The Film Critic Pauline Kael

Readers familiar with websit's ebb and flow will know that November marks a change in bathroom reading. Gone is last year's People's Almanac #3 (1981) and in its place something I picked up at the MCC Thrift Shop on yesterday's late-morning walk -- a 650 page collection of New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael's 1972-1975 film reviews.

The first entry in Reeling (1977) appears under the chapter title "Soul Food". In an artful pairing, Kael discusses two films -- Sounder (1972) and The Emigrants (1972) -- and leaves it the reader to wonder why.

So what do we know about these two films? Sounder is a dog, a coon hound. The family he lives with are Depression-era Black sharecroppers; not slaves like the parents' parents' generation but enslaved by Jim Crow laws that were enforced in the American South as late as 1965. The emigrants in this case are Swedes who came willingly to the United States in the mid-19th century, many of whom settled in north-central winter states like Minnesota. Traces of Swedish immigration can be found in later films like the Cohen Brothers' Fargo (1996).