Bosley Crowther

There are countless more fascinating facets to this city than the work of cops with crime and countless more striking characters in it than genial detectives and mumbling crooks. However, within that range of interest, Mr. Hellinger has done a vivid job in this, his appropriate valedictory, which comes to you spontaneous and unrehearsed.

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.

A most intriguing film.

A brilliantly graphic estimation of a whole swath of society in sad decay and, eventually, a withering commentary upon the tragedy of the overcivilized. (Review of Original Release)

Somehow, the fullness of Dickens, of his stories and characters—his humor and pathos and vitality and all his brilliant command of atmosphere—has never been so illustrated as it is in this wonderful film, which can safely be recommended as screen story-telling at its best.

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.

One of the wildest, bawdiest and funniest comedies that a refreshingly agile filmmaker has ever brought to the screen.

Mr. Kaufman and Mr. Hart might even find themselves outclassed by the dazzling and devastating mockery that is brilliantly packed into this film.

This is not to say that the action is not vivid, exciting and tense, or that Kurosawa's camera is any less graphic than it usually is. This is simply to say that The Hidden Fortress is essentially a superficial film and that Kurosawa, for all his talent, is as prone to pot-boiling as anyone else.

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.

Although the reality of it goes soft and then collapses at the end, it is a tough and engrossing motion picture, weird and cruel, while it stays on the beam.

Room for One More makes for generally appealing movie fare. So long as this anecdotal look-in upon the experience of a husband and wife in bringing up two foster children, as well as three of their own, sticks simply to the humorous complications that arise in a house full of kids, plus appropriate livestock and paraphernalia, it has genuine gaiety and domestic charm.

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.

The production, which Donald Siegel has directed from the screen play of the original author, Reginald Rose, is cramped and flimsy. It matches the rest of the show.

The Ipcress File is as classy a spy film as you could ask to see.

The consequence in his denouement falls quite flat for us. But the acting is fair. Mr. Perkins and Miss Leigh perform with verve, and Vera Miles, John Gavin, and Martin Balsam do well enough in other roles.

For all its high spots, however, the show lacks consistent style and pace, and the stars are forced to clown and grimace much more than becomes their speed. Actually, the plotted humor is conspicuously bush-league stuff. Don't be surprised if you see people getting up for a seventh-inning stretch.

The color is good and Bobby Darin warbles a song at the start that may be amusing to humans but would probably fill Felix with disgust. Anyhow, it's an entertaining picture.

For a courtroom melodrama pegged to a single plot device--a device that, of course, everybody promises not to reveal--the Arthur Hornblow Jr. film production of the Agatha Christie play "Witness for the Prosecution" comes off extraordinarily well. This results mainly from Billy Wilder's splendid staging of some splintering courtroom scenes and a first-rate theatrical performance by Charles Laughton in the defense-attorney role.

The fury and hate that John Osborne was able to pack into a flow of violent words in his stage play, Look Back in Anger, are not only matched but also documented in the film that the original stage director, Tony Richardson, has made from that vicious play.

This modernized remake of Miss Hurst's frankly lachrymose tale is much the same as its soggy predecessor. It is the most shameless tear-jerker in a couple of years.

It is a pretty plain and unimaginative looksee at a lower-depths character with a perilous weakness for narcotics that he miraculously overcomes in the end.

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.

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.

That old master of screen melodrama, Alfred Hitchcock, and Writer John Steinbeck have combined their distinctive talents in a tremendously provocative film—indeed, a surprisingly unique one—titled Lifeboat.

For fanciers of hard-boiled cinema, They Drive By Night still offers an entertaining ride.

The story that's told against this background is a curiously empty tabloid tale, and the title performer, Ava Gardner, fails to give it plausibility or appeal.

A deliciously wicked character portrait and a helter-skelter satire.