Like the stage show, this Technicolored shindig, which laughingly pretends to be a biography of the famous swimmer, Annette Kellerman, is a luxuriance of razzle-dazzle that includes Hippodrome acts, water ballets, bathing suit shows, diving performances, low comedy, anachronisms and clichés. It also includes an abundance of Miss Williams and Victor Mature, but it does not include the felicities of a reasonably fascinating script.

Neither comedy nor tragedy altogether, it is a brilliant weaving of comic and tragic strands, eloquent, tearful and beguiling with supreme virtuosity.

Thanks to a skillful combination of some sensational African hunting scenes, a musical score of rich suggestion and a vivid performance by Gregory Peck, Twentieth Century-Fox and Darryl F. Zanuck have concocted a handsome and generally absorbing film in The Snows of Kilimanjaro.

Let's face it. Mr. Ford is in love with Ireland, as is his cast, and they give us a fine, gay time while they're about it.

It requires a good deal to play a person who is strangely jangled in the head. And, unfortunately, all the equipment that Miss Monroe has to handle the job are a childishly blank expression and a provokingly feeble, hollow voice. With these she makes a game endeavor to pull something out of the role, but it looks as though she and her director, Roy Baker, were not quite certain what.

Meaningful in its implications, as well as loaded with interest and suspense, High Noon is a western to challenge “Stagecoach” for the all-time championship. (Review of Original Release)

An expert rendition of an ancient legend that is as pretty as its Technical hues and as lively as a sturdy Western.

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

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.

Powell and Pressburger have hammered the ingredients with blunt, unyielding strokes, seasoned with vague psychological clangings and only remotely tempered with humor and real perception.

Sprawling across a mammoth canvas, crammed with the real-life acts and thrills, as well as the vast backstage minutiae, that make the circus the glamorous thing it is and glittering in marvelous Technicolor--truly marvelous color, we repeat--this huge motion picture of the big-top is the dandiest ever put upon the screen.

The nonsense is generally good and at times it reaches the level of first-class satiric burlesque. Adolph Green and Betty Comden may have tossed off the script with their left hands, but occasionally they come through with powerful and hilarious round-house rights.

A slick job of movie hoodwinking with a thoroughly implausible romance, set in a frame of wild adventure that is as whopping as its tale of off-beat love. And the main tone and character of it are in the area of the well-disguised spoof...Mr. Huston merits credit for putting this fantastic tale on a level of sly, polite kidding and generally keeping it there, while going about the happy business of engineering excitement and visual thrills.

Room for One More makes for generally appealing movie fare. So long as this anecdotal look-in upon the experience of a husband and wife in bringing up two foster children, as well as three of their own, sticks simply to the humorous complications that arise in a house full of kids, plus appropriate livestock and paraphernalia, it has genuine gaiety and domestic charm.

Much of the power of the picture—and it unquestionably has hypnotic power—derives from the brilliance with which the camera of Director Akira Kurosawa has been used. The photography is excellent and the flow of images is expressive beyond words.

Within and around these visual triumphs and rich imagistic displays is tediously twined a hackneyed romance that threatens to set your teeth on edge.

Although it is questionable whether this picture has the simple, universal appeal of an old Chaplin film, for instance, or whether its meanings are as sharp as some may think, it is certainly a lively entertainment and should be a subject of discussion for months to come.

For all the sincere and shrewd direction and the striking outdoor photography, this R. K. O. melodrama fails to traverse its chosen ground.

Indeed, if it weren't for Mr. Thomas and the warmth that wells up from him, we would not want to voice a speculation as to the residual qualities of the film—not even conceding the wry humor that frequently pops in the script, the verve of the other performers and the nostalgic lushness of the songs.

Mr. Pal barely gets us out there, but this time he doesn't bring us back.

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

Detective Story is a hard-grained entertainment, not revealing but bruisingly real.

Clarence Brown, who produced and directed, and Dorothy Kingsley and George Wells, the scenarists, were, it is apparent, not interested in facts. But they make convincing and thoroughly charming the legends they wish to purvey.

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.

Its tensions are manufactured and apparent. List "Tomorrow Is Another Day" as just another picture.

The performers are as seductive as the script. It's quite an affaire.

It is comforting, of course, to have it made plain that our planetary neighbors are much wiser and more peaceful than are we, but this makes for a tepid entertainment in what is anamolously labeled the science-fiction field.

Elia Kazan and a simply superlative cast have fashioned a motion picture that throbs with passion and poignancy.

