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Chicago Daily News

Chicago Daily News is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer® when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Carl Sandburg, David Elliott.

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins (1975) David Elliott The movie is good because it is just like the characters: always looking for action, enjoying what comes, not pushing for significance, eager to be happy but never quite convinced of it.
Posted Aug 18, 2025  Edit critic review
Paper Moon (1973) David Elliott Bogdanovich has learned the oldest trade in Hollywood -- he doesn't direct the movie, he directs the audience. He doesn't have the tonic vision of the artists he admires, Wells and Ford; he has the commercial acumen of the first-class hacks.
Posted Oct 03, 2023  Edit critic review
The French Connection (1971) David Elliott The French Connection gives us suspense mixed with violence, and the cocktail is so volatile that you don't really care if the film is nothing more than two hours of fun in the dark.
Posted Oct 03, 2023  Edit critic review
Man of La Mancha (1972) David Elliott Peter O'Toole, as Don Quixote-Cervantes, gives a performance of such sincerity, stylized with such a fine line, that he carries the movie right along with him, past the bad songs and clumsy action scenes and Wasserman's often squishy dialogue.
Posted Oct 03, 2023  Edit critic review
The Man (1971) David Elliott The film has only a bland, interior decorator's regard for the presidency, combined with the tackiest sort of plot-turning by Rod Serling.
Posted Oct 03, 2023  Edit critic review
The Candidate (1972) David Elliott The synthetic quality of The Candidate, along with its sacrifice of substance for image, should make it offensive. It isn't, however, because it never tries to milk our emotions and is such visible fun with itself.
Posted Oct 03, 2023  Edit critic review
Deliverance (1972) David Elliott It is not meant to be "liked," and in a sense I didn't like it at all, but that made its power and control all the more convincing, and I greatly admire the film's single-minded intensity.
Posted Oct 03, 2023  Edit critic review
Two English Girls (1971) David Elliott Ardent fans of François Truffaut have often wished that he would give us another Jules and Jim. Now, 11 years after that masterwork, the great French director has obliged with Two English Girls.
Posted Oct 03, 2023  Edit critic review
The King of Marvin Gardens (1972) David Elliott The heavy touch probably belongs mostly to scriptwriter Jacob Blackman... Rafelson pulls off some striking scenes, but he's never on top of Brackman's dull symbolism and gassy chatter, and finally it buries him.
Posted Oct 03, 2023  Edit critic review
Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1972) David Elliott The movie is a miserable experience. The gags keep coming crazily, punch-pressing laughter from the audience long after the mirth of the situation has been curdled by the waves of pity, pain, contempt and blistering self-abuse.
Posted Oct 03, 2023  Edit critic review
The Way We Were (1973) David Elliott It's a movie with big sharp teeth but no bite. The mouth opens, the dentures fall out and the story just sits there gaping at its own emptiness.
Posted Oct 03, 2023  Edit critic review
The New Land (1972) David Elliott Troell's victory (and that of his wonderful actors) is to show us a world we would not really want to live in but that we can cherish because of the people who did live in it so humanly.
Posted Oct 03, 2023  Edit critic review
Electra Glide in Blue (1973) David Elliott It's easy to enjoy the film's brash energy, but there's no way to admire a movie in which [the characters] are all used as devalued chips in a game without meaning -- a crap game.
Posted Oct 03, 2023  Edit critic review
American Graffiti (1973) David Elliott I'm not sure I would have enjoyed their way of life, but it's a great one to remember, even if you didn't live it yourself, and it makes American Graffiti the ultimate nostalgia movie -- certainly the best teen-myth movie since Rebel Without a Cause.
Posted Oct 03, 2023  Edit critic review
Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) David Elliott "Superstar" would be fairly innocuous except that its appeal is so calculated to blitz the audience with pure, dumb sensation. The emphasis on brute scale and shrill volume is oppressive, and at times even frightening.
Posted Oct 03, 2023  Edit critic review
Smokey and the Bandit (1977) David Elliott For me at least, the world of "Smokey" is stranger than the outer space of Star Wars... "Smokey" may be faintly memorable as the absolute pit of Jackie Gleason's career.
