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“Object to the Hollywood film and you’re an intellectual snob, object to the avant-garde films and you’re a Philistine. But, while in Hollywood, one must often be a snob; in avant-garde circles one must often be a Philistine.”

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Pauline Kael

"Movies, the Desperate Art" (1956)

“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.”

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Pauline Kael

Quoted in Francis Davis, Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael (Da Capo, 2003, ISBN 0-306-81230-4).

“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.”

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Pauline Kael buch Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

“And for the greatest movie artists where there is a unity of technique and subject, one doesn’t need to talk about technique much because it has been subsumed in the art. One doesn’t want to talk about how Tolstoi got his effects but about the work itself. One doesn’t want to talk about how Jean Renoir does it; one wants to talk about what he has done. One can try to separate it all out, of course, distinguish form and content for purposes of analysis. But that is a secondary, analytic function, a scholarly function, and hardly needs to be done explicitly in criticism. Taking it apart is far less important than trying to see it whole. The critic shouldn’t need to tear a work apart to demonstrate that he knows how it was put together. The important thing is to convey what is new and beautiful in the work, not how it was made — which is more or less implicit.”

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Pauline Kael buch Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

“If you can't make fun of bad movies on serious subjects, what's the point?”

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Pauline Kael

Interview with Hal Espen, The New Yorker (1994-03-21); reprinted in Espen's Conversations with Pauline Kael (University of Mississippi Press, 1996, ISBN 0-878-05899-0), p. 162.
Interviews

“I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them.”

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Pauline Kael

Quoted by Israel Shenker, "Critics Here Focus on Films As Language Conference Opens," http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50A11FF3E59107A93CAAB1789D95F468785F9 The New York Times (1972-12-28)
Often quoted as "How could Nixon have won? Nobody I know voted for him"; referring to George McGovern's loss to Richard Nixon in in the 1972 presidential election.

“The past has a terror and fascination and a beauty beyond almost anything else. We are looking at the dead, and they move and grin and wave at us; it's an almost unbearable experience. When our wonder or our grief are interrupted or followed by a commercial, we want to destroy the ugly box. Old movies don't tear us apart like that. They do something else, which we can take more of and take more easily; they give us a sense of the passage of life. Here is Elizabeth Taylor as a plump matron and here, an hour later, as an exquisite child.”

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Pauline Kael buch Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

"Movies on Television"
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968)

“De Mille's bang-them-on-the-head-with-wild-orgies-and-imperilled-virginity style is at its ripest; the film is just about irresistible.”

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Pauline Kael

"The Sign of the Cross," p. 680.
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982)

“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.”

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Pauline Kael buch State of the Art

"King Candy," review of Against All Odds (1984-03-19), p. 145.
State of the Art (1985)

“Charles Laughton is superbly vulgar in this whack at the backside of Victorianism. He makes a great vaudeville turn out of the role of an egocentric scoundrel, the prosperous bootmaker who doesn't want to part with his three marriageable daughters because they are too useful as unpaid labor. As the oldest daughter, the spinster in spite of herself, Brenda de Banzie is so "right" that when she marries her father's best workman and puts belching, drunken old Dad out of business, one feels the good old-fashioned impulse to applaud.”

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Pauline Kael

"Hobson's Choice," pp. 335-336.
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982)

“This is a nature-boy movie, a kid's daydream of being an Indian. When Dunbar has become a Sioux named Dances with Wolves, he writes in his journal that he knows for the first time who he really is. Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head.”

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Pauline Kael buch Movie Love

"New Age Daydreams," review of Dances with Wolves (1990-12-17), p. 295.
Movie Love (1991)

“The slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lightning-fast choreography.”

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Pauline Kael

"Enter the Dragon," p. 221.
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982)

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

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Pauline Kael

"Raising Kane" http://www.paulrossen.com/paulinekael/raisingkane.html, The New Yorker (1971-02-20 and 1971-02-27); reprinted in Kael's The Citizen Kane Book (1971).

“Kicked in the ribs, the press says "art" when "ouch" would be more appropriate.”

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Pauline Kael buch Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

“The words "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies. This appeal is what attracts us, and ultimately what makes us despair when we begin to understand how seldom movies are more than this.”

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Pauline Kael buch Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

"A Note on the Title".
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968)

“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.”

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Pauline Kael buch Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

“October 14, 1972: that date should become a landmark in movie history comparable to May 29, 1913 — the night Le Sacre du Printemps was first performed — in music history. There was no riot, and no one threw anything at the screen, but I think it’s fair to say that the audience was in a state of shock, because Last Tango in Paris has the same kind of hypnotic excitement as the Sacre, the same primitive force, and the same thrusting, jabbing eroticism. […] Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form. Who was prepared for that?”

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Pauline Kael

From "The Current Cinema" http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/834-last-tango-in-paris. The New Yorker. October 28, 1972.

“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.”

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Pauline Kael

"The Perils of Being Pauline," interview with Francis Davis, The New Yorker (October 2001).
Interviews

“The conglomerate heads may be business geniuses, but as far as movies are concerned they have virgin instincts; ideas that are new to them and take them by storm may have failed grotesquely dozens of times. But they feel that they are creative people — how else could they have made so much money and be in a position to advise artists what to do? Who is to tell them no?”

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Pauline Kael

Taking It All In (1983), Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers (1980-06-23)

“People have expected less of movies and have been willing to settle for less. Some have even been willing to settle for Kramer vs. Kramer and other pictures that seem to be made for an audience of over-age flower children. These pictures express the belief that if a man cares about anything besides being at home with the kids, he’s corrupt. Parenting ennobles Dustin Hoffman and makes him a better person in every way, while in The Seduction of Joe Tynan we can see that Alan Alda is a weak, corruptible fellow because he wants to be President of the United States more than he wants to stay at home communing with his daughter about her adolescent miseries. Pictures like these should all end with the fathers and the children sitting at home watching TV together.”

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Pauline Kael

Taking It All In (1983), Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers (1980-06-23)

“Since I have an aversion to movies in which people say grace at the dinner table (not to the practice but to how movies use it to establish the moral strength of a household), the opening night montage of Sunday-night supper in one home after another in Waxahachie, Texas in 1935 — a whole community saying grace — made me expect the worst.”

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Pauline Kael buch State of the Art

"Mirrors," review of Places in the Heart (1984-10-15), p. 246.
State of the Art (1985)

“After one of those terrible lovers' quarrels that leave one in a state of incomprehensible despair. I came out of the theater, tears streaming, and overheard the petulant voice of a college girl complaining to her boyfriend, "Well I don't see what was so special about that movie." I walked up the street, crying blindly, no longer certain whether my tears were for the tragedy on the screen, the hopelessness I felt for myself, or the alienation I felt from those who could not experience the radiance of Shoeshine. For if people cannot feel Shoeshine, what can they feel?… Later I learned that the man with whom I had quarreled had gone the same night and had also emerged in tears. Yet our tears for each other, and for Shoeshine did not bring us together. Life, as Shoeshine demonstrates, is too complex for facile endings.”

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Pauline Kael

Review for Shoeshine (1946) as quoted in Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me (2004) by Craig Seligman.

“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.”

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Pauline Kael

"The Beachcomber," p. 56.
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982)

“[T]his 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.”

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Pauline Kael

"The Wild One," p. 838.
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982)

“TV executives think that the programs with the highest ratings are what TV viewers want, rather than what they settle for.”

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Pauline Kael

Taking It All In (1983), Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers (1980-06-23)

“Unlike storybook heroes and heroines but like many actual heroes and heroines, she was something of a social outcast. (As Simone Weil noted, it was the people with irregular and embarrassing histories who were often the heroes of the Resistance in the Second World War; the proper middle-class people may have felt they had too much to lose.)”

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Pauline Kael buch State of the Art

"Busybody," review of Silkwood (1984-01-09), p. 107.
State of the Art (1985)

“A mistake in judgment isn't fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is.”

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Pauline Kael

"Zeitgeist and Poltergeist; or, Are Movies Going to Pieces?" http://www.paulrossen.com/paulinekael/aremoviespieces.html (December 1964), from I Lost It at the Movies (1965).