One of the biggest box-office successes in movie history — probably because for young audiences it's like getting a box of Cracker Jack that is all p… - Pauline Kael

Charles Laughton is superbly vulgar in this whack at the backside of Victorianism. He makes a great vaudeville turn out of the role of an egocentric scoundrel, the prosperous bootmaker who doesn't want to part with his three marriageable daughters because they are too useful as unpaid labor. As the oldest daughter, the spinster in spite of herself, Brenda de Banzie is so "right" that when she marries her father's best workman and puts belching, drunken old Dad out of business, one feels the good old-fashioned impulse to applaud.

There is a dreadful discrepancy between Michelangelo's works and the words put into the mouth of Charlton Heston, who represents him here, and this picture — which is mostly about a prolonged wrangle between the sculptor and Pope Julius II (Rex Harrison), who keeps sweeping into the Sistine Chapel and barking, "When will you make an end of it?" — isn't believable for an instant.

A country which accepts wars as contests between good and evil is suffering from the delusion that the morality play symbolizes real political conflicts.