Bosley Crowther

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

For a popular entertainment, Anchors Aweigh is hard to beat. The proof is that it pleases both the pro and con Sinatra-ites.

Forget the length of time it took to make it and all the tattle of troubles they had, including the behavior of two of its spotlighted stars. The memorable thing about this picture is that it is a surpassing entertainment, one of the great epic films of our day. By virtue of brilliant staging, Mr. Mankiewicz keeps this well-known tale moving with visual excitements that increase the dramatic flow and give extraordinary insights into the characters.

As always in Mr. Disney's pictures, the quality of the humor is bright and sly, with touches of gentle satire laced in with jovial fun.

On the point of the fundamental issue in the Nazi war guilt trials that were held in Nuremberg, Germany, after World War II, Stanley Kramer, the producer-director, has pinned a powerful, persuasive film. The major weakness, perhaps, of the whole thing is that it is inevitably compressive and sometimes glib. The strength and wonder of it is that it manages to say so much that still needs to be said.

Vivid, motley, ornamental and just-a-bit questionable in spots.

Cat Ballou does have flashes of good satiric wit. But, under Elliot Silverstein's direction, it is mostly just juvenile lampoon.

For the most part, this scatter-brained fiction, in which Mr. Lewis is teamed with his popular partner, Dean Martin, is a cut-to-size Martin-Lewis farce, wherein the two playmates lightly fancy that they are a golf contestant and his caddy, respectively.

A rip-snorting Western, as brashly entertaining as they come.

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.

It is all reminiscent of some of those gay, galvanic larks that Gregory LaCava and Leo McCarey used to make ten or more years ago. And a higher recommendation we can't give to a light summer show.

It's a wonderfully crazy and colorful collection of "chase" comedy, so crowded with plot and people that it almost splits the seams of its huge Cinerama packing and its 3-hour-and-12-minute length.

Mr. Stevens has done a superb job of putting upon the screen the basic drama and shivering authenticity of the Frances Goodrich-Albert Hackett play, which in turn caught the magnitude of drama in the real-life diary of a Jewish girl.

Thanks to a dandy performance by James Cagney in the role of the great silent-film star, Lon Chaney, there is drama and personality in Man of a Thousand Faces.

One of the brightest, most delightful satiric comedies since It Happened One Night.

Well, the extent of the film's disconcertion and delight for a viewer will depend upon how prone one may be to a juvenile quandary and to the nimble performing of a pleasant cast.

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

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.

It is written, produced and directed by Mr. Johnson with a clean documentary clarity, and played with superlative flexibility and emotional power by Joanne Woodward in the main role.

I don't want to give you the impression that The Thrill of It All is a great film. I just want to tell you it is loaded with good, clean American laughs.

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

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.

Almost a quarter of a century after its initial performance on the stage (and seventeen years after the revival that really established it), this most haunting of American musical dramas has been transmitted on the screen in a way that does justice to its values and almost compensates for the long wait.

It has some quite clever popular music, Ricardo Montalban to make Latin love—and it has, above all, Red Skelton and Betty Garrett to play the buffoons.

Everyone works hard at the business of singing, dancing and cracking jokes, but the stuff that they work with is minor.

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

It is firmly directed by John Sturges (of Bad Day at Black Rock fame), and it is ruggedly acted by all and sundry—of which there is quit[e] a heap.

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.