Bosley Crowther

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.

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.

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.

Don't look for something in the mood of Tennyson's "Idylls of the King" or Malory's "Morte d'Arthur" in this extraordinarily eye-filling film. The poetic eloquence and grandeur of those distinctly literary works have been replaced by a sweep of graphic action and romantic symbols that is straight Hollywood.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Lightning Strikes Twice, in short, is not explosive fare, but it does crackle on occasion.

Has its ups and downs. Bronislau Kaper has provided a highly chromatic musical score that is consistent with the size, the sweeping romance and the eventual lumpishness of this film.

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.

The dialogue is rough. Let's say O'Harrowing. And the ending is absurd. But so is most of it for that matter. It's the living it up that gets you in this film.

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]

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.

If anything, it has hauled back much too briskly on the strings of the heart and has strained a few muscles in the process.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 is an overlong, overlabored essay on the torments of conscience and love which Mr. Hitchcock has beautifully filmed in Technicolor but pointed in glaring blacks and whites.

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.

There is one thing about this picture that is clever and joyous, at least. That is a cartooned pink panther that runs through the main titles at the start making mischief with the lettering, insistently getting in the way. He is so blithe and bumptious, so sweet and entirely lovable, that he's awfully hard to follow. It's questionable whether the picture does.

Like the stage show, this Technicolored shindig, which laughingly pretends to be a biography of the famous swimmer, Annette Kellerman, is a luxuriance of razzle-dazzle that includes Hippodrome acts, water ballets, bathing suit shows, diving performances, low comedy, anachronisms and clichés. It also includes an abundance of Miss Williams and Victor Mature, but it does not include the felicities of a reasonably fascinating script.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

In these times, with James Bonds cutting capers and pallid spies coming in out of the cold, Mr. Hitchcock will have to give us something a good bit brighter to keep us amused.

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

The action is swift and the mystery fetching in this handsomely made color film. But eventually it seems a bit too obvious, imitative, old-fashioned and, worst of all, stale.

It is something for racing fans to see. But the business that passes for a story in between and among the racing scenes is depressingly unoriginal and banal.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

The sharpness and contemporary significance of Mr. Morley's commentary are missing.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

Michael Gordon's direction is not as nimble as it was on "Pillow Talk."

If it were stopped at the end of an hour and 40 minutes instead of at the end of 2 hours and 10 minutes, it might be a terminally satisfying entertainment instead of the wearying one it is.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Mervyn LeRoy, who produced and directed, has lost a great deal of the bite of the play. He has done it in a style of presentation that is ostentatious and often insincere.

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.

As a brash little night-club singer who is supposed to act like a swell, Miss Day is most plainly the victim of the writers' unutterable ennui. Furthermore, Michael Curtiz's direction of her and the rest of the cast is as slapdash and void of distinction as it can professionally be. Not only has he let the young lady spread noisiness all over the place, but he has wasted the few minor talents that he had in a most provoking way.

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.

IF the threat of Frank Sinatra as a film director is judged by his first try on "None But the Brave," it is clear that there need be no apprehension among the members of the Screen Directors Guild.

Unfortunately, trick photography is not sufficient to maintain a whole film, and this one reveals quite plainly that you don't see much when you see an "Invisible Man."

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.

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

The script is neither satire nor good, fresh, fanciful corn. It is a batch of old-fashioned nonsense put together without distinct charm.

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 boys themselves are exuberant and uninhibited in their own genial way. They just become awfully redundant and—dare I say it?—dull.

Apparently the Disney wonder-workers are just a lot of conventional hacks when it comes to telling a story with actors instead of cartoons.

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.