The drab script is by Albert Maltz and Malvin Wald; the film is visually impressive only.

One of the strongest of all American movies...The picture is emotionally memorable, though - it has a powerful cumulative effect; when it's over you know you've seen something.

One of the best of the lighthearted rah-rah collegiate musicals.

This is a landmark of Hollywood-on-Thames trompe-l’oeil.

A thin but well-shot suspense melodrama, kept from collapsing by the suggestiveness and intensity that the director, Jacques Tourneur, pours on.

The film loses its imaginative energy once it moves out of the ripe, sleazy carny milieu, and from the start the technique of the director, Edmund Goulding, is conventional, even a little stodgy. Still, the material, adapted from William Gresham's novel by Jules Furthman, is unusual and the cast first-rate.

The pictures is an almost total drag, though Agnes Moorehead, as the villainess, has a sensational exit through plate-glass windows.

The director, Michael Curtiz, seems to be totally out of his element in this careful, deadly version of the celebrated, long-running Broadway comedy.

It has a sweetness and a simplicity that suggest greatness of feeling, and this is so rare in films that to cite a comparison one searches beyond the medium.

The title is accurate: this is a crudely powerful prison picture.

The film has a strong style that is very different from Lean's earlier work. He seems to have finally to have let go--to have pulled out all the stops. The film is emotional, exciting, full of action.

When Jody and Fodderwing are together, something quirky and magical seems to be happening on the screen; when Jody and his deer are together the boy's emotion has a fairytale glitter; and when Jody's mother reveals a streak of humor she's so pleased at her dumb joke that you find yourself staring in disbelief--and laughing. Even Peck seems to blend into the atmosphere.

Though the director, Carol Reed, doesn't quite succeed in creating a masterpiece (the inflated ideas in the script don't allow him to), there are bravura visual passages, the sound is often startlingly effective, and the film provides an experience that can't be shrugged off.

Lupino’s flinty performance and Bennett’s haunted one infuse the movie’s pugnacity and violence with tender vulnerability, and Walsh, a cinematic poet of brassy urbanity, stokes the story’s volatile elements—artistic passions, high-society temptations, streetwise bravery, postwar trauma, family loyalty, and the secrets and lies that pass for romance—to a crescendo of abraded grandeur.

A forgettable Bogart melodrama that was already familiar when it came out; it had been synthesized from several of his hits, with Lizabeth Scott's role processed out of Mary Astor and Lauren Bacall routines.

It's not a great picture; it's too schematic and it drags on after you get the points. However, the episodes and details stand out and help to compensate for the soggy plot strands, and there's something absorbing about the banality of its large-scale good intentions; it's compulsively watchable.

This is a charmer of a movie.

Gangster whimsey--which is to say the very worst kind.

Bergman is literally ravishing in what is probably her sexiest performance. Great trash, great fun.

The action is tense and fast, and the film catches the lurid Chandler atmosphere.

A celebrated, craftsmanlike tearjerker, and incredibly neat.

It's a smooth, proficient, somewhat languorous thriller, handsomely shot with some showy long takes. It's quite watchable, but the script is clever in a shallow way; the people need more dimensions.

Entertaining, though overlong. The director, Tay Garnett, knew almost enough tricks to sustain this glossily bowdlerized version of the James M. Cain novel, and he used Lana Turner maybe better than any other director did.

Perhaps the farthest out of the Bob Hope--Bing Crosby road pictures. Some of the patter is pure, relaxed craziness, but the topical jokes and the awful quips keep pulling it down.

As an example of the "woman's picture" this doesn't have any of the grubbiness or conviction of the Barbara Stanwyck Stella Dallas, but de Havilland works hard confecting cold cream.

The central conceit of glorifying progress and moral uplift in a musical comedy set in New Mexico in the 1880s is certainly a strange one, but it worked out surprisingly well--though the charm is mostly heavy.

Yet, with all the obvious ingredients for success, Spellbound is a disaster.

Miss Crawford's heavy breathing was certified as acting when she won an Academy Award for her performance here.

Val Lewton produced, but except for a few touches, it's a mess.

Ugh. A murder mystery that starts from a Leslie Charteris story but never gets anyplace you'd want to go to.

