THE SAGA OF BOSLEY CROWTHER
A critic can be an intimidating figure. They are the gatekeepers of taste, the judges who assign a film’s level of quality before it’s even had a chance to be been seen by the hoi polloi. With an elative review, they can give the film a seat at the table of public discourse; with a damning one, they can deny it an audience entirely. Yet, in 1967, following the release of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, this dynamic was thrown upside-down. This is a moment that mostly resides in the footnotes of one of the canonical great films of American history, yet it’s one that highlights the truly fickle role of the critic, and how they can sometimes be shaped by the world around them, rather than the other way around.
For our purposes, the story begins with Warner Brothers nervously shuffling into the 1967 World’s Fair Film Festival, unsure what, exactly, to do with the film they were about to premiere. Bonnie and Clyde was a strange beast, it was a dramatic retelling of the spree of bank robberies committed by the Barrow Gang between 1932 and 1934. Shying from the traditional tropes of American westerns and gangster flicks, the film drew heavy inspiration from the French New Wave movement. It was a movie that dared to revel in the moral ambiguity of its protagonists, telling their story at a lackadaisical pace that focused on moments of humor and sad, nostalgic beauty. It was also one of the first films to make extensive use of squibs –small explosive charges mounted with bags of fake blood– meaning that where once gunshot victims quietly slumped over a chair, they now brutally convulsed as their chest erupted in a firework show of gore. Running over-budget at $2.5 million, the film was an incredible risk, made possible by enough industry players who believed that the rising counter-culture demanded a new kind of Hollywood.
By the start of 1968, that risk had paid off. The film took the US by storm, grossing $23 million and becoming the studio’s then second highest-grossing film of all time[1]. It would go on to garner ten academy award nominations, ultimately winning Best Cinematographer and Best Supporting Actress. In light of all these obvious indicators of achievement, it can be surprising, then, to learn that the film was almost dead on arrival, thanks to the efforts of just one man.
Bosley Crowther was the head film critic of The New York Times and the only American representative at the World’s Fair Film Festival, where Bonnie and Clyde had its premiere. On August 6, he wrote a piece titled “Shoot-Em-Up Film Opens World Fete” which, while ostensibly a recap of the festival’s first two days, was dominated by his hatred of the one particular film. “Hollywood moviemakers seem to have a knack of putting the worst foot forward at international film festivals,”[2] the piece began, before going on to call the movie a “wild, jazzy farce melodrama”[3]. He attacked its vast historical liberties and tonal experimentation, claiming that it recreated events “as though it were funny instead of sordid and grim.”[4] He concluded the piece by writing off the applause at the end of the premiere, calling it a symptom of “how delirious these festival audiences can be.”[5]
The review seemed harsh, but it turned out Crowther was just getting started. Ten days after his initial festival thoughts, Crowther wrote a longer review, labelling Bonnie and Clyde both “a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy”[6], and “strangely antique, sentimental claptrap”[7]. He claimed that its Americana campiness turned the titular couple into “the Beverly Hillbillies of next year,”[8] then accused Arthur Penn of “aggressively”[9] splashing blood onto otherwise comic scenes. Most pointedly, he damned the films historical revisionism, calling it “as pointless as it is lacking in taste”[10].
To appreciate the power of this condemnation, one needs to understand the height of Crowther’s role in American cinema at the time. He had written for The New York Times since 1940, and made a name for himself with both his prolific output and his stern writing style, which his obituarist Robert D. McFadden would charitably call “scholarly, rather than breezy”. Through his columns, Crowther established himself as one of the singular qualifiers of taste on the east coast. In his book Pictures at A Revolution, historian Mark Harris provides a perfect example of Crowther’s power; in 1950, his hatred of the Orson Welles comedy Falstaff was enough to make its US distributor to avoid opening the film in New York. Harris summarizes Crowther’s crucial role in the festival circuit by explaining that “[he] delighted in being a kingmaker- and sometimes an executioner- at international festivals”[11].
