Bosley Crowther - Bonnie and Clyde Criticism

Bonnie and Clyde Criticism

The end of Crowther's career was marked by his disdain for the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. His review was scathing:

"It is a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cut-ups in Thoroughly Modern Millie... uch ridiculous, camp-tinctured travesties of the kind of people these desperadoes were and of the way people lived in the dusty Southwest back in those barren years might be passed off as candidly commercial movie comedy, nothing more, if the film weren't reddened with blotches of violence of the most grisly sort... This blending of farce with brutal killings is as pointless as it is lacking in taste, since it makes no valid commentary upon the already travestied truth. And it leaves an astonished critic wondering just what purpose Mr Penn and Mr Beatty think they serve with this strangely antique, sentimental claptrap."

Other critics besides Crowther panned the movie; for example, New York Magazine's notoriously harsh critic, John Simon, while praising its technical execution, declared "Slop is slop, even served with a silver ladle". Its distributor pulled the film from circulation. However, the critical consensus on Bonnie and Clyde reversed, notably with two high-profile reassessments by Time and Newsweek. The latter's Joe Morgenstern wrote two reviews in consecutive issues, the second retracting and apologizing for the first. Time hired Stefan Kanter as its new film critic in late 1967; his first assignment was an ostentatious rebuttal of his magazine's original negative review. A rave in The New Yorker by Pauline Kael was also influential. Re-released, the film became a substantial critical and financial success.

In the wake of this critical reversal, the most dogged critic of the film was Bosley Crowther, who wrote three negative reviews, as well as periodically blasting the movie in reviews of other films, and also in a letters column response to unhappy Times readers. The New York Times replaced Crowther as its primary film critic in early 1968, and it was widely speculated that his persistent attacks on Bonnie and Clyde had shown him to be out of touch with current cinema, and weighed heavily in his removal. Crowther worked as an executive consultant after leaving the Times. The turn of events dramatized a "changing of the guard" in film criticism, as a younger generation of critics achieved clout and prominence. The venerable Crowther had been no favorite among this group; in 1964, Kael sarcastically praised his "reverse acumen that makes him invaluable."

Crowther wrote The Lion's Share: The Story of an Entertainment Empire (1957), the first book documenting the history of MGM, as well as Hollywood Rajah: The Life and Times of Louis B. Mayer (1960), a biography of that studio's head.