Film Reviews by Steve

There was a revival of prison films after WWII when the punishment of crime became a hot topic in US news. Maybe because many returning combat veterans had experienced POW camps. This isn't among the best of these. It's mainly of interest as a remake of one of the classics of the first wave of big house melodramas, Howard Hawks' The Criminal Code.

It worked better in 1931, in the wild, permissive precode days when it felt raw and strange. The realism no longer stacks up in more regulated times. And it makes exactly the same case for reform as it did in the age of prohibition. Broderick Crawford plays the liberal lawyer who becomes governor and attempts to introduce more humane strategies.

But why is his daughter (Dorothy Malone) involved in rehabilitating prisoners, as a sort of hobby? She develops an unlikely romance with Glenn Ford, incarcerated for punching a rich blowhard in a bar... who fell awkwardly and died. Familiarity eventually stifles the drama and improbable things happen to enable a good outcome for the unlucky con.

Henry Levin was a director who could make a small budget go a long way, but the elementary lighting betrays a rushed production and exposes studio sets which look phoney in an age of location shoots. It's never dull or sanctimonious, and the performances are sincere, but Brute Force (1947) had already moved the prison film onwards.

This absorbing film noir was intended to be mostly of interest for its demonstration of the new science of forensics, as a Harvard Professor and a Cape Cod detective solve the murder of a young woman whose remains are discovered in the isolated sand dunes of the peninsular. Only by then she's a skeleton and the police have no other clues.

Bruce Bennett plays the academic and Ricardo Montalban the resolute cop. And they are fine and the investigation is actually fascinating as they build their case from nothing. But... the real bonus is the performances of a couple of the support cast. Jan Sterling as the seen-it-all peroxide floozy who gets killed...

...And particularly Elsa Lanchester as her duplicitous landlady. There's an efficient (Oscar nominated) script and a compelling story, but she really rips it up and is genuinely very funny though her dialogue isn't at all. She's one of Hollywood's greatest character actors and she elevates all her scenes.

John Sturges directs a spare, exciting B thriller. But there is also a sense of sadness for the dead girl and the jeopardy of the innocent suspect (Marshall Thompson). The locations in Boston and rural Massachusetts broke new ground for film noir and John Alton's photography is typically expressive. Maybe the mystery is, why isn't this better known?

For many years, to English speakers, Jacques Tati /was/French comedy. Maybe it helped that speech played little part in his comic art. There is some dialogue but he explored visual and character based humour which feels rooted in the musical hall. This was his debut as writer/director/star and predates his creation of Monsieur Hulot...

He is François, the postman, an irascible and pompous yet forlorn middle aged public servant working in a French rural backwater forsaken by progress. The routines are episodic, centred on preparations for the annual fiesta, which mainly amounts to a merry-go-round and getting drunk. But the principal routine involves Tati trying to compete with US postal efficiencies.

And after a slow start, the comedy gains momentum and becomes lot of fun, with the postman's bicycle his indispensable prop; it gets a credit. Tati has his own unique style, which has been copied. But in terms of global comedy he crosses the expressiveness of Charlie Chaplin with the mid-life frustration of WC Fields. Some gags go back to the Lumière Brothers!

It's his lanky, jerky choreography that sets him apart. There's some subtext about modernisation which remained a key theme for Monsieur Hulot. The support cast does little but provoke the officious postal worker into spasms of buffoonish overreaction. Children may no longer sit still for this cheerful optimism; but it should hit the spot with nostalgics.

The title applies to the relationship of a potential Republican nomination (Spencer Tracy) with his wife (Katherine Hepburn). And of course, to the condition of the United States. The marriage is threatened by a predatory young press magnate (Angela Lansbury) while democracy is vulnerable to powerful vested interest.

It's an exposé of Washington realpolitik and the parasites and henchmen that attach themselves to the public relations roadshow. Tracy is persuasive in the lead. Hepburn has a support role though the film seems to suggest that her character is the more natural leader. Lansbury is wonderfully chilling as a manipulative agent of the far right.

This is Frank Capra's last masterpiece, though it is a departure; more naturalistic than with his great political fantasies of the '30s. Only at the end when the candidate confesses to his dishonesty on network tv and calls for labour and capital to pull together do we feel the old touch.