Yet Crowther’s role wasn’t entirely a destructive one. While a shameless lover of classic Hollywood values, he had also stood as one of the most tireless proponents of foreign cinema. Throughout the late 40s and early 50s, he proudly championed the Italian neo-realist movement and frequently promoted the works of Ingmar Bergman and Roberto Rossellini. This passion even placed him at the epicenter of controversy when he emphatically supported Rossellini’s 1948 film The Miracle. The movie had been condemned by numerous Catholic organizations condemned for its story of a pregnant woman who falsely believed her child to be an immaculate conception. Despite a wave of hate mail that his stance incurred, Crowther went so far as to write a six-page defense of movie in a 1951 issue of The Atlantic, claiming that censoring the film would mean denying “the same freedom for the medium that is enjoyed by the over-all press.”[12] This capacity to both give and take had established Crowther as an ongoing fixture, and the first hurdle any film would need to clear to finding success in the American market.
If Warner Brothers was nervous before Bonnie and Clyde’s release, Crowther’s attacks the studio terrified. The film was pulled from theaters after a two-month run localized around Manhattan, and a small 35-theater tour of the southwest. In all fairness, Crowther wasn’t the film’s only detractor. Time Magazine’s Alan Rich had called it “a strange and purposeless mingling of fact and claptrap,”[13] while Newsweek’s Joe Morgenstern had labeled it “a squalid shoot-‘em-up for the modern age”[14].
Yet, no other critic managed to hit the film where it hurt quite as much as Crowther. On September 24, an interview with the film’s producer and star, Warren Beatty, revealed just how much his reviews had stung. Despite the fantastic reviews the film had been receiving in London (where the interview was conducted), Beatty found himself pensively pacing his hotel room and brandishing a copy of the New York Times. “What really hurts” he had said, “is that one lousy review in the New York Times. Bosley Crowther says your movie is a glorification of violence, a cheap display of sentimental claptrap and that’s that. The New York Times has spoken, hallelujah.”[15] It’s worth noting that the writer of said interview was, himself, a tremendous supporter of Bonnie and Clyde: a young critic who had just started his career at The Chicago Sun-Times, by the name of Roger Ebert.
On September 25th, Ebert had a chance to fully express his thoughts on the movie. He gave it four out of four stars, calling it “a milestone of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance.”[16] He would go on to laud its tonal complexity, describing it as “pitilessly cruel, filled with sympathy, nauseating, funny, heartbreaking, and astonishingly beautiful.”[17] The beauty of Ebert’s review is that it reads like something written with the gift of retrospect. He subtly linked the film’s violence to the horrors of the Vietnam war, and the hokey Americanisms to the growing disillusionment of America’s youth. Most profoundly, he could look at the film as something that defined a very specific point in history. He concluded his review by declaring “The fact that the story is set thirty-five years ago doesn’t mean a thing. It had to be set sometime. But it was made now and it’s about us.”[18]
Yet, as powerful as Ebert’s review was, it was just part of a wave that was gaining momentum. Even though Warner Bros gave the film a practically moot release outside of New York, it had still become an outstanding hit within Manhattan. Eventually, after a great deal of intervention and negotiating from Beatty himself, the movie found its way back into theatres. More favorable takes on the film started to roll in, even from former detractors. After his unfavorable review, Morgenstern published a second piece totally countering his previous position. His new review began with the disclaimer “I am sorry to say that I consider [the previous] review to be grossly unfair and regrettably inaccurate. I am sorrier to say I wrote it,” before going on to call the film “scene after scene of dazzling artistry”[19]. Between his two reviews, Morgenstern had re-watched the film in a sold-out theater, surrounded by an audience who had laughed and cheered the whole time. It also didn’t help that, at a dinner party, he’d received a smug tongue lashing from a rising freelancer, Pauline Kael.
