As film critic for The
New Yorker since 1908,
Pauline Kael is America's most influential writer on cinema, with her every word collected, most recently in When the Lights Go Down. But she was in her mid-40s when she burst on to the national scene from
Californian obscurity with her first book I Lost it at the Movies. In conversation with PHILIP FRENCH she discusses her late-flowering career, the American cinema, her alleged anglophobia and her recent experience of film production in Hollywood. followed by an interlude