Alec Guinness delivers a masterful, not-to-be-missed performance in a brilliant screenplay by J. B. Priestley that combines irony, humor, and tenderness. Shy George Bird (Guinness) learns his days are numbered, so he decides to take a "last holiday. " He withdraws his life savings and dashes off to a fashionable seaside resort, where he is taken for a man of substance and becomes a favorite with his newfound aristocratic friends.

Fans of Sidney Lumet and screen adaptations of 20th-century literature may want to check out The Group, a relatively faithful film version of Mary McCarthy's seminal post-graduate "campus" novel of the same name. The elliptical and rather familiar plot follows a group of young women-all classmates, friends, and recent graduates from a certain single-sex liberal arts college-as they face the inevitable pressures to sand the rough edges off their personalities and to surrender their independence to the men in their lives and the institutions they represent. Lumet (The Verdict, Dog Day Afternoon) lends to this tale his peculiar sense of lighting, pacing, and rich, captivating color, but he directs with a ponderousness and seriousness that the source material perhaps does not deserve, and certainly cannot comfortably withstand. The wedding-funeral framing device employed here is one we've all encountered before, and Lumet does not afford his young actresses much latitude of expression or interpretation. Particularly stiff (in her first film role, and, boy, does it show) is Candace Bergen; as Lakey Eastlake, the "beautiful one" among the friends, she's asked to provide a moral center for the story, yet her scenes are wooden and rarely develop any dramatic momentum. The lovely Elizabeth Hartman fares better as Priss, an innocent whose blunt sexual initiation still feels harrowing. Amid the gravity of the proceedings, an ensemble cast (which includes, among others, Joan Hackett, Shirley Knight, and Joanna Pettet) strains to replicate the searing wit of McCarthy's prose; and, in several winning scenes, the script preserves some fine examples of her dialogue. Nevertheless, the source novel-by no means War and Peace-doubtlessly would have benefited from a lighter touch. -Miles Bethany.

David O. Selznick wanted Gone with the Wind to be somehow more than a movie, a film that would broaden the very idea of what a film could be and do and look like. In many respects he got what he worked so hard to achieve in this 1939 epic (and all-time box-office champ in terms of tickets sold), and in some respects he fell far short of the goal. While the first half of this Civil War drama is taut and suspenseful and nostalgic, the second is ramshackle and arbitrary. But there's no question that the film is an enormous achievement in terms of its every resource-art direction, color, sound, cinematography-being pushed to new limits for the greater glory of telling an American story as fully as possible. Vivien Leigh is still magnificently narcissistic, Olivia de Havilland angelic and lovely, Leslie Howard reckless and aristocratic. As for Clark Gable: we're talking one of the most vital, masculine performances ever committed to film. -Tom Keogh.

David Lean's beautiful adaptation of Noel Coward's play is an absorbing as well as charming look at an English family's struggle for stability between the two World Wars. Lean does a masterful job of gently penetrating human nature with truly imaginative camera direction. Robert Newton and Celia Johnson are brilliant, with an especially poignant performance by Johnson. One of David Lean's best cinematic accomplishments.