The Age of Movies

by Kael, Pauline; Schwartz, Sanford

• ISBN13: 9781598531091
• ISBN10: 1598531093
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-10-27
• Publisher: Library of America

Summary

"Film criticism is exciting just because there is no formula to apply," Pauline Kael once 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, the first new selection in more than a generation, is to be swept up into an endlessly revealing and entertaining dialogue with Kael at her witty, exhilarating, and opinionated best. 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. Here in this career spanning collection 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.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. xi
Movies, the Desperate Art	p. 1
I Lost it at the Movies
The Glamour of Delinquency	p. 25
The Golden Coach	p. 40
Shoeshine	p. 44
Breathless, and the Daisy Miller Doll	p. 46
West Side Story	p. 51
Lolita	p. 58
Jules and Jim	p. 64
Billy Budd	p. 70
Yojimbo	p. 75
Devi	p. 80
Hud, Deep in the Divided Heart of Hollywood	p. 90
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Laurence Olivier as Othello	p. 107
Marlon Brando: An American Hero	p. 110
Movie Brutalists	p. 118
Tourist in the City of Youth [Blow-Up]	p. 127
Movies on Television	p. 135
Orson Welles: There Ain't No Way [Falstaff/Chimes at Midnight]	p. 146
Bonnie and Clyde	p. 154
Going Steady
Movies as Opera [China Is Near]	p. 177
A Minority Movie [La Chinoise]	p. 182
Faces	p. 190
A Sign of Life [Shame]	p. 194
Trash, Art, and the Movies	p. 201
Saintliness [Simon of the Desert]	p. 235
Deeper into Movies
The Bottom of the Pit [Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid]	p. 245
High School	p. 251
Fellini's "Mondo Trasho" [Fellini Satyricon]	p. 257
Notes on Heart and Mind	p. 263
The Poetry of Images [The Conformist]	p. 273
Pipe Dream [McCabe & Mrs. Miller]	p. 279
Helen of Troy, Sexual Warrior [The Trojan Women]	p. 284
Louis Malle's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog [Murmur of the Heart]	p. 290
Urban Gothic [The French Connection]	p. 296
The Fall and Rise of Vittorio De Sica [The Garden of the Finzi-Continis]	p. 303
Stanley Strangelove [A Clockwork Orange]	p. 310
Alchemy [The Godfather]	p. 316
Collaboration and Resistance [The Sorrow and the Pity]	p. 323
Reeling
Tango [Last Tango in Paris]	p. 331
Pop Versus Jazz [Lady Sings the Blues]	p. 340
The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book	p. 347
Days and Nights in the Forest	p. 353
A Rip-off with Genius [Marilyn]	p. 358
After Innocence [The Last American Hero]	p. 367
Everyday Inferno [Mean Streets]	p. 376
Movieland - The Bums' Paradise [The Long Goodbye]	p. 384
Moments of Truth [The Iceman Cometh]	p. 393
Politics and Thrills	p. 400
Survivor [Sleeper]	p. 409
Killing Time [Magnum Force]	p. 414
Cicely Tyson Goes to the Fountain [The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman]	p. 420
The Used Madonna [The Mother and the Whore]	p. 426
When the Saints Come Marching In [Lenny]	p. 432
Fathers and Sons [The Godfather, Part II]	p. 440
Beverly Hills as a Big Bed [Shampoo]	p. 448
Coming: Nashville	p. 456
When the Lights Go Down
The Man from Dream City [Cary Grant]	p. 465
All for Love [The Story of Adele H.]	p. 500
Walking into Your Childhood [The Magic Flute]	p. 506
Notes on the Nihilist Poetry of Sam Peckinpah [The Killer Elite]	p. 511
The Artist as a Young Comedian [Next Stop, Greenwich Village]	p. 520
Underground Man [Taxi Driver]	p. 525
Sparkle	p. 530
Notes on Evolving Heroes, Morals, Audiences	p. 533
Hot Air [Network]	p. 545
Marguerite Duras [The Truck]	p. 552
A Woman for All Seasons? [Julia]	p. 557
Shivers [The Fury]	p. 564
Fear of Movies	p. 569
Bertrand Blier	p. 586
The God-Bless-America Symphony [The Deer Hunter]	p. 596
Pods [Invasion of the Body Snatchers]	p. 606
Taking It All In
Why Are Movies So Bad? or, The Numbers	p. 615
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith	p. 630
The Man Who Made Howard Hughes Sing [Melvin and Howard]	p. 638
Used Cars	p. 647
Religious Pulp, or The Incredible Hulk [Raging Bull]	p. 652
Atlantic City	p. 659
Hey, Torquemada [History of the World-Part I]	p. 666
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Gadgeteer [Blow Out]	p. 671
Pennies from Heaven	p. 677
Shoot the Moon	p. 684
Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip	p. 691
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial	p. 695
Up the River [Fitzcarraldo, Burden of Dreams]	p. 700
Tootsie	p. 708
Memory [The Night of the Shooting Stars]	p. 713
State of the Art
A Masterpiece [The Leopard]	p. 723
The Perfectionist [Yentl]	p. 730
Golden Kimonos [The Makioka Sisters]	p. 737
Hooked
Out There and In Here [Blue Velvet]	p. 745
Irish Voices [The Dead]	p. 753
The Lady From the Sea [High Tide]	p. 758
Movie Love
Unreal [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown]	p. 765
A Wounded Apparition [Casualties of War]	p. 769
Satyr [My Left Foot]	p. 779
The Grifters	p. 783
Sources and Acknowledgments	p. 787
Index	p. 789
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