For Keeps

5 ideas

1. Defending Bonnie and Clyde against critics

   In 1967 Kael wrote a long defence of Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, which leading critics such as Bosley Crowther of the New York Times had dismissed as tasteless and glorifying violence. She argued that the film's sudden shifts from comedy to gunfire were its point: they draw the audience in by making the outlaws likable, then make the bloodshed land as real consequence. The piece ran in The New Yorker, helped turn critical opinion on the film, and led to her becoming the magazine's regular film critic.

2. Last Tango hailed as a cultural breakthrough

   In 1972 Kael reviewed Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris after its festival premiere and compared the night to the 1913 premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. She argued that the film had changed what movies could do by treating sexual passion as an expression of character, and she called Marlon Brando's improvised performance a breakthrough in screen acting. The review showed a critic staking her reputation on a contested film before the public had seen it.

3. Great trash is the gateway to art

   Kael argued that movies are so rarely great art that anyone who cannot enjoy great trash has little reason to care about movies at all. On her account, the energy, vulgarity and pleasure of popular entertainment are the qualities that also make the best films alive. A taste trained to value only respectable art loses contact with why people love the medium.

4. The viewer's reaction is the evidence

   Kael treated her own moment-by-moment response in the theatre as data. She described what was on the screen and what it did to the audience, often addressing the reader as "you" and writing as though the reader had been sitting beside her. The method replaces appeals to theory or to a director's stated intentions with a checkable account of experience, so readers can argue from their own reactions.

5. Prestige pictures flatter audiences into complacency

   Kael argued that respectable, uplifting and self-consciously important films are often more dishonest than open entertainment. They sell audiences the feeling of being cultured or morally improved while offering safe, pre-digested sentiment. She held that critics who reward good intentions and tasteful packaging train audiences to prefer reassurance to experience.

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