On October 21, Kael wrote a twenty-three-page review for The New Yorker that not only vehemently praised the film, but also took unsubtle jabs at its detractors. Its opening line proclaimed “How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on? Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American movie since the Manchurian Candidate.”[20] Her review wasn’t quite as glowing as Ebert’s; she felt that the subplot surrounding Clyde’s sexual impotency dumbed the film down. Yet, much like Ebert, she could recognize the film as a game changer, writing “Bonnie and Clyde brings into the almost frighteningly public world of movies things that people have been feeling and saying and writing about… And once something is said or done on the screens of the world, once it has entered mass art, it can never again belong to a minority, never again be the private possession of an educated, or ‘knowing,’ group”. Her review also went on to celebrate the audience as participants in the movie’s subversive thrills. “People in the audience at Bonnie and Clyde are laughing,” she wrote, “they’re demonstrating that they’re not stooges- that they appreciate the joke- when they catch the first bullet in the face.”[21]
In all likelihood, Kael didn’t mean to call Crowther a stooge, but that didn’t stop a flood of other critics from directly taking him on. The New Yorker’s Penelope Gilliatt wrote “Bonnie and Clyde could look like a celebration of gangster glamor only to a man with a head full of wood shavings.”[22] Variety went so far as to assert that Crowther had “hurt the cause of serious filmmaking in America by shooting down a work of art.”[23] Even The New York Times, his own publication, began running a series of letters that called Crowther “blinded” and “insensitive”[24], and accused him of trying to resurrect the prudish censorship standards of the Hayes code.
For what it’s worth, during this time, Crowther had been presented a final chance to save face, but chose to double down further. In a third piece, published in September, he was able to acknowledged the vast outpouring of support from audience members. “Quite as puzzling to me as the production of feelings of empathy and sorrow for a couple of slap-happy killers,” Crowther wrote, “is the upsurge of passionate expressions of admiration and defense of the film.”[25] He then showed some appreciation for the films originality, describing it as an experiment into the “abstraction of violence.”[26] But he immediately shot himself in the foot by trying to invalidate the movie once and for all by proving its historical inaccuracies. He recited news articles from the time calling Bonne and Clyde “the most ruthless and kill-crazy outlaws,”[27] as if these primary sources were the smoking gun to prove his case. Then, in the most oddly telling conclusion possible, he tried to grapple with the audience’s ongoing appreciation of the film. He wrote, “by this same line of reckoning, one could build up a theme of sympathy and sadness on the thought that the system was the enemy of a character named Lee Harvey Oswald…or that the irony of Hitler’s terror was that he was so confused by his early rejection that he didn’t realize the awfulness of the violence he caused.”[28]
In December- shortly after Kael was officially made film critic for The New Yorker -Crowther was reassigned to the Roving Reporter desk. In September of 1987, he left the Times for good.
Looking at these events with the gift of hindsight, it’s easy to assign archetypes to its players, with Kael and Ebert representing the funky, new, free-love generation; and Crowther standing in the corner as a stubborn member of the old guard. Indeed, Kael herself would actively court this narrative, adding a sort of rebellious urgency to her writing. At one point in her review, she stated “when a movie so clearly conceived as a new version of a legend is attacked as historically inaccurate, it’s because it shakes people a little”, and later, in a rather pointed jab, added “too many people — including some movie reviewers — want the law to take the job of movie criticism.”[29] The problem with this narrative, however, is that it ignores the tremendously important role that Crowther had played, in his own time, as an advocate for free speech.
Crowther spent almost his entire career fighting censorship. When, in 1959, the Supreme Court ruled that Lady Chatterley’s Lover held redeeming social values, he called the decision a “victory for ideas.”[30] In 1954, when Michael Wilson’s Salt of The Earth was being widely blasted as communist propaganda and struggling to find steady distribution (only 12 theaters in the US were willing to screen it), Bosley Crowther was one of its few defenders. As a critic, he was even capable immense self-awareness and humility, first dismissing Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho as “a blot on an otherwise honorable career”, only to later reassess it, writing “sensual and sadistic though it was, it presented expert and sophisticated command of emotional development with cinematic techniques”.