Posted Oct 03, 2023  Edit critic review
Greased Lightning (1977) David Elliott Pryor's rabbit-faced anxiety does not really get the chance it needs here -- he's a natural loony -- but his performance is very humanly attractive.
Posted Oct 03, 2023  Edit critic review
The Go-Between (1971) David Elliott The Go-Between, taken from L.P. Hartley's novel, is also facile but in the best sense, and more a work of genuine sensitivity. It's a vignette, nothing more -- but of the kind that changes a man's life forever.
Posted Oct 03, 2023  Edit critic review
The Emigrants (1971) David Elliott They've made a connoisseur's "family movie," without special pomp or special pleading, one that sums up the best spirit of our country's past and that could, without a bit of jingoism, help revive our faith in its future.
Posted Oct 03, 2023  Edit critic review
Carnal Knowledge (1971) David Elliott [Jules Feiffer and Mike Nichols] have made a film that is hard but not cynical, clever but not superficial and, as movies go, quite important.
Posted Oct 03, 2023  Edit critic review
Big Jake (1971) David Elliott It's not great Wayne, in the tradition of Hondo or The Searchers, because neither the story nor the direction has any comparable flair... But at last it does move, an imperative asset in any decent Western.
Posted Oct 03, 2023  Edit critic review
Red Sky at Morning (1971) David Elliott It is a formula movie that works because, even though it lacks that machine-tooled instinctive sentiment of the 1940s studio films, it tries very hard and it is full of occasional graces.
Posted Oct 03, 2023  Edit critic review
The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) David Elliott Nobody intelligently alive can find this epic film too long, or dull, or alien. Above all it is an incredible work of organization by director Marcel Ophuls.
Posted Oct 03, 2023  Edit critic review
Zabriskie Point (1970) David Elliott Zabriskie Point sums up all that it means to be really ignorant of what is happening in this country. The new Michelangelo Antonioni film is both intellectually atrocious and, perhaps worse, morally infantile.
Posted Oct 03, 2023  Edit critic review
The Confession (1970) David Elliott It is a trenchant, harrowing movie, all bone and muscle, that seems not so much a drama or even a document as a replica, a cast lifted directly from the face of history.
Posted Oct 03, 2023  Edit critic review
The Exorcist (1973) David Elliott It cannot be denied that The Exorcist proves the power of film to control your emotions. But it is not proof positive. I think it may well be an evil film, for The Exorcist is itself possessed by the resident house devil of Hollywood: rank commercialism.
Posted Sep 27, 2023  Edit critic review
Safety Last (1923) Carl Sandburg The large and growing number of Harold Lloyd fans will enjoy Safety Last. It is full of the tricks which have earned him his friends, and in some scenes he is probably funnier than in any previous picture.
Posted Feb 22, 2023  Edit critic review
The Thief of Bagdad (1924) Carl Sandburg Not only is it the best production which has come from Douglas Fairbanks in his extended motion picture career -- it is also one of the few sure film classics, one of the rare and surprising creations of the film world.
Posted Oct 22, 2022  Edit critic review
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) Carl Sandburg The craziest, wildest, shivery movie that has come wriggling across the silver sheet of a cinema house. [It's] like a collaboration of Rube Goldberg, Ben Hecht, Charlie Chaplin and Edgar Allan Poe -- a melting pot of the styles and technique of all four.
Posted Oct 03, 2022  Edit critic review
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) Carl Sandburg In The Hunchback of Notre Dame may be seen what is surely Lon Chaney's masterpiece, the best piece of character work he has done in his interesting life in the movies.
Posted Mar 28, 2022  Edit critic review
Nanook of the North (1922) Carl Sandburg Besides geographic facts, Nanook of the North is a story. It is as clean and big and strong a story as Robinson Crusoe. It is as mysterious, sinister and gripping as Treasure Island.
Posted Mar 28, 2022  Edit critic review
Blood and Sand (1922) Carl Sandburg Those who rate Valentino an actor of high degree rather than a matinee hero first of all will, after seeing Blood and Sand, continue to give him a top-notch place.
Posted Mar 28, 2022  Edit critic review
The Sheik (1921) Carl Sandburg The pageantry of horsemen and spears on backgrounds of white sand and sloping dunes is notable. As a spectacle photoplay it should easily have high rank.
