“If you’re not a passionate devotee of film—or, in plainer language, a movie nut—you can’t really function as a critic. Why bother to criticize if you don’t care? The analogy is simple if carried on to human relations. When as children we’d accuse our mother of ‘picking’ on us, she’d say, ‘Of course a stranger wouldn’t. Only someone who loves you would.’ It is, after all, only the person who cares, who demands an adherence to standards, who dreams of the perfectibility of the beloved—and who refuses the easy out, who won’t settle for cheap and who will recognize sincerity and integrity, and cherish these, while scorning the specious and denouncing the cheap-jack.”—Judith Crist, “Honest—She Loves the Movies,” TV Guide, August 1970, collected in TV Guide: The First 25 Years, compiled and edited by Jay S. Harris in association with the editors of TV Guide (1978).
I guess I’m the type of “passionate devotee of film” that Ms. Crist had in mind—except that this year, I can only recall three new releases that I’ve managed to see. Filmmakers have just left me increasingly angry with either hopelessly crass or nihilistic offerings, and I have better things to do with my time—like watch old movies.
Her contemporary Pauline Kael got the cult fans (the “Paulettes”) and certainly the more high-prestige gig (The New Yorker), but if you wanted someone who didn’t brandish attitude or fixations so much like gun on the hip, then Judith Crist was the one for you.
Or for me, anyway, growing up. In her heyday in the Sixties and Seventies, she delivered verdicts on new releases for The Today Show, where she became network television’s first theater and film critic, and in such print publications as The New York Herald Tribune, New York and TV Guide.
Kael could be waspish, but she could go oddly gooey over pulp violence from the likes of Sam Peckinpah and Brian DePalma if she felt their reflected an individual vision.
Crist didn’t even have those moments. Otto Preminger referred to her as “Judas Christ” (maybe it had something to do with her verdict on his overheated Sixties flick Hurry Sundown: “For to say that Hurry Sundown is the worst film of the still-young year is to belittle it. It stands with the worst films of any number of years.”) Billy Wilder, far more imaginative, said that inviting her to review a film was “like asking the Boston Stranger for a neck message.”
In the mid-Seventies, I saw Crist deliver an address to high-school journalists at Columbia University, where she served as an adjunct professor at the J-School. She was marvelously droll. I bet she was as smart, funny, and infectious about movies and writing with her regular students as she was with younger kids like myself.
I guess I’m the type of “passionate devotee of film” that Ms. Crist had in mind—except that this year, I can only recall three new releases that I’ve managed to see. Filmmakers have just left me increasingly angry with either hopelessly crass or nihilistic offerings, and I have better things to do with my time—like watch old movies.
Her contemporary Pauline Kael got the cult fans (the “Paulettes”) and certainly the more high-prestige gig (The New Yorker), but if you wanted someone who didn’t brandish attitude or fixations so much like gun on the hip, then Judith Crist was the one for you.
Or for me, anyway, growing up. In her heyday in the Sixties and Seventies, she delivered verdicts on new releases for The Today Show, where she became network television’s first theater and film critic, and in such print publications as The New York Herald Tribune, New York and TV Guide.
Kael could be waspish, but she could go oddly gooey over pulp violence from the likes of Sam Peckinpah and Brian DePalma if she felt their reflected an individual vision.
Crist didn’t even have those moments. Otto Preminger referred to her as “Judas Christ” (maybe it had something to do with her verdict on his overheated Sixties flick Hurry Sundown: “For to say that Hurry Sundown is the worst film of the still-young year is to belittle it. It stands with the worst films of any number of years.”) Billy Wilder, far more imaginative, said that inviting her to review a film was “like asking the Boston Stranger for a neck message.”
In the mid-Seventies, I saw Crist deliver an address to high-school journalists at Columbia University, where she served as an adjunct professor at the J-School. She was marvelously droll. I bet she was as smart, funny, and infectious about movies and writing with her regular students as she was with younger kids like myself.
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