Word: melodrama
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This trite melodrama has more good performances than good roles, and it is chiefly interesting for the appearance of Actor Parks, cast as Adam in John Huston's forthcoming The Bible. As Bus Riley, Parks will inevitably be compared to James Dean and Marlon Brando, but that need not discourage him. His own assurance, intensity, and hair-trigger temperament make even unoriginal sin worth watching...
...Preminger (Exodus, The Cardinal) often makes ostentatious movies, but he almost never makes dull ones. This epic based on the novel by James Bassett is among Preminger's liveliest. Its clear, unequivocal message is that World War II was fought to make the world safe for wide-screen melodrama...
Thus this action melodrama, based on an actual incident, pretends to concern itself with a moral problem: whether to save the masterworks or spare the men. It must have seemed a dull question to Director John Frankenheimer, who simply shunts morality onnto a siding and concentrates on the conflict between a fanatic villain and an athletic hero, playing tug of war with real trains. The results are exhilarating, but only in a muscular...
...coastal resort look like a terrible place to visit and no fun to live in either, for the beaches are littered with disreputable Americans. One of them is dead-a suicidal beach boy named Billy, who has obviously taken the easy way out of a flabby, overdressed melodrama...
None but the Brave. As producer, director and star of this World War II melodrama, Frank Sinatra is triply committed to a piece of flip moral hindsight. War is archaic, he says. It is also rough on brotherhood. But he cannot conceal his boyish enthusiasm for any activity that brings together a swell bunch of guys...