Although this thesis produces a lot of talk in Major Barbara, it is the kind of talk that cinemaddicts seldom hear—brilliant, provocative, richly comic. It is solidly backed up by a baker’s dozen of superb acting performances.

The picture returns the lately heavily dramatic Barbara Stanwyck to glamor, with 25 swank costume changes, and reveals homespun Henry Fonda, with a drawing room haircut and 14 sound tailoring jobs, as one of the screen's most socially eligible juveniles.

In a way, she gives voice to everything an audience might fantasize about saying to a belittling authority figure, whether it’s a boss, policeman or teacher.

The result of all this high-priced maladjustment is terribly funny, terribly upper class. No one could have written it better than Plahywright Barry, who has written it often ("Holiday," "The Animal Kingdom," et al.)...It's a good, entertaining show.

Though Disney's toddling cannot keep pace with the giant strides of Ludwig van Beethoven, Fantasia as a whole leaves its audience gasping. Critics may deplore Disney's lapses of taste, but he trips, Mickey-like, into an art form that immortals from Aeschylus to Richard Wagner have always dreamed of.

This time Hitchcock does it all his way, does a splendid job and has a splendid cast to do it with.

The Grapes of Wrath is possibly the best picture ever made from a so-so book. It is certainly the best picture Darryl F. Zanuck has produced or Nunnally Johnson scripted. It would be the best John Ford had directed if he had not already made "The Informer."

The charm, humor and loving care with which it treats its inanimate characters puts it in a class by itself.

Roughest spots in the original versions have been sandpapered or excised, the pressroom’s whiskey cynicism toned down to half of one per cent, but the comedy still has enough Hecht-MacArthur kick to make later interpolations smell synthetic.

Whatever it was not, Gone With the Wind was a first-rate piece of Americana, and Americans in the mass knew what they wanted before the critics had got through telling them they should not want it.

The acting of the brilliant cast is sometimes superb. But Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is bigger than any of these things. Its real hero is not calfy Jeff Smith, but the things he believes, as embodied in the hero of U. S. democracy's first crisis, Abraham Lincoln.

As long as The Wizard of Oz sticks to whimsey and magic, it floats in the same rare atmosphere of enchantment that distinguished Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. When it descends to earth it collapses like a scarecrow in a cloudburst.

The Lady Vanishes exhibits Director Alfred Hitchcock, England's portly master of melodrama, at the top of his form.

A melodramatic hodge-podge that lacks the vivid outlines and clear characterizations of previous Hitchcock films, but is, nevertheless, a fair sample of Hitchcock devices.

True Confession is skillfully played and paced, keyed up to the pitch of the dizziest haywire skit.

The Green Pastures is the nearest thing there is to modern U. S. folk drama.

Directed by England's pudgy master of melodrama, Alfred Hitchcock, Secret Agent is a first-rate sample of his knack of achieving speed by never hurrying, horror by concentrating on the prosaic.

Despite the efforts of Producer Irving Thalberg, Director Frank Lloyd, three scenarists and $2,000,000 to give it balance, polish and direction, the picture lacks all three. There are intervals when the two hours which it lasts seem as interminable as Bligh's voyage in the open boat must have seemed to its occupants. The narrative, which skips the saga of Pitcairn's Island entirely for Tahiti love interest, still contains enough material for at least three films. These faults are indigenous to the historic material used. The picture has few others.

The Thirty-Nine Steps neatly converts its essential implausibility into an asset by stressing the difficulties which confront its hero when he tries to tell outsiders about the predicament he is in.

It is a perfect little masterpiece of high camp, not untouched by pity, terror and the desire to satirize boy-girl romances.

Alfred Hitchcock's direction, in which the story is told in sharp, abbreviated sequences gathering speed steadily toward their explosive climax, makes The Man Who Knew Too Much one of the neatest melodramas of the year.

Because of the authority with which it is acted and the skill with which Director John Stahl has built up individual episodes, the picture remains an efficient tearjerker, outspoken in its praise of motherlove.

The quick flow of comic incident through It Happened One Night reaches its fantastic conclusion...

Kong is an exaggeration ad absurdum, too vast to be plausible. This makes his actions wholly enjoyable.

The atmosphere which Director von Sternberg cleverly built up through the slow beginning of the picture and the brilliant photographic effects achieved by his camera man, Lee Garmes, have effect of giving this melodramatic cliché a reality which it could not possibly achieve in a medium less persuasive than the cinema.

Fredric March, ably assisted by Miriam Hopkins and Rose Hobart, is magnificent as Hyde, and he gives Jekyll a stilted Victorian elegance which, being a little false, makes Hyde's existence seem more credible.

Universal entrusted the direction of Frankenstein to James Whale. He did it in the Grand Guignol manner, with as many queer sounds, dark corners, false faces and cellar stairs as could possibly be inserted.

Unlike City Streets, this is not a Hugoesque fable of gangsters fighting among themselves, but a documentary drama of the bandit standing against society.