Pauline Kael Quotes

118 Sourced Quotes

At the end, Schwarzenegger makes his ritual preparations for the climactic showdown, decking himself out in leather, packing up an arsenal of guns, and, as he leaves his apartment, copping a quick look of satisfaction in the mirror. It's his only love scene.

Pauline Kael
The happiest screen collaboration of Elsa Lanchester and Charles Laughton — they're both wonderful — is in this adaptation of a Somerset Maugham story, "The Vessel of Wrath." It's set on an island in the Pacific, which Maugham calls Baru, and it's concerned with the efforts of the prim missionary (Lanchester) to reform the carnal, ribald beachcomber (Laughton). The situation is the reverse of that in Maugham's Sadie Thompson story, but with a light, comic tone. The Hepburn-Bogart "African Queen" probably took a few notions from it.

Pauline Kael
Tasteful and colossal are — in movies, at least — basically antipathetic.

Pauline Kael
When I see those ads with the quote 'You'll have to see this picture twice,' I know it's the kind of picture I don't want to see once.

Pauline Kael
Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider.

Pauline Kael
Movies are a combination of art and mass medium, but television is so single in its purpose—selling—that it operates without that painful, poignant mixture of aspiration and effort and compromise.

Pauline Kael
The Way We Were is a fluke — a torpedoed ship full of gaping holes which comes snugly into port.

Pauline Kael
Though she came from the theatre, Barbara Stanwyck seemed to have an intuitive understanding of the fluid physical movements that work best on camera; perhaps she had been an unusually "natural" actress even onstage. This was her first big hit in the movies. Under Frank Capra's direction, she plays a tough "party" girl (euphemism for call girl) who poses for a wealthy young artist (Ralph Graves); he sees in her the spirituality that she attempts to deny. The story is a museum piece of early-talkies sentimentality, but, in a way, that only emphasizes Stanwyck's remarkable modernism.

Pauline Kael
What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.

Pauline Kael
Alienation is the most common state of the knowledgeable movie audience, and though it has the peculiar rewards of low connoisseurship, a miser's delight in small favors, we long to be surprised out of it — not to suspension of disbelief nor to a Brechtian kind of alienation, but to pleasure, something a man can call good without self-disgust.

Pauline Kael
If there is any test that can be applied to movies, it's that the good ones never make you feel virtuous.

Pauline Kael
De Niro's inflamed, brimming eyes are the focal point of the compositions. He's Travis Bickle, an outsider who can't find any point of entry into human society. He drives nights because he can't sleep anyway; surrounded by the night world of the uprooted — whores, pimps, transients — he hates New York with a Biblical fury, and its filth and smut obsess him. This ferociously powerful film is like a raw, tabloid version of Notes from the Underground. Martin Scorsese achieves the quality of trance in some scenes, and the whole movie has a sense of vertigo. The cinematographer, Michael Chapman, gives the street life a seamy, rich pulpiness.

Pauline Kael
McLuhanism and the media have broken the back of the book business; they've freed people from the shame of not reading. They've rationalized becoming stupid and watching television.

Pauline Kael
Infallible taste is inconceivable; what could it be measured against?

Pauline Kael
I loved writing about things when I was excited about them. It's not fun writing about bad movies. I used to think it was bad for my skin. It's painful writing about the bad things in an art form, particularly when young kids are going to be enthusiastic about those things, because they haven't seen anything better, or anything different.

Pauline Kael
For some strange reason we don't go to charming, light movies anymore. People expect a movie to be heavy and turgid, like "American Beauty." We've become a heavy-handed society.

Pauline Kael
When you clean them up, when you make movies respectable, you kill them. The wellspring of their art, their greatness, is in not being respectable.

Pauline Kael
If I never saw another fistfight or car chase or Doberman attack, I wouldn't have any feeling of loss. And that goes for Rottweilers, too.

Pauline Kael
It's sometimes discouraging to see all of a director's movies, because there's so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director's artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But it can also be a sign that he's a hack.

Pauline Kael
If there's anything to learn from the history of movies, it's that corruption leads to further corruption, not to innocence.

Pauline Kael
The small triumph of "The Graduate" was to have domesticated alienation and the difficulty of communication, by making what Benjamin is alienated from a middle-class comic strip and making it absurdly evident that he has nothing to communicate — which is just what makes him an acceptable hero for the large movie audience. If he said anything or had any ideas, the audience would probably hate him.

Pauline Kael
Movies, far more than the traditional arts, are tied to big money. Without a few independent critics, there's nothing between the public and the advertisers.

Pauline Kael
This film offers a nightmare image: the "Black Rebels," an outlaw motorcycle gang — a leather-jacketed pack who resemble storm troopers — terrorize a town. Their emblem is a death's head and crossed pistons and rods, and Marlon Brando, in his magnetic, soft-eyed youth, is their moody leader. The picture seemed to be frightened of its subject — the young nihilists who say "no" to American blandness and conformity — and reduced it as quickly as possible to the trivial meaninglessness of misunderstood boy meets understanding girl (Mary Murphy), but the audience savored the possibilities, and this clumsy, naive film was banned and argued about in so many countries that it developed a near-legendary status.

Pauline Kael
Kevin Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head. The Indians should have called him 'Plays with Camera.

Pauline Kael
I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.

Pauline Kael
The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you've seen.

Pauline Kael
Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.

Pauline Kael
The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren't drawing an audience - they're inheriting an audience. People just want to go to a movie. They're stung repeatedly, yet their desire for a good movie - for any movie - is so strong that all over the country they keep lining up.

Pauline Kael