Bosley Crowther

The trouble with this romantic picture—among other minor things, including Mr. Stack's absurd performance and another even more so by Miss Malone—is that nothing really happens, the complications within the characters are never clear and the sloppy, self-pitying fellow at the center of the whole thing is a bore.

A dandy entertainment which has some shrewd and realistic things to say.

So studiously wild and woolly it turns out to be good fun.

For a popular entertainment, Anchors Aweigh is hard to beat. The proof is that it pleases both the pro and con Sinatra-ites.

Facing it squarely, "My Uncle" is perceptibly contrived when it lingers too long and gets too deeply into the dullness of things mechanical. After you've pushed one button and one modernistic face, you've pushed them all.

The whole thing becomes a routine and mechanical cat-and-rat chase, with the outcome completely apparent, despite a few bright and clever twists.

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.

Inspired by the novel of Glendon Swarthout, which one reviewer described as "a highly carbonated elixir of sex, sun-shine and beer," it has been patterned into a movie by the glib script writer, George Wells, so that it looks and sounds like a chummy dramatization of the Kinsey reports.

Except that they take a long time at it, Scriptwriter John Michael Hayes and Director Mark Robson construct a drama of personal tensions and incongruities that has something of the irony and terror of the film version of "An American Tragedy."

Darryl Zanuck, John Ford and their associates at Twentieth Century-Fox have fashioned a motion picture of great poetic charm and dignity, a picture rich in visual fabrication and in the vigor of its imagery, and one which may truly be regarded as an outstanding film of the year.

The major causes for anxiety presented by this film are in the savagery of its conception and the intolerable artlessness of its sound. It is thrown and howled at the audience as though the only purpose was to overwhelm the naturally curious patron with an excess of brutal stimuli.

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.

A rip-snorting Western, as brashly entertaining as they come.

In the advancement of the romance, which itself is hot stuff, for what it is, several capable actors do entertaining jobs.

It is far from the mature outdoor drama that might be brilliantly filmed around a gun. It's just a frisky, fast-moving, funny Western in which a rifle is the apple of a cowboy's eye.

As a slashing social satire and also a devastating spoof of the synthetic, stomach-turning output of the television-advertising age--it is loaded with startling expositions and lacerating wit.

Lightning Strikes Twice, in short, is not explosive fare, but it does crackle on occasion.

An uncommonly good little picture.

Shadows is an unfinished picture in every sense of the word. Yet it is fitfully dynamic, endowed with a raw but vibrant strength, conveying an illusion of being a record of real people, and it is incontestably sincere.

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.

It is the wondrously youthful Miss Caron and that grandly pictorial ballet that place the marks of distinction upon this lush Technicolored escapade.

Has its ups and downs. Bronislau Kaper has provided a highly chromatic musical score that is consistent with the size, the sweeping romance and the eventual lumpishness of this film.

It has no more plot than a horse race, no more order than a pinball machine, and it bounces around on several levels of consciousness, dreams and memories as it details a man's rather casual psychoanalysis of himself. But it sets up a labyrinthine ego for the daring and thoughtful to explore, and it harbors some elegant treasures of wit and satire along the way.

A better film about war beneath the ocean and about guys in the "silent service" has not been made.

Sweet Bird of Youth, for all its graphics and the vigorous performance of its top roles, has the taint of an engineered soap opera, wherein the soap is simply made of lye, that's all.

With an excellent script by Mr. Riskin—overwritten in many spots, it is true—Mr. Capra has produced a film which is eloquent with affection for gentle people, for the plain, unimpressive little people who want reassurance and faith.

Richard Fleischer's direction, is slow and without surprise. Indeed, toward the end it is perfunctory. Things happen mechanically. The actors appear self-conscious and the fantasy is dull.

A sense of outdoor living and a tingle of open-air adventure are the breath of life in this film.