--- title: Book Review: Brian Kellow's Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark description: Not long after I became a movie critic, a journalist friend told me he was considering taking a trip to see Pauline Kael at her... canonical: https://time.com/archive/7125235/the-perils-of-reading-about-pauline-kael/ author: TIME Staff article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2011-11-02T09:00:57.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-16T06:48:13.274Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: Book Review: Brian Kellow's Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark og:description: Not long after I became a movie critic, a journalist friend told me he was considering taking a trip to see Pauline Kael at her... og:url: https://time.com/archive/7125235/the-perils-of-reading-about-pauline-kael/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb97f523dedd90bbe/698a90af929fad91e0c02605/pauline-kael.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: Pauline Kael og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Book Review: Brian Kellow's Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark twitter:description: Not long after I became a movie critic, a journalist friend told me he was considering taking a trip to see Pauline Kael at her... twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb97f523dedd90bbe/698a90af929fad91e0c02605/pauline-kael.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # The Perils of Reading About Pauline Kael > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) Nov 2, 2011 9:00 AM UTC  Film critic Pauline Kael at home on May 1, 1968. Film critic Pauline Kael at home on May 1, 1968. MARTHA HOLMES / Time Life Pictures by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) Nov 2, 2011 9:00 AM UTC Not long after I became a movie critic, a journalist friend told me he was considering taking a trip to see Pauline Kael at her home in Great Barrington, Mass. He didn’t know Kael, other than as the most famous movie critic of all time, but she was a sitting duck, retired**,** old, infirm (she had Parkinson’s Disease) and apparently welcoming enough. “You should come too,” he said. “We could road trip to Pauline’s”. This was around 2000, a year before her death and not long after I had read a New York _Times_ piece by Wes Anderson, in which he recounted in agonizing, impolite detail how he’d traipsed up to show Kael his second film, _Rushmore_. “Aren’t you her biggest fan?” my friend said. “Don’t you want to meet her before she dies?” I did not. I would liked to have known her, but I had no desire to invade her space and impose some need of mine upon her as Anderson had. She certainly didn’t seem dazzled by the future director of _The Royal Tennenbaums_ and _The Fantastic Mr. Fox_, and he had come bearing a movie, the thing she loved most. What would I bring, my reviews? No way; I was still trying to feel my way into a beat I’d been lucky enough to land with more desire than qualifications. Besides, she’d probably heard every variation on “your writing changed my life” before. There was a whole generation of critics known as the “Paulettes” (a name ginned up, no less, by my witty colleague, TIME’s Richard Corliss), people who had been inspired by her and maybe tried to write like her and eventually came to travel in the same circles as she did. Beyond not wanting to bother Kael, I had reservations about having any interaction that might interfere with my enormous affection for her work. She was so open on the page, so passionate and seemingly incapable of being circumspect, that readers felt they knew her. That’s almost always a mistake. Generally, it is safer to keep one’s idols at a remove. Reading Brian Kellow’s _Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark_, which is thorough and respectful but still full of depressing revelations, brought Kael the flawed human being a little too close. **(MORE: The** [**All-TIME 100 Movies**](http://entertainment.time.com/2005/02/12/all-time-100-movies/)**)** For starters, she was an ethical disaster, not just fraternizing with the talent, but advising them and then, later on, reviewing them. In 1979, more than a decade after she propelled _Bonnie and Clyde_ into cinematic history with a single, joyous review, Warren Beatty convinced her to come work with his production company in Los Angeles. She lasted less than a year, went back to _The New Yorker_ and then weighed in on his next movie, _Reds_ in 1981\. Kellow writes that Kael believed herself incapable of being corrupted or writing with bias. It’s hard to believe that she didn’t know, on some level, that this was impossible. Kellow also presents compelling evidence that Kael made off with the research of a young UCLA professor named Howard Suber, paid him a pittance, strung him along on the hope of a shared byline and then used his work in _Raising Kane_, her infamous essay on the making of _Citizen Kane,_ without credit. Maybe it wasn’t outright intellectual theft (more leasing to own), but it was definitely wrong. She was also fond of bashing the viewpoints of other critics in