Bosley Crowther

M. Carne has created a frequently captivating film which has moments of great beauty in it and some performances of exquisite note.

A most delightfully acted and gracefully entertaining film, fashioned much in the manner of a stage drawing-room comedy, that seems to be about something much more serious and challenging than it actually is.

Mr. Clayton and Miss Kerr have neglected to interpret the tale and character with sufficient incisiveness and candor to give us a first-rate horror or psychological film. But they've given us one that still has interest and sends some formidable chills down the spine.

In spite of its almost interminable and physically exhausting length—it takes two hours and fifty minutes to cover less than four days in a group of people's lives—and in spite of some basic detruncations of the novel's two leading characters, it vibrates throughout with vitality and is topped off with a climax that's a whiz.

The Caine Mutiny, though somewhat garbled, is a vibrant film.

Thanks to a dandy performance by James Cagney in the role of the great silent-film star, Lon Chaney, there is drama and personality in Man of a Thousand Faces.

Miss Kerr and Miss Simmons look attractive and Mr. Grant and Mr. Mitchum try hard to create the illusion of being moved by love and passion. But they both appear mechanical and bored. [24 Dec 1960, p.8]

The nonsense is generally good and at times it reaches the level of first-class satiric burlesque. Adolph Green and Betty Comden may have tossed off the script with their left hands, but occasionally they come through with powerful and hilarious round-house rights.

Mr. Hitchcock again is tossing a crazy murder story in the air and trying to con us into thinking that it will stand up without support.

It is nostalgic, warm with sentiment and full of fight in every foot. It is hard to commend any actor above the rest. Each plays his part well.

The one mild surprise of this cheap reprise of earlier Hollywood and Japanese horror films is the ineptitude of its fakery.

A piercing and powerful contemplation of the passage of man upon this earth. Essentially intellectual, yet emotionally stimulating, too, it is as tough—and rewarding—a screen challenge as the moviegoer has had to face this year.

Some outdoor scenes in excellent color and the expanse of CinemaScope give a bit of magnificence to a picture that lacks it in every other way.

To be sure, the production is elegant. Settings and costumes are superfine and, photographed in technicolor, they all mawe a lavish display. But that richness of décor and music is precisely what gets in the way of the tale.

One of the brightest, most delightful satiric comedies since It Happened One Night.

Every bit of the humor and vibrant humanity that flowed through the tender story of the English school-teacher and the quizzical king is richly preserved in the screen play that Ernest Lehman has prepared.

Lewis Milestone's direction suits the movement of Harry Brown's and Charles Lederer's script, which is entirely centripetal, focusing exclusively on Mr. Sinatra and his gang. Young people are likely to find this more appropriate and bewitching than do their elders. The latter are likely to feel less gleeful in the presence of heroes who rob and steal.

It is hard to think of a picture, aimed and constructed as this one was, doing any more or any better or leaving one feeling any more exposed to the horror of war than this one does.

Mr. Kramer has brilliantly directed a strong and responsive cast, headed by Gregory Peck as the submarine commander and Ava Gardner as the worldly woman who craves his love. Miss Gardner is remarkably revealing of the pathos of a wasted life. Fred Astaire is also amazing as the cynical scientist, conveying in his self-effacing manner a piercing sense of the irony of his trade.

The picture achieves its distinction through the smart way in which it has been made and through the quality of its representation of two passion-torn characters.

This one is so thoroughly mystifying that we wonder whether Mr. Bergman himself knew what he was trying to say.

Thanks to Mr. Stevens' brilliant structure and handling of images, every scene and every moment is a pleasure. He makes "picture" the essence of his film.

Burl Ives, Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Judith Anderson, Jack Carson and two or three more almost work and yell themselves to pieces making this drama of strife within a new-rich Southern family a ferocious and fascinating show. And what a pack of trashy people these accomplished actors perform!

An amiable little romance in which a boy meets a girl at Christmas-time, and the sentiments are quite as artificial and conveniently sprinkled as the snow is provided—for those who like such things—in RKO's Holiday Affair.

There is nothing wrong with the music—except that it does not fit the people or the words. But that did not seem to make much difference to Mr. Hammerstein or Mr. Preminger. They were carried away by their precocity. The present consequence is a crazy mixed-up film.

To put it mildly, Mr. Hitchcock and his writers have really let themselves go. Melodramatic action is their forte, but they scoff at speed limits this trip.

A curiously flat and fragmentary visualization of the original.

Mr. Stevens has done a superb job of putting upon the screen the basic drama and shivering authenticity of the Frances Goodrich-Albert Hackett play, which in turn caught the magnitude of drama in the real-life diary of a Jewish girl.