ABSTRACT
Pauline Kael's famous attack on Andrew Sarris appeared in the pages of Film Quarterly in 1963. Kael was responding to an article Sarris had published the year before in Film Culture, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962.” That article was not an introduction to auteur theory. By 1962, everyone who read Film Culture knew what an auteur was. Even people in Hollywood knew what an auteur was, because they had been reading the interviews with American directors that had been running in Cahiers du Cinéma since 1954. By the late nineteen fifties, every American director with any artistic ambition at all dreamed of being called an auteur by some Frenchman. The intention of Sarris's article was to defend an approach to film criticism that he conceded, right at the start, people had begun to get a little tired of.
