Word: screening
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Lady in the Dark (Paramount] is $3,000,000 worth of free advertising for psychoanalysis and more than your money's worth of entertainment, if you can comfortably contemplate the id in Technicolor. In any case, this screen version of Moss Hart's Broadway hit is a munificent, ingenious show, as artificial, colorful and shakily pretty as a cathedral made of Jello...
Most chillers overcrowd the screen with werewolves or explain away all supernatural antics as the deliberate hocus-pocus of a mad scientist, estate-grabber or Axis agent. The Uninvited blends the everyday with the inexplicable, gets a lot of its best scares out of the everyday. The skittering of a squirrel across the drumhead floors of the vacant house suddenly gives vacancy a cold portentousness. The scraping of a wine glass against a table, during the seance, is more scary than the seance itself. The unexpected smashing of a window while you are watching a rather good Paramount ghost rasps...
...liberating power of blending comedy and realism, wild farce and cool intellect. But the best of the domestic and anarchic satire cannot be suggested on paper; it is too thoroughly cinematic. It reaches its perfection in William Demarest, whose performance is one of the few solid-gold pieces of screen acting in recent years. But chief credit for The Miracle must go to Sturges, who has given the slick, growing genteelism of U.S. cinema the roughest and healthiest shaking up it has had since the disease became serious...
After three flops, Sturges went to Hollywood. For eight years he pestered producers to let him direct his own pictures; finally, after he had written 13 screen plays, Paramount's William Le Baron gave him his chance with The Great McGinty. This was the surprise hit of 1940. Some Hollywoodians even accepted Sturges' startling theory-that one man with a good head is better than any hundred men bumping heads...
...Solomon Sturges, on the other hand, Preston may have derived his exaggerated respect for plain success, which leaves him no patience towards artists of integrity who fail at the box office. The combination might explain his matchless skill in producing some of the most intoxicating bits of nihilism the screen has known, but always at the expense of a larger excellence...