Bosley Crowther

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.