Only a small part of John Steinbeck's "East of Eden" has been used in the motion picture version of it that Elia Kazan has done, and it is questionable whether that part contains the best of the book….

Compressed in a script by Paul Osborn, which reduces the mother to little more than a black shrouded figure of a madam of a sporting-house in a California town, this quarter-part of the novel is boiled down to a mere review of the coincidental way in which the conflict between the father and son is resolved.

Yet Mr. Kazan has at it,… with such elaborate pictorial build-up and such virtuosity on his actors' part that he gets across the illusion of a drama more pregnant than it is.

In one respect, it is brilliant. The use that Mr. Kazan has made of CinemaScope and color in capturing expanse and mood...