The New Yorker’s Other Film Critic
All the recent attention showered on The New Yorker’s best-known former film critic, Pauline Kael, has pushed her contemporary at the mag, Penelope Gilliatt (pictured), to the side. So articles like this one help to restore the balance. I’m amused by all the chat in the piece about how the magazine’s fact checkers had to be “triply” careful with Gilliatt’s prose, because she’d had plagiarism problems and she liked, to put it mildly, to take a drink. I can assure you, however, that I was the fact checker on one of the pieces discussed in the Gilliatt article (a profile of Jonathan Miller) and that Gilliatt was great fun to deal with. Her breath may have reeked of vodka, but her mind reeked of joy.
