David Thomson

“….The high-class veneer tries to make audiences believe that Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine are for real. But the script and the approach are from 1940, and the parts need the gusto of Joan Crawford and Rosalind Russell: Mildred Pierce meets the mother of Gypsy.

“….If it's tough to believe in Shirley MacLaine stagnating in Oklahoma, the prospect of Anne Bancroft as a Fonteynhead of grand art is straight out of a Mel Brooks film. If only he had been there to throw egg in her race as she tosses off a coy exercise or flexes a delicate arm. Her big role, Anna Karenina, judiciously requires that she wear a scarlet gown and be statuesque in a spotlight and paper snowstorm. All her best scenes are at the bar, but it's the champagne cocktail bar. She's as much a dancer as John Garfield was hooked on the violin in Humoresque--hooked, there is the word, for Garfield had the instrument rammed under his chin while other, abler arms came out of the dark to fiddle….

“The aging ballerinas of The Turning Point are not truly vulnerable people, they're star parts advancing on a showdown like gunfighters. It comes on a huge terrace but it's very genteel, and bile and envy soon collapse in hilarious reconciliation. Bancroft throughout is as daft as she's ever been, and I guess with a little encouragement and some of the vulgarity that the film lacks she could have portrayed a prima donna ham along the lines of Tallulah Bankhead, all drawn neck and acid answers. But the picture is hung up on being genuine and homely--especially Shirley MacLaine….”

David Thomson
Real Paper, December 24, 1977

"....[H]er dedicated attempts to take up a ballet position ... hinted at a camp comic potential. A mad Bette Davis movie was lurking within Ross's dull tidiness, and Bancroft was the actress who might have rescued it."

Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film, p. 41