This Gene Kelly-Frank Sinatra musical has an abundance of energy and spirit, and you may feel it could be wonderful if it weren't so stupidly wholesome.

One of the dreariest films in the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy series; it has a metallic flavor.

The Oscar Wilde story has its compelling gimmick and its cheap thrills, and despite the failings of Albert Lewin as writer and director, he has an appetite for decadence and plushy decor.

A horror item considerably better than most. [09 Jun 1945, p.56]

One of the most likable movies of all time.

Slickly professional, thoroughly enjoyable.

This came late in the series but it's still fairly cheerful.

This shrewd, smoothly tawdry thriller, directed by Billy Wilder, is one of the high points of nineteen-forties films. Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson—a platinum blonde who wears tight white sweaters, an anklet, and sleazy-kinky shoes—is perhaps the best acted and the most fixating of all the slutty, cold-blooded femmes fatales of the film-noir genre.

This pseudo-Victorian thriller is rather more enjoyable than one might expect, and Bergman is, intermittently, genuinely moving.

This is one of Preston Sturges's surreal-slapstick-satire-conniption-fit comedies, and part of our great crude heritage.

Ham-handed, wartime Hitchcock.

In its own terms, the movie--the eighth Garland and Rooney had made together--is just about irresistible.

Someone at Universal had the brainstorm of redoing the 1925 silent Lon Chaney horror picture and taking advantage of the fact that it was set in an opera house to make it not only a sound picture but a high-toned musical. The result is this flaccid, sedate version.

Housebound and fearfully lofty.

The whole thing became amorphous and confused. Paramount did rather better by the romance than the politics; Ingrid Bergman is lovely and affecting as Maria.

The most familiar movie in the world is still fresh; it has so many little busy corners to nestle in... Casablanca is the most sociable, the most companionable film ever made. Life as an endless party.

It's very well worked out in terms of character and it has a sustained grip, but it certainly isn't as much fun as several of his other films.

While other B-budget horror producers were still using gorillas, haunted houses, and disembodied arms, Lewton and the director, Jacques Tourneur, employed suggestion, creepy sound effects, and inventive camera angles, leaving everything to the viewers' fear-filled imagination.

The only reason to see this hunk of twaddle is the better to savor the memory of the Carol Burnett - Harvey Korman parody, which also was shorter. Mervyn LeRoy, who directed many a big clinker, also gets the blame for this one.

Tracy and Hepburn, but not a comedy, and not good, either.

The director, Irving Rapper, is just barely competent, and the action plods along, yet this picture is all of a piece, and if it were better it might not work at all. This way, it's a schlock classic.

The farce situations are pushed too broadly, and have a sanctimonious patriotic veneer, but this first American film directed by Billy Wilder was a box-office hit.

There's no denying that for many people sequences such as Bambi's birth have an enduring primal power.

The film as it stands is a vision of a lost world of graces and traditions that are as alluring as they are confining, as beautiful as they are useless—as well as a portrait of the makers and the victims of modernity.

A big, enjoyable musical biography, well directed by Michael Curtiz.

M-G-M's wartime salute to gallant England, engineered to make the audience choke up.

A good-natured and engaging minor novel by Steinbeck, turned into a good-natured and engaging (though corny and quaint and picturesque) film at M-G-M.

A mixed-up and over-loaded American spy thriller by Alfred Hitchcok, with the unengaging Robert Cummings in the lead and an unappealing cast, featuring Priscilla Lane and Otto Kruger. Nothing holds together, but there are still enough scary sequences to make the picture entertaining.

Ernst Lubitsch, who directed, starts off on the wrong foot and never gets his balance; the performers yowl their lines, and the burlesque of the Nazis, who cower before their superior officers, is more crudely gleeful than funny.

Sturges is more at home in slapstick irony (as in The Lady Eve, earlier in '41) than in the mixed tones of this comedy-melodrama, but it's a memorable film nevertheless.

The play was built on topical jokes and a series of vaudeville turns, and in this version the jokes are flat and the turns seemed forced and not very funny.

The chemistry is great, but the plot and tone are wobbly.

Rather shrill and tiresome.

