Cinema: Snow White v. Grumpies

When Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (TIME, Dec. 27) was released in Manhattan last fortnight, it loosed a hum of delighted praise, reduced even strong arm critics to little, childish cries. Scripps-Howard Columnist Westbrook Pegler wrote with tears in his eyes that Snow White was the happiest event since the Armistice. By last week, only rare exceptions to this consensus had been filed. The New York News humphed editorially: “Nevertheless, we’d rather see seven reels of Ginger Rogers, Jeanette MacDonald or several others. . . .”And last week the New Masses, following its Marxian line, grumped that Disney had bowdlerized Grimm’s “savage and moral” tale, had turned out a version “a little too genial,” with “too much of the trees-in-the-breeze quality.”