[On the new CinemaScope process] The effect produced on the viewer is to make him feel he is sitting inside a monster pillar-box looking out through … - 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.

[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.