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The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael (paperback)

Edited by Sanford Schwartz

“Pauline Kael commanded the American idiom. Her paragraphs announced their author. Like George Bernard Shaw, she wrote reviews that will be read for their style, humor, and energy long after some of their subjects have been forgotten.”—Roger Ebert

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Interviews “She was a writer, and her subject was movies”—new documentary celebrates Pauline Kael ahead of her 100th birthday
February 17, 2021

Interviews Sanford Schwartz on the “emotional rightness and believability” of Pauline Kael’s film criticism
June 18, 2019

Interviews Michelle Dean’s Sharp celebrates ten women writers who did it their way
April 18, 2018

Pauline Kael’s I Lost it at the Movies (1965) marked the emergence of a major modern critic: fearless, impassioned, caustically funny, alert to the nuance of the smallest detail. “Film criticism is exciting just because there is no formula to apply,” she observed, “just because you must use everything you are and everything you know.” Between 1968 and 1991, as regular film reviewer for The New Yorker, Kael used those formidable tools to shape the tastes of a generation, enthralling readers with her gift for capturing, with force and fluency, the essence of an actor’s gesture or the full implication of a cinematic image. Kael called movies “the most total and encompassing art form we have,” and she made her reviews a platform for considering both film and the worlds it engages, crafting in the process a prose style of extraordinary wit, precision, and improvisatory grace.

To read The Age of Movies is to be swept up into an endlessly revealing and entertaining dialogue with Kael at her witty, exhilarating, and opinionated best. She was, in the words of editor Sanford Schwartz, “a romantic and a visionary” who “believed that movies could feed our imaginations in intimate and immediate—and liberating, even subversive—ways that literature and plays and other arts could not.” Her ability to evoke the essence of a great artist—an Orson Welles or a Robert Altman—or to celebrate the way even seeming trash could tap deeply into our emotions was matched by her unwavering eye for the scams and self-deceptions of a corrupt movie industry.

Coming into her own as a writer during a time of cultural turmoil and remarkable cinematic accomplishment, she became one of the great chroniclers of that time and of the movies that were so central to it. Here are her appraisals of the films that defined an era—among them Breathless, Bonnie and Clyde, The Leopard, The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, Nashville—along with many others, some awaiting rediscovery, all providing the occasion for masterpieces of observation and insight, alive on every page.

Sanford Schwartz, editor, writes for The New York Review of Books. His essays and reviews have been collected in The Art Presence and Artists and Writers, and he is the author of critical biographies of the nineteenth-century Danish painter Christen Købke and the twentieth-century English artist William Nicholson. He and Pauline Kael were friends for many years.

The paperback edition features French flaps and has been printed on acid-free paper.
Table of Contents

Introduction by Sanford Schwartz

Movies, the Desperate Art

from I Lost it at the Movies
The Glamour of Delinquency
The Golden Coach
Shoeshine
Breathless, and the Daisy Miller Doll
West Side Story
Lolita
Jules and Jim
Billy Budd
Yojimbo
Devi
Hud, Deep in the Divided Heart of Hollywood

from Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Laurence Olivier as Othello
Marlon Brando: An American Hero
Movie Brutalists
Tourist in the City of Youth [Blow-up]
Movies on Television
Orson Welles: There Ain’t No Way [Falstaff / Chimes at Midnight]
Bonnie and Clyde

from Going Steady
Movies as Opera [China Is Near]
A Minority Movie [La Chinoise]
Faces
A Sign of Life [Shame]
Trash, Art, and the Movies
Saintliness [Simon of the Desert]

from Deeper into Movies
The Bottom of the Pit [Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid]
High School
Fellini’s “Mondo Trasho” [Fellini Satyricon]
Notes on Heart and Mind
The Poetry of Images [The Conformist]
Pipe Dream [McCabe & Mrs. Miller]
Helen of Troy, Sexual Warrior [The Trojan Women]
Louis Malle’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog [Murmur of the Heart]
Urban Gothic [The French Connection]
The Fall and Rise of Vittorio De Sica [The Garden of the Finzi-Continis]
Stanley Strangelove [A Clockwork Orange]
Alchemy [The Godfather]
Collaboration and Resistance [The Sorrow and the Pity]

from Reeling
Tango [Last Tango in Paris]
Pop Versus Jazz [Lady Sings the Blues]
The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book
Days and Nights in the Forest
A Rip-Off with Genius [Marilyn]
After Innocence [The Last American Hero]
Everyday Inferno [Mean Streets]
Movieland—The Bums’ Paradise [The Long Goodbye]
Moments of Truth [The Iceman Cometh]
Politics and Thrills
Survivor [Sleeper]
Killing Time [Magnum Force]
Cicely Tyson Goes to the Fountain [The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman]
The Used Madonna [The Mother and the Whore]
When the Saints Come Marching In [Lenny]
Fathers and Sons [The Godfather, Part II]
Beverly Hills as a Big Bed [Shampoo]
Coming: Nashville

from When the Lights Go Down
The Man from Dream City [Cary Grant]
All for Love [The Story of Adèle H.]
Walking into Your Childhood [The Magic Flute]
Notes on the Nihilistic Poetry of Sam Peckinpah [The Killer Elite]
The Artist as a Young Comedian [Next Stop, Greenwich Village]
Underground Man [Taxi Driver]
Sparkle
Notes on Evolving Heroes, Morals, Audiences
Hot Air [Network]
Marguerite Duras [The Truck]
A Woman for All Seasons? [Julia]
Shivers [The Fury]
Fear of Movies
Bertrand Blier
The God-Bless-American Symphony [The Deer Hunter]
Pods [Invasion of the Body Snatchers]

from Taking It All In
Why Are Movies So Bad? or, The Numbers
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
The Man Who Made Howard Hughes Sing [Melvin and Howard]
Used Cars
Religious Pulp, or The Incredible Hulk [Raging Bull]
Atlantic City
Hey, Torquemada [History of the WorldýýýPart I]
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Gadgeteer [Blow Out]
Pennies from Heaven
Shoot the Moon
Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
Up the River [Fitzcarraldo, Burden of Dreams]
Tootsie
Memory [The Night of the Shooting Stars]

from State of the Art
A Masterpiece [The Leopard]
The Perfectionist [Yentl]
Golden Kimonos [The Makioka Sisters]

from Hooked
Out There and In Here [Blue Velvet]
Irish Voices [The Dead]
The Lady from the Sea [High Tide]

from Movie Love
Unreal [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown]
A Wounded Apparition [Casualties of War]
Satyr [My Left Foot]
The Grifters

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-508-2 864 pages

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