Bosley Crowther

As in most Westerns, the dramatic penetration is not deep, and the plot complications are many and hard to follow in Japanese. Kurosawa is here showing more virtuosity than strength. Yojimbo is a long way (in the wrong direction) from his brilliant Rashomon.

What it comes to is simply that the dazzle of Mr. Godard's cinematic style is not matched by the hackneyed idea of a robot society that is expounded in the script.

Mr. Kubrick has made it look terrific. The execution scene is one of the most craftily directed and emotionally lacerating that we have ever seen. But there are two troubling flaws in this picture, one in the realm of technique and the other in the realm of significance, which determine its larger, lasting worth.

This is not to say that the action is not vivid, exciting and tense, or that Kurosawa's camera is any less graphic than it usually is. This is simply to say that The Hidden Fortress is essentially a superficial film and that Kurosawa, for all his talent, is as prone to pot-boiling as anyone else.

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

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.

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.

This modernized remake of Miss Hurst's frankly lachrymose tale is much the same as its soggy predecessor. It is the most shameless tear-jerker in a couple of years.

Another French film that fairly glitters with photographic and cinematic "style," yet fails to do more than skim the surface of a cryptic dramatic theme.

What they give us in Goldfinger is an excess of science-fiction fun, a mess of mechanical melodrama, and a minimum of bedroom farce...It is good fun, all right, fast and furious, racing hither and yon about the world as Double-Oh Seven pursues the intrigues of a mysterious financier named Goldfinger.

It is a spotty, uneven drama in which the entire opening phase representing the basic-training program in a gladiatorial school is lively, exciting and expressive, no matter how true to history it is, and the middle phase is pretentious and tedious, because it is concerned with the dull strife of politics.

The trouble with this romantic picture—among other minor things, including Mr. Stack's absurd performance and another even more so by Miss Malone—is that nothing really happens, the complications within the characters are never clear and the sloppy, self-pitying fellow at the center of the whole thing is a bore.

There are a few moments when Richard Attenborough as the chief engineer of the whole project demonstrates some impressive strength and poise. But for much longer than is artful or essential, The Great Escape grinds out its tormenting story without a peek beneath the surface of any man, without a real sense of human involvement. It's a strictly mechanical adventure with make-believe men.

The Big Sleep is one of those pictures in which so many cryptic things occur amid so much involved and devious plotting that the mind becomes utterly confused. And, to make it more aggravating, the brilliant detective in the case is continuously making shrewd deductions which he stubbornly keeps to himself.

It is a crowded and colorful picture, but it is choppy, episodic and vague.

The style is still sharp and realistic, the dialogue still crackles with verbal sparks and the action is still crisp and muscular, not to mention slightly wanton in spots. But the pattern and purpose of it is beyond our pedestrian ken.

You may not get much satisfaction from the tortured human drama in this film, but you should get an eyeful graphic exercise.

The Cat People is a labored and obvious attempt to induce shock. And Miss Simone's cuddly little tabby would barely frighten a mouse under a chair.

Facing it squarely, "My Uncle" is perceptibly contrived when it lingers too long and gets too deeply into the dullness of things mechanical. After you've pushed one button and one modernistic face, you've pushed them all.

Mr. Kazan keeps the courtship bouncing between the emotional and the ludicrous. The nonchalance of the pursuer is its most entertaining grace.

This one should be cold-cuts for old-timers who remember Boris Karloff as the get of Frankenstein, but it may tittilate the blissful youngsters.

It is comforting, of course, to have it made plain that our planetary neighbors are much wiser and more peaceful than are we, but this makes for a tepid entertainment in what is anamolously labeled the science-fiction field.

There's a lot to be said for it as a fast-moving, urbane entertainment in the comedy-mystery vein.

They Live by Night has the failing of waxing sentimental over crime, but it manages to generate interest with its crisp dramatic movement and clear-cut types.

Walt Disney has let his animators and his color magicians have free rein in his latest cartoon package-picture, Melody Time. And again, as in Make Mine Music! he has come up with a gaudy grab-bag show in which a couple of items are delightful and the rest are just adequate fillers-in.

