some critics as a masterpiece. The West Coast premiere at the Carthay Circle Theatre was a grand affair, attracting some 5000 people, including Shirley Temple, Cecil B. DeMille, Forrest Tucker, James Cagney, Robert Montgomery, James Murphy, Edgar Bergen, and many other notables in the film industry. Among those at the film's premiere was film critic Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times who considered the film to be a magnificent achievement in film which would go down in cinematic history as a landmark film, noting the rapturous applause the film received by the audience during the various interludes. He stated that Fantasia was "caviar to the general, ambrosia and nectar for the intelligentsia" and considered the film to be "courageous beyond belief". Music critic of the newspaper, Isabel Morse Jones, was highly praising of the soundtrack to the film, believing it to be a "dream of a symphony concert", an "enormously varied concert of pictorial ideas, of abstract music by acknowledged composers, of performers Leopold Stokowski and orchestra players of Hollywood and Philadelphia, and, for the vast majority, new and wonderful sound effects". Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, also at the premiere, noted that "motion-picture history was made last night ... Fantasia dumps conventional formulas overboard and reveals the scope of films for imaginative excursion ... Fantasia ... is simply terrific." Peyton Boswell, an editor at Art Digest, called it "an aesthetic experience never to be forgotten". Time magazine described the premiere as "stranger and more wonderful than any of Hollywood's" and the experience of Fantasound "as if the hearer were in the midst of the music. As the music sweeps to a climax, it froths over the proscenium arch, boils into the rear of the theatre, all but prances up and down the aisles." Dance Magazine devoted its lead story to the film, saying that "the most extraordinary thing about Fantasia is, to a dancer or balletomane, not the miraculous musical recording, the range of color, or the fountainous integrity of the Disney collaborators, but quite simply the perfection of its dancing". Variety also hailed Fantasia, calling it "a successful experiment to lift the relationship from the plane of popular, mass entertainment to the higher strata of appeal to lovers of classical music". The Chicago Tribune assigned three writers to cover the film's Chicago premiere: society columnist Harriet Pribble; film critic Mae Tinee; and music critic Edward