Word: cliches
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Casbah (Universal-International). "Come with me to the Casbah" has become almost as solid a cliché, in American romantic kidding, as Mae West's "Come up and see me some time" used to be. The Casbah owes its popularity to Detective Ashelbe's tried & true romantic tale about the French super-crook Pépé le Moko (Tony Martin), who just sneers at the cops as long as he keeps to the native quarter of Algiers, but doesn't dare venture outside. It is also the story of a plainclothesman (Peter Lorre) who languidly bides...
...comeuppance, she hopefully wiggles her hips and sings a couple of songs in the manner of a self-consciously refined Betty Hutton. Instead of seizing its opportunity for a few good-natured jabs at the jitterbug cult, Something in the Wind quickly sinks in a welter of foolish movie clichés. Johnny Green's score (best songs: Something in the Wind, I'm Happy Go Lucky and Free, The Turntable Song) has a tough time bucking the script. Several competent supporting actors (Donald O'Connor, Charles Winninger and Margaret Wycherly) stand around looking vaguely embarrassed...
...tried& -trusted clichés came tripping out of typewriters: "gigantic underworld combine"; "imported triggermen"; "multimilliondollar gambling empire"; "mob biggies." Florid Florabel Muir, the New York Daily News's specialist in Hollywood crime, at least tried to be different. She wrote: "Bugsy was cut down amid the overwhelming perfume of blossoming jasmine...
...rivet . . . able, dramatic . . . a man who will never try to steal second unless the pitcher breaks his leg." Taft is an amalgam of "brain power . . . sincerity . . . majestic wrongheadedness . . . Brobdingnagian bad judgments." Gunther on Bricker: "Intellectually he is like interstellar space-a vast vacuum occasionally crossed by homeless, wandering clichés." Gunther finds U.S. public life full of "poltroons, chiselers, parvenus . . . politicians bloated with intellectual edema." But after all, he says, the U.S. is the "craziest, most dangerous, least stable, most spectacular, least grownup, and most powerful and magnificent nation ever known...
...movie labors under two handicaps. First, there have been a good many war pictures in which The Group is the hero, and the face of the nation is portrayed through characters chosen from all walks of the nation's life. The curse of this narrative cliché can be dispelled only by unusually original and vivid characterizations. Unfortunately, most of the characters in this film, although well acted, are close to cliche themselves. (One up for the British: most of the wives are plain women and most of the marriages are convincingly beautiful.) The second difficulty...