When the Lights Go Down (book)

All material in the book originally appeared in The New Yorker.^[1] The collection begins with an appreciation of Cary Grant." Mae West's raucous invitation to him - 'Why don't you come up sometime and see me?' - was echoed thirty years later by Audrey Hepburn in Charade: 'Won't you come in for a minute? I don't bite, you know, unless it's called for.' And then, purringly, 'Do you know what's wrong with you? Nothing.' That might be a summary of Cary Grant, the finest romantic comedian of his era: there's nothing the matter with him." . After the profile of Cary Grant the book contains reviews of movies of the second half of the 1970s - more than one hundred and fifty of them.

The book is out-of-print in the United States, but is still published by Marion Boyars Publishers in the United Kingdom.

National Post reported that the volume "sold in impressive numbers".^[2] Matthew Wilder of City Pages wrote of Kael and offered "Her peak can be seen in the masterly collection When the Lights Go Down".^[3] Jim Emersonon of Sun Times wrote of Renata Adler's 7,646-word attack on Kael, "The Perils of Pauline," in the New York Review of Books, that it "...was ostensibly a review of Kael's 1980 collection When the Lights Go Down." Adler panned Kael's work on the volume, writing, "When the Lights Go Down, a collection of her reviews over the past five years, is out; and it is, to my surprise and without Kael- or Simon-like exaggeration, not simply, jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless. It turns out to embody something appalling and widespread in the culture."^[4]

The volume has been archived in the National Library of Australia.^[5]