Phil Albinus = father of three, husband, magazine editor, paperback hound, frustrated drummer, and aspiring novelist. I wear khakis - got a problem with that?
Pauline Kael was the first writer I wanted to copy. After getting a copy of Taking It All In, her 1983 collection of movie reviews for the New Yorker, it just clicked: Her voice worked on me. She wrote with passion, with a head-long forward rush, it seemed dangerous, fun and almost out of control - not what you think when you imagine a writer working at the New Yorker. I can still remember some choice phrases from her reviews: “Is Michael Corleone starting to rot?” “Richard Gere walks like a junior high school student imitating Yul Brenner” and “After watching the three hour and forty-seven minute version of Heaven’s Gate I knew what to take out but not what to keep in.”
Brian Kellow’s new biography of Kael, A Life in the Dark is a unique beast - a full-length bio of a film critic. Has there ever been one of these before? (Maybe James Agee now that I think of it). It’s a very, very good book and not just because it doesn’t overstay its welcome. It shows Kael’s hard scrabble early years, her antagonism against northeastern intellectuals and how she made New Yorker editor WIlliam Shawn’s life miserable. Any story about the Paulettes - the movie critics she groomed and found jobs for even though they betrayed one another almost constantly - is catnip for me. Reading her books in the New Paltz library was a joy and one reason was I thought I could have been one of her acolytes. She didn’t demand extensive film knowledge but a passion for movies first and last. I got that, I thought.
The bio has some great eye-openers. I loved the scene where she movies to New York from San Francisco with a boyfriend who dumps her for two gay men and leaves her stranded in Grand Central without money for a hotel room or a meal! (One of the gays was Samuel Berber of Adagio for Strings fame.) I still think that the claim that she only saw a movie once and never again was bunk, it reeks of self-serving promotion. And I was surprised that for someone who wrote with such abandon about movies and loved to use dirty titles for her books - Losing it at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Deeper into Movies - she didn’t have many lovers or a desire for sex. I guess she got it from the screen.
A good read, and probably the best take we’ll get on the critic unless her daughter Gina writes a memoir. As her typist, driver and constant companion, her eulogy for her mother, which is in the last chapter of the book, is clear-eyed and rather distant. Her mother loved her and her son but there was a real price to be the daughter of the most divisive critic in the United States. Watching the Paulettes circle around her mother for decades must have been eye-opening.
Oh, and Pauline Kael’s grandson is on the autism spectrum. Trust me.
