I saw the movie 'Bonnie and Clyde' in 1968, a year after it was made, in the open air, in the little garden outside the ballroom at Admiralty House.

It was a small audience - a few dozen very tired soldiers who, at the end, looked as if they had been forced to sit through a film about rural life in Russia, without benefit of subtitles. One of them said he thought it was "strange", a word which, in his mouth, I took to mean fit to be shown only to an audience of lizards on Pembroke Dump.

I loved it, but perhaps that was because I knew something about it. Quite apart from anything else, there was this intriguing irony: It was a Warner Bros. gangster movie inspired by Jean Luc Godard's first film, 'Breathless', which was a gangster movie that had been inspired by… you guessed it… Warner Bros. gangster movies.

When he saw it for the first time, Jack Warner - a man not known for the breadth of his cultural knowledge - is reported to have asked "What the #*&% is this?"

Warren Beatty, who not only starred with Faye Dunaway in the film but produced it, picked the director, Arthur Penn, and sold the project to Jack Warner, told him it was an homage to the gangster films Warner Bros had made in the 1930s.

"What the #*&%'s an homage?" asked Mr. Warner.

Beatty's deal with Jack Warner and Warner Bros. got him 40 percent of the gross, so I don't suppose he minded much.

'Bonnie and Clyde' changed the way films were made in the United States. One American critic, Louis Menand, says its release was the moment the United States took over the creative dominance of film from France.

It changed some other things, as well. Bosley Crowther was then the film critic of the New York Times, and he hated it… called it "a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as if they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cut-ups of 'Thoroughly Modern Millie'.

Joe Morgenstern, who wrote for Newsweek, called it a "squalid shoot-'em-up for the moron trade." Other leading critics followed the same sort of tone.

But things started, oddly, to change.

Joe Morgenstern decided to go back and see it again, this time with his wife, and he changed his mind. Newsweek, at his request, published a retraction a week after his original review was published, saying that he had been mistaken, and that on second sight, he had realised it was an important film.

Then… enter, stage left, Pauline Kael. If you don't know that name, let me quickly set you straight. She was the New Yorker's film critic for 33 years. During those 33 years she turned herself into the best and most influential film critic in the United States.

She was a freelancer when 'Bonnie and Clyde' was released, but was so taken with it she wrote, and sold to the New Yorker, a 9,000-word essay in its praise.

It was some essay. Nine thousand words is hard to summarise in a few sentences, but these four little excerpts, taken from different parts of the essay, but all dealing with the violence that had so bothered other critics, will give you a little bit of the flavour.

"'Bonnie and Clyde' keeps the audience in a kind of eager, nervous imbalance - holds our attention by throwing our disbelief back in our faces. To be put on is to be put on the spot, put on the stage, made the stooge in a comedy act. People in the audience at 'Bonnie and Clyde' are laughing, demonstrating that they're not stooges - that they appreciate the joke - when they catch the first bullet right in the face. The movie keeps them off balance to the end. During the first part of the picture, a woman in my row was gleefully assuring her companions, 'It's a comedy. It's a comedy.' After a while, she didn't say anything. Instead of the movie spoof, which tells the audience that it doesn't need to feel or care, that it's all just in fun, that 'we were only kidding,' 'Bonnie and Clyde' disrupts us with 'And you thought we were only kidding.'"

"In a sense, it is the absence of sadism - it is the violence without sadism - that throws the audience off balance at 'Bonnie and Clyde'. The brutality that comes out of this innocence is far more shocking than the calculated brutalities of mean killers."

"The end of the picture, the rag-doll dance of death as the gun blasts keep the bodies of 'Bonnie and Clyde' in motion, is brilliant. It is a horror that seems to go on for eternity, and yet it doesn't last a second beyond what it should. The audience leaving the theatre is the quietest audience imaginable."

"'Bonnie and Clyde', by making us care about the robber lovers, has put the sting back into death."

In the wake of this supremely perceptive piece, Bosley Crowther lost his job at the Times, and Pauline Kael began her long career at the New Yorker.

Of all people, Lenin called film "the most important art" early in the 20th Century. But Americans, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, really hadn't caught up with that notion at all. They saw the movies as a sort of second cousin to the Sunday funny papers.

Kael saw film as art, and she demanded of art that it entertain her. "If art isn't entertainment," she is supposed to have asked, "what is it, work?"

Her style was to go to a film, then tell her audience in simple terms whether it lived up to her expectation that it would entertain her, or not.

This was about half her review of a remake of 'The Thing', a ghastly horror picture first made in the 1950s (and shown at the Island Theatre, as I fondly, though youthfully, recall):

"It appears to be a film of limited imagination with unlimited horror effects. A new landmark in gore, it features oozing, jellied messes of blood and entrails and assorted parts of the people and serpents and animals that the mutating Thing devours. And it's grimly serious. Carpenter (the director) seems indifferent to whether we can tell the characters apart; he apparently just wants us to watch the apocalyptic devastation."

She suggested that the Kevin Costner film, 'Dancing with Wolves', should be renamed 'Playing with Camera'. About the Antonioni film, 'Red Desert', she wrote "If I've got to be driven up a wall, I'd rather do it at my own pace - which is considerably faster than Antonioni's."

The effect on other film critics in America was rather like that of a swooping hawk on a coteful of pigeons.

But they learned to love, and admire her.

Writing in Salon.com after her death in 2001, Roger Ebert remembered that: "Writing and speaking, Pauline Kael commanded the American idiom. Her paragraphs announced their author. Like George Bernard Shaw, she wrote reviews that will be read for their style, humour and energy long after some of their subjects have been forgotten. Her work pointed up the disconnect between the immediate sensual experience of moviegoing and the abstract theory-mongering of many film critics. She was there, she sat in the theatre, it was happening to her, and here was what she felt about it. Critics aren't supposed to talk during screenings, but I can still hear her Oh! Oh! Oh! during scenes she thought were dreadful. She loved the movies so much that bad ones were a personal affront. And when she loved one, her ecstasy came racing through her prose."

And Charles Taylor, who writes about film at Salon, thought that: "Her greatest gift was to teach people to trust their own instincts. Whether or not Pauline liked a piece of criticism often had nothing to do with whether she agreed with it. What she responded to was a writer's avidity for words, and writers' passion for their subject. She loved it when people's craziness came out (in movies or in writing) as long as it wasn't self-important craziness. What made her a great critic, and the greatest movie critic ever, was that she put pleasure at the centre of her responses."

Once, I recall, she wrote that the way to tell a really good film is by the fact that it is fresh every time you watch it, not just the first time.

Her criticism meets the same standard. If you're interested, she has published several collections of her reviews - try 'For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies'. That should keep your mouth open for a while.

gshorto@ibl.bm