We witness a political machinery which promotes narcissism and rewards insincerity. This is a comedy in the sense that the people who occupy the screen talk with in constant flow of irony, which evades explicit meaning. The writing is sharp and witty, but the strength of the film is its believable cynicism. It feels true, and it feels it is still true.

Tough heist-noir released a few weeks after The Asphalt Jungle. So it was present at the dawn of the genre. This is the low budget version; punchy, modest but compelling. It was shot on the streets of Los Angeles with just a suggestion of the realistic police procedural style which was abundant in this period.

It clocks in at just over an hour and there isn't any let up. The cast is an ensemble of lesser B-picture stalwarts promoted to leads. William Talman is the vicious gang leader who pulls together a handful of deadbeats to carry out the heist. Naturally, it all falls apart due to dumb bad luck and the boss' uncompromising brutality. And the production code...

Then the focus shifts to the investigation with Charles McGraw as the cop who seeks to avenge the death of his partner in the robbery. Richard Fleischer commits a surprising amount of the short running time to Adele Jergens' routine as a stripper in a burlesque theatre. Though we only ever see the start of the act.

She's more interesting offstage as an astonishingly pragmatic femme fatale. This is a programmer which was only intended to be half of a double bill. It survives because Fleischer is a fine genre director and the character roles fit his unstarry cast like an old raincoat. And because the conventions of noir and the heist film are so resilient.

High quality, low budget 'Frisco noir which is now restored after many years of only being available in low grade duplicates. So maybe worth another look. There is a lesser director and minor stars, but they do fine work. The chief merit is the script which is stacked with knockout wisecracks, which Ann Sheridan in particular handles with assurance.

Her estranged husband (Ross Elliott) witnesses a gang killing and goes on the run pursued by a cop (Robert Keith) who wants him to testify. His wife needs to track him down to give him his meds and gradually learns he has a whole other life outside his marriage. She is joined by a crime reporter (Dennis O'Keefe) looking for a scoop...

But is the hardheaded spouse a bit too helpful to the tenacious newspaperman? Sheridan is excellent as the sassy-but-sour spitfire searching all over San Francisco, briefed only by what little she knows about the man she married. Director Norman Foster creates a great deal of suspense and a very dark, downbeat picture of the big city at night.

He tells the hooky plot with style, building to an exciting climax at the seafront amusement park. This is the best of his many support features and it's just possible to sense the tremor of his previous association with Orson Welles. And the link of his editor (Otto Ludwig) with Alfred Hitchcock in the montage. This is a thrilling B-noir classic.

This has one of the most celebrated openings in pictures as a long tracking shot of a small town accountant (Edmond O'Brien) delivers him to the desk of a police detective where he announces he wants to report a murder: 'my own'. He swallowed a slow acting poison on a bar crawl in San Francisco and solved the crime in his last few hours of life.

And how noir is that... an ordinary Joe who steps out of line just once, and he sleeps the big sleep. Sadly, after the tasty appetiser, there is uninspired filler as the victim narrates how he  figured out the unimaginative mystery. Though O'Brien as the desperate, despairing inquisitor gives the convoluted story the momentum of a charging bull.

There is one of the worst gimmick in pictures; during the wage slave's rare down time in the big city, every good looking dame triggers a kind of wolf-whistle on the soundtrack. Fortunately this soon goes away as his thoughts turn to his approaching death. There are some great locations in 'Frisco and LA, though the photography is only functional.

It's a very cheap looking B-picture, with a minor support cast, though we see Neville Brand's debut as the sadistic heavy he would play forever. And it's fun to watch Pamela Britton's Gloria Grahame impression as Ed's secretary/neglected love interest. This is more famous than it deserves to be, but still superior to the many remakes.

This now gets marketed as film noir though crime is not central to the story. It's one of the social issue melodramas which became popular in Hollywood in the '50s, usually about addiction. Here, the title tells all. Barbara Stanwyck starts gambling to research a news story, and pretty soon loses everything the postwar housewife desires.

It's a wild ride as curiosity leads to excitement and then addiction, lies and shame, all the way down to the street. Though over the two year flashback into her downfall, she does a whole lot of living after her husband abandons her in Mexico, including getting mixed up with a mob of racetrack gamblers. Until prostitution... and worse.

