Five directors who hated Pauline Kael
Few film critics have inspired as much devotion as Pauline Kael, the iconic New Yorker critic who counted Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson among her devotees. Her acerbic, sharply written, and entirely personal reviews were devoured by cinephiles for decades, and her often-hilarious write-ups likely shaped the taste of an entire generation.
However, Kael wasn’t just beloved – she was also loathed in equal measure by a host of people in Hollywood. You see, many actors and directors had a sneaking suspicion that Kael would routinely allow personal feelings to seep into her reviews and that if you angered her at any point, she would gladly tear you apart on the page. For instance, Robert Redford reportedly believed she held a grudge against him for many years because of a time he refused to talk to her in person about a series of highly critical reviews she’d given him.
Throughout her career, Kael also seemed to dislike several directors, including Oliver Stone and Michael Cimino, whom she described as “brazen vulgarians” who were “still living in a cave”. She once called Kevin Costner a “bland megalomaniac” in her Dances With Wolves review and declared William Friedkin’s The Exorcist to be “in the worst imaginable taste”.
None of these directors ever truly rose to Kael’s bait, though, unlike the five iconic helmers featured in this list. From a grudge-holding helmer who hung a bad review above his desk for decades to an actor-turned-director who may have believed Kael simply wanted to bed him, here are five legendary directors who hated Pauline Kael.
Five directors who hated Pauline Kael:
5. Ridley Scott
These days, Ridley Scott seems entirely fuelled by anger, ego, and an insane commitment to mounting as many large-scale historical epics as anyone in their 80s has ever attempted. In truth, though, almost his entire career has also been driven by the hatred he harbours for a critic who had the temerity to give him a scathing review 43 years ago. That critic is, of course, Kael, and the movie she tore to shreds was Blade Runner, which is pretty widely viewed as a sci-fi classic these days.
In 1982, Scott was horrified to find out that Kael had taken Blade Runner to task in what he dubbed “four pages of destruction.” She called it an ugly, unpleasant “suspense-less thriller” and accused Scott of demonstrating a “creepy, oppressive vision” in the film. On top of that, she accused Scott and his team of spending so much time on the movie’s visuals and worldbuilding that, at some point, they “must have decided that the story was unimportant”.
Naturally, Scott was offended and upset by the review. However, he wasn’t simply going to take it lying down and admitted to The Hollywood Reporter, “I framed those pages, and they’ve been in my office for 30 years to remind me there’s only one critic that counts – and that’s you.”
In fact, Kael’s criticism was so abhorrent to Scott that he swore off reading reviews of his own films for life, claiming, “If it’s a good one, you can get a swollen head and forget yourself. And if it’s a bad one, you’re so depressed that it’s debilitating.”
4. Clint Eastwood
Clint Eastwood once said the following about New Yorker readers who paid attention to Kael’s reviews: “She’s really suckered them into thinking she knows something. That’s what’s so funny.” If that doesn’t tell you that he hated her guts, then nothing will. In truth, though, this one was a mutual hatred society because Kael was so notoriously negative about Eastwood and his films that she became jokingly referred to as his “nemesis”.
For example, Kael infamously dubbed Dirty Harry a “right-wing fantasy” and “a remarkably single-minded attack on liberal values”. She doubled down on the sequel Magnum Force, calling it “carnage without emotion”, and regularly denigrated his acting and directing abilities. Amusingly, when Eastwood directed Bird, and it received rave reviews from fellow critics, Kael raged that, even though the star was “a perfectly atrocious director,” the critics “would like to be Clint Eastwood. It is basically as silly as that”.
Eastwood would later theorise that Kael simply didn’t like his brand of “stylised” acting, but his ex-girlfriend Sondra Locke claimed that he wasn’t always so sanguine on the matter. In her 1997 autobiography, she claimed Eastwood enlisted a psychiatrist to analyse Kael after her vitriolic review of The Enforcer, and the shrink supposedly concluded that Kael was so attracted to Eastwood and angry that she couldn’t have him that she acted out by giving him poor reviews. Take that with the largest grain of salt you can find.
