Quotes

All over Alabama the lamps are out--Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

A streetcar raising its iron moan; stopping, belling and starting; stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past, the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks; the iron whine rises on rising speed; still risen, faints, halts, the faint stinging bell; rises again, still fainter, fainting, lifting, lifts, faints forgone: forgotten. Now is that night one blue dew.

[on Lauren Bacall] She has a javelin-like vitality, a born dancer's eloquence in movement, a fierce female shrewdness and a special sweet sourness. With these faculties, plus a stone-crushing self-confidence and a trombone voice, she manages to get across the toughest girl a piously regenerate Hollywood had dreamed of in a long, long while.

[on Judy Garland] How good she is! She is no Venus, let us admit--but how delightful is her smile, how genuine her emotion, how sure her timing, and how brilliantly she brings off her effects.

[on D.W. Griffith] There is not a man working in movies, nor a man who cares for them, who does not owe Griffith more than he owes anyone else.

[on Preston Sturges] Preston is like a man from the Italian Renaissance--he wants to do everything at once.

[on Gracie Fields] I think Miss Fields is about as nice a woman over 40 as I have ever seen; I have certainly never seen anyone in movies to approach her in that age bracket.

[on John Huston] A natural-born anti-authoritarian individualistic libertarian anarchist, without portfolio.

[reviewing Give My Regards to Broadway (1948)] Vaudeville is dead; I wish to God someone would bury it.

[reviewing The Iron Curtain (1948)] If it could be proved that there is any nation on earth which does not employ spies, that would be news. This is just the same old toothless dog biting the same old legless man.

[reviewing Tycoon (1947)] Several tons of dynamite are set off in this movie, none of it under the right people.