No, it was a now-forgotten movie reviewer for Hearst newspapers named Rose Pelswick. I found a vertical file of her 1960s film reviews at a library in Austin, Texas, of all places.
Back in the day, when certain newspaper wire services and New York dailies shut down, the owners realized that the New York Public Library system and Columbia University didn't have room for old vertical files. So many ended up in unlikely parts of the United States where the locals have no idea a nearby building has artifacts from New York City history. Some who don't know that spend their life savings to visit New York City where they hope to get bombarded by a lot of entertainment, much of it taking place a long time ago.
As for Crowther, yes, I have noticed those flaws in his 1960s reviews, especially his take on Bonnie and Clyde. Consider that he was much more believable in the New York area than in other parts of the United States, including southern California. New Yorkers had the option of getting entertained on Broadway, so they didn't become pessimistic when they heard that a lot of films supposedly sucked.
Crowther's negativity didn't mean much in Los Angeles. Even today, you will find that many Los Angeles people hesitate to say anything bad about films or TV shows, and they don't care if others have. This is partly because they don't know who might stand in line with them at a grocery store and partly because they are bombarded with so many options for attending film festivals and joining the studio audiences of Jimmy Kimmel, etc. Talking bad wastes their time, much of which they spend driving. They don't have to get bored if they don't want to as long as they avoid fender benders and the vicinities of multi-vehicle accidents. To a certain extent that was true in the 1960s.
Charles Champlin may have seemed important, but his opinion was one of many in Los Angeles.
In the 1960s, the film critics in your local papers held sway. If residents of Kansas didn't subscribe to The New York Times, then they didn't read Crowther's comments. If you check certain microfilmed newspapers in the heartland, you'll be very surprised to find some critics there liking Bonnie and Clyde.
The film reviews in women's magazines had little influence in the 1960s. An excellent example was Pauline Kael's numerous negative comments in McCall's magazine during the year 1965. She slammed The Sound of Music, The Pawnbroker, which was the first American film to portray the Nazi Holocaust realistically and Dr. Zhivago. Not until the 1970s did a lot of people pay attention to what Ms. Kael said and had said earlier.
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hobnob53
11 years ago
Film critics individually seldom held much sway over what people chose to see or not. Of course, unanimously bad reviews and negative word-of-mouth will help doom a movie, but the single fact that Bosley Crowther or Pauline Kael thought something was good or bad had little effect on most people's decisions on whether to see a film.
I've lived in or around New York City most of my life and seldom paid attention to what they or anyone else said. I often read reviews but have never decided to see or not to see a film based solely on its reviews. Until Siskel and Ebert, and later the internet and national TV shows, film critics were always strictly local.
The fact that NYC has a lot of theater I'm sure had absolutely no effect on whether people saw a movie. But speaking of the power of critics, for decades the reviews written by the theater critics of the major newspapers in New York were indeed make-or-break for a Broadway show's success. There's a scene near the beginning of the Doris Day movie Please Don't Eat the Daisies, in which Doris portrays real-life writer Jean Kerr, where we see her husband -- played by David Niven, portraying the famed theater critic Walter Kerr -- being subjected to attacks by aspiring playwrights and actors as being one of the "holy seven", the theater critics for NYC's seven major daily newspapers, who could indeed close a show with a bad review. This apparently happened to Kerr in real life, and it was an accurate reflection of the situation at the time.
No film critic has ever had that power.
I disagree that The Pawnbroker was the first American film to portray the Holocaust realistically. In fact, it didn't portray it at all: it explored the effect of it on a survivor, but actual depictions of the Holocaust itself were basically absent. Earlier films like The Search, The Juggler, Exodus, Operation Eichmann, Judgment at Nuremberg and others all either depicted the Holocaust or its after-effects on its victims.
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