Word: kael
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When Critic Pauline Kael goes to the movies, she often spends as much time looking at the audience as at the screen. While watching Bonnie and Clyde, she noticed that a woman sitting near by kept insisting rather frantically, "It's a comedy, it's a comedy." That reaction, thought Miss Kael, aptly reflected the film's unsettling mixture of violence, humor and tragedy. Watching The PARIS.MATCH Defiant Ones in an audience composed of whites and Negroes, she noted two reactions when the black convict, Sidney Poitier, sacrifices his own freedom to try to save his white companion, Tony Curtis...
...this attention to a film's entire environment "that distinguishes Pauline Kael, 49, from her fellow critics. Movies are no peripheral affair for her but the most interesting fact of her life. "They move so fast into the bloodstream," she says. For this reason, she does not lightly suffer actors who give less than their all. "He seems more eccentric than heroic," she wrote of Marlon Brando's performance in Mutiny on the Bounty. "He's like a short, flabby tenor wandering around the stage and not singing; you wonder what he's doing there." She described Dirk Bogarde...
...Ease. A native Californian, Pauline Kael arrived in New York three years ago and landed a reviewing job on McCall's. She did not stay very long because of her unladylike way of dismissing certain movies with a karate chop of criticism. "I thought I'd last six months," she says. "I lasted five." She moved on to the more congenial New Republic, then switched to The New Yorker last winter. She has brought out two books of collected criticism, Lost It at the Movies and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Though she is now considered one of the country...
Whether a Godard deserves a festival is a matter of some critical dispute. To Richard Roud, author of a worshipful new study of his movies (Godard; Seeker & Warburg), the director is "one of the most important artists of our time," worthy of comparison, with Joyce and Vermeer. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker calls Godard "the most exciting director working in movies today." On the other hand, Stanley Kauffmann of the New Republic describes him as "a magician who makes elaborate uninspired gestures and then pulls out of the hat precisely nothing...
...Yorker ran a respectful appreciation by Guest Critic Penelope Gilliatt, followed nine weeks later with an ecstatic 9,000-word analysis by another guest critic, Pauline Kael. In Chicago, the Tribune's reviewer sided with the naysayers. He called it "stomach churning": the American said it was "unappetizing." But the Daily News acclaimed it as one of the most significant motion pictures of the decade; the Sun-Times said it was "astonishingly beautiful." It seemed as if two different Bonnie and Clydes were slipping into towns simultaneously...