So it's a familiar saga, and there is plenty of editorialising as the dangers of addiction are laid bare. There are no surprises, though it's interesting to see the way people lost their shirt in Vegas back when it was still a shiny new racket. This being the postwar period there is some Freudian MacGuffin about a childhood trauma that makes the good girl go bad.

The photography is functional rather than expressive, and the score is inappropriately romantic. Robert Preston is suitably dull as the stalwart husband, though Stephen McNally engages as the oleaginous casino boss/crook. Stanwyck is too old, but is the source of most of the quality, and all of the fireworks, in a wholehearted, yet detailed performance.

Curious exposé of postwar 'baby rackets' in which single mothers were coerced into giving up their newborn by unlicensed operators. The offbeat theme is perhaps an indication that the documentary noir cycle of the late 1940s was beginning to run out of scandal and the studios seeking to refresh the formula. We don't get G-men staking out the crooks, but a droll newsman (Dennis O'Keefe).

And the predatory female (Marjorie Rambeau) is the leader of a criminal gang rather than a femme fatale, which must have troubled the production code. O'Keefe picks up a small town damsel in distress (Gale Storm) at the missing persons office while he's looking for a story. She's tracing her sister who turns up dead after giving birth, and her baby is missing.

Well, the mother was murdered and the baby was sold and the duo investigate. There's a feeling of a Val Lewton horror as the innocent visitor gets an education in the big city, except this is crime rather than the supernatural. But it's a ruthless gang and the scene where one of the heavies (Raymond Burr) gets tortured for going solo is still quite shocking.

The most satisfying performances are from the support cast, with Burr a typically insidious villain. O'Keefe is a bit creepy for a hero. The plot is flaky and the script a bit flat, but, as usual with postwar docu-noirs, the interior photography is stylish and the locations full of atmosphere. This may be ripped from long ago headlines, but it's an unusual, well crafted thriller.

By the end of the 1940s, the documentary style crime picture was dominated by poverty row, and low budget productions from bigger studios. This is a class above that and crucially hasn't dropped out of copyright. There's a significant star in Glenn Ford, and Burnett Guffey's photography is a standout.

And it boasts (arguably) the best director of B films in the studio era- Joe Lewis. Not only does this look great, but he also tells the story well and with realism. There is a very palpable sense of threat. It's adapted from a bestselling memoir by the US treasury agent who got notorious gangster Al Capone sent down for tax evasion.

Though the names are changed, and the period updated to (then) present day Chicago. In 1949, this may have been the most violent and homicidal criminal mob ever seen in pictures. Any witness who testifies is automatically murdered while the guilty live in fabulous wealth. We observe the strategies and dedication that put Scarface inside.

There's an ensemble cast of convincingly harassed T-Men led by Ford. And there is an impression of how the public is thoughtlessly complicit in the crime which then makes their lives hell. Which is still relevant. It's a decent gangster film from a decade when they went mostly out of fashion.

High concept action comedy which really is about watching a variety of (now) classic automobiles driving south through Mexico while the actors bounce smart-ass one liners off each other. Aside from being shot in B&W it could have been released last week. Except we have the pleasure of watching Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum deliver the wisecracks...

This wasn't greenlit to reunite the stars of classic noir Out of the Past (1947). Mitch was just out of jail for drug offences and a few Hollywood leading ladies backed out. Greer took the role and they make a wholly relishable double act as they chase a bundle of MacGuffin down the coastal highway. Pursued by William Bendix. In a '46 Buick.

It's just a car chase, with a nice twist at the climax. The action is well staged, though admittedly rudimentary compared with modern stunts. It's the laconic wit that drives the narrative, and the sassy rapport of the two stars. This was co-scripted by Daniel Mainwaring who wrote their previous vehicle. Nothing really matters, but they have chemistry to burn.

Some may find the picture of Mexico as a sleepy backwater a bit problematic, but the Chief of Police (Ramón Novarro) is a sharp operator, behind his ingratiating facade. Unfortunately, TCM went to the trouble of colourising the print, which is currently the only version available in the UK. Just so I have to turn down the colour to see it in its original specification...

Another low budget documentary noir released after WWII, this time about the US government's treasury department. So it begins with a five minute presentation on their many responsibilities followed by a fictional case which assures the public that crime doesn't pay. In this case, the counterfeit currency racket.

