- [on Cecil B. DeMille] He remained true to the literary tradition of [James Fenimore Cooper's] "Leatherstocking Tales" and to the dramatic conventions of David Belasco.
- [on George Cukor] When a director has provided polished, tasteful entertainments of a high order consistently over a period of 30 years, it is clear that said director is much more than a mere entertainer.
- The obligatory scene in most [Frank Capra] films is the confession of folly in the most public manner possible.
- [on Raquel Welch] I still don't believe that Raquel Welch really exists. She has been manufactured by the media merely to preserve the sexless plasticity of sex objects for the masses.
- [on Jacques Tati] Perhaps he is simply another sketch talent hopelessly stretched out of shape by the relentless pull through time and space of the feature film.
- [on William A. Wellman] What is at issue is not the number of bad films he has made, but a fundamental deficiency in his direction of good projects.
- [on Richard Brooks] Although most of his films display something of value on first viewing, none can take the high ground in retrospect.
- [on Sidney Lumet] Those who would be led, Lumet will guide. Those who would lead, Lumet will follow.
- [on Stanley Kubrick] His tragedy may have been that he was hailed as a great artist before he had become a competent craftsman. However, it is more than likely that he has chosen to exploit the giddiness of middlebrow audiences on the satiric level of "Mad" magazine.
- [on George Stevens] He was a minor director with major virtues before A Place in the Sun (1951) and a major director with minor virtues after.
- [on Bryan Forbes] He perpetually pursues the anti-cliché only to arrive at anticlimax.
- [on Howard Hawks] He stamped his remarkably bitter view of life on adventure, gangster and private eye melodramas, the kind of thing Americans do best and appreciate least.
- [on Alfred Hitchcock] His reputation has suffered from the fact that he has given audiences more pleasure than is permissible for serious cinema. No one who is so entertaining could possibly seem profound to the intellectual puritans.
- [on Robert Siodmak] He manipulated Hollywood's fantasy apparatus with taste and intelligence.
- [on Fredric March] Fredric March's laborious stylishness--which always made up in persistence what it lacked in persuasiveness.
- [on John Cassavetes] As a director, too much of the time he is groping when he should be gripping.
- [on Roman Polanski] His talent is as undeniable as his intentions are dubious.
- [on Stanley Kramer] He will never be a natural, but time has proved that he is not a fake.
- [on Max Ophüls] If all the dollies and cranes in the world snap to attention when his name is mentioned, it is because he gave camera movement its finest hours in the history of cinema.
- [on Robert Parrish] His films belong to a director who craves anonymity.
- [on Josef von Sternberg] A lyricist of light and shadow rather than a master of montage.
- [on John Sturges] It is hard to remember why his career was ever considered meaningful.
- [on Alexander Korda] He represented, and indeed virtually created, the tradition of quality in the British cinema.
- [on Jean Renoir] Only when style is confused with meaningless flourishes does Renoir's economy of expression seem inadequate for textbook critics.
- [on Sir Carol Reed] His career demonstrates that a director who limits himself to solving technical problems quickly lapses into the decadence of the inappropriate effect.
- [on D.W. Griffith] It is time D.W. Griffith was rescued from the pedestal of an outmoded pioneer. The cinema of Griffith, after all, is no more outmoded than the drama of Aeschylus.
- [on Otto Preminger] His enemies have never forgiven him for being a director with the personality of a producer.
- [in 1971] Who would have thought a few years back that [Peter Bogdanovich] would be traveling first class on the express train of film history while Dennis Hopper was bumming a ride on a freight train headed for oblivion?
- [on Ernst Lubitsch] A poignant sadness infiltrates the director's gayest moments, and it is this counterpoint between sadness and gaiety that represents the "Lubitsch touch" and not the leering humor of closed doors.
- [on Clarernce Brown (I)] His career is not without a certain amiability in its evolution from German Expressionism to American Gothic.
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