Bosley Crowther

Colonel Blimp is as unmistakably a British product as Yorkshire pudding and, like the latter, it has a delectable savor all its own.

Mr. Huston has filmed a straight crime story about as cleverly and graphically as it could be filmed.

As a straight piece of blackmail melodrama, it is a good bit below the British par. But as a frank and deliberate exposition of the well-known presence and plight of the tacit homosexual in modern society it is certainly unprecedented and intellectually bold.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz' direction is strained and sluggish, as is, indeed, the whole conceit of the drama. It should have been left to the off-Broadway stage.

Almost a quarter of a century after its initial performance on the stage (and seventeen years after the revival that really established it), this most haunting of American musical dramas has been transmitted on the screen in a way that does justice to its values and almost compensates for the long wait.

Except for a couple of places, there is no hilarity in The Lavender Hill Mob. But its humors are so ingenious and persistent that it is one big chuckle from beginning to end.

The performers are quite naturally restricted by the limitations of the script—and by the purely pedestrian direction that Irving Rapper has given them.

Not the best he has done in this line. It is a coyly romantic story, done with animals. The sentimentality is mighty, and the use of the CinemaScope size does not make for any less awareness of the thickness of the goo.

Brilliant is the word, and no other, to describe the quality of skills that have gone into the making of this picture, from the writing of the script out of a novel by the Frenchman Pierre Boulle, to direction, performance, photographing, editing and application of a musical score.

It is all reminiscent of some of those gay, galvanic larks that Gregory LaCava and Leo McCarey used to make ten or more years ago. And a higher recommendation we can't give to a light summer show.

You may not get much satisfaction from the tortured human drama in this film, but you should get an eyeful graphic exercise.

Mr. Faulkner's faded story does have some flavor of the old barnstorming tours of the early air-circus fliers, but there is precious little of it in this film, which was badly, cheaply written by George Zuckerman and is abominably played by a hand-picked cast.

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.

It's an empty and careless little fable, intended to be a mystery farce, about the wholly incredible mix-up of a debutante in a murder plot.

The style is still sharp and realistic, the dialogue still crackles with verbal sparks and the action is still crisp and muscular, not to mention slightly wanton in spots. But the pattern and purpose of it is beyond our pedestrian ken.

Mr. Lemmon is little short of brilliant — vigorous, incisive and deft.

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 cheerful and inspiring film about the coming to manhood of a youngster.

Mr. Kazan keeps the courtship bouncing between the emotional and the ludicrous. The nonchalance of the pursuer is its most entertaining grace.

Production of this picture in England endowed it with a rich, distinctive air. It is a grand picture, told in what Sir Walter himself called his "big bow-wow style."

Another moronic mishmash in which Mr. Lewis falls all over himself.

Ronald Neame, who has directed the picture, and John Michael Hayes, who has written the script, present us with a cozy, compact drama that follows a comfortable, sentimental line.

The film, while it packs all the satire of our modern tribal matrimonial rite that was richly contained in the original, also possesses all the warmth and poignancy and understanding that makes the Streeter treatise much beloved.

Mr. Wilder has done more than write the film. His direction is ingenious and sure, sparkled by brilliant little touches and kept to a tight, sardonic line.

Clearly, the magnet of this picture, which has been a phenomenal success in Italy and other parts of Europe, is this cool-cat bandit who is played by Clint Eastwood, an American cowboy actor who used to do the role of rowdy in the Rawhide series on TV. Wearing a Mexican poncho, gnawing a stub of cheroot and peering intently from under a slouch hat pulled low over his eyes, he is simply another fabrication of a personality, half cowboy and half gangster, going through the ritualistic postures and exercises of each.

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.

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.

One must remark that the ending is not up to Mr. Hitchcock's usual style, and the general atmosphere of the picture is far less genuine than he previously has wrought. But still he has managed to bring through a tense and exciting tale, a psychological thriller which is packed with lively suspense and a picture that entertains you from beginning to—well, almost the end.