3. Michael Moore
In 1989, future Bowling For Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 documentary filmmaker Michael Moore released his debut film Roger & Me. It told the story of General Motors CEO Roger Smith’s decision to close several auto plants in Moore’s hometown of Flint, Michigan, which removed 30,000 jobs from the area over a 14-year period. The film was extremely well-received critically and won numerous awards, although there was one prominent dissenting voice. Kael accused Moore of exaggerating the effect the plant’s closures had on Flint and even claimed he presented events out of order. She then dubbed the film “shallow and facetious, a piece of gonzo demagoguery that made me feel cheap for laughing”.
In 2000, though, Moore claimed that he believed Kael only lambasted his movie because she felt personally slighted when he declined to send her a copy to watch at home. At this point, Kael was getting on in years and would have had to drive 150 miles to see the film in a cinema, so Moore is of the opinion she was hopping mad by the time she made it to midtown Manhattan to watch the movie.
The very next day was the meeting of the New York critics to decide what to nominate for its annual Film Critics Circle awards, and Moore claimed he heard Kael made an impassioned plea for Roger & Me not to be granted an award. She was unsuccessful, though, and it won ‘Best Documentary’. According to Moore, only two weeks later, her review was published, which “printed outright lies about my movie. I had never experienced such a brazen, bald-faced barrage of disinformation. She tried to rewrite history”.
2. George Lucas
When George Lucas’ American Graffiti was released in 1973, the good-natured comedy-drama was rewarded with five Oscar nominations, including ‘Best Director’ and ‘Best Picture’. Naturally, though, there was one critic who didn’t tow the party line. In fact, Kael lamented how “American Graffiti fails to be anything more than a warm, nice, draggy comedy because there’s nothing to back up the style.” Having said that, though, she did dub Lucas a “real filmmaker” who displayed a “sensual understanding of film.”
When Lucas’ next film was released, though – a little sci-fi movie called Star Wars – Kael tore him a new one. She said the film felt like taking children to the circus and claimed, “The loudness, the smash-and-grab editing, the relentless pacing drive every idea from your head”. Worse, she noted that Lucas had made this abomination of his own volition, with no studio interference, yet emerged with “a film that’s totally uninterested in anything that doesn’t connect with the mass audience”.
To be fair, Kael wasn’t exactly wrong with this summation of the galaxy far, far away, although she was maybe a tad mean when she wrote, “Lucas has got the tone of bad movies down pat: you never catch the actors deliberately acting badly, they just seem to be bad actors”. Either way, Lucas must have taken this to heart because when he produced and came up with the story for 1986’s Willow, he insisted that the sinister death’s head mask-wearing villain be called ‘General Kael’. Kael gleefully pointed out his “hommage a moi” in her review – and took a cheap shot by mentioning his recent “costly divorce”.
1. David Lean
In 1971, legendary Doctor Zhivago director David Lean attended a National Society of Film Critics luncheon in New York City, ostensibly to find out why so many critics had savaged his 1970 film Ryan’s Daughter. What Lean thought would be a polite discussion about the merits or demerits of his most recent film quickly turned into a two-hour assault on his entire filmography, with Lean musing, “I sensed trouble from the moment I sat down.”
It was Kael who supposedly functioned as the critic who first steered the conversation toward his older films. She reportedly told him his movies were overblown and old-fashioned – which was on-brand for her, as she had given Lawrence of Arabia a scathing review only nine years earlier.
Kael and her colleagues’ criticisms of Ryan’s Daughter were also so vicious, though, that Lean once said, “They just took the film to bits.” Being denigrated so thoroughly to his face was a real hammer blow to Lean’s ego, and he admitted, “It really had such an awful effect on me for several years. You begin to think that maybe they’re right. Why on earth am I making films if I don’t have to? It shakes one’s confidence terribly.” In the end, he only made one more movie – 1984’s A Passage to India – before he passed away in 1991.
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