The New Yorker:

Sixties Hollywood ushered in a tidal wave of commercial romantic slop, and now bad movies are more popular than good books. Can independent criticism save the day?

By Pauline Kael

When Pauline Kael joined The New Yorker’s staff as a movie critic, in January, 1968, the world of cinema was undergoing drastic change. The previous year, much of the film establishment had reacted with bewilderment—and even condemnation—to “Bonnie and Clyde,” which mirrored sixties politics with its story of heedless youth caught in America’s web of violence. In Kael’s famous New Yorker review (which she’d written as a freelancer), she had hailed it as a sign of Hollywood’s rejuvenation. But, three years into the job, she felt that the industry was backsliding. In January, 1971, after a week in which she deemed no new releases worth reviewing, she channelled her discontent into a startling article, “Notes on Heart and Mind,” which, true to its title, is a batch of journal-style riffs rather than a conventional essay. Together, the notes form something of a manifesto and reveal why, despite Kael’s status as the foremost critic of her era, she was also sharply at odds with it.

Kael charged that studios were clamping down on “the new creative freedom of young American moviemakers” and, instead, injecting their films with what she called “the new sentimentality,” a regression to obsolete commercial traditions. She claimed that “the back-to-heart movement is accompanied by strong pressures on reviewers”—both from editors and from the studios themselves. Increasingly, she believed, studios kept her out of press screenings in order to prevent her reviews from appearing before movies opened. Her response is the philosophical and polemical core of “Notes,” and the ideas she expresses there would remain central to her long career at The New Yorker, from which she retired as a regular reviewer in 1991.

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