It’s a mistake to read Crowther’s reviews of Bonnie and Clyde as a call for censorship. He never wanted some authority to step in and take the movie away, he just wanted it to never get made in the first place. Crowther’s reviews treated the violence in Bonnie & Clyde as the personal responsibility of the director, and expected him to hold himself to a higher standard. Crowther also believed that a director should have the viewer’s best interests at heart. This meant that showing real-life murders in a humorous way was tantamount to lying to the audience, and thereby dishonoring history. What Crowther just couldn’t comprehend was that Bonnie & Clyde wasn’t twisting history, it was making it irrelevant. Arthur Penn was intent on making a film that explored the very nature of the American folk tale, something that could capture both its other-worldly charm and its horrible consequences. There’s no moral to the tale; there isn’t even a villain. There’s just two young lovers who found an anarchic good time in an otherwise bleak age, only for things to end in pain and bloodshed.
Maybe it was just a question of age. Ebert and Kael hadn’t spent nearly as much time working as full staff-writers, and could look at the films violence with the open eyes that irony usually requires. Crowther, meanwhile, had been taking films seriously, and making a case for them to be taken seriously, for over twenty-five years. Maybe he was just a victim of the era. Crowther belonged to the generation that had optimistically believed in conquering the hardships of the 30’s and the 40’s, rather than the generation that had watched the Kennedy assassination and the Vietnam War kill the American dream.
Twenty-five years after its release, Bonnie and Clyde would be among the first hundred films to be selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. In this time, the film’s profound legacy would be strongly felt in all walks of American cinema, permanently shifting views on violence, and the American conception of the anti-hero. In the decades that followed, both Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael would go on to redefine the shape of film criticism. They would also find themselves challenged by the legacy that Bonnie & Clyde left behind. Roger Ebert would later spend entire episodes of his groundbreaking series At the Movies railing against the emerging slasher movie genre, for both its violence against women and its elevation of serial killers to franchise-leading icons. Kael, meanwhile, would continuously decry the careers of figures like Clint Eastwood and John Milius, as they crafted reactionary anti-heroes like Dirty Harry.
Eventually, yet another wave would step in and adapt the art of film criticism to changing technologies. Radio shows would turn into podcasts. Print film columns would be supplanted by blogs, and then by outlets that operated entirely online. Websites such as YouTube and Twitter would tear down the barriers for entry, creating a world where a clever video review or a funny tweet thread could an audience larger than the New Yorker’s 1.3 million subscribers []. These tools would allow voices from all walks of life to turn criticism into an ongoing dialectic, attacking sacred cows and shining a light on neglected treasures. Where things will go from here is anyone’s guess.
Bosley Crowther died of heart failure on March 7, 1981. It’s estimated that, in his career, he’d maintained an output of 200 film reviews a year. In his 25-year tenure at the New York Times, this amounted to 5,000 reviews. According to his obituary, the last movie he saw was Roman Polanski’s epic drama Tess. He never published his thoughts on the film, but hopefully he enjoyed it.
[1] Harris, Mark. Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood. New York: Penguin Press, 2008. Pg. 365.
[2] Crowther, Bosley. “SHOOT-EM-UP FILM OPENS WORLD FETE.” The New York Times, August 07, 1967. ProQuest.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Crowther, Bosley. “Screen: ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ Arrives: Careers of Murderers Pictured as Farce.” The New York Times, August 14, 1967. ProQuest.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Harris. Pictures at a Revolution. Pg. 143.
[12] Crowther, Bosley. “The Strange Case Of The Miracle.” Atlantic 01 Jan. 1951. Print.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ebert, Roger. Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert ; Forty Years of Reviews, Essays, and Interviews. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2006. Print. Pg. 4
[16] Ebert. Pg. 104
[17] Ebert. Pg. 105
[18] Ebert. Pg. 107
[19] Harris. Pictures at a Revolution. Pg. 343.
[20] Kael, Pauline. “Onward and Upward With The Arts.” The New Yorker 21 Oct. 1967: 147–71. Print
[21] Ibid.
[22] Harris, Mark. Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood. New York: Penguin Press, 2008. Pg. 344.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Crowther, Bosley. “Run, Bonnie and Clyde: Run, Bonnie.” The New York Times, September 03, 1967. ProQuest.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Haberski, Raymond J. Freedom to Offend: How New York Remade Movie Culture. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007. Pg. 156.