Posted Mar 28, 2022  Edit critic review
The Three Musketeers (1921) Carl Sandburg As a spectacle photodrama that cost a million dollars, The Three Musketeers is not much ahead, if at all, of other million dollar spectacle photodramas which have passed before our eyes in recent months and years.
Posted Mar 28, 2022  Edit critic review
The Golem (1920) Carl Sandburg The art, the play spirit, the mummery, craft and workmanship which lie back of the production of The Golem are of the stuff out of which the future of the movies is to root and establish a cinema art surpassing that of the present hour.
Posted Mar 28, 2022  Edit critic review
The Kid (1921) Carl Sandburg Those constant contenders who maintain that Charlie Chaplin is the master mummer of the movies and the world's greatest actor, either in the silent or the spoken drama, now have another exhibit to put forward in behalf of their argument.
Posted Mar 28, 2022  Edit critic review
The North Wind's Malice (1920) Carl Sandburg While the mountains, valleys, sled dogs, running streams and waterfalls of our coldest northern territory are the most interesting feature, there is entertainment connected with the plot and the actors who play the play.
Posted Mar 28, 2022  Edit critic review
A Sainted Devil (1924) Carl Sandburg A Sainted Devil is more Valentino than story, more picture than sequence, but, considering that the popular interest is all in Valentino and not at all in his stories, discussion of the successes and failures of this tale by Rex Beach are idle.
Posted Jan 11, 2022  Edit critic review
Way Down East (1920) Carl Sandburg In point of acting, photography and sustained dramatic interest, however, this is fully up to what Griffith has done before this.
Posted Dec 14, 2021  Edit critic review
The Mark of Zorro (1920) Carl Sandburg Doug's latest picture will be considered by thousands to be his best.
Posted Dec 14, 2021  Edit critic review
Metropolis (1927) Carl Sandburg Anyone who had a good time at The Lost World will have a better time at Metropolis, for it carries the spectator into the world of a thousand years hence. No such settings have ever been attempted before on the screen, not even in Intolerance.
Posted Dec 14, 2021  Edit critic review
The Testing Block (1920) Carl Sandburg It is fair to say that "Bill" Hart's latest picture is one of his very best.
Posted Dec 14, 2021  Edit critic review
The Scarlet Letter (1926) Carl Sandburg Hawthorne wrote a daring story. Seastrom turned it into a picture that dares to be poignant and poetic in the midst of sensational happenings such as branding, desertions, seductions, public confessions of sin and moral accusations.
Posted Dec 14, 2021  Edit critic review
(undefined) Carl Sandburg Rin-Tin-Tin, the dog being starred in films with such success by Warner Brothers, demonstrates again his almost human powers in Tracked by the Police.
Posted Dec 14, 2021  Edit critic review
The Sorrows of Satan (1926) Carl Sandburg Sorrows of Satan has the sense of vastness, chaos, originality, and sudden interludes of unimagined beauty that make Griffith so much akin, in his present stage, to Walt Whitman, the poet.
Posted Dec 14, 2021  Edit critic review
Babe Comes Home (1927) Carl Sandburg Like "Red" Grange, this other athletic marvel is surprisingly good as an actor. Perhaps the control of muscle and nerve they have learned in sport makes them unusually responsive in obeying film direction.
Posted Dec 14, 2021  Edit critic review
Faust (1926) Carl Sandburg [Faust] is one of the most beautiful of all works of the moving picture. It should be in the library of every art school and museum of America.
Posted Dec 14, 2021  Edit critic review
Flesh and the Devil (1926) Carl Sandburg Miss Garbo is hereafter a star to be reckoned with, so perfectly does she create a character for the heroine, lovely, pitiful, thrilling Felicitas, who drifts downward without ever realizing that the world holds such things as morals.
Posted Dec 14, 2021  Edit critic review
Rough House Rosie (1927) Carl Sandburg Clara Bow seems to be winning in the race of flappers.
Posted Dec 14, 2021  Edit critic review
It (1927) Carl Sandburg It is smart, funny and real. It makes a full-size star of Clara Bow and it hits William Austin out of the minor class into the upper crust of screen comedians.
Posted Dec 14, 2021  Edit critic review
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