ABSTRACT
In her introduction to For Keeps, the compendium with which she wrapped up her work as a film critic, Pauline Kael concludes: ‘I'm frequently asked why I don't write my memoirs. I think I have’ (Kael 1994: iv). It's a fair way of measuring the flow of life through work, ten collected volumes of reviews and radio broadcasts, plus her much-contested sally into Orson Welles scholarship with ‘Raising Kane’ (1971): a forty-year relationship with as much heated ebb and flow as life elsewhere.
