Bosley Crowther

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 back-lot boys working for producers Frank Melford and Jack Dietz have, for the most part, performed an adequate job. As for the human side of the plot, written by David Duncan and Robert Blees, just forget it.

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.

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.

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.

Vincente Minnelli's direction lacks his usual vitality and flow. Brigadoon on the screen, we must say, is pretty weak synthetic Scotch.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The story is so imitative—and is repeated so dutifully—that it's hard to feel any more towards it than a mildly nostalgic regard.

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.

Everyone works hard at the business of singing, dancing and cracking jokes, but the stuff that they work with is minor.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.