From the imaginative point of view, the Fellini is a masterpiece of its kind. I hasten to add that it is a very dreadful kind. I should not like to s… - C. A. Lejeune

If Mr. Hitchcock would rid himself of the delusion that it is enough for an artist to give perfect expression of any subject—the feelings of a cat sitting on a garbage can, the smell of over-ripe bananas in a broken basket on a dusty street—he would become a film producer of considerable merit in the world. He has originality. He has a fine economy of detail. He has made himself independent of words with a strongly developed pictorial sense. Some day he may surprise us all, and himself among the number, by making a picture that is as good in its conception as in its execution. And when Hitchcock sets to work on real film material, real artist's material, there will not be more than half a dozen producers in the world who will be able to beat him. There are none in England now.

I have never made any secret of my distaste for films concerned with the glorification of the spiv, and I must declare al once that Brighton Rock, the new British film at Warners, is not my notion of entertainment. Graham Greene's savage storv about a couple of race-course gangs and their fancy ways with a razor is one of the most brutal things I have seen on the screen since They Made Me a Fugitive...
Once having made this point clear, I have nothing but the highest praise for the way in which the film has been done. Brighton Rock is a splendid bit of picture-making. I do not think that for direction and all-round performance it could have been excelled by the work of any other country. ... [The Boulting Brothers] have taken the audience triumphantly behind the front of Brighton in the holiday season, into an underworld as subtle as the Casbah, where sleazy-lodging houses bed shameful secrets, and a youth can become a seasoned murderer at seventeen.

A book could be written if Harpo didn't eat it first, or Groucho and Chico tear it up page by page on the art of the Marxes. You could call it surrealism, or or dadaism, or what about that -ism that all depends on the use of staircases? You could analyse its clear cold illogic, entirely divorced from emotion. You could suggest that Harpo, with his motor horn, is in the direct line of the clowns of history. You could even argue that it represents the furthest manifestation of, pure comedy on the modern screen, and you wouldn't be far wrong.