Pauline Kael - American Quotes

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Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher.

Pauline Kael
People who are just getting "seriously interested" in film always ask a critic, "Why don't you talk about technique and 'the visuals' more?" The answer is that American movie technique is generally more like technology and it usually isn't very interesting.

Pauline Kael
Men are now beginning their careers as directors by working on commercials — which, if one cares to speculate on it, may be almost a one-sentence résumé of the future of American motion pictures.

Pauline Kael
It is a depressing fact that Americans tend to confuse morality and art (to the detriment of both) and that, among the educated, morality tends to mean social consciousness.

Pauline Kael
For perhaps most Americans, TV is an appliance, not to be used selectively but to be turned on — there's always something to watch.

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
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