Hardly even a shadow; Myrna Loy, William Powell, and Asta go through their paces for the fourth time, but the jauntiness is gone.

Moving and impressive in a big-Hollywood-picture-way.

An almost perfect visual equivalent of the Dashiell Hammett thriller...It is (and this is rare in American films) a work of entertainment that is yet so skillfully constructed that after many years and many viewings it has the same brittle explosiveness - and even some of the same surprise - that it had in its first run.

Turgidly predictable.

The Orson Welles film is generally considered the greatest American film of the sound period, and it may be more fun than any other great movie.

There's too much metaphysical gabbing and a labored boy-gets-girl romance, but audiences loved this chunk of whimsey.

Too bad that the director, George Cukor, doesn't have a little more feeling for the loony baroque; the story is treated much too soberly.

Terrible, but bearable; there's a fascination to its clunkiness.

The picture starts out in the confident Capra manner, but with a darker tone; by the end, you feel puzzled and cheated.

A frivolous masterpiece. Like Bringing Up Baby, The Lady Eve is a mixture of visual and verbal slapstick, and of high artifice and pratfalls.

In a long career of giving pleasure, this is one of the few occasions when (Rogers) failed; it isn't her worst acting but there's nothing in the soggy material to release the distinctive Ginger Rogers sense of fun.

Shiny and unfelt and smart-aleck-commercial as the movie is, it's almost irresistibly entertaining - one of the high spots of M-G-M professionalism.

Davis gives what is very likely the best study of female sexual hypocrisy in film history. Cold and proper, she yet manages to suggest the passion of a woman who'd kill a man for trying to leave her. She is helped by an excellent script (by Howard Koch) and by two unusually charged performances--James Stephenson as her lawyer and Herbert Marshall as her husband.

So klunky and poorly paced, and so loaded with sanctimonious moral lessons, that even the George and Ira Gershwin score doesn't save it.

There are agreeable overtones of Mark Twain tall tales in this good-humored, though uneven, version of the paradoxical life of Judge Roy Bean, with Walter Brennan in the part.

Intermittently first-rate.

The pugnacity of Walsh’s comic direction infuses turbulently free enterprise with tragedy.

Animated and bouncing, the movie is more Dickens than Austen; once one adjusts to this, it's a happy and carefree viewing experience.

Tennyson wrote Enoch Arden in 1864, and the movies have been making versions of it ever since D.W. Griffith did it in 1908 (and again in 1911). This one is the most famous and the funniest.

Magnificent romantic-gothic corn, full of Alfred Hitchcock's humor and inventiveness.

In spite of his problem of sentiment, it's a happy, unpretentious farce.

This famous film, high on most lists of the greatest films of all time, seems all wrong - phony when it should ring true. Yet, because of the material, it is often moving in spite of the acting, the directing, and the pseudo-Biblical pore-people talk.

Russell is at her comedy peak here...and as Walter Burns, Grant raises mugging to a joyful art.

Close to perfection--one of the most beautifully acted and paced romantic comedies ever made in this country.

The story, about the friendship between two lonely, vagrant ranch hands--the small, bedraggled, intelligent George and the simpleminded giant Lennie--is gimmicky and highly susceptible to parody, but it is emotionally effective just the same.

Though the film has its bright moments, and some weird ones, too, the first freshness is gone. Even the effects seem repetitive.

James Stewart is charming and even a little bit sexy as the mild-mannered Destry.

The third in the series, and without any new ideas except a bad one: still airily casual, Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy) are now the parents of a baby boy.

If you fed the earlier gangster movies into a machine and made a prototype, you'd come up with this picture.

No one else can balance the ups and downs of wistful sentiment and corny humor the way Capra can - but if anyone else should learn to, kill him.

A forgettable, generally forgotten Hitchcock gothic, from a Daphne du Maurier novel, full of Cornwall shipwrecks and smuggling and murder in the time of good King George IV.

Fantasy is still Walt Disney’s undisputed domain. Nobody else can tell a fairy tale with his clarity of imagination, his simple good taste, or his technical ingenuity. This was forcibly borne in on me as I sat cringing before M-G-M’s Technicolor production of The Wizard of Oz, which displays no trace of imagination, good taste, or ingenuity.

