Critics reviews

Lonsdale's zingers are marvelously dry — "Richard has either enjoyed your joke immensely, or has eaten something indigestible" — and the cast spits them out with impeccable aplomb, relishing the cruelty while retaining a sense of underlying warmth. Watching them parry, it's hard not to conclude that excess formality served comedy much better than the excess informality that defines the genre today. Who'll have the courage to revive it?

If the situations are stock and the outcomes predictable, the emotional colorings of the performances remain credible and complex. Ultimately not as affecting as Lonsdale's screenplay for Korda's wonderful THE PRIVATE LIFE OF DON JUAN, ON APPROVAL is nevertheless an honest, thoughtful effort to grapple with many of the same ideas.

Where the deft, zigzag-y editing during the party scene in act one showed the external pressures that the quartet must overcome in order to inveigle domestic bliss, these surreal moments represent the internal stress involved—stress that, presumably, would be eradicated by the sex Maria's proposal has prudishly rendered verboten.

[Bea Lillie's] wide mouth and prominent nose may have been just right for the stage but were a bit much for movies, where unconventionally pretty female clowns were and remain rare: a shame, since her one lead performance in a silent film... suggests a gift for physical comedy that could have earned her a place with Keaton, Chaplin and Lloyd.