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.

The freshest little picture in a long time, and maybe even the best comedy of this year.