Hollis Alpert, 1916 - 2007.

Hollis Alpert, a film critic and author who co-founded the National Society of Film Critics more than 40 years ago in the living room of his New York apartment, has died. He was 91....

The society was started in 1966 after Mr Alpert - then a critic for the weekly Saturday Review magazine - and other reviewers were denied membership in the New York Film Critics Circle, which then favored critics who worked for newspapers.... Joe Morgenstern, who was then Newsweek's film critic, recalled that one reason he helped found the group was to counteract Bosley Crowther, the New York Times movie critic "who was the really dominating influence on the New York film scene. And it was a deadening influence."... The world of entertainment also permeated Mr Alpert's many fiction and non-fiction books.... Film critic and historian Leonard Maltin said in an email that Mr Alpert "was an erudite man at a time when that was a virtue, not a liability, in the world of journalism and film criticism."

Valerie J Nelson, Los Angeles Times.

Posted by dwhudson at December 4, 2007 7:23 AM