orson Welles. In 1980, Renata Adler, in the New York Review of Books, characterized her collection "When the Lights Go Down" as being "piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless." Read now, Adler's diatribe -- referring to Kael's work as "nearly out of control," a series of "denouncings, exhortations, code words, excommunications, programs, threats" -- is a list of what any passionate moviegoer should, in 1999, actually want more of in criticism.

So there were stop signs, roadblocks and big bad wolves along the way. In 1979, she succumbed to the beguilement of Warren Beatty and accepted a position as an "executive consultant" for Paramount, which lasted only five months. As the years went by, Kael's health has grown weaker -- as "Rushmore" director Wes Anderson recently revealed in a putatively affectionate but peculiarly heartless piece in the New York Times, Kael suffers from Parkinson's disease -- and she has written little over the last decade.

Nevertheless, Kael's influence is everywhere and lasting, and not just in the prose styles of enough movie-critic thieves to fill a small apartment building (call it the Paulette Arms). When New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd writes, as she did this past January, of President Clinton's "entertaining display of schiziness," she is deploying a Kael neologism, whether she realizes it or not. Her finest adepts are critics who have borrowed not her self-created slang and rhetoric -- the so-called "Paulettes" -- but who have developed a stubborn independence of opinion and an original manner of expressing it. Here I am thinking not even of movie critics, but of writers as disparate as Dave Hickey, Mim Udovich and Tom Carson. (Carson has been writing tough, funny TV reviews for the Village Voice for years, but suddenly people are talking about his deft eviscerations of, say, news anchors because he's now also writing for Esquire. Like the New Yorker for Kael, establishment publications confer weight on critics' judgments -- it ain't fair, but it's true.)

My paperback copy of Kael's first collection, "I Lost It at the Movies," carries a line of breathless ad copy: "A savagely written book by America's most controversial movie critic!" Can you imagine a contemporary movie critic who could inspire such overripeness? "A slashingly written book by America's most dull-blade film critic, Lawrence Van Gelder!" "A brutal thumb's-up by America's most thumb-uppable movie critic, Roger Ebert!" Film criticism in the present day is dominated by careerists whose primary frames of reference are other examples of their chosen art plus the desired opinions, real or imagined, of their editors.

Certainly pride in -- or simply the privilege of -- the sort of critical independence Kael maintains is increasingly rare. The film critic for a New York tabloid was asked last year to remove the foreign films from her 10 best list; when she balked, the titles were pushed to the bottom, so as, one supposes the editor imagined, to avoid making readers uncomfortable about encountering the unfamiliar -- a crucial duty of a good critic.

And when they're not being sold out by their bosses, critics can just as often sell themselves out. In a recent interview, Stephen Schiff -- former Boston Phoenix Paulette, New Yorker critic-at-large and recent "Lolita" screenwriter -- was quoted as saying of his new industry friends and his old movie criticism, "I just hope everyone is willing to forgive and forget, but mainly not even notice that I was around." Reading this, a friend suggested that someone should immediately issue a Schiff collection of movie reviews called "Kiss Kiss Ass Ass," but, in keeping with what Kael has called the "sexually tinged titles" of her own collections, I suggested a vanity-press chapbook titled "Turned Out."

Kael -- diminutive (a mere 5 feet tall!), adroit, cussing and cussed -- has maintained the right attitude for a generation. "Not many reviewers have a real gift for effrontery," she once told an interviewer. "I think that may be my best talent." Oh, how I and so many others wish we could read her thoughts on "Happiness" or "The Thin Red Line" or "Affliction" or "The Waterboy." (A guess: She likes Adam Sandler more than Todd Solandz -- wanna bet?)

Personal disclosure: I met her once, in 1980. She had just reviewed "Honeysuckle Rose" and quoted a description I had written of Willie Nelson's music. Upon being introduced, I told her how flattered I was. She squeezed my hand in both of hers and said, "I thought you would be, dear." Kael is the only writer about whom I can say that being condescended to by her felt like an honor.
SALON | Feb. 9, 1999

Ken Tucker is critic-at-large for Entertainment Weekly.

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