The picture, rousingly directed by William Wellman, was indeed a success, but Cooper, horribly miscast as a dashing young British gallant...was embarrassingly callow, almost simpering, and he looked too old for the part.

One of John Ford's most memorable films, and not at all the tedious bummer that the title might suggest. Henry Fonda, in one of his best early performances, is funny and poignant as the drawling, awkward young hero.

Hawks weaves brawny romance and humor and a man’s-man sort of heartbreak into his tribute to the ideal of vocation.

It's a beautifully made gothic-romantic classic, with many memorable scenes.

The re-creations of the Castles' dances are painstakingly authentic, and most of them are fun to watch, but the movie is cursed with the dullness of big bios--especially those produced when some of the key figures are alive.

Rapturous fun.

Perhaps the most likable of all Westerns, and a Grand Hotel-on-wheels movie that has just about everything--adventure, romance, chivalry--and all of it very simple and traditional.

It is directed with such skill and velocity that it has come to represent the quintessence of screen suspense.

A dazzling romantic melodrama.

The director, Howard Hawks, keeps all this trifling nonsense in such artful balance that it never impinges on the real world; it may be the American movies' closest equivalent to Restoration comedy.

The film is pretty fair Hitchcock, though not as sexy or as witty as the 39 Steps.

The characters of the husband and wife are too simplified and their comic turns too forced, but the general giddiness and Barrymore keep the picture going.

William Wellman's direction is more leisurely than usual; he has such good material here that he takes his time.

Irene Dunne's way with a quip is to smile brightly and wring it dry, but she's at her best here.

One of M-G-M's powerhouse moralizing "family" entertainments, it's beefy and rousing, with almost guaranteed tears and laughter for children.

Though it has few dimensions it has pace and "entertainment value."

The film is peculiarly masochistic and self-congratulatory.

The film has the tawdry simplicities of many of the 30s movies that were built out of headline stories, but it also has more impact than most of the melodramas played out in more elevated surroundings.

Hitchcock thought that he erred in this one, and that that explained why the picture wasn't a hit. But he was wrong; this adaptation of Conrad's The Secret Agent may be just about the best of his English thrillers, and if the public didn't respond it wasn't his fault.

It isn't particularly entertaining; it's just busy.

The movie starts out with a promising satiric idea and winds up in box-office romance, but it's likable and well-paced even at its silliest.

Southern idiom, delicious fish fries, and naive theology are fused with awe and wonder.

This classic musical-melodrama with the Jerome Kern songs and the novelistic Edna Ferber plot, full of heartbreaks and miscegenation and coincidences, is hard to resist in any of its versions.

Fanny Brice is herself, though she isn't on screen enough to vitalize this lavish, tedious musical biography; it goes on for a whopping 3 hours.

This is a polished light comedy in the "continental" style -- a sophisticated romantic trifle, with Dietrich more chic and modern than in her von Sternberg pictures.

The 25-year-old Errol Flynn has the smile and dash to shout "All right my hearties, follow me!" as he leaps from his pirate ship to an enemy vessel.

It's a creditable though unadventurous film, handsomely staged in the M-G-M backlot style for classics.

A stirring 18-centry sea adventure...For the kind of big budget, studio controlled romantic adventure that this is, it's very well done.

This suave, amusing spy melodrama is directed with so sure a touch that the suspense is charged with wit; it's one of the three or four best things Hitchcock ever did.

Naive yet powerful.

A macabre comedy classic.

The best scenes--especially an assassination attempt at Royal Albert Hall--are stunning, but Hitchcock seems sloppily unconcerned about the unconvincing material in between the tricks and jokes.

Classic, compulsively watchable rags-to-riches-and-heartbreak weeper, from a novel by Fannie Hurst.

The plot is trivial French farce (about mistaken identities), but the dances are among the wittiest and the most lyrical expressions of American romanticism on the screen.

People hadn't seen anything like it; that doesn't mean they needed to.

It started a new cycle in screen entertainment by demonstrating that a murder mystery could also be a sophisticated screwball comedy.

No one has ever fully explained what gives this basically slight romantic comedy its particular - and enormous - charm.

