Final credits go to Pauline Kael

"Movies can overwhelm us, as no other art form, except, perhaps, opera does," wrote Pauline Kael in the early '70s.

"It says something about the nature of movies that people don't say they like them, they say they love them — yet even those who love movies may feel that they can't always handle the emotions that the film heats up."

Kael, who died Monday at the age of 82, devoted her writing life (primarily as movie critic for The New Yorker, from 1968 to 1991) to documenting the passions that movies can stir. Like many other movie lovers, I followed her columns religiously until her retirement, rushing home from movies to read what she had to say.

She wrote like no one I'd read before: vigorous, witty, irreverent (" `Rain Man' is Dustin Hoffman humping one note on a piano for two hours and eleven minutes"), bracingly knowledgeable. Her reviews might reference classic films, literature, classical music, jazz, theater, philosophy (which she studied at Berkeley in the '30s) — she seemed to have an endless fountain of arts knowledge on which to draw.

Kael's literary works Tracking the literary output of Pauline Kael is tricky, as many of her books are now out of print (including most of the volumes of collected reviews originally published in The New Yorker, from 1965's "I Lost It at the Movies" through 1991's "Movie Love"). Many of them, however, can still be found in used-book stores. The best introduction to Kael's work currently in print is "For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies" (Plume/Penguin, $19.95), a massive volume (almost 1,300 pages) of collected reviews and essays; also available is "5001 Nights at the Movies" (Henry Holt & Co., $29.95), a collection of capsule reviews. Kael aficionados will also appreciate "Conversations with Pauline Kael" (edited by Will Brantley, University Press of Mississippi, $17), a collection of interviews that proves that Kael was as adept with conversation as she was with prose.

Soaring above all that prose — and it was a lot; sometimes pages and pages on such movies as "Blue Velvet" or "Casualties of War" — was her abiding love for movies (rarely "films"), which she called "our national theater." She singled out brilliant performances buried in mediocre movies (Teri Garr played her role in "Out Cold" "with a savage, twinkling joy. Why doesn't her skill get more recognition?"); praised movies that others might dismiss (she loved "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure"); and never gave anyone a free ride.

Kael reveled in the sheer fun of going to the movies. "It's one of the things I've tried to write about, and that readers get most indignant about, because they feel you're not being a cultivated, serious person if you talk about your pleasure at silliness, at lushness," she said in a 1989 interview.

She appreciated the larger-than-life pleasures of movie stars on screen and wasn't afraid of appearing star-struck.

"Part of the fun for many of us — you see it now if you look at old movies of the '30s — is that extravagance of gesture, doing things to excess. Every emotion is made bright. And it helps us satirize ourselves, helps put our own emotions in perspective, because they are so overdramatized."

Kael's enthusiasm for movies was never tempered with pretension: "If art isn't entertainment, then what is it? Punishment?"

She sent me, a new college graduate in mid-'80s Seattle with my new subscription to The New Yorker, to movies I might not otherwise have seen. She got me thinking about those I had seen. Now, as a new movie critic, I think of the conversational swing of her words as I sit in the dark — and in moviehouses everywhere, countless other Kael readers do, too.

Although she was mostly silent since retiring from The New Yorker in 1991, her work lives on in her many books. "I'm frequently asked why I don't write my memoirs," wrote Kael in the introduction to "For Keeps," a collection of her critical writing from 1961 to 1991. "I think I have."

Moira Macdonald can be reached at 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com.