If you are not too particular about the images of Carroll and Tenniel, if you are high on Disney whimsey and if you'll take a somewhat slow, uneven pace, you should find this picture entertaining.

With Mr. Wayne, Mr. Ryan and their charges in the cockpits against the crackling magnificence of Mr. Ray's battletorn sky, the picture is all it should be.

Despite the fact that this version of Dreiser's tragedy may be criticized—academically, we think—for its length or deviations from the author's pattern, A Place in the Sun is a distinguished work, a tribute, above all, to its producer-director and an effort now placed among the ranks of the finest films to have come from Hollywood in several years.

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.

A superb piece of motion picture art and, beyond doubt, one of the finest screen translations of a literary classic ever made.

Although it strives to develop a genuine nostalgic mood, all that On Moonlight Bay seems to create, sadly enough, is the feeling that this film format is old hat.

Mr. Hitchcock again is tossing a crazy murder story in the air and trying to con us into thinking that it will stand up without support.

It is not very often that the sequel to a successful film turns out to be even half as successful or rewarding as the original picture was. But we've got to hand it to Metro: its sequel to "Father of the Bride" is so close that we'll willingly concede it to the humor and charm of that former film.

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

If you're for warm and gentle whimsey, for a charmingly fanciful farce and for a little touch of pathos anent the fateful evanescence of man's dreams, then the movie version of "Harvey" is definitely for you.

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. Kaufman and Mr. Hart might even find themselves outclassed by the dazzling and devastating mockery that is brilliantly packed into this film.

Sunset Boulevard is that rare blend of pungent writing, expert acting, masterly direction and unobtrusively artistic photography which quickly casts a spell over an audience and holds it enthralled to a shattering climax.

A grand and glorious entertainment. Six or 60, the spectator is bound to be caught up in the magic of this thrilling quest for fabulous wealth.

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.

One of the tautest and most stimulating Westerns of the year.

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.

Vincent Sherman's direction is as specious as the script.

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

Stage Fright is dazzlingly stagy but it is far from frightening.

The Rules of the Game is among the most perfectly balanced of films: a movie about discretion that is in every way a model of it.

Whoever engineered the sequence of the pumpkin transformation in this film—the magical change to coach and horses—deserves an approving hand. And the scene in which Cinderella blows soap bubbles—opalescent globes full of fragile reflections and rainbow colors—is one of the cleverest animations yet seen. To the fellows who dreamed up these fancies we are heartily grateful, indeed. They have sprinkled into Cinderella—along with sugar and wit—some vagrant art.

Sands of Iwo Jima so easily could have been a great war film instead of just a good one.

If you have a sneaking affection for 1950-ish, made-to-measure movies, there are pleasures to be found in Young Man With a Horn.

Pretty cheap stuff.

The credits outweigh the debits and Mr. Disney has included enough elements of entertainment to make his newest film package a solid entertainment.

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

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.

Of Adam's Rib we might say, in short, that it isn't solid food but it certainly is meaty and juicy and comically nourishing.

They Live by Night has the failing of waxing sentimental over crime, but it manages to generate interest with its crisp dramatic movement and clear-cut types.

In this big Technicolored Western Mr. Ford has superbly achieved a vast and composite illustration of all the legends of the frontier cavalryman.

It is an overlong, overlabored essay on the torments of conscience and love which Mr. Hitchcock has beautifully filmed in Technicolor but pointed in glaring blacks and whites.

Mr. Reed has brilliantly packaged the whole bad of his cinematic tricks, his whole range of inventive genius for making the camera expound. His eminent gifts for compressing a wealth of suggestion in single shots, for building up agonized tension and popping surprises are fully exercised. His devilishly mischievous humor also runs lightly through the film, touching the darker depressions with little glints of the gay or macabre. [3 Feb 1950, p.29]

The Warners have pulled all the stops in making this picture the acme of the gangster-prison film. They have crammed it with criminal complications—some of them old, some of them glittering new—pictured to technical perfection in a crisp documentary style. And Mr. Cagney has played it in a brilliantly graphic way, matching the pictorial vigor of his famous "Public Enemy" job.

The wonder of Mighty Joe Young is the mobility of the mechanical star, but even that novelty wears thin after a while.

It has some quite clever popular music, Ricardo Montalban to make Latin love—and it has, above all, Red Skelton and Betty Garrett to play the buffoons.

The striking force and terrifying impact of this RKO melodrama is chiefly due to Bobby's brilliant acting, for the whole effect would have been lost were there any suspicion of doubt about the credibility of this pivotal character.

The Set-Up is a real dilly for those who go for muscular entertainment.

