By 1970 even radical European films seemed tame to New York critics

Evidence

Some critics accepted Fellini’s description of the movie as a “psychedelic arcane dream.” Others did not. Telling tales out of school, Sarris reported that at the press review, “a covey of influential New York critics made a big show of booing and hissing.” His own feeling was that the movie, which opened as a road show at the midtown Little Carnegie, was belated: “Fellini’s chaste treatment of amoral antics may thereby seem too tame in the context of contemporary permissiveness.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1552

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s aim of tracking when the underground/scene becomes mainstreamed — the moment even Fellini’s orgy-film reads as ‘too tame’ marks a phase shift in permissiveness.