[A] film-version of Noel Coward's Easy Virtue ... for all its cleverness, is not a good film. - 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.

But I believe and I stick to it that there is a code in this sort of free-handed slaughter, and Hitchcock has gone outside the code in Sabotage. As a detective fan and an Inveterate reader of thrillers I suggest that this is the sort of thing that should get a fellow blackballed from the Crime Club. Discreet directors don't kill schoolboys and dogs in omnibuses. Believe me, it isn't done..

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.