RIP Judith Crist (mother of Steve Crist)
 

Only we old farts will remember her, but she was a very accomplished lady in her own right (more so than her son, actually).

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/08/mo...ies-at-90.html

Condolences to Steve.

Very sorry to hear this. Condolences to Steve and the Crist family.

Condolences to Steve and the Crist family. Certainly a critic not shy about giving her honest opinion. Very admirable quality indeed. I love the part where she had said a critic must be an egomaniac, but a larger job requirement is passion, perhaps even love for what movies are, do and can be. That is the same feelings those of us film lovers share, at least I know I do.
RIP Ms. Crist

Sorry to hear the news Steve....looks like she lived a long and full life.

My condolances to the Crist family.

I remember watching her as a kid on the Today Show, before that clown Gene Shalit took over. She was way classier. But TV had those kind of people on then--William F. Buckley, Dick Cavett, David Susskind, etc. The entertainment programming was largely dreck in those days, but they were not afraid to appear "elitist" on programs meant to engage your mind.

You can scour MSNBC, Fox News and CNN and not find anybody worthy to be compared to the likes of them.

Concur completely. She was the film critic of choice in our house as well between 'Today' and her New York Magazine work... I think I recall her reviewing for Metromedia 5 News too. She was delightfully smart, funny and acerbic. As Roger Ebert has said for ages, everything in film criticism as entertainment derives from Judith Crist. Condolences to Steve; an apple that didn't fall far from the tree, but rolled into a different orchard.

I remember reading an article MANY years ago in SI (I think) about Steve Crist (this may have been when he was at the NYT) and Beyer. His family was originally mortified at his career focus. I am guessing eventually that resolved itself.

Here's the article, in fact (SI's archive is down right now--the article is from 1989), but the Google and Yahoo caches seem to have it all:

http://goo.gl/l1Hrf

http://goo.gl/FIlYs

http://goo.gl/u3KB3

http://goo.gl/sBwUs

http://goo.gl/mRVyA

http://goo.gl/TzR67

http://goo.gl/sZEs1

http://goo.gl/psmul

PS: I cannot imagine SI ever doing anything like this article today.

One of my longtime favorites. I remember being shocked at finding out Steve "is Judith Crist's SON??" Fondly remembered. Condolences to her family and friends.

RIP
 

The Atlantic tweeted this Crist blurb of GWTW's 30 year anniversary in-theater re-release. My mother dragged me to see it -- it was her favorite film -- and I remember being awed by what a spectacle it was. It was the first movie I ever saw that had an intermission.

"Glorious Excesses"
by Judith Crist

MARCH 1973

THE difference is, of course, that thirty years later, as with all things, one squints the eye a little, puts all thoughts of the purity of its kitsch aside, and consciously relaxes before being swept up in all the glorious excesses of Gone With the Wind, undoubtedly still the best and most durable piece of popular entertainment to have come off the Hollywood assembly lines.

One is still swept up and one wallows (of course in a nostalgic glow) in the pace, the variety of scenes and personalities, the enriched and particularized stereotypes, and the somehow archetypal clichés which only that moviemaking rarity, a showman with taste and intelligence, could have produced out of Margaret Mitchell's total diminution (intellectual as well as structural) of War and Peace. For my moviegoing generation, the Russians' 1968 433-minute film of the Tolstoy work certainly underlined its Americanization and minimization by Selznik et al -- but until then certainly GWTW stood as our spectacular.

And therefore there's generational nostalgia, recall of an adolescent wonder at the opulence of cinematic magic (how the liberal-intellectual critics of that day scorned the $4-million cost and the publicity attendant on the star selection -- while in our critical day we scarce batted an eye at Cleopatra's $40 million and its star shenanigans!), scorn of today's lack of glamour and superstars (and who's around to beat the Gable-Leigh-Howard-de Havilland combo, with a supporting cast that would merit stardom in today's talent-scarce market?), and wonderment at the relative realism of character amid the mush-mouth Southernisms and Civil War Weltschmerzisms.

All that glows. But so does the film, because it's the stuff our movie dreams were made on -- and mighty durable stuff it proves to be.