Bosley Crowther

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.

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

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?

Gaiety, rhythm, humor and a good, wholesome dash of light romance have been artfully blended together in this bright Technicolored comedy.

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

The charm of his picture lies in the casual kookiness of his characters, plus the random and childlike unreality of the lovely, fragile, dead-panned Miss Deneuve.

So far as we're concerned, this self-conscious fantasy of a husband and wife who reverse their biological status is a tired and tiresome jape, as subtle as a five-cent stogie and just as aromatic.

A most delightfully acted and gracefully entertaining film, fashioned much in the manner of a stage drawing-room comedy, that seems to be about something much more serious and challenging than it actually is.

The whole thing is played expertly by everyone in the large cast, and a lively jazz score and bright color make it seem much more casual than it is.

A dazzling, eye-filling, nerve-tingling display of a wide variety of individual and mass reactions to awesome challenges and, in some of its sharpest personal details, a fine reflection of experience that rips the heart.

The whole thing is colorful, gay — and Henry Mancini's music is as sassy and frivolous as the film.

It works out to a fascinating picture, for one reason because of its superior illustrative performance and, for another, because of its striking mise en scène.

What happens next is cut to order—routine procedure, as they say.

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.

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.

It is a grandly engrossing and exciting melodrama of wartime espionage, done with stunning documentary touches in a tight, tense, heroic story line.

Unless the three authors of this picture have access to some new and startling source, there is no basis other than legend for the silly murder plot unfolded here.

What it basically needed in its transfer to the screen was a drenching in cinema magic to remove all the dull and pretentious patches of realism and romantic cliché that kept it from sparkling in the theater. And that's what we all hoped it would have. Well, it hasn't, alas.

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 remarkably apt and dramatic visualization of a social idea—the idea of men of different races brought together to face misfortune in a bond of brotherhood — is achieved by Producer Stanley Kramer in his new film, The Defiant Ones.

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.

Remarkable...[a] most uncommon film, which projects a disagreeable subject with power and cogency.

There is more than a trace of outright hokum in this thriller...but there is also an ample abundance of scenic novelty and beauty to compensate.

Mr. Wellman's film seems dominated by the tremendous shadow of its predecessor.

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.

It takes more than two hours to come to a solution of the problem in this film. They would do it in one hour on TV, and it would probably be every bit as good.

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.

Mr. Disney's earnest people have done a remarkable job of collecting some extraordinary footage and his editors have assembled it well for excitement and fascination, more than for education.