Why Pauline Kael Liked Barbara Stanwyck
Jana Prikryl’s essay on film critic Pauline Kael (pictured) in the current New York Review of Books had me hooked from this sentence in the second graf: ‘It’s not hard to see why Pauline Kael loved [Barbara] Stanwyck, calling her “an amazing vernacular actress,†a phrase that might just as aptly describe Kael’s style on the page. She was drawn to comedy because it always finds shortcuts to the awful truth.’
