BOOKS: That Wild Old Woman

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In her introduction to For Keeps, she calls her New Yorker gig "the best job in the world." It wasn't. For one thing, it was only half a job; she shared it with Penelope Gilliatt, who reviewed films from April to October, and who would often find her published opinions mocked and overruled when Kael returned. For another, Kael had to fight editor William Shawn and his timid minions to retain her brassy voice. "The editors," she writes, "tried to turn me into just what I'd been struggling not to be: a genteel, fuddy-duddy stylist ... Sometimes almost every sentence was rearranged." Shawn never got Kael. He is said to have wondered aloud why she didn't write for the Voice, "where she belongs."

At her peak Kael validated the vitality of such pop hits as Jaws, Taxi Driver, the Godfather films. Gradually, though, her opinions calcified into dogma. She became more auteurist, more predictable in defending favorite directors -- Kaufman, Sam Peckinpah, Brian De Palma, Irvin Kershner, Fred Schepisi -- than Sarris ever was, more frantic when her guys made flops. ("Are people becoming afraid of American movies?" she asked in a memorable burst of hysteria in 1978.)

And she loved trotting out her bugbears, those midcult darlings she despised: "Meryl Streep just about always seems miscast. (She makes a career out of seeming to overcome being miscast.)" This could set up some amusing abrasions when A-list men made movies starring Z-list women. In 1985, before the release of the Schepisi-Streep Plenty, the director mused, "Now we'll find out if she likes me more than she hates Meryl Streep." The answer was no.

Like most pundits, Kael was thick fisted and thin skinned. But Lord, that wild old woman could write. "You have to be open to the idea of getting drunk on movies," she says at the end of this humongous volume, as bulky as a six- pack of Bud and as instantly intoxicating. Reading For Keeps is like going on a toot with Mary McCarthy, Belle Barth and Billie Holiday. It's movie analysis with a serrated edge; film criticism as stand-up bawdry; intellectual improvisation that soars into the highest form of word jazz.