Film critic Pauline Kael proposed that the real Golden Age of American Movies was not the much-heralded 1940s, but instead the long decade of the 1970s, when a kind of freewheeling creativity and an explosion of new voices and impulses were unleashed. American film suddenly revealed more varieties of stories, more unconventional talents, more dialogue with foreign film and forbidden subject-matter than ever before. In Peter Hardy’s Sally and Glen at the Palace, pop movie culture does not coarsen the mind and emotions, but creates a conduit for the most delicate moments of (imperfect) communication. Peter Hardy’s young heroine and hero–battered, puzzled, and tentatively brave—find in the movies that whirl through the local movie palace a whole new vocabulary with which they can explore and share their most vulnerable truth—their unsure steps on the path of growing up.
Michael Evenden, Associate Professor Theatre Studies, Emory University