Stromboli is the story of a sinner who receives God's grace. But Rossellini does not show the odyssey of a conversion, with its hesitation, remorse, hopes, and slow and continual victories over oneself. God's majesty shines here with such a hard and terrible brilliancy that no human conscience could bear even the dullest reflection of it. This grand Catholic film solemnly unravels its exterior pomp and shows nothing of interior life, except what we are left to imagine of the…

The revolution brought about by Welles seems greater every day. Without him, as we said in the dedication to our Christmas issue, "the new American cinema would not be what it is." From Wyler to Robert Aldrich, through Kazan or Preminger, following a meandering but never entirely broken line, his influence has never ceased to obsess Hollywood. True, like Eisenstein, he is not the type that can be imitated, and with the help of time and ingratitude, the many errors…

I'm not crazy about westerns. The genre has its requirements, its conventions, like any other, but they are less liberal. The plains, the herds, the guitars, the chase scenes, and the eternal good guys and their rugged bravado, their traces of Scottish or Irish humor, are apt to tire anyone from this Old World who carries a more resounding, more distant past among his baggage. Yet the great masters, the Fords, the Wylers, were able to affirm their mastery in…

Nicholas Ray has enough partisans among our readers for me to venture praising him without preliminaries. Yet I can easily see how his last film might be shocking in the eyes of those who demand a certain literary content in a cinematic work. Bigger Than Life is not a melodrama. If it were, defending it to certain people would be easier. I will therefore limit myself to pleading guilty; I will consider the style, and only incidentally mention the conventions…

Is Clouzot's Picasso a good or a bad film? It all depends on what one expects from it. I enjoyed seeing it very much, enjoyment that would have been perfect if it had not been for the music by Georges Auric, which seemed rather mangled and overwhelming. 1 did not want to find out any secrets, but to see a painter, whom I admire, at work. I went, I saw it, and I was not disappointed. Picasso, in the back-…