WHEN people meet me they are always surprised," TIME'S Cinema reviewer once complained. "They expect me to be a nasty, screwed-up Scrooge--a mean, embittered person who bites children." Some Hollywood characters think he has the taste of a tarantula. But Associate Editor Henry Bradford Darrach Jr. is a meditative man of ideas who looks younger than his 42 years and feels that one of his faults as a reviewer is that "I try to find meaning behind appearance, which means that I sometimes do an injustice to a film." While he may at times seem to etch his phrases in acid, he says that "I only make word plays when I'm reviewing a film so dull that there is nothing worth saying about it except in the form of word plays."

While his practical art is cinema reviewing, Brad Darrach's passion is writing, a craft at which he is so meticulous that if he had time he would probably want to cut his copy in stone. He was writing stories at the age of four, poetry at 15, and at the University of Pennsylvania (A.B., 1942) he did his senior college paper on philosophy in verse. A sometime insurance investigator, schoolteacher, newspaper reporter (Providence Journal, Baltimore Sun), he came to TIME as a writer in 1945 and has been our principal Cinema reviewer for some ten years.

His approach to a movie is a study in agonizing intensity. Seated in the darkened theater, he holds on his lap a stenographer's note pad and jots down scribbles that look to anyone else like a kind of obscure Sanskrit patois. The picture itself is only part of his research. He wants every piece of material extant about the film--the original book, biographies of the performers, reports from correspondents on the making and makers of the picture, even handouts. Thus, when he wondered how some Japanese film makers got the effect of blood gushing from a samurai victim's chest, a report from the Tokyo bureau enabled him to write in his review of The Idiot (May 17): "Mifume's sword trips a valve concealed beneath his opponent's kimono and opens a tank containing a gallon of vegetable oil, iron oxide, water and chocolate sauce under 40 pounds of pressure. Spfluurrroooooooooosh!" He composes his reviews on a yellow-lined pad in pencil ("Typewriters talk back at you"), leaving a wide margin for notes about his own copy. He does not feel that readers should take his review of a film as gospel; on the contrary, he merely hopes they will realize that he is writing about his own reaction conditioned by "a cultural frame of reference."

Since he is adept in French, Italian, German and Spanish ("and I'm beginning to understand Swedish after seeing 20 Bergman films"), he rarely has to read subtitles on foreign films--except to criticize the accuracy of the translation. For this week's cover story he had the reporting of TIME correspondents in practically every city where films are made to supplement his own critical viewing of virtually every foreign and domestic film of consequence in the past decade. Working with Senior Editor William Forbis, he aimed to produce not only a good story but a sensitive guide for those who want to be cinemate.

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