It is smoothly directed by George Cukor and slyly, amusingly played by the whole cast, especially by its due of easy, adroit, experienced stars.

Not the best he has done in this line. It is a coyly romantic story, done with animals. The sentimentality is mighty, and the use of the CinemaScope size does not make for any less awareness of the thickness of the goo.

If some one could just have decided who should carry the ball, instead of letting it pass from one to the other, The Westerner might have been a bang-up, dandy film. And that, we are sorry to say, it isn't. The trouble, as indicated, is that the picture has no core.

For all the sincere and shrewd direction and the striking outdoor photography, this R. K. O. melodrama fails to traverse its chosen ground.

There are some precious moments of romantic charm in this bitter account of domestic discord amid surroundings that should inspire nothing but delight. And so one must seize upon them for the entertainment that is to be had, and endure the tedium of much of the picture.

Solid and sensible drama plainly had to give way to outright emotional bulldozing and a paving of easy clichés.

Mr. Huston's direction is dynamic, inventive and colorful. Mr. Gable is ironically vital. Miss Ritter, James Barton and Estelle Winwood are amusing in very minor roles, and Alex North has provided some good theme music. But the picture just doesn't come off.

If you're not too squeamish at the sight of slaughter and blood and can keep your mind fixed on the notion that there was something heroic and strong about British colonial expansion in the 19th century, you may find a great deal of excitement in this robustly Kiplingesque film.

Maybe the brand of British banter and buffoonery that Peter Cook and Dudley Moore bombard us with in Stanley Donen's Bedazzled would be very funny if it came in small bursts at not too frequent intervals in an expansive musical comedy or revue. But fired at you exclusively and endlessly for more than an hour and a half in this pretentiously metaphorical picture...it becomes awfully precious and monotonous.

The whole thing becomes a routine and mechanical cat-and-rat chase, with the outcome completely apparent, despite a few bright and clever twists.

Oddly enough, despite its opulence, coupled with a brilliant rendering of the score by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Sir Thomas Beecham's bristling baton and some masterly singing of the libretto (in English) by a host of vocal cords, this film version of the opera is, in toto, a vastly wearying show.

Is Mr. Polanski endeavoring to tell us anything about life or crime or perversion in this complex and terminally morbid joke?If he is, I sure don't get it — except maybe that people are sick, that even good humor isn't funny and that social sterility is.

The scenery provided for this picture is clearly more profound than the script, and the sense of magnitude in the environment more engrossing than that in the plot.

The feeble attempts that Mr. Aldrich has made to suggest the irony of two once idolized and wealthy females living in such depravity and the pathos of their deep-seated envy having brought them to this, wash out very quickly under the flood of sheer grotesquerie. There is nothing particularly moving or significant about these two.

The script prepared by Mr. Huston and Richard Brooks was too full of words and highly cross-purposed implications to give the action full chance.

The fact that this film is constructed to endorse the exercise of murderers, to emphasize killer bravado and generate glee in frantic manifestations of death is, to my mind, a sharp indictment of it as so-called entertainment in this day.

The hard-focus, realistic quality of the picture's photography and style completes its characterization as a calculated social document.

It is a commanding picture, and it is extremely well played by Mr. Lemmon and Miss Remick, who spare themselves none of the shameful, painful scenes. But for all their brilliant performing and the taut direction of Blake Edwards, they do not bring two pitiful characters to complete and overpowering life. [18 Jan 1963, p.7]

In Technicolor, it looks good enough to eat. But the voracity with which Miss Day has at it and wolfs it down is unnerving to see. David Butler, who directed, has wound her up tight and let her go. She does everything but hit the ceiling in lashing all over the screen.This is not altogether entrancing.

There are countless more fascinating facets to this city than the work of cops with crime and countless more striking characters in it than genial detectives and mumbling crooks. However, within that range of interest, Mr. Hellinger has done a vivid job in this, his appropriate valedictory, which comes to you spontaneous and unrehearsed.

