Bosley Crowther

The performers are quite naturally restricted by the limitations of the script—and by the purely pedestrian direction that Irving Rapper has given them.

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.

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

It's an empty and careless little fable, intended to be a mystery farce, about the wholly incredible mix-up of a debutante in a murder plot.

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.

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.

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.

Sweet Bird of Youth, for all its graphics and the vigorous performance of its top roles, has the taint of an engineered soap opera, wherein the soap is simply made of lye, that's all.

Richard Fleischer's direction, is slow and without surprise. Indeed, toward the end it is perfunctory. Things happen mechanically. The actors appear self-conscious and the fantasy is dull.

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

Universal will have to try again.

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.

With little or no imagination and, indeed, with no pictorial style, despite the fact that the three directors were Henry Hathaway, George Marshall and John Ford, they have fashioned a lot of random episodes, horribly written by James Webb, into a mat of outdoor adventure vignettes that tell you nothing of how the West was really won.

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.

Whatever allegorical intimations there may be in it are not conveyed to any sensible degree in a voice narration that breaks in occasionally or in the mumblings of the old man.

It is loaded with hospital lore, coldly realistic and compelling, but also it is creeping with ponderous characters. With so much dissecting in his picture—and so much of it being good—it is too bad that Mr. Kramer couldn't have done a little on his characters.

It's a mighty low class of people that you will meet in the Paramount's I Walk Alone—and a mighty low grade of melodrama, if you want the honest truth—in spite of a very swanky setting and an air of great elegance.

Vincent Sherman's direction is as specious as the script.

It is hard to believe that Lillian Hellman's famous stage play, The Children's Hour, could have aged into such a cultural antique in the course of three decades as it looks in the new film version.

Mr. Pal barely gets us out there, but this time he doesn't bring us back.

Gene Saks, directing his first movie, has paced it so unevenly and allowed such glaring mismatches of scenic backgrounds and even of gag sequences that it looks as though his costly picture was made by people who didn't know their way around.

Such folks as delight in murder stories for their academic elegance alone should find this one steadily diverting, despite its monotonous pace and length...But the very toughness of the picture is also the weakness of its core, and the academic nature of its plotting limits its general appeal.

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

The whole thing... makes little or no intelligible sense.

What is to be said of such a picture? The story is trite. The motivations are thin. The writing is glossy and pedestrian. The acting is pretty much forced.

The whole thing is in the category of cheap cinematic horror-stuff.

A sadly deficient entertainment when looked at objectively. Its book is an obvious and witless rework of a plot that has gray hairs, and its music and so-called dances are depressingly lacking in class.

This beautifully produced, superbly scenic and excitingly photographed spoof of old-fashioned horror movies is as dismal and dead as a blood-drained corpse.

Mr. Faulkner's faded story does have some flavor of the old barnstorming tours of the early air-circus fliers, but there is precious little of it in this film, which was badly, cheaply written by George Zuckerman and is abominably played by a hand-picked cast.

Another moronic mishmash in which Mr. Lewis falls all over himself.

It takes a soft heart and a strong stomach to absorb the amount of saccharine that is studiedly and shamelessly dished up in Henry Koster's The Singing Nun.

The major causes for anxiety presented by this film are in the savagery of its conception and the intolerable artlessness of its sound. It is thrown and howled at the audience as though the only purpose was to overwhelm the naturally curious patron with an excess of brutal stimuli.

A confusing patchwork of scenes and characters.

What they have to go through to reach Oregon is nothing to compare to what an old Western fan has to go through to keep from getting up in the middle and walking out.

Catherine Turney, who assembled this rhetoric from a novel by Ethel Vance, should be made to sit through Winter Meeting about twenty-five or thirty times—which is the number of times you are likely to feel you've sat through it when you've seen it once.

George Axelrod's play, "Goodbye, Charlie," was bad enough on the stage. On the screen, it is a bleak conglomeration of outrageous whimsies and stupidities.

The latest of a succession of super-bloody Westerns made by Italians and Spaniards in Spain with Italian, Spanish and American actors, this time led by Burt Reynolds, as the American titular superhero who dispatches troops of villains singlehanded. Shot in color but decidedly colorless.

Phil Karlson's direction is clumsy. The Cine-color, in which the film is shown, is dull. And, altogether, this work from Allied Artists is as much to be pitied as panned.

The nearest this watered-down rewrite gets to the solid soil is the dirt on the farm sets constructed on a studio soundstage. And the nearest it comes to realizing any of the diary's observation and wit is in a few farcified re-creations of some of its milder episodes.

In a spirit of levity, contused by frequent doses of shock, Mr. Lubitsch has set his actors to performing a spy-thriller of fantastic design amid the ruins and frightful oppressions of Nazi-in-vaded Warsaw. To say it is callous and macabre is understating the case.

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