Bosley Crowther

The environment is more impressive than the slow, mawkish drama it contains, and the peasants are more assertive and colorful than the main characters. Scenes of sheepherding, farm gatherings, harvest suppers and assemblies at markets and fairs are more energetic and entertaining than the bloodless confrontations of the principals.

So studiously wild and woolly it turns out to be good fun.

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

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.

Practically every moment spent with Bing and Bob is good for consecutive chuckles and frequent belly-deep guffaws.

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

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.

The back-lot boys working for producers Frank Melford and Jack Dietz have, for the most part, performed an adequate job. As for the human side of the plot, written by David Duncan and Robert Blees, just forget it.

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.

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.

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.