So it looks as though this film simply makes more goose pimples than sense, which is rather surprising and disappointing for a picture with two such actresses, who are very good all the way through it, and produced and directed by the able Robert Wise.

That's about the nature of the picture. It is one with which you can laugh--with its own impudence toward foreign crises--while laughing at its rowdy spinning jokes.

Sadistic, anti-Nazi slaughter mission. Entertaining as a blowtorch.

At all events, the picture takes on a dull tone as it goes and finally ends in a fizzle which is forecast almost from the start.

Essentially a film of mordant feeling in which violence is always just below the surface of pokerfaced bluffing and fake Old-World Spanish courtesy.

Unless a viewer is addicted to freakish ironies, the unlikely spectacle of Mr. Williams losing an inch of height each week, while his wife, Randy Stuart, looks on helplessly, will become tiresome before Universal has emptied its lab of science-fiction clichés.

At least a good half of the effect in a sea-picture comes from the sea, and when that element is lacking the whole thing seems flat and synthetic. This, we regret to say, is a major fault in The Sea Wolf.

Mr. Schulberg and Mr. Kazan spawn a monster not unlike the one of Dr. Frankenstein. But so hypnotized are they by his presence that he runs away not only with the show but with intellectual reason and with the potentiality of their theme.

In short, there is energy and intensity but little clarity and emotion in this film. It is like a great, green iceberg: mammoth and imposing but very cold.

It's razzle-dazzle of a random sort, but it works.The big trouble with this picture is that the characters and their romantic problems are stereotypes and clichés.

In the advancement of the romance, which itself is hot stuff, for what it is, several capable actors do entertaining jobs.

Mr. McCarey's direction is unpropitiously and unaccountably slow. Could it be, too, that a brand of make-believe that was tolerable eighteen years ago, before color and CinemaScope and other intrusions, is just a little discomforting now?

So far as we're concerned, this self-conscious fantasy of a husband and wife who reverse their biological status is a tired and tiresome jape, as subtle as a five-cent stogie and just as aromatic.

What happens next is cut to order—routine procedure, as they say.

As flimsy as a gossip-columnist's word, especially when it is documenting the weird behavior of the socially elite. And with pretty and lady-like Grace Kelly flouncing lightly through its tomboyish Hepburn role, it misses the snap and the crackle that its un-musical predecessor had.

Unless the three authors of this picture have access to some new and startling source, there is no basis other than legend for the silly murder plot unfolded here.

What it basically needed in its transfer to the screen was a drenching in cinema magic to remove all the dull and pretentious patches of realism and romantic cliché that kept it from sparkling in the theater. And that's what we all hoped it would have. Well, it hasn't, alas.

The story that's told against this background is a curiously empty tabloid tale, and the title performer, Ava Gardner, fails to give it plausibility or appeal.

There is more than a trace of outright hokum in this thriller...but there is also an ample abundance of scenic novelty and beauty to compensate.

Mr. Wellman's film seems dominated by the tremendous shadow of its predecessor.

And this is the weakness of the film. Mr. Bolt has reduced the vast upheaval of the Russian Revolution to the banalities of a doomed romance.

It takes more than two hours to come to a solution of the problem in this film. They would do it in one hour on TV, and it would probably be every bit as good.

Most of the comic invention in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is embraced in the idea and the title. The notion of having these two clowns run afoul of the famous screen monster is a good laugh in itself. But take this gentle warning: get the most out of that one laugh while you can, because the picture...does not contain many more.

The Man I Love is both silly and depressing, not to mention dull.

Indeed, it is in the bizarre contacts of Mr. Bogart with shady characters such as those played by these well-directed actors that Dark Passage achieves tension and drive. Perhaps he should be given more time with them.

Even though moments in the picture do have some tension and power, and the whole thing is scrupulously acted by a tightly professional cast, the consequence is an entertainment that tends to drag, sag and generally grow dull. It is not the sort of entertaiment that one hopefully expects of "Hitch."

The wonder is that John Sturges, a top director, has made such an obvious, slow film with this cast, and that Mr. Garner should be such a nobody as the legendary Mr. Earp.

It is all very complex and confused. Indeed, it is so oddly garbled that John Patrick and Arthur Sheekman, who did the script, have to go for a melodramatic shooting to bring it all to a tolerable end.

Although the reality of it goes soft and then collapses at the end, it is a tough and engrossing motion picture, weird and cruel, while it stays on the beam.

A curiously flat and fragmentary visualization of the original.

The shame of it is that this conclusion is so anticlimactic and banal, because there is so much in the picture that seems to be leading to -- certainly prepares us to expect -- much more.

As a straight melodrama of juvenile violence this is a vivid and hair-raising film.

The drama, for all its invention, is creaky and a bit passé. (Apparently there has still been no contact with other planets in 800,000 A. D.) And the mood, while delicately wistful, is not so flippant or droll as it might be in a fiction as fanciful and flighty as this one naturally is.

For all its high spots, however, the show lacks consistent style and pace, and the stars are forced to clown and grimace much more than becomes their speed. Actually, the plotted humor is conspicuously bush-league stuff. Don't be surprised if you see people getting up for a seventh-inning stretch.

Robert Ardrey has put it together into a literate and playable script and Vincente Minelli has kept it moving with a smooth and refined directoral touch.

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.

The Wayne-Douglas Western looks like something that the two saddle-sore stars cooked up to kill time and make a little money... It's not a bad picture, just obvious.

The chief fault, in our estimation, with the Warners' "Destination Tokyo" is that there is just too doggone much of it and is all too conventionally crammed in.

Clearly, the magnet of this picture, which has been a phenomenal success in Italy and other parts of Europe, is this cool-cat bandit who is played by Clint Eastwood, an American cowboy actor who used to do the role of rowdy in the Rawhide series on TV. Wearing a Mexican poncho, gnawing a stub of cheroot and peering intently from under a slouch hat pulled low over his eyes, he is simply another fabrication of a personality, half cowboy and half gangster, going through the ritualistic postures and exercises of each.

Here is but another repetition of the standard tale of the vampire bugaboo who likes to sink his oversized dentures into the necks of pretty girls.There is nothing new or imaginative about it.

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.

Miss Andrews, with her air of radiant vigor, her appearance of plain-Jane wholesomeness and her ability to make her dialogue as vivid and appealing as she makes her songs, brings a nice sort of Mary Poppins logic and authority to this role, which is always in peril of collapsing under its weight of romantic nonsense and sentiment.

Inspired by the novel of Glendon Swarthout, which one reviewer described as "a highly carbonated elixir of sex, sun-shine and beer," it has been patterned into a movie by the glib script writer, George Wells, so that it looks and sounds like a chummy dramatization of the Kinsey reports.

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.

It is a pretty plain and unimaginative looksee at a lower-depths character with a perilous weakness for narcotics that he miraculously overcomes in the end.

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.

The production, which Donald Siegel has directed from the screen play of the original author, Reginald Rose, is cramped and flimsy. It matches the rest of the show.

Stage Fright is dazzlingly stagy but it is far from frightening.

If the film doesn't quite come off, it is not for lack of effort. Mr. Wayne is in there swinging all the way, as a reactionary old cattle baron coping with encroaching homesteaders, discontented Indians, a marriageable daughter and a rebellious wife.

Random Harvest is a strangely empty film. Its characters are creatures of fortune, not partisans in determining their own fates. Miss Garson and Mr. Colman are charming; they act perfectly. But they never seem real. And a sense of psychiatric levels is not conveyed in either the script or direction.

For all this film's mighty pretensions, it does not get far beneath the skin of its conventional Western situation and its stock Western characters. It skims across standard complications and ends on a platitude.

What is annoying about this picture is that the set-up for pulling off the plot is just too slick and artificial, too patly and elaborately contrived.

It requires a good deal to play a person who is strangely jangled in the head. And, unfortunately, all the equipment that Miss Monroe has to handle the job are a childishly blank expression and a provokingly feeble, hollow voice. With these she makes a game endeavor to pull something out of the role, but it looks as though she and her director, Roy Baker, were not quite certain what.