Bosley Crowther

Lore & Background

Francis Bosley Crowther Jr. was born in Lutherville, Maryland, and moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, as a child. He graduated from Western High School in Washington, D.C., attended Woodberry Forest School, and then Princeton University, where he was editor of The Daily Princetonian. He won The New York Times Intercollegiate Current Events Contest in 1928 and later worked as a cub reporter for The New York Times. He married Florence Marks on January 20, 1933, and they had three sons. He became film critic for The New York Times in 1940 and semi-retired in 1967, becoming critic emeritus. He received the Directors Guild of America's first film criticism award in 1954. After semi-retirement, he worked for Columbia Pictures.

Reader's Guide

Crowther was an advocate of foreign-language films in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly those of Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Ingmar Bergman, and Federico Fellini. He opposed censorship of films and advocated greater social responsibility in filmmaking. He detested action and war films that depicted violence and gunplay. His negative review of the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde was followed by his replacement as primary film critic for The New York Times in early 1968.

Did You Know?

• Crowther wrote The Lion's Share: The Story of an Entertainment Empire (1957), the first book documenting the history of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
• He wrote Hollywood Rajah: The Life and Times of Louis B. Mayer (1960), a biography of the head of MGM.
• Crowther's career is discussed in the 2009 documentary For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism.