Richard Brody on Pauline Kael’s “Notes on Heart and Mind”

When Pauline Kael joined The New Yorker’s staff as a movie critic, in January, 1968, the world of cinema was undergoing drastic change. The previous year, much of the film establishment had reacted with bewilderment—and even condemnation—to “Bonnie and Clyde,” which mirrored sixties politics with its story of heedless youth caught in America’s web of violence. In Kael’s famous New Yorker review (which she’d written as a freelancer), she had hailed it as a sign of Hollywood’s rejuvenation. But, three years into the job, she felt that the industry was backsliding. In January, 1971, after a week in which she deemed no new releases worth reviewing, she channelled her discontent into a startling article, “Notes on Heart and Mind,” which, true to its title, is a batch of journal-style riffs rather than a conventional essay. Together, the notes form something of a manifesto and reveal why, despite Kael’s status as the foremost critic of her era, she was also sharply at odds with it.

Kael charged that studios were clamping down on “the new creative freedom of young American moviemakers” and, instead, injecting their films with what she called “the new sentimentality,” a regression to obsolete commercial traditions. She claimed that “the back-to-heart movement is accompanied by strong pressures on reviewers”—both from editors and from the studios themselves. Increasingly, she believed, studios kept her out of press screenings in order to prevent her reviews from appearing before movies opened. Her response is the philosophical and polemical core of “Notes,” and the ideas she expresses there would remain central to her long career at The New Yorker, from which she retired as a regular reviewer in 1991.

“Movie executives,” she writes, “often say critics should be the same age as the average moviegoer; sometimes they say reviewers shouldn’t go on for more than three years or they won’t have the same enthusiasm as the audience.” Kael, by then a staff critic for exactly that duration, took such attacks personally, because she was hired at The New Yorker at age forty-eight—at a time when, she acknowledged, the target audience was much younger. While calling out the industry’s open ageism, she also spotlights a different generation gap: one that, to all appearances, troubled her far more. In “Notes,” she heroically casts her lot with movies by young filmmakers, declaring, “If a few critics don’t go all the way for them, the public doesn’t hear about them in time to keep the directors working and to keep the art of film alive.” Yet she inveighs against what she deemed the generation’s “Pop” sensibility, which, she contended, led young people to abandon literature, drama, and other “traditional art forms,” and to take—or, rather, to mistake—the mass medium of cinema for their equal.

Kael asserted that her age and long experience protected her from this trendy error, and she challenged the movie-loving young by playing the age card: “I remember seeing ‘To Have and Have Not’ the night it opened, in 1944, and I remember how everyone loved it,” she writes. “But if anyone I knew had said that it was a masterpiece comparable to the greatest works of literature or drama, he would have been laughed at as a fool who obviously didn’t know literature or drama.” Kael was passionate about movies—at least according to the pop-culture norms and aesthetic judgments of her own youth—and so she had a firm prejudice about their limitations. “Movies are good at action; they’re not good at reflective thought or conceptual thinking,” she writes.

Yet, in the sixties and beyond, many directors advanced the art of movies precisely through unprecedented achievements in intellectual filmmaking. What’s more, many of the young creators of this emerging cinema, including Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, and Peter Bogdanovich, exalted movies by such Hollywood filmmakers as Howard Hawks (the director of “To Have and Have Not”) and Alfred Hitchcock as art of the first order—and resisted the commercial constraints that such elders endured. That’s why, even as movies began to change rapidly again, in 1971, with the rise of the New Hollywood era that Kael would celebrate as a golden age, she was hostile to many of its masterworks—and why her mighty œuvre is both illuminated by her brilliant insights and darkened by her blind spots. ♦

Notes on Heart and Mind

Sixties Hollywood ushered in a tidal wave of commercial romantic slop, and now bad movies are more popular than good books. Can independent criticism save the day?