Pauline Kael on “The Godfather”
The New Yorker Radio Hour 
About this episode
<p><span>As </span><i><span>The New Yorker’s</span></i><span> film critic from 1968 to around 1991, the influential Pauline Kael gave voice to her visceral reactions: she wrote as a moviegoer, not a cineaste. Fifty years ago, in the March 10, 1972, issue, she </span><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1972/03/18/alchemy-pauline-kael"><span>wrote</span></a><span> about a new film by the hot-shot young director Francis Ford Coppola. “If ever there was a great example of how the best popular movies come out of a merger of commerce and art,” Kael wrote, “ ‘The Godfather’ is it.” She noted that Coppola took Mario Puzo’s potboiler of a novel, and the familiar outline of the gangster melodrama, and imbued them with “a new tragic realism,” which reflected a darker view of Americanism in the Watergate era. </span></p> <p><span>Edie Falco performs an excerpted version of Kael’s review. </span></p> <p><span>Some of Pauline Kael’s best work for </span><i><span>The New Yorker</span></i><span> is collected in “The Age of Movies,” published by the Library of America.</span></p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>
Listen to this episode in English to learn English
Podcast episodes are one of the highest-density ways to absorb English at native pace. Pauline Kael on “The Godfather” from The New Yorker Radio Hour gives you natural dialogue, unscripted speech, and vocabulary that actually appears in real conversations.
In the Clue app, every word in the transcript is tappable. Tap an unknown word, see the translation in your language instantly, and keep listening without breaking flow.