Pauline Kael Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Pauline Kael (June 19, 1919 -- September 3, 2001) was the film critic of The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991. She reviewed nearly every film covered in this wiki project -- Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Blow Out, Outland, Body Double, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three -- and her notices shaped how each was received and remembered. Roger Ebert said she "had a more positive influence on the climate for film in America than any other single person over the last three decades." (wikipedia)

Kael wrote for The New Yorker for twenty-three years and changed what film criticism could sound like

Kael joined The New Yorker in 1968, initially alternating six-month shifts with Penelope Gilliatt. By 1979 she was the magazine's sole film critic, a position she held until Parkinson's disease forced her retirement in March 1991. She published thirteen books of collected criticism, including I Lost It at the Movies (1965), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968), and Deeper into Movies (1973), which won the National Book Award. (britannica)

Her style was conversational, polemical, and physical -- she wrote about movies as bodily experiences, not intellectual exercises:

"I worked to loosen my style -- to get away from the term-paper pomposity that we learn at college." — Pauline Kael, quoted in Wikipedia

She championed Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and above all Brian De Palma, whose career she defended more aggressively than any other director's. A circle of younger critics she mentored -- dubbed "the Paulettes" -- went on to dominate American film criticism in the 1990s. (wikipedia)

She called the 1978 Body Snatchers the best film of its kind ever made

Kael's New Yorker review of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) was the loudest notice on the film's release and set the terms for every reassessment that followed. She placed it in the company of the genre entertainments she had been championing all decade:

"Invasion of the Body Snatchers is more sheer fun than any movie I've seen since Carrie and Jaws and maybe parts of The Spy Who Loved Me." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1978)

"It may be the best film of its kind ever made." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1978)

Her reading was local and specific. She heard est seminars, group therapy, and the whole California human-potential industry in Leonard Nimoy's Dr. Kibner, and she called Werner Erhard "the original spore" in the piece. The line stuck -- it became one of the most quoted observations about the film's satirical layer. (deepfocusreview)

Her Blow Out review placed De Palma alongside Altman and Coppola

Kael's review of Blow Out (1981) was the high-water mark of her De Palma advocacy. She argued that he had crossed a threshold:

"De Palma has sprung to the place that Altman achieved with films such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Nashville and that Coppola reached with the two Godfather movies -- that is, to the place where genre is transcended and what we're moved by is an artist's vision." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1981)

She praised the fluidity and control:

"You don't see set pieces in Blow Out -- it flows, and everything that happens seems to go right to your head." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1981)

"The pyrotechnics and the whirlybird camera are no longer saying 'Look at me'; they give the film authority." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1981)

The review mattered beyond its immediate subject. It was one of the last times a major American critic could make a canonical claim for a new film and have the claim taken seriously by the culture at large.

She saw Outland's corporate dystopia clearly but thought the filmmaking fell short

Kael's review of Outland (1981) is remembered for one line that became the film's unofficial thesis:

"The future is conceived as a continuation of capitalist exploitation in space." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1981)

She admired the production design -- she called the mining station "the offspring of a gigantic pipe organ and an oil rig" -- and she recognized the film's blue-collar realism:

"The workers (who sign on for a year) are meant to be just like ordinary Americans of the present -- the kind who might have worked on the Alaska pipeline." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1981)

But she thought Peter Hyams wasted the premise. She wrote that "all the imagination seems to have gone into the sets and costumes and chases" and that Hyams was "like a guy who saw High Noon and didn't get it." Sean Connery saved the picture from total collapse: "Without him, it would be junk metal." (scrapsfromtheloft)

Body Double disappointed her, and her disappointment wounded De Palma

After years of championing De Palma through Carrie, The Fury, Dressed to Kill, and Blow Out, Kael pulled back with Body Double (1984):

"If Brian De Palma were a new young director, Body Double would probably be enough to establish him as a talented fellow. But, coming from De Palma, Body Double is an awful disappointment." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1984)

"The big, showy scenes recall Vertigo and Rear Window so obviously that the movie is like an assault on the people who have put De Palma down for being derivative. This time, he's just about spiting himself and giving them reasons not to like him." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1984)

The review stung precisely because Kael had been his most important defender. Michael Sragow compared the Kael-De Palma relationship to the great critic-artist pairings: "As critic and creator, Kael and De Palma became as strongly linked as Edmund Wilson and F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Malcolm Cowley and William Faulkner."

She found Pelham competent but blunt

Kael's 1974 New Yorker review of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three admired the premise but not the execution:

"The movie must have been an editor's nightmare: the scenes are thudders, and the whole thing was punched together -- with no glue but the basic idea." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1974)

"Sargent doesn't make points, he drops weights." — Pauline Kael, SBS Australia (1974)

Later critics have argued that the bluntness is the point -- the film works like the city it depicts.