The picture--which is almost surreally entertaining--is also famous for its madcap choreography; chorus girls dancing on the wings of planes, to the title song.

The film was lavishly produced, with great care given to the sets and costumes and makeup, but the spirit is missing.

A lovely, graceful film, and surprisingly faithful to the atmosphere, the Victorian sentiments, and the Victorian strengths of the Louisa May Alcott novel.

The Marx Brothers in their greatest movie.

A little poky but impressively well done, with witty special effects (by John P. Fulton) and traces of the Whale humor that enlivened his Old Dark House and The Bride of Frankenstein.

The first time you see this film, you're likely to find it silly, autoerotic, static, absurd, and you may feel cheated after having heard so much about it. But though it may seem to have no depth, you're not likely to forget it -- it has a suggestiveness unlike any other film.

It has some silly, yet irresistibly wonderful examples of Busby Berkeley's pinwheel choreography.

Great fun in the uninhibited early-30s style, made at M-G-M before fear of church pressure groups turned the studio respectable and pompous.

The self-conscious good taste of it all creaks, but Noel Coward knows plenty of tricks, and the performers know how to get the most out of his lines.

The backstage story is pleasantly tawdry and corny.

Harlow is intensely liable, delivering her zingy wisecracks with a wonderful dirty good humor, and Gable is at that early peak in his career when he is so sizzlingly sexual that it seems both funny and natural for the two women to be fighting over him.

Most of the players give impossibly bad performances—they chew up the camera. But if you want to see what screen glamour used to be, and what, originally, “stars” were, this is perhaps the best example of all time.

The Marx Brothers in one of their niftiest corny-surreal comedies; it isn't in the class of their Duck Soup but then what else is?

Overall, it's a terrific movie, even though the pacing doesn't always seem quite right.

A true nightmare.

Irresistibly enjoyable.

The director, Rouben Mamoulian, rather overdoes the pseudo-science at the beginning, but at some levels this story seems to work in every version, and this one, set in a starched mid-Victorian environment, suggests the lust that has to come out--and the attraction of the gutter.

Probably the most famous of all horror films, and one of the best.

Heavenly, corny nonsense.

A good picture, even if the theme music is "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles."

This first American version, directed by Tod Browning, was adapted from a play based on the Bram Stoker novel, rather than from the novel itself, and it becomes too stagey.

One of Edna Ferber's heartfelt, numbskull treks through the hardships and glories of the American heritage.

It's more languidly paced than his mid 30s work, and the dialogue is spoken in stage rhythms, but there are inventive moments.

The aviation footage is still something to see, with great shots of zeppelin warfare...But the First World War story, involving two brothers...is plain awful.

It was a Broadway musical comedy, slightly adapted, and filmed in Astoria--and it looks stagey. But the film is too joyous for cavilling.

The point of the film gets to you, and though you may wince at the lines Maxwell Anderson wrote (every time he opens his heart, he sticks his poetic foot in it), you know what he means.

A London-set Hitchcock silent thriller that was in part reshot and in part dubbed to make it a sound film--and an unusually imaginative and innovative one.

The material hasn't been paced for the screen; there are dead spots (without even background music), but there are also a lot of funny verbal routines and a musical burlesque of Carmen, and Harpo, as a fiendish pickpocket, is much faster (and less aesthetic and self-conscious and innocent) than in the Brothers' later comedies.

When talkies were new, this was the musical that everyone went to see.

One of the greatest of all movies...Falconetti's Joan may be the finest performance ever recorded on film.

A near masterpiece...The story is told in a flowing, lyrical German manner that is extraordinarily sensual, yet is perhaps too self-conscious, too fable-like for American audiences.

Great as it undoubtedly is, it's not really a likable film; it's amazing, though--it keeps its freshness and its excitement, even if you resist its cartoon message.

The plunging and roving camera provides visceral thrills; ecstatic special effects capture the sacred (the Crucifixion) and the profane (combat in the Great War); a metaphysical framing device (starring Lillian Gish) raises human conflict to universal import; and Griffith’s trademark closeups lend a quivering lip or a trembling hand the tragic grandeur of historical cataclysm.

The director, Vincente Minnelli, stages an impressive romantic ball, but the whole movie is hopelessly overscaled.