NEW YORK -- Judith Crist, a blunt and popular film critic for the Today show, TV Guide and the New York Herald Tribune whose reviews were at times so harsh that director Otto Preminger labelled her "Judas Crist," died Tuesday at her Manhattan home after a long illness.
Starting in 1963 at the Tribune, Crist wrote about and discussed thousands of movies, and also covered theatre and books. She was among the first reviewers of her time to gain a national following, and Roger Ebert credited her with helping to make all film critics better known, including such contemporaries as The New Yorker's Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris of the Village Voice.
With the growing recognition of such foreign directors as François Truffaut and Federico Fellini, and the rise of such American filmmakers as Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese, the 1960s and 70s were an inspiring time for movie reviewers. But Crist's trademark quickly became the putdown.
An early review was for Spencer's Mountain, a sentimental family melodrama starring Henry Fonda and Maureen O'Hara. Unmoved by a story that became the basis for the TV series The Waltons, Crist denounced the film's "sheer prurience and perverted morality."
The critic really poured it on for Cleopatra, the budget-busting historical epic that starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and was overwhelmed by the actors' off-screen love affair. "At best a major disappointment, at worst an extravagant exercise in tedium," Crist called the film, dismissing Taylor as "an entirely physical creature, no depth of emotion apparent in her kohl-laden eyes, no modulation in her voice, which too often rises to fishwife levels."
Crist was occasionally banned from advance screenings, while studios and theatres would threaten to pull advertising. When her Cleopatra review brought her a prize from the New York Newspaper Women's Club, officials at 20th Century Fox, which released the movie, withdrew from the ceremony.
After she condemned Billy Wilder's cross-dressing classic Some Like It Hot for its "perverse" gags and "homosexual 'in' joke(s)," Wilder allegedly remarked that asking her to review your movie was like "asking the Boston Strangler to massage your neck."
She was born in New York in 1922 and would say that Charlie Chaplin's silent masterpiece The Gold Rush was her first and most vivid film memory. By 10, she had decided she wanted to be a reviewer; movies became her passion and her vice. She would cut classes for a chance to visit a theatre or two, including a cherished day in which she took in showings of Gone With the Wind, The Grapes of Wrath and Grand Illusion.
Her edge was likely formed by her Dickensian childhood. The daughter of a successful fur trader, she lived in Canada until the age of 9, attending private school, enjoying the luxuries of multiple homes, live-in servants and the family's bulletproof Cadillac. But in the 1930s, her father's business was ruined by the Great Depression.
"And then suddenly, our most gracious home was gone. The servants left," she wrote years later in Time magazine. "After we lost the last of our homes, we moved to New York to get some kind of assistance from my mother's family. Well, from both of my parents' families. We lived in a small, one-bedroom apartment while my father went out on the road, recouping things."
She still managed to attend Hunter College and receive a master's degree from Columbia University's journalism school. In 1945, she was hired as a feature writer by the Herald Tribune, where she remained until the paper closed, in 1966.
Crist reviewed film and theatre for the Today show from 1964-73, and as a print critic worked for New York magazine, TV Guide and the New York Post.
Her husband, William B. Crist, died in 1993. Their son, Steven Crist, covered horse racing for The New York Times and later became publisher of the Daily Racing Form.
