Orson Welles’s second ‘I-did-it’ should show once and for all that film making, radio and the stage are three different guys better kept separated. ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’ is one of those versions of the richest family in town during the good old days. Manny Farber Read Quote
Sunset Boulevard’ – the story of Hollywood movies draped on a depressing sex affair – is an uncompromising study of American decadence displaying a sad, worn, methodical beauty few films have had since the late twenties. Manny Farber Read Quote
Capra is an old-time movie craftsman, the master of every trick in the bag, and in many ways he is more at home with the medium than any other Hollywood director. But all of his details give the impression of contrived effect. Manny Farber Read Quote
The cold, mean ‘Sunset Boulevard’ – a beautiful title, though I suspect it was shot on another boulevard – is further proof of the resurgence of art in the Hollywood of super-craftsmen with insuperable taste. Manny Farber Read Quote
One of the fine moments in 1940s film is no longer than a blink: Bogart, as he crosses the street from one bookstore to another, looks up at a sign. Manny Farber Read Quote
The Big Sleep’ would have been a more effective study of nightmarish existence had the detective been more complicated and had more curiosity been shown about his sweetheart’s relation to the crime. Manny Farber Read Quote
The Big Sleep’ is an unsentimental, surrealist excitement in which most of the men in Hollywood’s underworld are murdered and most of the women go for an honest but not unwilling private sleuth (Humphrey Bogart). Manny Farber Read Quote
Henry V’ is a great deal more than almost any other hell-bent-for-armor movie that you’ve seen. Manny Farber Read Quote
Frank Capra, Hollywood’s Horatio Alger, lights with more cinematic know-how and zeal than any other director to convince movie audiences that American life is exactly like the ‘Saturday Evening Post’ covers of Norman Rockwell. ‘It’s A Wonderful Life,’ the latest example of Capracorn, shows his art at a hysterical pitch. Manny Farber Read Quote
The new Disney cartoon ‘Bambi’ is interesting because it’s the first one that’s been entirely unpleasant. Manny Farber Read Quote
