Frank S. Nugent

If it were not so brilliant a melodrama, we should class it as a brilliant comedy.

Is it the greatest motion picture ever made? Probably not, although it is the greatest motion mural we have seen and the most ambitious film-making venture in Hollywood's spectacular history.

A pretty kettle of bubbling brew it makes under Mr. Lubitsch's deft and tender management and with a genial company to play it gently, well this side of farce and well that side of utter seriousness.

In the vast library where the celluloid literature of the screen is stored there is one small, uncrowded shelf devoted to the cinema's masterworks, to those films which by dignity of theme and excellence of treatment seem to be of enduring artistry, seem destined to be recalled not merely at the end of their particular year but whenever great motion pictures are mentioned. To that shelf of screen classics Twentieth Century-Fox yesterday added its version of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

It is a classic, as important cinematicaly as "The Birth of a Nation" or the birth of Mickey Mouse. Nothing quite like it has been done before; and already we have grown impolite enough to clamor for an encore. Another helping, please!

Another astonishing chapter in the career of the Monster.

His Girl Friday is a bold-faced reprint of what was once—and still remains—the maddest newspaper comedy of our times.

Here, in a sentence, is a movie of the grand old school, a genuine rib-thumper and a beautiful sight to see.

A delightful piece of wonder-working which had the youngsters' eyes shining and brought a quietly amused gleam to the wiser ones of the oldsters.

The plot is never permitted to weigh upon the shoulders of the cast; of comedy there is a generous portion; of romance the lightest sprinkling; of dancing, in solo, duet and ensemble, a brisk and debonair allotment.

Mr. McCarey has balanced his ingredients skillfully and has merged them, as is clear in retrospect, into a glowing and memorable picture.

Not merely a natural and straightforward biography, but a film which indisputably has the right to be called Americana. Henry Fonda's characterization is one of those once-in-a-blue-moon things: a crossroads meeting of nature, art, and a smart casting director.

After the first five minutes of the Music Hall's new show - we needed those five to orient ourselves - we were content to play the game called "the cliche expert goes to the movies" and we are not at all proud to report that we scored 100 per cent against Dudley Nichols, Hagar Wilde and Howard Hawks, who wrote and produced the quiz. Of course, if you've never been to the movies, Bringing Up Baby will be all new to you - a zany-idden product of the goofy farce school. But who hasn't been to the movies?

Lewis Milestone, who directed it; Eugene Solow, who adapted it, and Burgess Meredith, Lon Chaney Jr., Betty Field and the others who have performed it, have done more than well in simply realizing the drama's established values.

Universal's excellent screen transcription, preserving the Jerome Kern score and accepting Oscar Hammerstein's book and lyrics, is the pleasantest kind of proof that it was not merely one of the best musical shows of the century but that it contained the gossamer stuff for one of the finest musical films we have seen.

Awfully unimportant, but it is also one of the more laughable screen comedies of 1937.

An altogether brilliant film, haunting, suspenseful, handsome and handsomely played.

When you add it all up, Only Angels Have Wings comes to an overly familiar total. It's a fairly good melodrama, nothing more.

You will not, in Desire, find a great story, but you will discover one that has been splendidly told. If it is a Lubitsch production, constantly highlighted by those indefinable touches of his, still one should not overlook the skill of its director, Frank Borzage; its excellent camera work, or the performances.

A masterly exercise in suspense. His new film is imperfect narrative, but perfect dramaturgy.

It is Goldwyn at his best, and better still, Emily Brontë at hers. Out of her strange tale of a tortured romance Mr. Goldwyn and his troupe have fashioned a strong and somber film, poetically written as the novel not always was, sinister and wild as it was meant to be, far more compact dramatically than Miss Brontë had made it.

An exuberantly funny picture.

Pasteur's life is warm and vital, of itself. It has lost none of that warmth through Mr. Muni's sensitive characterization, through the gifted direction of William Dieterle and the talents of a perfect cast.

It is still an interesting film, though, in spite of our sniffs at its climax; colorful, generally well-performed and admirably directed by William Wyler.

[Capra] has paced it beautifully and held it in perfect balance, weaving his romance lightly through the political phases of his comedy, flicking a sardonic eye over the Washington scene, racing out to the hinterland to watch public opinion being made and returning miraculously in time to tie all the story threads together into a serious and meaningful dramatic pattern.

With its rich production, magnificent marine photography, admirable direction and performances, the film brings vividly to life every page of Kipling's novel and even adds an exciting chapter or two of its own.

A bit of the old West with a good bit of the old Dietrich in it; a tightly written, capitally directed show, with perfectly grand supporting performances.

With a commentator's voice interpolating ultra-dramatic commonplaces as the film unreels, their melodrama has taken on an annoying pretentiousness which neither the theme nor its treatment can justify.

One of the liveliest, gayest, wittiest and naughtiest comedies of a long hard season.

Alfred Hitchcock, England's jovial and rotund master of melodrama, has turned out another crisply paced, excellently performed film in "The Girl Was Young."

The original beauty. Not as glittery as Garland-Mason but in some ways even more golden.

In a changing age it is completely heartening to discover that the Charles family-Nick, the amateur sleuth, Nora, his understanding but frequently underfoot wife, and Asta, the hydrant fancier—has weathered successfully the well-known vicissitudes of time.

Intermezzo is not exactly a dramatic thunderbolt, nothing the glamour-conscious will be inflamed about. But we found it a mature, an eloquent and sensitive film and we recommend it to you.

Marked Woman could easily have become a maudlin piece. It totters every now and then on the brink of bathos and of melodramatic hokum. But invariably it is snatched back by Lloyd Bacon's direction or by the honesty of its players.

A valiant comedy, it stands on a level with such blissfully remembered items as I Met Him in Paris and Nothing Sacred... for they are all of a piece -- witty, clever and hugely amazing shows.

The picture has the opulence, the lavishness, the expansiveness and the color of the old Follies; it has the general indifference to humor which was one of Ziegfeld's characteristics; and it has the reverential approach with which, we suspect, Mr. Ziegfeld might have handled his own life story.

A beautifully told story, with sincere and vigorous performances, and with a solid and richly atmospheric production to lend its interest and fascination.

The Road to Singapore is cobbled with good intentions, is blessed intermittently with smooth-running strips of amiable nonsense, but is altogether too uneven for regular use.

This third of the trademarked Thin Men takes its murders as jauntily as ever, confirms our impression that matrimony need not be too serious a business and provides as light an entertainment as any holiday-amusement seeker is likely to find.

Jamaica Inn will not be remembered as a Hitchcock picture, but as a Charles Laughton picture.

The Invisible Man Returns is a mite on the ghostly side, too, although neither so horrendous nor so humorous as the first one was.

If The Raven is the best that Universal can do with one of the greatest horror story writers of all time, then it had better toss away the other two books in its library and stick to the pulpies for plot material.

The uniformly competent performance of the cast make it a moderately entertaining, if rather somnolently paced, story-book film.