Film critic Pauline Kael stars in 2 books

Before movies were rated by thumbs or tomatoes, and before anyone with access to a computer and an Internet connection could fancy himself a "film critic," they were assessed -- praised, usually hyperbolically, or damned, often witheringly -- at great length by a tiny woman who, from 1968 to 1991, was the most celebrated critic in the country, if not the world. A decade after her death, Pauline Kael's influence on film culture continues, evident in the work of the many younger film writers whom she nurtured and in a comprehensive new biography, "Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark" (Viking, $27.95), the first of the legendary New Yorker critic.

Kellow, an editor at Opera News and the author of books on Ethel Merman and other performers, notes that Kael, unlike many biographical subjects, wasn't mired in scandal: "Pauline's life was not a highly dramatic or even a particularly eventful one in terms of marriages and love affairs. I discovered to my surprise that she had not traveled widely, and that her curiosity had been unflagging but in some ways oddly limited. Her life had been consumed by reading and going to the movies and writing about them."

Yet Kael's career trajectory was affected by at least one bold, unconventional decision: She raised her only child, Gina, born in 1948, on her own as an unwed mother, never making any financial demands on her daughter's father, bisexual experimental filmmaker James Broughton. (She was married briefly in the late 1950s to Edward Landberg, who ran the Berkeley Cinema Guild, for which she wrote program notes.) To support herself and Gina, Kael worked a series of odd jobs while composing essays for magazines such as Sight and Sound and Film Quarterly, but it wasn't until 1965, when Kael was 46, that she could actually make a living from her writing.

The real drama of Kael's life played out in her responses to what was projected on screen -- and how readers, filmmakers and other writers responded to her. "Her love of the movies was nothing short of life-giving: It sustained her in ways that nothing and no one else in her life ever could, or ever did," Kellow writes. Much of this biography, especially after Kael begins writing regularly for The New Yorker in 1968, consists of long excerpts from her reviews. It's a necessary, if occasionally tiresome, strategy, for it gives readers a clear sense of Kael's colloquial (and sometimes crass) voice, loose but always impassioned. Her prose style shook up the genteel New Yorker and its decorous editor-in-chief, William Shawn; Kellow's accounts of some of their dust-ups are among the book's greatest pleasures. Kael was notorious for picking fights in print with fellow critics like Andrew Sarris, whose essay on the auteur theory she considered hooey. But Kael's detractors were equally vicious, perhaps none more so than Renata Adler, who, in a 1980 New York Review of Books takedown of a recent collection of Kael's reviews, wrote that her criticism was "jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless."

The first decade of Kael's reign at The New Yorker, as Kellow isn't the first to point out, coincided with the efflorescence of talented directors associated with New Hollywood, like Robert Altman and Brian De Palma, whom the critic championed feverishly (and, in the case of the latter, many thought foolishly). But her support was not unconditional, as some of her acolytes discovered. In his admiring chronicle, Kellow doesn't demur from pointing out Kael's flaws, both personal and professional (particularly her habit of palling around with directors whose works she wrote about). But through his close reading of Kael's reviews, Kellow proves Oscar Wilde's maxim: that "the highest criticism . . . is the record of one's soul."

If the opening lines of Kael's besotted review of Bernardo Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris," quoted in Kellow's biography, leave you desperate for more, you can find the full text of her rapturous rave in "The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael" (Library of America, $40). Edited by Sanford Schwartz, this volume culls reviews and essays from 10 of Kael's 13 books, many of which are out of print. Though you may find yourself getting swept up in Kael's praise of movies like "Nashville," her stinging kickers are just as powerful, as in her assessment of "A Clockwork Orange": "How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience?"