Deeper into Movies

First edition cover

Deeper Into Movies is a collection of 1969 to 1972 movie reviews by American film critic Pauline Kael, published by Little, Brown and Company in 1973. It was the fourth collection of her columns; these were originally published in The New Yorker. It won the U.S. National Book Award in category Arts and Letters.

Containing reviews of individual films from the aforementioned time period, the collection also includes a long essay entitled "Numbing the Audience".

In the anthology, Kael praises the merits of then up-and-coming directors Robert Altman and Francis Ford Coppola, in her reviews of MASH, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and The Godfather. She pans Stanley Kubrick and his A Clockwork Orange for its brutality and moral convolutions.

The book is now out-of-print in the United States, but is still published in the United Kingdom by Marion Boyars Publishers, an independent publishing company.

Films reviewed

• Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - " a glorified vacuum"
• Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice - " the liveliest American comedy so far this year - this movie is made up of what was left out of the optimistic Doris Day comedies - Dyan Cannon is most effective (really brilliant)."
• Oh! What a Lovely War - " lethal - the small-mindedness of the approach destroys feeling "
• The Bed Sitting Room - " an apocalyptic farce - but there's no spirit, no rage, nothing left but ghastly, incessant sinking-island humour."
• A Walk with Love and Death - "a tale of chivalry which is at times as brutal as The Seventh Seal - it has an unusual integrity of vision."
• de Sade - " a rotten movie "
• High School - "so extraordinarily evocative that a feeling of empathy with the students floods over us - Wiseman is probably the most sophisticated intelligence to enter the documentary field in recent years. "
• The Royal Hunt of the Sun - " could turn into a classic of the hooting variety. Christopher Plummer, hissing and prancing, is a wickedly funny Inca king - "
• The Madwoman of Chaillot - "Jean Giraudoux's fragile play is doubtful screen material at best, and Anhalt's updating and message-mongering destroyed at the outset whatever chance it might have had."
• Paint Your Wagon - "how can we watch Clint Eastwood in a musical? - He's controlled in such an uninteresting way "
• Lions Love - "first American feature by Agnès Varda -visually it's very pretty - but it lacks a sense of the fitness of things - true sensibility"
• The Sterile Cuckoo -" directed very simply, but with remarkable and sustained tact, by Alan J. Pakula; - Pookie Adams (Liza Minnelli) is one of those brilliant, disordered, and dissociated kids - Miss Minnelli's sad, quizzical persona - the gangling body and the features that look too big for the little face - are ideal equipment for the role."
• The Secret of Santa Vittoria -" a horible kind of picturesque anti-Fascist opéra-bouffe bacchanal"
• Duet for Cannibals - "one more sealed-off-sex-games-and-guess-what's-real movie. - Miss Sontag is often a thoughtful writer, but she has never had much dramatic sense - and she certainly doesn't get a lot of drama going here."
• Coming Apart - " a sex-exploitation-plus-hangups-movie."
• Goodbye, Mr. Chips - " Peter O'Toole and Petula Clark play together so well that one smiles, wanting to accept the romance, wanting to believe in this middle-class fairy tale."
• Adalen 31 - "Bo Widerberg has made Adalen 31 with great skill and artistry and intelligence, yet it's uninspired - it's fundamentally didactic and academic."
• Hail, Hero! - "conglomerate-made "youth" soap opera"
• In the Year of the Pig - "assemblage of news footage and interviews that presents an overview of the Vietnam War - it provides a historical background and puts the events of the last few years into an intelligible framework."
• Downhill Racer - " Michael Ritchie making his début as a movie director - shows some talent, and some wit, in handling the actors in the semi-documentary situations."
• The Arrangement - " painfully bad in a way that isn't fun."
• La Femme Infidèle - "exquisitelty detailed, impeccably acted, stunningly directed suspense story about adultery and passion among the bourgeoisie - I only wish it were fundamentally more interesting."
• Futz - "I sat there to the repulsive end. It's still not easy to explain why it's awful -"
• All the Loving Couples - "sex-exploitation film"
• Popcorn -
• The Comic - " an emaciated little picture"
• Z - "a political film with a purpose - it derives from American gangster movies and prison pictures and anti-fascist melodramas of the forties (Cornered, Crossfire, Brute Force (1947 film), All the King's Men, Edge of Darkness, The Cross of Lorraine, et al ) - Z is based on the novel by Vassilis Vassilikos about the assassination of Gregorios Lambrakis, in Salonika, in May 1963 - a hell of an exciting movie"
• Alfred the Great -"appears to be not about the king who burned the cakes but about a movie studio that has been burning money."
• They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (film) -" Gloria is played by Jane Fonda - the strongest role an American actress has had on the screen this year - Fonda goes all the way with it -[she] stands a good chance of personifying American tensions and dominating our movies in the seventies as Bette Davis did in the thirties "
• John and Mary (film) - " a trifle"
• Gaily, Gaily - " Norman Jewison tries hard, but he just doesn't have the feeling for Hecht's Chicago "
• The Reivers (film) - " the script has great charm - of the Our Town and Ah, Wilderness sort, - " "I wish The Reivers were better done, but it does make one feel good."
• Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here - "There isn't a character who doesn't make points and stand for various political forces"
• Topaz - - "the same damned picture Alfred Hitchcock's been making since the thirties, and it's getting longer, slower, and duller."
• Hello, Dolly! (film) - " Dolly - Barbra Streisand - in the second half of the movie she energizes and transforms the prancing rubbish."
• On Her Majesty's Secret Service (film) - " marvellous fun "
• Marooned (film) -" a sci-fi space epic, is total, straight Dullsville"
• The Damned - " I have rarely seen a picture I enjoyed less, - a ponderously perverse spectacle by Luchino Visconti"
• Hamlet - " Hamlet's speeches, as Williamson delivers them, lack beauty."
• A Boy Named Charlie Brown - " a pathetically limp animation feature"
• M*A*S*H - " a marvellously unstable comedy, a tough, funny and sophisticated burlesque of military attitudes - It's a sick joke, but it's also generous and romantic - an erratic, episodic film, full of the pleasures of the unexpected."
• Anne of the Thousand Days - " well acted and with much sharper dialogue than the original Maxwell Anderson play"
• Patton - " holds out on us - because we aren't given enough information to evaluate Patton's actions."
• Hospital - " documentary by Frederick Wiseman -as open and revealing as filmed experience has ever been. The movie was made at Metropolitan Hospital in New York - the doctors and nurses are not unctuous in that fake-"professional" fashion of private hospitals [-] their occasional crudeness, even roughness, seems to be part of a recognition of the facts of life for the poor in a big city."
• The Milky Way - " a guided tour of heresies [a] relaxed parody of religious doctrines and excesses."
• The Molly Maguires - " an impressive failure - we don't quite believe any of it."
• The Kremlin Letter - " a complicated plot that loses one at the outset."
• The Honeymoon Killers - " based on the lives of the multiple murderers Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez - it's simple minded - a primitive version of old Republic pictures "
• A Married Couple - " Allan King's actuality drama - What is abandoned in this kind of filmmaking is imagination"
• End of the Road - " the filmmakers throw in every fancy trick they can steal - It's intelligence that's missing"
• Zabriskie Point - " Michelangelo Antonioni - winds up with an America as false and unconvincing as if it had been manufactured in a studio by foreign craftsmen. Though he uses actual locations, Zabriskie Point is as far off America as the Italian Westerns shot in Spain."
• The Looking Glass War- " fails at the premier level of drama - basic involvement."
• Loving - " an unusual movie - compassionate but unsentimental. [Director] Irvin Kershner is fortunate in having as his middle-class anti-hero George Segal, - He has perhaps the warmest presence of any current screen actor. As the wife Eva Marie Saint gives a stunning performance ""
• The Only Game in Town - "a sluggish star vehicle of the old, bad days"
• Start the Revolution Without Me - "a spoof of swashbucklers - It's worth mentioning mainly for Hugh Griffith, who is oddly poignant as a bufuddled Louis XVI"
• The Magic Christian (film) - "contemptible"
• Tropic of Cancer - "much less than the book"
• Fellini Satyricon - "a terrible movie - Somewhere along the line - Fellini gave in to the luxurious basking in sin that has always had such extraordinary public appeal . He became the new De Mille - a purveyor of the glamour of wickedness."
• The Adventurers (1970 film) -"Mr. Levine and Paramount Pictures are said to be cutting a half hour from the version I saw; they should keep cutting until there's nothing left."
• Airport - "doesn't work"
• The Boys in the Band - " it's a theatre piece that has lost its theatrically satisfying form, and what was bad is now worse, while what was passable because it "played well" doesn't play so well on screen."
• Women in Love -
• Trash -
• The Baby Maker -
• The Great White Hope -
• Monte Walsh -
• First Love (1970 film) -
• Ice -
• I Never Sang for My Father -
• Goin' Down the Road -
• This Man Must Die -
• Little Fauss and Big Halsy -
• C.C. and Company -
• Burn! -
• The Twelve Chairs -
• Cromwell -
• WUSA -
• The Owl and the Pussycat -
• Where's Poppa? -
• The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes -
• Song of Norway -
• Ryan's Daughter -
• Perfect Friday -
• The Pizza Triangle -
• Bombay Talkie -
• Scrooge -
• Groupies -
• I Walk the Line -
• The Confession -
• The Act of the Heart -
• Gimme Shelter -
• Little Big Man -
• Love Story (film)
• Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion -
• Husbands (film) -
• Alex in Wonderland -
• Brewster McCloud -
• There Was a Crooked Man... -
• The Music Lovers -
• Bed and Board (1970 film) -
• Promise at Dawn -
• The Last Valley -
• Puzzle of a Downfall Child -
• Little Murders -
• The Hour of the Furnaces -
• Doctors' Wives -
• The Sporting Club -
• The Garden of Delights -
• Claire's Knee -
• Wanda -
• A New Leaf -
• The Conformist -
• The Andromeda Strain -
• McCabe & Mrs. Miller -
• Klute -
• Carnal Knowledge -
• The Anderson Tapes -
• Sunday Bloody Sunday -
• The Last Picture Show -
• The Last Movie -
• Skin Game -
• The Trojan Women -
• Murmur of the Heart -
• The Début -
• T.R. Baskin -
• The French Connection -
• Long Ago, Tomorrow -
• Is There Sex After Death? -
• Fiddler on the Roof -
• El Topo -
• Billy Jack -
• Born to Win -
• Going Home (1971 film) -
• King Lear -
• Man in the Wilderness -
• Bedknobs and Broomsticks -

External links

• Pauline Kael on A Clockwork Orange