When Critic Pauline Kael goes to the movies, she often spends as much time looking at the audience as at the screen. While watching Bonnie and Clyde, she noticed that a woman sitting near by kept insisting rather frantically, "It's a comedy, it's a comedy." That reaction, thought Miss Kael, aptly reflected the film's unsettling mixture of violence, humor and tragedy. Watching The PARIS.MATCH Defiant Ones in an audience composed of whites and Negroes, she noted two reactions when the black convict, Sidney Poitier, sacrifices his own freedom to try to save his white companion, Tony Curtis. The whites accepted the gesture in approving silence; the Negroes hooted derisively.
It is this attention to a film's entire environment "that distinguishes Pauline Kael, 49, from her fellow critics. Movies are no peripheral affair for her but the most interesting fact of her life. "They move so fast into the bloodstream," she says. For this reason, she does not lightly suffer actors who give less than their all. "He seems more eccentric than heroic," she wrote of Marlon Brando's performance in Mutiny on the Bounty. "He's like a short, flabby tenor wandering around the stage and not singing; you wonder what he's doing there." She described Dirk Bogarde in Accident: "He aches all the time all over, like an all-purpose sufferer for a television commercial, locked in with a claustrophobia of his own body and sensibility." And she disposed of Ann-Margret in a remake of Stagecoach: "She does most of her acting inside her mouth."
Ill at Ease. A native Californian, Pauline Kael arrived in New York three years ago and landed a reviewing job on McCall's. She did not stay very long because of her unladylike way of dismissing certain movies with a karate chop of criticism. "I thought I'd last six months," she says. "I lasted five." She moved on to the more congenial New Republic, then switched to The New Yorker last winter. She has brought out two books of collected criticism, Lost It at the Movies and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Though she is now considered one of the country's top movie critics, Miss Kael still feels ill at ease in the East and lacks rapport with fellow intellectuals in Manhattan. Not that she always makes things easy for them. She is even racier in her talk than in her writing, and does not hesitate to correct someone's erroneous ideas about a movie. A chain-smoker, she exhibits that edge of insecurity of the almost emancipated woman. About the only publication she refuses to write for is Playboy, because of its condescending view of women. "For a woman to write for Playboy," she says,"is like a Negro being against civil rights.",