Pauline Kael

“…. For many years, a fair number of people have been longing for more of those Bette Davis-Miriam Hopkins movies….

“Will anybody long for more Anne Bancroft-Shirley MacLaine movies? It's doubtful…. Anne Bancroft overdoes her sacrificial-artist laceration. Trying for glamour and bravura, she holds her haggard head up gallantly, with her neck drawn so taut that it pulls her mouth down. She has a gnarled, ascetic look, and the worst case of nobility in the eyebrows since Greer Garson. Garbo's suicidally exhausted ballerina in Grand Hotel was a ball of fluff compared with Bancroft; suffering, not dance, seems to be Bancroft's art. Shirley MacLaine plays in a snappier spirit…. But ... with subsidiary roles played by a dozen or more famous dancers, and with the possibility of seeing them dance, Emma and Deedee would have to be larger personalities to hold our attention. We get a glimpse of something great in this movie, and Emma and Deedee--two harpies out of the soaps--block the view….

Pauline Kael
New Yorker, November 14, 1977
When the Lights Go Down, p. ?