Bosley Crowther

There are some excruciating flashes of accuracy and truth in this film...However, we do wish the young actors, including Mr. Dean, had not been so intent on imitating Marlon Brando in varying degrees. The tendency, possibly typical of the behavior of certain youths, may therefore be a subtle commentary but it grows monotonous.

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.

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.

You've got to hand it to Alfred Hitchcock: when he sows the fearful seeds of mistrust in one of his motion pictures he can raise more goose pimples to the square inch of a customer's flesh than any other director of thrillers in Hollywood.

Thanks to a skillful combination of some sensational African hunting scenes, a musical score of rich suggestion and a vivid performance by Gregory Peck, Twentieth Century-Fox and Darryl F. Zanuck have concocted a handsome and generally absorbing film in The Snows of Kilimanjaro.

A superb piece of motion picture art and, beyond doubt, one of the finest screen translations of a literary classic ever made.

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.

Mr. Reed has brilliantly packaged the whole bad of his cinematic tricks, his whole range of inventive genius for making the camera expound. His eminent gifts for compressing a wealth of suggestion in single shots, for building up agonized tension and popping surprises are fully exercised. His devilishly mischievous humor also runs lightly through the film, touching the darker depressions with little glints of the gay or macabre. [3 Feb 1950, p.29]

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.

Hombre seems constantly meaning to have something vital to say, maybe about racial antagonisms, that it can't quite sputter out because it has so much to do. But in the doing of it, all the people are fine in their roles and the whole is tremendously engrossing without being important. Hombre is tough.

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.

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

Once this build-up is accomplished—once the sinister plot is launched and the young woman suddenly realizes that she has been duped and is in grave peril—the shock and suspense of the situation hit the audience with almost the same force, I'd imagine, as they evidently hit her. And from here on, the tension is terrific and the melodramatic action is wild as the blind woman uses all her courage and ingenuity to foil her assailants and save her life.

It makes like a wild adventure picture and, with some forty famous actors in "bit" roles, it also takes on the characteristic of a running recognition game. It is noisy with sound effects and music. It is overwhelmingly large in the process known as Todd-AO. It runs for two hours fifty-five minutes (not counting an intermission). And it is, undeniably, quite a show.

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

From Kathryn Hulme's novel The Nun's Story, which gives an amazing account of a young Belgian woman's experiences in becoming and being a nursing nun, screen writer Robert Anderson and director Fred Zinnemann have derived an equally amazing motion picture of an extraordinary dedicated life.

A dynamic crime-and-punishment drama, brilliantly and broadly realized.

One of the tautest and most stimulating Westerns of the year.

It is seldom that there comes a motion picture which can be wholly and enthusiastically endorsed not only as superlative entertainment but as food for quiet and humanizing thought.

It is as cheerful and respectful an invasion of the realm of conscience that we have seen. And it comes very close to being the most enchanting picture of the year.

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.

Provided you have a little patience for the lavishly rich, which these folks are, you should have great fun at The Philadelphia Story. For Metro and Director George Cukor have graciously made it apparent, in the words of a character, that one of the "prettiest sights in this pretty world is the privileged classes enjoying their privileges." And so, in this instance, you will too.

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.

Joined with the equally nimble talents of Fred Astaire. Jack Buchanan and Cyd Charisse and some tunes from the sterling repertory of Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz, this literate and witty combination herein delivers a show that respectfully bids for recognition as one of the best musical films ever made.

It's always nice to have a mystery melodrama, no matter how implausible it may be, that takes place amid elegant surroundings and involves people who are beautiful and rich. It makes one feel so luxurious to be there with the diamonds and champagne, enjoying the heat on the rich folks and knowing that you are not going to be burned.

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.

This new gloomlodger, though not as nerve-paralyzing as the performers might lead you to expect, has enough suspense and atmospheric terror to make it one of the better of its genre.

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