Joe Baltake, former Bee movie critic who reviewed more than 10,000 films, dies

The first thing Joe Baltake wrote for The Bee in 1987 as the newspaper’s new movie reviewer was not a review at all, but an obituary for Hollywood legend John Huston.

“The single word that comes to mind regarding John Huston is maverick,” Baltake wrote as his introduction to Sacramento readers. “He was perhaps Hollywood’s first movie maverick, certainly the Mount Rushmore of mavericks.

“He was at once thuggish and noble, unfinished and refined, self- satisfying and selfless.”

Baltake, who devoted the next 17 years charming, enraging and educating Sacramento moviegoers, died Thursday at his Haddonfield, N.J., home after a long battle with multiple myeloma. He was 74.

Baltake was born in Camden, N.J., to parents who owned a bakery, leaving Baltake time to immerse himself in movies as they worked, his wife, Susan, recounted in an obituary she wrote.

He began his career working for Gannett’s suburban newspapers, the moved on to the Philadelphia Daily News before Gregory Favre, then The Bee’s executive editor, hired him away to write in Sacramento.

“He wrote well, and that’s obviously very important,” Favre said. “At the time the movie market for The Bee was huge, we had a huge number of movie ads for the size of our city.

“It was such a vibrant movie town. You’d go to the movie houses and they’d be filled. That’s one of the reasons it prompted me to bring in a full-time movie critic.”

Jack Lemmon fan

Baltake wrote more than 10,000 movie reviews, his wife recalled, and like any critic he faced blow back from readers with decidedly different opinions.

“I’d get letters, phone calls from time to time, as we would for the restaurant reviewers and others, but you expect that really,” Favre said. “It’s part of the job. He knew that came with the job.”

In fact, Baltake embraced it, once writing a tongue-in-cheek list of eight “rules” of movie reviewing he had learned from angry readers who thought they could do better.

Rule No. 3 was: “Don’t be too articulate.”

“Being overly literate in a review, using the right words and the correct grammar, and demonstrating a knowledge of the material impresses no one,” he wrote. “You’re a show-off.”

Former Bee columnist Pete Dexter, a colleague from Philadelphia, devoted a column introducing Baltake to Bee readers.

“He is, first of all, dead honest,” Dexter wrote. “He is also as knowledgeable about movies as anybody who does this for a living anywhere.

“He is consistent – so even if you disagree with his tastes, you still know what to go see – but that should not be taken to mean he’s sitting in an office somewhere dictating what’s good and what isn’t. What he does is talk about films, bringing up things you may not have thought of yourself, and along the way you find out what he likes.”

Baltake did more than review films. He wrote about the actors and directors who made them, why some movies worked and some did not, and wrote two books on his favorite actor, Jack Lemmon. Baltake’s favorite movie was “The Apartment.”

Former Bee photo editor Mark Morris recalled Baltake’s devotion to Lemmon.

“Most folks entered The Bee photo studio reluctantly and many times their body language reflected it,” Morris wrote Saturday in a Facebook tribute. “Not Joe. He arrived with a copy of a ‘headshot’ of Jack Lemmon and a desire to replicate the pose.

“At the time I didn’t know that he had written a book about Jack Lemmon. I watched as Joe realized the studio lighting was set opposite of Lemmon’s and he carefully reversed the pose. Funny, I forgot that story until I saw Joe’s obit photo and then the memory came rushing back. Remembering Joe this morning. He was a ‘four star’ kind of guy.”

Roger Ebert, Passionate Moviegoer, and animals

Baltake retired from The Bee on New Year’s Eve 2004, reviewing Jonathan Caouette’s “incredibly modest but undeniably impressive ‘Tarnation’’’ as his last piece in Sacramento.

But he continued to write about films after returning to the East Coast, and maintaining a blog he called “The Passionate Moviegoer.”

He had used the same name for his column in Philadelphia, Susan Baltake wrote in an email to The Bee.

“One day in the 1970s he was in New York for a screening/junket along with Roger Ebert and a bunch of other critics,” she recalled. “Roger told Joe he thought that was a great name for a column and asked if it was trademarked.

“Coming home, instead of getting off the train in Philadelphia he stayed on and went to Washington, checked into a hotel, hired an attorney, and spent several days there. When he arrived at The Bee in 1987 he wanted to use it but was told it was ‘too long.’ He always renewed his trademark and then started the blog when he retired.”

Baltake had a soft spot for animals; he and his wife were legacy donors to the San Francisco Society to Prevent Cruelty to Animals’ Sido Fund, which provides for animals that outlive their owners.

“Joe won multiple awards for his columns but as a longtime animal activist was most proud of being honored by the Performing Animal Welfare Society in 1995 for a column on the film industry’s mistreatment of animals, both simulated and real,” Susan Baltake wrote.

No services are planned, but contributions may be made to Samaritan Hospice, 5 Eves Dr., Marlton, N.J. 08053, or to any no-kill animal shelter.