The small triumph of The Graduate was to have domesticated alienation and the difficulty of communication, by making what Benjamin is alienated from … - Pauline Kael

TV executives think that the programs with the highest ratings are what TV viewers want, rather than what they settle for.

The happiest screen collaboration of Elsa Lanchester and Charles Laughton — they're both wonderful — is in this adaptation of a Somerset Maugham story, "The Vessel of Wrath." It's set on an island in the Pacific, which Maugham calls Baru, and it's concerned with the efforts of the prim missionary (Lanchester) to reform the carnal, ribald beachcomber (Laughton). The situation is the reverse of that in Maugham's Sadie Thompson story, but with a light, comic tone. The Hepburn-Bogart "African Queen" probably took a few notions from it.

When you clean them up, when you make movies respectable, you kill them. The wellspring of their art, their greatness, is in not being respectable.