Pauline Kael on “The Godfather”

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 8 March 2022

⏱️ 7 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As The New Yorker’s film critic from 1968 to around 1991, the influential Pauline Kael gave voice to her visceral reactions: she wrote as a moviegoer, not a cineaste. Fifty years ago, in the March 10, 1972, issue, she wrote about a new film by the hot-shot young director Francis Ford Coppola. “If ever there was a great example of how the best popular movies come out of a merger of commerce and art,” Kael wrote, “ ‘The Godfather’ is it.” She noted that Coppola took Mario Puzo’s potboiler of a novel, and the familiar outline of the gangster melodrama, and imbued them with “a new tragic realism,” which reflected a darker view of Americanism in the Watergate era. Edie Falco performs an excerpted version of Kael’s review. Some of Pauline Kael’s best work for The New Yorker is collected in “The Age of Movies,” published by the Library of America.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.6	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:13.9	The critic Pauline Kale used to say that she lost it at the movies.
0:18.4	And if that phrase sounds a little erotic, she meant it to be. As the New Yorker's
0:24.1	film critic from 1968 to around 1991, she always gave voice to her most visceral reactions
0:30.4	to the movies. There was nothing snobbish, nothing airy about her movie going or her writing.
0:36.7	And 50 years ago, in March of 1972,
0:40.6	she wrote about a new film on the scene.
0:43.0	It was called The Godfather.
0:47.3	Here's Edie Falco, reading from Pauline Kale's Review.
0:52.4	If ever there was a great example of how the best popular movies come out of a merger of
0:57.8	commerce and art, the godfather is it.
1:01.9	I believe in America. America has made my fortune. And I raised my daughter in American
1:09.8	fashion.
1:17.2	The movie starts from a trash novel that's generally considered gripping and compulsively readable,
1:22.9	though, maybe because movies more than satisfy my appetite for trash, I found it unreadable.
1:29.5	It features a Sinatra stereotype and sex and slaughter and little gobbets of truth and heartbreak. You gotta get them close like this, and bina-bing, you blow their brains all over your nice
1:32.4	cyber league suit.
1:33.3	Come in.
1:34.3	You're taking us very personal.
1:36.3	Tom, this is business and this man has taken it very, very personal.
1:40.3	It's gripping, maybe, in the same sense that Spiro Agnew's speeches were a few years back.
	...

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