(Borrowed from Lincoln Center Public Library) At a current exhibition celebrating the New Yorker magazine at the New York Public Library, there is no mention of Pauline Kael. This is surprising since she was probably their most influential critic and perhaps the most influential American movie critic ever. This collection of profiles and interviews forms a mini-biography and offers several of her insights on the state of the movies--both the art and the business aspects--from the 1960s to the time of her retirement in the 1990s. There is some repetition but numerous interesting observations on the shifting national cultural scene. According to Kael, the 1970s were the real Golden Age of American moviemaking. Blockbusters like Jaws and Star Wars ruined the creative landscape created by Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma and Altman. Along with Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael, this volume offers a glimpse of her tastes and how her mind worked. As a result of reading this book, I went back to some of her reviews in my battered paperback editions of Deeper Into Movies and Reeling. I find I can only read a few at a time. Her tastes are not mine. I don't always agree with her, but she always had something arresting to say and expressed it in an off-kilter, intriguing way.
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