Word: kael
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Holy Hindsight. In her reviews, Miss Kael usually assembles a wealth of detail from past movies. She detected that footage purporting to show atomic-bomb damage in Hiroshima Mon Amour was not authentic, but had been lifted from an earlier Japanese atrocity film. She is equally discerning with movies that are morally pretentious. With "holy hindsight," she wrote, Screenwriter Abby Mann and Producer Stanley Kramer had used Ship of Fools to heap scorn on Germans and Jews who lacked the prescience to see that Nazism was coming. The film, she asserted, implies too facile an equation between shipboard rudeness...
...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...
...Pauline Kael does not pass judgment aloofly; she puts herself into her reviews, revealing glimpses of her personal life to illustrate points in movies. Any discerning reader will pick up information on her friends, boy friends, ex-husbands (three), her 19-year-old daughter Gina, not to mention her feelings about other critics, which border on the unprintable. In her review of Hud, the footloose, amoral rancher played by Paul Newman, she berated her fellow reviewers for considering Hud a bad sort. To make the point that he was pretty typical, she compared him to her own father...
...derision of U.S. movie moguls and their rampant commercialism, Pauline Kael is not an art-house snob. She prefers genuine American kitsch, if it has style and verve, to such avant-garde films as Hiroshima Mon Amour, Red Desert and Last Year at Marienbad ("the snow job in the ice palace"). Among her favorite directors are John Frankenheimer and Orson Welles, who provide "clean, fast pacing without the fancy stuff. It goes better with our national rhythm." A onetime experimental moviemaker in San Francisco, where she grew up and attended the University of California at Berkeley, she finds today...