Once Mickey & friends get involved with Willie, the whole picture peters out and becomes as oddly off-balance and inconsequential as its title.

Shoeshine may strengthen a suspicion that the best movies in the world are being made, just now, in Italy.

Author-Director George Seaton has laced his sure-fire sentimentality with equally sure-fire wit and some cynical knowledge about how men of business and law might talk, look and act under these extravagant circumstances. The movie handles all its whimsy deftly and is consistently a smooth, agile job.

Even in its failures, Odd Man Out is admirable. It is a reckless, head-on attempt at greatness, and the attempt frequently succeeds.

Most plausible explanations for the picture's success are: 1) the presence of Victor Moore, past master of creaky charm and pathos; 2) a show as generally oldfashioned, in a harmless way, as a 1910 mail-order play for amateurs; 3) the fact that now, as in 1910, a producer cannot go wrong with a mass audience if he serves up a whiff of comedy and a whirlwind of hokum.

It's a Wonderful Life is a pretty wonderful movie. It has only one formidable rival (Goldwyn's The Best Years of Our Lives) as Hollywood's best picture of the year.

Unlike most sure-fire movies, it was put together with good taste, honesty, wit—and even a strong suggestion of guts.

The film is an achievement in civilized comedy; even in its grave and noble moments it preserves a graceful, tender gaiety.

Even on the chaste screen Hawks manages to get down a good deal of the glamorous tawdriness of big-city low life, discreetly laced with hints of dope addiction, voyeurism and fornication. A round dozen minor players help him out with great efficiency— not to mention Miss Bacall, who is like an adolescent cougar.

Walt Disney's best films—barring his wonderful slapstick—have suffered from sticky taste; in this effort to be just plain folksy, that stickiness pretty thoroughly gums up the works.

Adroitly directed by Orson Welles, who also plays the star, it is a grade A gooseflesh-raiser.

It is a tear-jerker that is consistently slick and at moments almost believable.

Lady on a Train sets out to elicit chills and chuckles, but never quite reaches its modest destination.

That rare event, a Disney failure...The movie as a whole presents the unhappy spectacle of a brilliant artist screaming his lungs out in an effort to make up for the fact that he has, for the moment, nothing to say.

To Have and Have Not is neither an action picture nor a Bogart picture. Its story is, in fact, just a loosely painted background for a kind of romance which the movies have all but forgotten about—the kind in which the derelict sweethearts are superficially aloof but essentially hot as blazes, and seem to do even their kissing out of the corners of their mouths.

A musical that even the deaf should enjoy.

Yes, he ends up being felled by a heroic dog, but the film nonetheless creatively imagines the horrors of power in the wrong hands.

Double Indemnity is the season's nattiest, nastiest, most satisfying melodrama.

A good-neighborly, Technicolor whimsey that has made Walt Disney one of South America's favorite North Americans.

Nothing short of an invasion could add much to Casablanca.

A superb film.

Edward Plumb's background music is expertly keyed into the production, but none of Bambi's four songs is notable. Some innovations are. For the first time, Disney has done his backgrounds in oils instead of watercolors. The result is striking. The russet reds, browns, bright yellows, make autumn look like autumn. Each season has a special color impact.

Ambersons is not another Citizen Kane, but it is good enough to remove Director Welles for keeps from the novice or one-picture-prodigy class.

Mrs. Miniver is that almost impossible feat, a great war picture that photographs the inner meaning, instead of the outward realism of World War II.

A melodramatic journey from coast to coast shows Hitchcock at his best. It gives movement, distance and a terrifying casualness to his painful suspense.

To Be is a very funny comedy, salted to taste with melodrama and satire.

Suspicion (RKO Radio) is good Alfred Hitchcock—up to the last few minutes. In those final minutes the picture falls apart at the seams.

Although Dumbo offers no startling innovations in animated cartooning, it is probably Disney's best all-round picture to date. Though it lacks the bomb-burst novelty of Snow White, its craftsmanship is far beyond that memorable fairy tale's. Seldom has Disney articulated his characters so aptly. Dumbo is a most human little fellow, not bright, but willing.