The best reviews of King Vidor's career in the sound era came for tonight's assured and glossy MGM films, based on highly regarded novels. "The carriage trade and class audiences" would line up for The Citadel, Variety assured exhibitors in 1938. (But consider yourselves invited too!) It "shines brilliantly with those deft human touches that first brought Vidor to prominence." Filled with master actors in secondary roles (Ralph Richardson, Rex Harrison, Emlyn Williams), The Citadel attacks the mercenary self-interest of British medicine with a harshness unlikely if targeted at this side of the Atlantic. Robert Donat stars as an idealistic doctor seduced from black-lung research by the prospect of lucrative hand-holding and pill-dispensing to London's nervous high society. Documentarist Pare Lorentz (The River, The Plow That Broke the Plains) assisted Vidor with the authentic Welsh mining sequences. And the film includes one rare Hollywood instance of an ending less upbeat than its source novel-though the film is otherwise quite faithful to A.J. Cronin. "One of the great events of the season," enthused Frank Nugent in the New York Times, "a picture which has the pace of a Hollywood production, the honest characterization typical of England's best films, and the sincerity and depth which are...in the public domain of drama." Scott Simmon