Bosley Crowther

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.

Mr. Sturges as author and director, is thoroughly up to his stinging style in this film. Situations spark, dialogue crackles and his camera works like a playful Peeping Tom. And from all of the actors he gets performances that make them look like inspired comedians.

Like its careening, footloose hero, A Fine Madness needs discipline. But you'll never guess what lurks around the bend, from gold to brass.

Indeed, the weakness of this picture, from this reviewer's point of view, is the sentimentality of it—its illusory concept of life. Mr. Capra's nice people are charming, his small town is a quite beguiling place and his pattern for solving problems is most optimistic and facile. But somehow they all resemble theatrical attitudes rather than average realities. And Mr. Capra's "turkey dinners" philosophy, while emotionally gratifying, doesn't fill the hungry paunch.

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

The Big Sleep is one of those pictures in which so many cryptic things occur amid so much involved and devious plotting that the mind becomes utterly confused. And, to make it more aggravating, the brilliant detective in the case is continuously making shrewd deductions which he stubbornly keeps to himself.

What Mr. Hawks and his script-writers have done to Mr. Hemingway's tale is to shape it out of all recognition into a pattern of worldly intrigue.

[Caron] helps "Lili" to be a lovely and beguiling little film, touched with the magic of romance and the shimmer of masquerade.

In this big Technicolored Western Mr. Ford has superbly achieved a vast and composite illustration of all the legends of the frontier cavalryman.

Most of the comic invention in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is embraced in the idea and the title. The notion of having these two clowns run afoul of the famous screen monster is a good laugh in itself. But take this gentle warning: get the most out of that one laugh while you can, because the picture...does not contain many more.

As flimsy as a gossip-columnist's word, especially when it is documenting the weird behavior of the socially elite. And with pretty and lady-like Grace Kelly flouncing lightly through its tomboyish Hepburn role, it misses the snap and the crackle that its un-musical predecessor had.

The whole thing is in the category of cheap cinematic horror-stuff.

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.

Mr. Stewart does a first-class job, playing the whole thing from a wheel chair and making points with his expressions and eyes. His handling of a lens-hound's paraphernalia in scanning the action across the way is very important to the color and fascination of the film.

Those who have blissful recollections of David O. Selznick's A Star Is Born as probably the most affecting movie ever made about Hollywood may get themselves set for a new experience that should put the former one in the shade when they see Warner Brothers' and George Cukor's remake of the seventeen-year-old film.

An amazingly poignant picture, rich in humor, heart and subtle ironies.

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.

If the film doesn't quite come off, it is not for lack of effort. Mr. Wayne is in there swinging all the way, as a reactionary old cattle baron coping with encroaching homesteaders, discontented Indians, a marriageable daughter and a rebellious wife.

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.

Solid and sensible drama plainly had to give way to outright emotional bulldozing and a paving of easy clichés.

Isobel Lennart's screenplay adds a few mild embellishments and George Roy Hill has directed in a nice, clear, uncomplicated way.

Whoever engineered the sequence of the pumpkin transformation in this film—the magical change to coach and horses—deserves an approving hand. And the scene in which Cinderella blows soap bubbles—opalescent globes full of fragile reflections and rainbow colors—is one of the cleverest animations yet seen. To the fellows who dreamed up these fancies we are heartily grateful, indeed. They have sprinkled into Cinderella—along with sugar and wit—some vagrant art.

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.

It is obvious that Alfred Hitchcock, Ben Hecht and Ingrid Bergman form a team of motion-picture makers that should be publicly and heavily endowed. With Cary Grant as an additional asset, it is one of the most absorbing pictures of the year.

Mr. Newman is excellent, at the top of his sometime erratic form, in the role of this warped and alienated loner whose destiny it is to lose. George Kennedy is powerfully obsessive as the top-dog who handles things his way as effectively and finally as destructively as does the warden or the guards.

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?

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.

It may be a rather lofty tribute to Fred Harvey's girls, but it's a show.