Day: July 5, 2025

Bosley Crowther’s reaction to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in his 6.16.60 N.Y. Times review is mostly one of distaste for the grisly stuff, which he regards as low-rent. He then masks his snooty prejudice by feigning boredom.

At age 54 the veteran critic was entering his harumphy, fuddy-duddy phase, I suppose, but how could this sophisticated movie maven…how could he have just sat in his seat like a heap of mashed potatoes during the startling, jittery editing of the shower-murder scene, compounded by Bernard Herrmann’s screechy violin score, neither of which he even mentions? Was he on painkillers?

And yet in the wake of Psycho’s striking popularity and financial success, Crowther’s opinion evolved. On 12.25.60 or six months later, he announced that Psycho was among his ten best of the year.

Andrew Sarris’s highly adniring Village Voice review didn’t appear until the August 11th issue — almost two full months after the Crowther verdict. Why would it have taken this long for the Voice to register an opinion? The downtown paper couldn’t even publish a review sometime in July?

Portions of Sarris’s 8.11.60 review:

Crowther reconsiders:

HE to friendo who’s seen James Gunn’s Superman: “How can you even stand to watch another DC Superman film? How can you let that shit into your soul? The endless reliance upon DC formula, remaking and remaking and remaking it all over again, is poison in the bloodstream.”

Friendo: “If I had a magic wand and could eliminate the blockbuster culture of the last 45 years, I would. But the poison didn’t start with comic-book movies. It started in the early ‘80s. And yet the bottom line is that some comic-book movies are good. That said, I’ve no doubt Superman will be trashed into the ground.”

Born on 7.18.61, Elizabeth McGovern was around 18 when she played Jeanine Pratt in Robert Redford’s Ordinary People (9.10.80). A lively career followed, and 45 years have since flown by. McGovern is now about to begin a six-week run in Ava: The Secret Conversations at the New York City Center (131 W. 55th Street).

On-stage she resembles the older Ava Gardner, wearing a dark and tidy On The Beach wig. This Ava actually half-resembles the brunette Elizabeth McGovern who appeared in Cannes in 2012. But she’s gone gray in recent years and is making no effort to hold onto a semblance of her former self.

The truth is that McGovern currently looks like a blend of Jessica Tandy in The Birds and that care-worn woman who came to take Blanche Dubois to the mental hospital during the finale of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

McGovern is roughly Demi Moore’s age (actually a year older), but she sure as hell hasn’t been taking Substance injections. We’re simply accustomed to famous actresses looking a little bit better for wear, and it’s a wee bit jolting when, out of costume and sans makeup, they appear to be more or less their natural age. Which is not a crime — just a surprise.

McGovern in Cannes in 2012: