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, th… - C. A. Lejeune

[Recalling The Mark of Zorro (1920)] Suddenly, as I watched [Douglas] Fairbanks' harlequin poses and swirling trajectories across the screen, there sprang into my mind a wonderful idea. Why should I not turn my pleasure into profit, and earn my living by seeing films? The profession of film criticism had not yet come into being ... An extra deterrent was the fact that women had very little standing yet as journalists.

The Cineguild director and producer, David Lean and Ronald Neame, have spared us nothing of the brutality of Oliver Twist.
All the ugliness is there: the filth and cold, humiliation and hunger; the thrashing of Oliver; the savage beating to death of Nancy; the special lust which Dickens describes in italics as "the passion for hunting something." All these things are realistically set out in the film in pictures as remorseless as a Cruikshank drawing. The producers have even added two special savageries of their own; an introduction in which Oliver's mother is seen battling through the storm in the last pangs of travail, and a climax in which the child is forced to climb to the chimney-stack and watch Bill Slkes hang himself. The introductory scene, as it happens, is magnificently done; the roof-tops sequence seems to me both distasteful and silly.

The Lodger was the best film made in England up to the end of last year. It had power, point, and an entirely new angle, that, is to say, in' an English studio—of visual expression. Downhill carries out every promise of its predecessor without being at all a good film.