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- Curtiz never gave second-hand treatment to an assignment once it was accepted. He went ahead and graced plot and character with fluid camera movement, exquisite lighting, and a lightning-fast pace. Even if a script was truly poor and the leading players were real amateurs, Curtiz glossed over inadequacies so well that an audience often failed to recognize a shallow substance until it was hungry for another film a half-hour later. (en)
- This Is the Army is still the freshest, the most endearing, the most rousing musical tribute to the American fighting man that has come out of World War II ... buoyant, captivating, as American as hot dogs or the Bill of Rights ... a warmly reassuring document on the state of the nation. It is, from beginning to end, a great show. (en)
- No matter what the story is, Mr. Curtiz is never at a loss. If it's about American small-town life, he is as American as Sinclair Lewis. If it's about Paris, he's as continental as Maurice Chevalier. And if it's a mystery, he's as good a teller of mystery tales as S. S. Van Dine. But English has him stumped. (en)
- He spoke terrible English; his English was always a joke on the set. But the dialog in his films is wonderfully given and directed. (en)
- No, this is a lovely boy, and he's going to be a wonderful actor. (en)
- The most obvious aspect of Curtiz's directorial signature is his expressionistic visual style, and its most obvious feature is its unusual camera angles and carefully detailed, crowded, complex compositions, full of mirrors and reflections, smoke and fog, and physical objects, furniture, foliage, bars, and windows, that stand between the camera and the human characters and seem to surround and entrap them. (en)
- I was laid in the aisles by Curtiz's camera work ... [by] shots and angles that were pure genius. (en)
- When I first came here I was called on to direct six or seven pictures a year. I never turned down a single story. That was my schooling. I worked hard on every one of them. That is how you learn. (en)
- With Michael Curtiz' magnificent 1941 version of The Sea Wolf ... full justice was for once done to London's text ... with the aid of models, newly introduced fog machines, and a studio tank, the film hauntingly captured an eerie malevolent atmosphere, brooding and full of terror ... From its economic opening scenes ... to its powerful climax ... it gripped consistently. Throughout, Curtiz provided object lessons in the use of sound - the groaning timbers of the ship, creaking footsteps, the wind - and closeups. (en)
- Michael Curtiz is the classic example of a studio director in that he could turn his hand to almost anything. He could go from any genre to another, and somehow this Hungarian knew exactly how those genres worked. Like there was some innate storytelling skill in this man. (en)
- I hate to see young directors throwing stories back at the studio. They should never throw a single one back because they do not think it is a good story. They should accept them gratefully ... That is the way they will learn. (en)
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