What is offered instead is merely gruesome. The trail leads to a sagging, swamp-view motel and to one of the messiest, most nau seating murders ever filmed. At close range, the camera watches every twitch, gurgle, convulsion and hemorrhage in the process by which a living human becomes a corpse...The nightmare that follows is expertly gothic, but the nausea never disappears.

Director Wilder handles his players superbly. He holds an amazingly tight rein on Actress MacLaine, which gives her performance a solidity she seldom achieves. Yet it is Actor Lemmon, surely the most sensitive and tasteful young comedian now at work in Hollywood, who really cuts the mustard and carries the show.

What matters most and comes off best in the picture is the great scenes of spectacle, particularly the chariot race, a superbly handled crescendo of violence that ranks as one of the finest action sequences ever shot. All by itself it would be worth the price of admission.

Caught in the ecstasy of collective creation, a handful of earnest amateurs have almost accidentally produced a flawed but significant piece of folk art.

Smoothly troweled and thoroughly entertaining, North by Northwest wears its implausibilities lightly, bobs swiftly past colored picture postcard backgrounds from Madison Avenue to South Dakota's Mount Rushmore, the U.N. Secretariat to George Washington's wattles.

At 160 minutes, Anatomy is longer than the subject warrants, but the pace seldom slackens—thanks to the competence of Director Otto Preminger.

Lipsticked, mascaraed and tilting at a precarious angle ("How do they walk in these things?"), Actor Lemmon digs out most of the laughs in the script. As for Marilyn, she's been trimmer, slimmer and sexier in earlier pictures.

Unhappily, Producer Walt Disney tells his shaggy-dog story so doggedly that he soon runs it into the pound.

The drawing in Sleeping Beauty is crude: a compromise between sentimental, crayon-book childishness and the sort of cute, commercial cubism that tries to seem daring but is really just square. The hero and heroine are sugar sculpture, and the witch looks like a clumsy tracing from a Charles Addams cartoon. The plot often seems to owe less to the tradition of the fairy tale than to the formula of the monster movie.

In his four earlier films, Williams seemed to need a warmup of two backward steps before he could take one step forward, but at least the movement was visible and real. This time, Adapter-Director Richard Brooks has been able to put very little motion in his motion picture. His Cat is a formaldehyded tabby that sits static while layer after layer of its skin is peeled off, life after life of its nine lives unsentimentally destroyed. But in Williams, Brooks has a rare playwright who can make his static electric, and a blinkered grope toward the past as suspenseful as a headlong crash into the future.

Gigi is dressed to kill, but if all the French finery impresses the customers, it also smothers the story.

The old master, now a slave to television, has turned out another Hitchcock-and-bull story in which the mystery is not so much who done it as who cares.

Another little nugget mined by Walt Disney, one of Hollywood's most successful prospectors. It comes from Disney's thoroughly proved mother lode: movies for the kids that adults will stay to enjoy themselves.

It is a whale (2 hr. 41 min.) of a story, and in the telling of it, British Director David Lean (Brief Encounter, Great Expectations) does a whale of a job. He shows a dazzlingly musical sense and control of the many and involving rhythms of a vast composition. He shows a rare sense of humor and a feeling for the poetry of situation; and he shows the even rarer ability to express these things, not in lines but in lives. Most important of all, he understands the real nature of the story he is telling.

I found myself -- all twitchy intellectualism aside -- liking it enormously. There's more to Stevens's exteriors than those great shots of the looming ranch house. He had learned John Ford's trick of keeping the horizon low in the frame, and there are literally dozens of long, wide shots that are more than merely awesome. They suggest an emptiness that stumbling, ill-educated, materialistic people will somehow fill with something -- oil derricks, bragging Texas talk, reactionary politics. [Reprinted in the NY Times: 25 May 2003, p.21]

Director LeRoy has been overly faithful to the play script. Actors march on and off the screen just as if they were making stage entrances and exits.

The strong implication of this picture is that the real delinquency is not juvenile but parental. The point may be obvious and only a part of the problem, but it is well worth propounding. The best thing about the film, in any case, is James Dean, the gifted actor who made his movie start in East of Eden, and was killed last month at 24 in an automobile accident. In this, the second of his three movie roles—Giant will probably be released next year—there is further evidence that Actor Dean was a player of unusual sensibility and charm.

In spite of its age and the fact that its 145-minute mass is sometimes dragging, Oklahoma! hollers itself home as a handsome piece of entertainment.

Walt Disney has for so long parlayed gooey sentiment and stark horror into profitable cartoons that most moviegoers are apt to be more surprised than disappointed to discover that the combination somehow does not work this time. The songs, by Peggy Lee and Sonny Burke, are naggingly reminiscent of other tunes, but none of the cartoon creatures—except, possibly, a whistling beaver playing a bit part—have a fraction of the lovable charm of those in Disney's earlier fables.

More important, however, than the letter of the film is the spirit. It seizes a burning issue, and lets the sparks fall where they may.

A big fat yam of a picture richly candied with VistaVision (Paramount's answer to CinemaScope), Technicolor, tunes by Irving Berlin, massive production numbers, and big stars. Unfortunately, the yam is still a yam.

Gold, in a word, is guaranteed at the boxoffice, and this is never less than glittering entertainment, but somehow a certain measure of lead has found its way into the formula.

There is never an instant, in fact, when Director Hitchcock is not in minute and masterly control of his material: script, camera, cutting, props, the handsome set constructed from his ideas, the stars he has Hitched to his vehicle.

Kazan succeeds in producing a shrewd piece of screen journalism, a melodrama in the grand manner of Public Enemy and Little Caesar. But he fails to do anything more serious—largely because he tries too hard. In searching for the general meaning in little lives, Director Kazan has trained his lens down fine on small events; he has too often watched his characters through the magnifying glass of special prejudice—the old sentimental prejudice that ordinary people are wonderful no matter what they do.

Dial M is starred with fine scenes and good performances. Though played as contemporary melodrama, it somehow manages to reflect the gaslight magic of turn-of-the-century London.

Ornamented with some bright and lilting tunes, it is a lively feature-length Technicolor excursion into a world that glows with an exhilarating charm and a gentle joyousness.

Singin’ in the Rain might have been the last musical of the ’50s to convey irrepressible optimism through what Alan Greenspan would call “irrational exuberance.” But what exuberance! Look at it and try to think of a contemporary picture that has half as much vivacity, fun, joy. When your movie-loving grandpa says, “They don’t make ’em like they used to,” he is surely thinkin’ of Singin’ in the Rain.

Operating under such handicaps of plot, but with the help of some amusing dialogue, Nightclub Comic Danny Thomas puts remarkable warmth into a portrait of Kahn.