print, bad behavior _The New Yorker’s_ gentlemanly editor William Shawn eventually put a stop to. Still, her word on something was _the_ word. “She insisted that she was right about everything, and you would be right, too someday, if you worked like hell and stayed loose,” David Denby wrote of Kael in his 2003 essay “My Life As a Paulette.” Being right is rewarding when it comes to measurable things. But engaging in movie criticism towards that end would be a miserable calling. In this business there are no _right_ rights, only louder ones. In that essay, Denby acknowledged the eventual souring of their mentor-mentee relationship.Kellow’s _A Life in the Dark_ includes enough other bleak tales of Kael mentoring gone wrong to make it seem that this too was a habit. When critic Carrie Rickey, who recently announced her retirement from the _Philadelphia Inquirer_ after 25 years, got her big break in 1980 writing about movies at The Village Voice, she told her mentor Kael the good news. “They didn’t ask me,” Kael told her. “If they had, I would have told them to hire Jim Wolcott,” referring to _Vanity Fair_ writer James Wolcott. **(MORE: The** [**Top 10 Sundance Films**](http://entertainment.time.com/2011/01/20/top-10-sundance-hits/)**)** Yet even after reading all that I still feel oddly protective of Kael. Some of it stems from my continued love of her writing, even as I now see about fifty things that could have been trimmed from every piece. Some of that stems from a granddaughterish pride. Even though Kael never identified herself as a feminist, she was a powerful woman whose intelligence and wit swayed readers in an era when this was still unusual. I admire any single mother who holds down a full-time job. This one just happened to change the face of American arts criticism while raising her daughter Gina James. And home schooling her. How was that possible? If my kid falls sick and stays home one day, my schedule falls apart. (Although Gina, who declined to speak with Kellow, also functioned as her mother’s unpaid assistant, so maybe Kael’s home schooling was cinema-centric.) It’s likely that the Wes Anderson piece, so bratty and ageist, stirred my first defensive impulse toward Kael. It deepened at a dinner party for Manny Farber, another famous critic now gone. One of the other guests mentioned he’d known Kael. He seemed disposed to brag about his inside knowledge and had been drinking, a winning combination where journalists are concerned, so I encouraged him by asking what she was like. “Well of course she was very ugly,” he said. “No one wanted to sleep with her.” That was the lead in his Kael story? That she was undesirable? Kael sold 150,000 copies of her first collection of criticism, _I Lost It At the Movies_, before she’d even joined _The New Yorker_. She excited and engaged readers like no other critic. She was exceptional. She remains exceptional. But how natural it was for him to reduce this woman to her sex. If Kael had ever written as a woman bitter and deprived of love, physical or otherwise, this perspective of his might have seemed pertinent. But whatever her status (married once, and briefly, to Edward Landberg, with whom she ran the Berkeley Cinema Guild in the 1950s) she wrote with an open heart and a steady sensuality. This is the woman who said to Landberg, Mae West-like, when his hand brushed her breast for the first time by accident “What have you got to lose?” And **t**his is the woman who apparently, in her youthful days in Sausalito, liked to stand at the window of her house in her bra. On one occasion, she waved it at someone walking by. There’s undeniably some dirty laundry in Kellow’s book. That bra might might be my favorite piece. **(Browse through all of TIME’s pop culture lists on** [**our new iPad app**](http://entertainment.time.com/2011/10/19/presenting-times-new-ipad-app-populist/)**)** ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/7125235/the-perils-of-reading-about-pauline-kael/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/7125235/the-perils-of-reading-about-pauline-kael/"},"headline":"The Perils of Reading About Pauline Kael","datePublished":"2011-11-02T09:00:57.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-16T06:48:13.274Z","description":"Not long after I became a movie critic, a journalist friend told me he was considering taking a trip to see Pauline Kael at her...","url":"https://time.com/archive/7125235/the-perils-of-reading-about-pauline-kael/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb97f523dedd90bbe/698a90af929fad91e0c02605/pauline-kael.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"TIME Staff","url":"https://time.com/author/time-staff/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb97f523dedd90bbe/698a90af929fad91e0c02605/pauline-kael.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Pauline Kael","caption":"Film critic Pauline Kael at home on May 1, 1968.","creditText":"MARTHA HOLMES / Time Life Pictures","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/archive/7125235/the-perils-of-reading-about-pauline-kael/","name":"The Perils of Reading About Pauline Kael"}}]}] ```