If anything, it has hauled back much too briskly on the strings of the heart and has strained a few muscles in the process.

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.

A dynamic crime-and-punishment drama, brilliantly and broadly realized.

It is Mr. Ford's wonderful style in picturing a frontier fable that has the classic mould. His unsurpassed talent for bringing upon the motion-picture screen the nature and the drama of the great West is in itself an art.

The Snake Pit, while frankly quite disturbing, and not recommended for the weak, is a mature emotional drama on a rare and pregnant theme.

The filmed Hamlet of Laurence Olivier gives absolute proof that these classics are magnificently suited to the screen.

At all events, the picture takes on a dull tone as it goes and finally ends in a fizzle which is forecast almost from the start.

Even despite a big let-down, which fortunately comes near the end, it stands sixteen hands above the level of routine horse opera these days.

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

The script prepared by Mr. Huston and Richard Brooks was too full of words and highly cross-purposed implications to give the action full chance.

Call it a mystery melodrama...Call it a courtroom tragi-romance or a husband-wife problem play. Call it, indeed, a social satire and you won't be entirely wrong. For it's all of these things rolled together in one fitfully intriguing tale, smoothly told through a cultivated camera.

As a brash little night-club singer who is supposed to act like a swell, Miss Day is most plainly the victim of the writers' unutterable ennui. Furthermore, Michael Curtiz's direction of her and the rest of the cast is as slapdash and void of distinction as it can professionally be. Not only has he let the young lady spread noisiness all over the place, but he has wasted the few minor talents that he had in a most provoking way.

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.

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.

Catherine Turney, who assembled this rhetoric from a novel by Ethel Vance, should be made to sit through Winter Meeting about twenty-five or thirty times—which is the number of times you are likely to feel you've sat through it when you've seen it once.

The Search is not only an absorbing and gratifying emotional drama of the highest sort, being a vivid and convincing representation of how one of the "lost children" of Europe is found, but it gives a graphic, overwhelming comprehension of the frightful cruelty to innocent children that has been done abroad.

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.

If you can resist seeing Cary Grant playing an angel, David Niven playing a bishop and Loretta Young playing Loretta Young, you're too tough a critic for The Bishop's Wife.

Mr. Huston has shaped a searching drama of the collision of civilization's vicious greeds with the instinct for self-preservation in an environment where all the barriers are down. And, by charting the moods of his prospectors after they have hit a vein of gold, he has done a superb illumination of basic characteristics in men. One might almost reckon that he has filmed an intentional comment here upon the irony of avarice in individuals and in nations today...But don't let this note of intelligence distract your attention from the fact that Mr. Huston is putting it over in a most vivid and exciting action display.

It's a mighty low class of people that you will meet in the Paramount's I Walk Alone—and a mighty low grade of melodrama, if you want the honest truth—in spite of a very swanky setting and an air of great elegance.

Even though an oldtimer may view this Good News with mocking eyes—may mutter that, back in 1927, which is the advertised date of its events, the goal-posts were set on the goal-line and the huddle was an undeveloped freak—the pleasures of reminiscence which the picture affords are worthwhile. As for the untraditioned youngsters—especially the Lawford-Allyson fans—the stars and the dancing activity should adequately satisfy.

Maybe this is not the funniest picture ever made; maybe it is not even quite as rewarding as some of those earlier journeys, but there are patches in this crazy quilt that are as good and, perhaps, even better than anything the boys have done before.

Powell and Press-burger may have a picture that will disturb and antagonize some, they also have in Black Narcissus an artistic accomplishment of no small proportions.

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.

Despite some fine and intense acting by Mr. Power and others, this film traverses distateful dramatic ground and only rarely does it achieve any substance as entertainment.

Indeed, it is in the bizarre contacts of Mr. Bogart with shady characters such as those played by these well-directed actors that Dark Passage achieves tension and drive. Perhaps he should be given more time with them.

Phil Karlson's direction is clumsy. The Cine-color, in which the film is shown, is dull. And, altogether, this work from Allied Artists is as much to be pitied as panned.

All that the fabulous play had to offer in the way of charm, comedy, humor and gentle pathos is beautifully realized in the handsomely Technicolored picture.

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.

While Song of the Thin Man is no world beater, it still is a mighty pleasant picture to have around.

Not a pretty picture to contemplate nor is it by any means a well-made picture. But "Shoe-Shine" mirrors the anguished soul of a starving, disorganized and demoralized nation with such uncompromising realism that the roughness of its composition is overshadowed by its driving, emotional force.

Jules Dassin's steel-springed direction keeps the whole thing approriately taut.