The 1968 review Roger Ebert called the greatest he ever wrote: “Got it right”
Asking someone to name their favourite movie is often like asking them to pick a favourite child, but does the same thing apply to critics? Apparently, it does, since Roger Ebert named one review as his favourite of the thousands upon thousands of them that he’d written.
Most critics who were or have been in the business for anywhere near as long as Ebert, who enjoyed a professional career that stretched from 1967 until 2013 and covered newspapers, television, and the internet, would struggle to reach that far back into their memory banks to single out one filmic assessment they held the closest to their hearts, especially if it was one of their earlier ones.
And yet, for over four decades, the thumbs-up/thumbs-down favourite never forgot. It’s a bit on the self-congratulatory side, with Ebert acknowledging that he was one of the few who were ahead of the curve, but when you’ve penned over 10,000 of them, and you’ve still got one that you’d happily place at the head of the back, he was allowed to pat himself on the back a little bit.
The year after his first review was published, he sat in for a screening of an ambitious, existential, and innovative epic, one that wasn’t greeted as rapturously as it would be in the years to come. In fact, one of the earliest public showings of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was defined more by the number of people who walked out than the seminal picture’s endless merits.
Today, it sounds preposterous for one of the greatest movies ever made, and almost certainly the single most influential sci-fi flick in cinema history, to struggle with winning approval from critics. That’s exactly what happened, though, with the auteur’s inimitable vision splitting opinion down the middle, with as many reviews showering it in praise as there were ones that heaped it with derision.
Ebert was one of the earliest adopters of the now-standard ‘2001 is an era-defining masterpiece’ school of thought, and when asked to name his favourite review that he’d ever written, that was precisely why. “I’m pleased that I reviewed 2001 on the night of its first public screening,” he reflected. “And got it right, when the initial reaction was largely negative.”
Even at the time, he saw how the film had split its audience into two distinct camps. “To describe that first screening as a disaster would be wrong,” he wrote in his self-appointed finest review. “For many of those who remained until the end knew they had seen one of the greatest films ever made. But not everyone remained.”
He even remembered ‘Golden Age’ icon Rock Hudson asking, “Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?” but Ebert was in on the ground floor, and he knew from the second the credits rolled that he’d witnessed the maiden showing of a masterwork, even if it took some people longer to come around to the same way of thinking.
These days, nobody’s going to bat an eyelid when you call 2001 an all-timer, because it is. However, back in ’68, it was hardly a universally accepted truth, which is why it remained Ebert’s favourite-ever of his own reviews.
