If Ann Tobin (Movie critics’ role in promoting violence, Letters, 19 May) had been an American cinephile, she’d probably have been aware that the sometime doyenne of US film critics, Pauline Kael, notoriously compared the release of Last Tango in Paris – “a landmark in movie history” – to the first performance of Stravinsky’s The Rites of Spring.
The rest of her gushing review contained similar hyperbole: “the movie breakthrough has finally come”. It was also “the most powerfully erotic movie ever made” and potentially “the most liberating” too.
She also announced that Maria Schneider’s alleged tormenters, Bertolucci and Brando, had “altered the face of an art form”. I could go on. The review is one of the most (in)famous of all time. Kael was right about one thing, though: “This is a movie people will be arguing about, I think, for as long as there are movies.”
Will Goble
Rayleigh, Essex
Ann Tobin argues the need for more female movie critics. I can recall what she might consider a lengthy golden age when Dilys Powell (the Sunday Times), CA Lejeune (the Observer), Margaret Hinxman (Sunday Telegraph), and Penelope Houston (editor of Sight & Sound) dominated that profession.
They were ably supported by numerous other women writers including (but far from exclusively) Freda Bruce Lockhart, Maryvonne Butcher, Virginia Dignam, Penelope Gilliatt, Virginia Graham, Elspeth Grant, Nina Hibbin, Penelope Mortimer and internationally such giants as Iris Barry, Molly Haskell, Pauline Kael and Susan Sontag.
However, I do not recall the Guardian ever having appointed a woman as its principal film critic.
Brian Baxter
Bournemouth, Dorset
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