Elia Kazan's direction strives for a personal intimacy but neither he nor the John Steinbeck scripting achieves in enough measure.

The direction and John Steinbeck's script seem stranded in a no man's land between straightforward adventure and a pessimistic allegory about the corrupting nature of power.

Throbs with a rare vitality, and a masterful picture of a nation in revolutionary torment has been got by Director Elia Kazan.

I mostly didn’t care for Brando’s performance or the execrable, preachy script by John Steinbeck, and these actually good scenes felt like punctuation marks rather than the substance of the film.