Bosley Crowther championed Fellini and Bergman, then lost his job over Bonnie and Clyde
For 27 years Bosley Crowther's verdicts in The New York Times could lift or sink a film. He helped American audiences discover Rossellini, De Sica, Bergman and Fellini, called Godzilla incredibly awful, and in the end his relentless campaign against one gangster picture was widely blamed for costing him his post.
Born in Lutherville, Maryland, on July 13, 1905, Crowther ran a neighbourhood newspaper as a boy in North Carolina and later edited The Daily Princetonian. Winning a Times current events contest in his final year at Princeton earned him a trip to Europe and then a job offer as a cub reporter at 30 dollars a week. He first turned it down, hoping for a small Southern paper, but those offered less than half as much, so he went to New York after all. He became the paper's first nightclub reporter, spent five years on the drama desk, and in 1940 succeeded Frank Nugent as chief film critic.
His tone was scholarly rather than breezy. Crowther opposed censorship yet wanted films made responsibly, favouring social dramas such as The Grapes of Wrath and High Noon. He stood against Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s and disliked flag-waving propaganda, even chiding the pro-Soviet wartime drama Mission to Moscow. In 1954 the Directors Guild of America gave him its first award for film criticism.
Violence and gunplay repelled him. He panned The Great Escape and dismissed Lawrence of Arabia as a thundering camel-opera, found Kurosawa's Throne of Blood ludicrous, and at first called Psycho a blot on Hitchcock's career, before reversing himself and naming it among the year's ten best. His personal barbs at Joan Crawford were notorious.
His undoing was Bonnie and Clyde in 1967. He attacked its mix of farce and killing as tasteless, and when rival critics reversed course and praised it, he kept going, writing three negative reviews. The paper replaced him as lead critic early in 1968. He consulted for Columbia Pictures afterwards, wrote books including the first history of MGM, and died on March 7, 1981.
Source: Bosley Crowther
