August 19, 2024 Issue

Wow! It was just like old times. I opened this week’s issue (an “archival issue”), and who should I find? None other than Pauline Kael – my all-time favorite New Yorker writer. What a treat! The selected piece is her great “Bravo!,” a review of William Wyler’s Funny Girl. It originally appeared in the September 28, 1968 New Yorker, and was later included in two Kael collections – Going Steady (1969) and For Keeps (1994). It’s a key piece in Kael’s oeuvre. It’s one of her earliest expressions of her critical credo. She wrote,

There hasn’t been a funny girl on the screen for so long now that moviegoers have probably also got used to doing without one of the minor, once staple pleasures of moviegoing: the wisecracking heroines, the clever funny girls—Jean Arthur, of course, and Claudette Colbert, and Carole Lombard, and Ginger Rogers, and Rosalind Russell, and Myrna Loy, and all the others who could be counted on to be sassy and sane. They performed a basic comic function—they weren’t taken in by sham; they had the restorative good sense of impudence—and in the pre-bunny period they made American women distinctive and marvellous.... The comedy is the comedy of cutting through the bull, of saying what’s really on your mind.  

I don’t think Kael aspired to be a “funny girl.” But she loved making wisecracks, and she could always be counted on for being “sassy and sane” and “cutting through the bull.” In a way, I think she saw herself in the tradition of Jean Arthur, Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard, and the other wisecracking actresses she mentions. They definitely influenced her impudent approach to criticism. 

“Bravo!” contains several quintessential Kael lines. This one, for example: “Most Broadway musicals are dead before they reach the movies—the routines are so worked out they’re stiff, and the jokes are embalmed in old applause.” And this: “And the tears belong to her face; they seem to complete it, as Garbo’s suffering in 'Camille' seemed to complete her beauty.”

“Bravo!” is one of Kael’s best pieces. I applaud The New Yorker for republishing it. Hail Kael!