The mid-1960s was a good time for Pauline to be coming into her own as a writer: The postwar flourishing of the art-house circuit and the explosion of interest in new foreign films meant that there were now more opportunities for film critics than ever before. Movies were no longer just a great common pastime, like Saturday afternoon baseball games. Now they were playing a more significant role in the culture as people became interested in exploring the connections between cinema and contemporary life. Hit films stayed in theaters longer and were dissected in national magazine cover stories, on television and radio talk shows, and in film studies courses, and movies were well on their way to demonstrating to the world that they really were the liveliest art.
The change had been coming since the 1950s when, in the flush of postwar prosperity, Americans became more inquisitive about the arts. “Growing numbers of middle-class consumers felt it their responsibility to be au courant,” wrote the social historian Todd Gitlin in his book The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. “They were accumulating coffee-table books, subscribing to Saturday Review and the Book-of-the-Month Club, buying records, briefing themselves about art.” By the following decade the national fascination with arts and culture had taken on a decidedly different shade of meaning with the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the tremendous upheaval wrought by the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Young audiences, in particular, wanted more from the movies than mere entertainment. There was still an enormous audience for Walt Disney family pictures and fluffy comedies, but people had also developed an appetite for films that conveyed the anxieties of the times. Movies such as The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, and Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb became extremely popular among college students and in intellectual communities. (In the previous decade, many of the most downbeat movies, such as Sweet Smell of Success, Twelve Angry Men, and A Face in the Crowd, had been box-office failures, perhaps because they seemed too dark and pessimistic.) “The rock ’n’ roll generation,” wrote Gitlin, “having grown up on popular culture, took images very seriously indeed; beholding itself magnified in the funhouse mirror, it grew addicted to media which had agendas of their own—celebrity-making, violence-mongering, sensationalism.”
This new climate had its effects even in movie-critic circles. For years many reviewers at major newspapers and magazines had acceded to studio publicists in exchange for access to the biggest movie stories and star interviews. But during the 1960s a number of critics began to speak out and show a much more independent spirit than had previously been the case. In 1963 Judith Crist, then movie critic of The New York Herald-Tribune, found herself at the center of a major standoff with a leading studio. When she slammed that year’s Easter attraction at Radio City Music Hall—Spencer’s Mountain, a sentimental family drama starring Henry Fonda and Maureen O’Hara—in both the daily and Sunday editions of the Herald-Tribune, Warner Bros. retaliated the following Monday by withdrawing an invitation to an upcoming screening and, more crucially, by pulling all of its advertising from the paper. Radio City Music Hall followed suit, and because the theater’s advertising provided income for the newspaper seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, the loss was felt immediately. The Herald-Tribune’s publisher, Jock Whitney, and editor, Jim Bellows, held firm, running an editorial affirming their support for Crist and her right to say what she thought. “The Associated Press picked up the editorial and transmitted it coast to coast,” Crist remembered, “and it made a nice little fuss.”
The message was clear: With the steady collapse of the once-powerful studio system and the immense publicity machine that operated within it, the public was forming a new, closer connection with movie critics. As personalities they were becoming better known via radio and television; starting in 1964, Crist would become a familiar face via her appearances on NBC’s Today Show. Talk show hosts frequently invited Pauline and Andrew Sarris, who were far more in tune with the latest trends in filmmaking, and the new audience it had created, than The New York Times’s Bosley Crowther, who increasingly resembled a relic from another era. As the subject matter of movies became more and more provocative, Crowther began to seem more and more out of touch—particularly in his distaste for onscreen violence.