Bosley Crowther

Francis Bosley Crowther (July 13, 1905 – March 7, 1981) was a film critic for "The New York Times" for over a quarter century.

Early life and education

Born in Lutherville, Maryland, Crowther moved as a child to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he published a neighborhood newspaper, "The Evening Star". His family moved to Washington, D.C., and Crowther graduated from Western High School in 1922. After two years of prep school in Orange, Virginia, at Woodberry Forest School, he entered Princeton University, where he majored in history. In his junior year he served as an editor of "The Daily Princetonian", and in his senior year, 1928, won a national essay contest sponsored by "The New York Times". His $500 award paid for his grand tour of Europe that summer.

Early writing career

For his writing performance, Crowther was offered a job as a cub reporter for the New York newspaper at a salary of $30 a week. He declined the offer, made to him by the publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, hoping to find employment on a small, Southern newspaper. When the salary offered by those papers wasn't half of the "Times" offer, he went to New York and took the job. He started as a reporter on the city beat and also was responsible for writing the news that was carried in bright lights around the outside of the Times building. He was "The New York Times" ' first night club reporter, and in 1933 was asked by Brooks Atkinson to join the Drama Department. He spent five years covering the theater scene in New York and even dabbled in writing for the theater.

While at the "Times" in those early years, Crowther met a fellow employee, Florence Marks. On January 20, 1933, they were married.

Influential later career

Crowther was a prolific writer of film essays as a critic for "The New York Times" from the early 1940s until the late 1960s. Such was his perceived influence that a negative review of the 1967 film "Bonnie and Clyde" (Excerpt: "as pointless as it is lacking in taste") [http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=EE05E7DF173CE361BC4C52DFB266838C679EDE] was said to have panicked the film's producers, who believed that the public would avoid the film as a result. By that time, however, his tastes were widely regarded as antiquated and even bizarre, even by his editors at the "Times".Fact|date=May 2008 He retired in 1968.

Crowther lauded the widely dismissed financial disaster "Cleopatra" and panned all of David Lean's later works. He called "Lawrence of Arabia" a "thundering camel-opera that tends to run down rather badly as it rolls on into its third hour and gets involved with sullen disillusion and political deceit." [http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=950CEEDE1630EF3BBC4F52DFB4678389679EDE] He stated that he considered the 1951 film version of "Show Boat" to be superior to both the stage production and all other film versions of the musical.

He was well known for his disparagement of avant-garde film in general and Japanese cinema in particular, finding the Kurosawa classic "Throne of Blood" ludicrous, particularly its ending; and calling "Godzilla" "an incredibly awful film." He also commented that Satyajit Ray's "Pather Panchali" was so bad that it would barely pass as a rough cut in Hollywood. Writing about "L'Avventura" in 1960, Crowther said that watching the film was "like trying to follow a showing of a picture at which several reels have got lost." [http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9400E0DB133DE733A25756C0A9629C946091D6CF]

Unusual for a film critic writing at that time, he chose the original "King Kong" as one of the fifty greatest films ever made.

Crowther is the author of "The Lion's Share: The Story of an Entertainment Empire," the first book documenting the history of MGM.

References

Notes

Bibliography

* "The Lion's Share: The Story of an Entertainment Empire." Ams Prs Inc, 1957. ISBN-10: 0404200710 ISBN-13: 978-0404200718
* "The Great Films: Fifty Golden Years of Motion Pictures." New York: Putnam, 1971. ISBN-10: 0399103619 ISBN-13: 978-0399103612

External links

* [http://movies.nytimes.com/ref/movies/reviews/author/rev_auth_crowther/ "New York Times" links to numerous film reviews by Crowther]

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