Bosley Crowther

Tortilla Flatt is really a little idyll which turns its back on a workaday world. But it is filled with solid humor and compassion—and that is pleasant, even for folks who have to work.

Even though redundant and familiar, as this performance inevitably is, with its obviously patterned reproduction of a caustic and vanity-ridden dame, Miss Davis still makes it sizzle with stinging sarcasm and feminine fire, so that it gives the illusion of emerging as a shaft of withering light from Hollywood.

Ugly, powerful drama. [28 May 1963]

Technically, it's a good job. Mr. Webb has prepared a tough, tight script and Mr. Thompson has directed in a steady and starkly sinister style. There is no waste motion, no fooling. Everything is sharp and direct. Menace quivers in the picture like a sneaky electrical charge. And Mr. Mitchum plays the villain with the cheekiest, wickedest arrogance and the most relentless aura of sadism that he has ever managed to generate...But this is really one of those shockers that provokes disgust and regret. There seems to be no reason for it but to agitate anguish and a violent, vengeful urge that is offered some animal satisfaction by that murderous fight at the end.

To be sure, the production is elegant. Settings and costumes are superfine and, photographed in technicolor, they all mawe a lavish display. But that richness of décor and music is precisely what gets in the way of the tale.

The chief fault, in our estimation, with the Warners' "Destination Tokyo" is that there is just too doggone much of it and is all too conventionally crammed in.

Oddly enough, despite its opulence, coupled with a brilliant rendering of the score by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Sir Thomas Beecham's bristling baton and some masterly singing of the libretto (in English) by a host of vocal cords, this film version of the opera is, in toto, a vastly wearying show.

An amiable little romance in which a boy meets a girl at Christmas-time, and the sentiments are quite as artificial and conveniently sprinkled as the snow is provided—for those who like such things—in RKO's Holiday Affair.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Walt Disney has let his animators and his color magicians have free rein in his latest cartoon package-picture, Melody Time. And again, as in Make Mine Music! he has come up with a gaudy grab-bag show in which a couple of items are delightful and the rest are just adequate fillers-in.

Mr. Kubrick has made it look terrific. The execution scene is one of the most craftily directed and emotionally lacerating that we have ever seen. But there are two troubling flaws in this picture, one in the realm of technique and the other in the realm of significance, which determine its larger, lasting worth.

It is smoothly directed by George Cukor and slyly, amusingly played by the whole cast, especially by its due of easy, adroit, experienced stars.

As in most Westerns, the dramatic penetration is not deep, and the plot complications are many and hard to follow in Japanese. Kurosawa is here showing more virtuosity than strength. Yojimbo is a long way (in the wrong direction) from his brilliant Rashomon.

Miss Hepburn gives a mischievous performance as the girl who really wants to be chased, and Mr. Tracy is charmingly acerbic when confronted with her cool or coy wiles.

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.

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

A cozy, good-humored and unbelievable little tale.

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.

As a straight melodrama of juvenile violence this is a vivid and hair-raising film.

If you're not too squeamish at the sight of slaughter and blood and can keep your mind fixed on the notion that there was something heroic and strong about British colonial expansion in the 19th century, you may find a great deal of excitement in this robustly Kiplingesque film.

Mr. Huston's direction is dynamic, inventive and colorful. Mr. Gable is ironically vital. Miss Ritter, James Barton and Estelle Winwood are amusing in very minor roles, and Alex North has provided some good theme music. But the picture just doesn't come off.

There is one mark of distinction: Mr. Stone has shot much of this film along the beautiful California seacoast in the vicinity of Monterey. That makes it easy to look at. Indeed, it makes it thrilling, at times.

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