Bosley Crowther

Mr. Kramer has brilliantly directed a strong and responsive cast, headed by Gregory Peck as the submarine commander and Ava Gardner as the worldly woman who craves his love. Miss Gardner is remarkably revealing of the pathos of a wasted life. Fred Astaire is also amazing as the cynical scientist, conveying in his self-effacing manner a piercing sense of the irony of his trade.

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

Mark this one down as good, crisp fun.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz' direction is strained and sluggish, as is, indeed, the whole conceit of the drama. It should have been left to the off-Broadway stage.

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.

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 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.

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.

Universal will have to try again.

The V.I.P.s is, gratifyingly, a lively, engrossing romantic film cut to the always serviceable pattern of the old multi-character Grand Hotel, and some of the other people in it are even more exciting than the two top stars.

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.

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.

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.

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's an unbelievably hackneyed and mawkish mish-mash of backstage plots and Peyton Place adumbrations in which five women are involved with their assorted egotistical aspirations, love affairs and Seconal pills.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Prepare yourselves rather for a lengthy and restless stretch on tenterhooks.

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.

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.

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

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

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."

It has no more plot than a horse race, no more order than a pinball machine, and it bounces around on several levels of consciousness, dreams and memories as it details a man's rather casual psychoanalysis of himself. But it sets up a labyrinthine ego for the daring and thoughtful to explore, and it harbors some elegant treasures of wit and satire along the way.

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.

Miss Hepburn gives a mischievous performance as the girl who really wants to be chased, and Mr. Tracy is charmingly acerbic when confronted with her cool or coy wiles.

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.

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.

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.

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

Believe us, that secret is so clever, even though it is devilishly far-fetched, that we wouldn't want to risk at all disturbing your inevitable enjoyment of the film.

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.

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.

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.

It's as warming as a Manhattan cocktail and as juicy as a porterhouse steak.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

There is one mark of distinction: Mr. Stone has shot much of this film along the beautiful California seacoast in the vicinity of Monterey. That makes it easy to look at. Indeed, it makes it thrilling, at times.

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

Forbidden Games is a brilliant and devastating drama of the tragic frailties of men, clear and uncorrupted by sentimentality or dogmatism in its candid view of life.