The storyline is interesting rather than original. Lloyd Bridges is inside for manufacturing plates used to make illegal banknotes. So who is responsible for printing the greenbacks coming back into circulation, which look like his work? When the convict is released to assist in the investigation, he absconds and plans to buy his way to Mexico with a phoney bankroll.

He and his compliant moll (Barbara Payton) are pursued by an undercover operative (John Hoyt). We see the usual stakeouts and wiretaps. There's nothing new here. In fact, this is very similar territory to the superior T-Men, directed by Anthony Mann a couple of years earlier, with the same documentary approach.

Which is also a B-picture, but with better production. The crucial difference is this one is out of copyright and only severely damaged duplicates are available. While T-Men has luminous noir photography by John Alton, this is a fuzzy blur. With poor sound. It still just about works as entertainment, but there is probably a better film under the blizzard.

Cumbersome dynasty saga which is a critics favourite but too weighted down by the laborious script. It's about the adaptation of a family of poor Sicilian immigrants to New York who achieve wealth but struggle to cast off the old ways. Like The Godfather. And it's a generational story about a patriarch who destroys his legacy by refusing to change.

To keep control, he sets his four sons against each other. Edward G. Robinson plays the father who grew up in poverty but made a fortune establishing a neighbourhood bank with idiosyncratic book keeping methods. After the 1933 banking act, the whole lot comes crashing down and his boys fight to take charge of the remains.

All the sons are like the father in different ways. His favourite is Richard Conte, a lawyer of dubious probity. There is much of the old country in all of them and insinuations of the mafia. The problem is the narrative focuses too little on the family's internecine power struggle and too much on Conte's on-off relationship with Susan Hayward.

She's always worth watching, but her role is inflated. There is lavish set decor and artistic noir photography, but the story lacks impetus. When a powerful climax looms into view, it is fluffed. Maybe due to the production code. It was remade as Broken Lance in 1954, and the themes of heritage and revenge work much better as a western.

Implausible psychological thriller which is really a schematic attempt to explain the criminal mind. It's possible that the three storeys of psychiatrist Lee J. Cobb's backwoods holiday retreat represent three levels of human consciousness! Anyway, William Holden's gang of psycho-killers escape from jail and hold his weekend party hostage.

Rather than fight back in an orgy of revenge... Cobb puts Holden on the couch and cures him of his demons! If only law and order was really like this! It must be the most liberal film ever made. The shrink sets aside the danger to his wife, son and visiting academics while he exhumes the childhood trauma that put the gun in the killer's hand.

The use of Freud to drive the plot of a thriller was ubiquitous in Hollywood after WWII, but this was based on a prewar play (by James Warwick) which had been filmed before in '39. Director Rudolph Maté was a five times Oscar nominated cinematographer and he makes it all look polished, even if there isn't enough budget for noir ambience.

It's great to see Cobb in the lead and he carries the film; Holden's role is too contrived to be convincing. It's more about the ideas, which promote a progressive approach to crime. Though the family of the murdered prison warden might demur. It's a short, suspenseful B-picture made with considerable sincerity.

Classy murder mystery adapted by Aldous Huxley from his own short story, and staged in the film noir style by Zoltan Korda. This is a beautiful production which generates considerable suspense. There's an abundance of superfluous conversation and humdrum philosophy but it hardly burdens the narrative flow.

Charles Boyer plays an idle, misogynistic aristocrat who can't get along with his disabled, middle aged wife (Rachel Kempson) but finds a more convivial alternative in his unspoiled 18 year old girlfriend (Ann Blyth). Who becomes pregnant! The husband is found guilty of the murder of his spouse and sentenced to death.

Though perhaps the real killer is his former protégée (Jessica Tandy) who presumes she is next in line to marry... Or the sickly wife's lesbian nurse (Mildred Natwick). Korda creates a great deal of tension with his cast of suspects. And it looks outstanding with the standard thunderstorm of gothic melodrama an absolute knockout.

Maybe it's a little highbrow and it failed to find an audience. There's lots of subtext. Presumably all the circumstantial evidence makes a case against the death penalty. But this is a twisty, high quality noir with fine performances; particularly from Tandy as the woman scorned. It's worth a look just for the stunning cloudburst.