For Mr. Astaire, along with Chaplin and Disney, is one of the only really significant trio that the cinema has yet evolved. These three are universal… - C. A. Lejeune

It is an odd and somewhat ironic commentary on the entertainment of the times that the best, happiest, most intelligent and human picture of the week, I was about to say of the year, should be a murder story. But so it is: The Naked City (Gaumont and Marble Arch) is a thriller and a beauty.

To. come down to film criticism, which is the first reason of this article, you are faced with a difficulty which distinguishes this from almost every other form of critical writing. The film is not really a lovable art, and to criticise well you must first love deeply. Don't misunderstand me. You may enjoy the cinema. You may admire its ingenuities, and find relief and comfort in its evasions; you may even prefer it, as many of us do, to any other form of public entertainment. But I defy anyone who has had rich experience of life, who has thought deeply, or felt honestly about life and its manifestations, to draw from the cinema, in its present stage of development, anything more than a fleeting participation in pleasure. Good music, great poetry, fine architecture, pure painting, can somehow take possession of the soul and succour it. For centuries men have felt these things deeply, and written about them greatly. But until there is something of this elemental quality in the cinema—and I often doubt whether there can be any such elemental quality while it is still the cinema—we shall have no greatly written criticism of the film.
The film critic, then, even if he cherishes no delusions of greatness, and aspires simply to be a good critic, doing a smaller job well; must look for his inspiration in something other than the material of the cinema. Occasionally, very occasionally, he will see a picture or an individual performance that sets his typewriter tapping out the word genius, but on the whole he must be prepared to deal creditably, and, if the gods bless him, creatively, with undistinction.

It would seem that Gone With the Wind, written by a woman, concerned with a woman, and read by millions of women all over the world, is working out on form. That is to say, it is primarily a woman's picture.
I say that advisedly, not to suggest that men won't like it, but because I am so sure that women will. It may not be a great, significant picture, with a strong, central theme, but I don't honestly believe that women care so much about great, significant pictures with strong, central themes. What they prefer, and what they will get in Gone With the Wind is a vivid account of personal and intimate details of this meeting and that quarrel; [life] seen not broadly, in perspective, but urgently, from day to day, as if they were living it themselves. Women are only dimly concerned with the meaning of what is happening in the world, but passionately concerned with the effect of what is happening on So-and-So. The American Civil War. the abolition of slavery, the burning of a city, the end of a social order, even the birth of a nation, would hardly in themselves justify the film's three hours and forty minutes of running-time. But in order to discover what happened to Scarlett O'Hara, to Melanie. to Rhett Butler, to the black mammy, to Scarlett's baby, during these events, most women will sit through this enormous picture without a murmur.
Curiously enough, the dominant feminine interest in the picture has worked through even to the acting. The best performances are all women's.