Hamlet ‘With a Nasal Twang’ — Pauline Kael’s ‘5001 Nights at the Movies’

One reason why my favorite collection of capsule film reviews is Pauline Kael’s 5001 Nights at the Movies: Expanded For The ’90s With 800 New Reviews (Holt, 960 pp., $35, paperback): Kael begins her comments on a 1969 Hamlet with, “Bearded, and with a nasal twang, Nicol Williamson is a surly Hamlet.” Hamlet with a nasal twang: what else do you need to know?

Do Readers Want ‘A Tragedy With a Happy Ending’?

“What the American public wants in the theater is a tragedy with a happy ending,” William Dean Howells said. Do people want this in novels, too? I gave a talk on The Story of Edgar Sawtelle at a library not long ago, and some members of the audience who loved the novel nonetheless disliked the downbeat ending. The reaction surprised me, because the reviews and publicity have made clear that the book has parallels to Hamlet, a tragedy in which corpses litter the stage in the last scene. Have the movies primed us to expect improbably happy endings? Or do the negative reactions have more to do with current events such as the recession?