Andrew Sarris

After two hours of which I felt almost every minute, I could find only a handful of positive things to say about this production. [25 Jul 1974, p.67]

I thoroughly enjoyed There Was A Crooked Man for its inhaling the fresh air of liberty on today's screen without its gagging on the fumes of gratuitous license. [31 Dec 1970, p.39]

The spectacle of people in Hollywood trying to do something different in a western at this late date is curiously reassuring. [09 Sep 1965, p.15]

The director's deepest instincts are less epic than dramatic, with the result that he gets sidetracked more often than his errant hero. The picturesque is gained too often at the expense of the picaresque, and the contour of a legend is obscured time and again by the pointless intimacy of a close-up. [09 Jan 1964, p.12]

A pretentious parable that manages to shrivel into drivel.

But why would so many critics fall for a piece of cheese like “The Candidate?” Robert Redford cultism? Partly, I suppose.

The Ipcress File was reasonably entertaining while I was watching it, but after it was over I felt I'd been had... Among the tiresome directorial tricks in The Ipcress File is the repetitively off-angle anti-climax with the heavies feeding parking meters, hibernating in libraries, and plotting at band concerts. Nothing happens most of the time, and this is supposed to be funny and ironic.

Tommy is turning out to be the kind of movie most people probably like more than they care to admit. Modest charm and unpretentiousness are hardly the qualities that I ever thought I would associate with Ken Russell, but there you are, and there Tommy is. [31 Mar 1975, p.68]

Husbands confirms, if indeed any confirmation were needed, that John Cassavetes is one of the major American film-makers of the past decade, and one of the most tortured and turgid as well. [10 Dec 1970, p.69]

The War Wagon is good for a few laughs and some spectacle while John Wayne and Kirk Douglas are taking Bruce Cabot and an outlandishly armored wagon apart. [14 Sep 1967, p.31]

Many reviewers have given the current exhibit low marks for vitality and originality, but then, most reviewers have never been wild about any of the Pink Panther movies. It is the public, not the critics, that made the Clouseau creations the highest grossing comedy series in the history of theatrical motion pictures. It is the perfect entertainment for children of all ages because it is not really designed as the perfect entertainment for children of all ages. [31 July 1978, p.35]

The parts are better than the whole. [24 Feb 1975, p.58]

Mart Crowley's brilliantly bitchy lines are worth standing on line for, and the original off-Broadway cast stands up well on the screen. [28 May 1970, p.53]

By any interpretation, Donovan's Reef is a beautiful example of cinematic art, and the atavistic desire to let the movie sweep over the spectator without disruptive analysis is at least understandable. [01 Aug 1963, p.13]

Murder on the Orient Express falls down so badly as escapist entertainment that it is as if it were designed to prove the proposition that movies and mysteries don't mix.

Ronald Neame's civilized anemia is appropriate enough for the direction of material that is going in no direction in particular. [23 Feb 1967, p.23]

It is refreshing to find a director who is still making talkies instead of gawkies, and who thus still believes in the spoken word as a vehicle of expression. [23 Dec 1974, p.83]

I thought there were about 11 good minutes in it, and the rest confused and uncertain. [22 Jul 1971, p.55]

Like it or not, Walking tall is saying something very important to many people, and it is saying it with accomplished artistry. [21 Feb 1974, p.61]

It is not even bad enough to be perversely amusing. Liz's first entrance is grotesque enough to prepare us for that high point of self-parody when she asks Julius Caesar (Rex Harrison) if he smells anything burning as the library of Alexandria goes up in smpke, but there are not enough of these pungent moments to relieve the soul-destroying tedium of little people lost on big sets in the most expensive session of hide-and-seek ever to masquerade as a movie. [20 June 1963, p.13]

Pleasantly inoffensive. [29 Jul 1965, p.8]

By any formal standards, it is a mess, but, surprisingly often, a moving mess. [23 Nov 1972, p.77]

A triumph of bounce over banality. [19 Mar 1964, p.12]

Help does not indicate that Lester has depleted his bag of tricks, but rather that he is too addicted to fragmentation for its own sake. [09 Sep 1965, p.15]

Considerably weaker than The Nutty Professor. [10 Sep 1964, p.17]

The sobriety of the entire enterprise is ill-suited to the lurid period in history it represents. [23 Dec 1971, p.61]

Unfortunately, Support Your Local Sheriff is basically serial material that in straining to be something more ends up being something less. [08 May 1969, p.47]

Gene Saks directs his first film so clumsily that he even muffs Mike Nichol’s exploitation of the climbing the stairs gag that kept Neil Simon’s feeble farce running for 79 years on Broadway.