Bosley Crowther

In Technicolor, it looks good enough to eat. But the voracity with which Miss Day has at it and wolfs it down is unnerving to see. David Butler, who directed, has wound her up tight and let her go. She does everything but hit the ceiling in lashing all over the screen.This is not altogether entrancing.

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.

A full-bodied Oklahoma! has been brought forth in this film to match in vitality, eloquence and melody any musical this reviewer has ever seen.

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.

So it looks as though this film simply makes more goose pimples than sense, which is rather surprising and disappointing for a picture with two such actresses, who are very good all the way through it, and produced and directed by the able Robert Wise.

Miss Wood has a beauty and radiance that carry her through a role of violent passions and depressions with unsullied purity and strength. There is poetry in her performance, and her eyes in the final scene bespeak the moral significance and emotional fulfillment of this film.

This is something more than just a brilliant and adult translation of a stimulating play, something more than a captivating compound of ironic humor and pity. This is a lasting memorial to the devotion of artists working under fire, a permanent proof for posterity that it takes more than bombs to squelch the English wit.

One of the most lively and up-to-date comedy-romances of the year.

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.

The whole thing achieves a tingling speed and irresistible tension under John Frankenheimer's direction, which deftly lifts some of the tricks of pictorial and musical emphasis from the old Nazi "Blitzkrieg" films.

Farce of this sort very seldom comes off with complete effect, but this time it does, and we promise that there's fun on the Road to Zanzibar.

A bountiful comedy-romance.

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

Sadistic, anti-Nazi slaughter mission. Entertaining as a blowtorch.

This grandly sophisticated romance, which Mr. Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond have penned with a courteous nod to a novel by a Frenchman named Claude Anet, is in the great Lubitsch tradition, right down to the froth on the champagne, with a couple of fine additional "touches" that Mr. Wilder may wholly claim.

At all events, the picture takes on a dull tone as it goes and finally ends in a fizzle which is forecast almost from the start.

Essentially a film of mordant feeling in which violence is always just below the surface of pokerfaced bluffing and fake Old-World Spanish courtesy.

Unless a viewer is addicted to freakish ironies, the unlikely spectacle of Mr. Williams losing an inch of height each week, while his wife, Randy Stuart, looks on helplessly, will become tiresome before Universal has emptied its lab of science-fiction clichés.

At least a good half of the effect in a sea-picture comes from the sea, and when that element is lacking the whole thing seems flat and synthetic. This, we regret to say, is a major fault in The Sea Wolf.

Miss Leigh shapes the role of the girl with such superb comprehension, progresses from the innocent, fragile dancer to an empty, bedizened street-walker with such surety of characterization and creates a person of such appealing naturalness that the picture gains considerable substance as a result.

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.

Every bit of the humor and vibrant humanity that flowed through the tender story of the English school-teacher and the quizzical king is richly preserved in the screen play that Ernest Lehman has prepared.

Mr. Schulberg and Mr. Kazan spawn a monster not unlike the one of Dr. Frankenstein. But so hypnotized are they by his presence that he runs away not only with the show but with intellectual reason and with the potentiality of their theme.

A Man for All Seasons is a picture that inspires admiration, courage and thought.

Mr. Kazan catches the poetry of immigrants arriving in America. With some masterfully authentic staging and a fitly hard-focus camera, he gives us as fine an understanding of that drama as the screen has ever had.

A blizzard of fractious sport and clowning, a whirlwind of gags and travesty, a snowdrift of suffocating nonsense.

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.

All I can tell you is it is quite a trip. Fortunately, all of the voyaging is done in the northern hemisphere.