Based on the Theodore Dreiser novel that publishers deemed "too immoral," William Wyler's Carrie is a power-house of human passions transformed into soul-withering frailties. As Carrie, the smalltown girl come to Chicago, Jennifer Jones "seems to have stepped out of the pages of the book" (Time). And Laurence Olivier gives one of his finest portrayals as love-doomed Hurstwood. "Olivier has always given credit to Wyler for teaching him how to act in the movies when they did Wuthering Heights together, but it's in Carrie that he showed how much he had learned" (Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies).