Pauline Kael on “The Godfather”

About this episode

<p><span>As </span><i><span>The New Yorker’s</span></i><span> 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 </span><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1972/03/18/alchemy-pauline-kael"><span>wrote</span></a><span> 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. </span></p> <p><span>Edie Falco performs an excerpted version of Kael’s review. </span></p> <p><span>Some of Pauline Kael’s best work for </span><i><span>The New Yorker</span></i><span> is collected in “The Age of Movies,” published by the Library of America.</span></p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>