Film Reviews by Steve

This signals the launch of Italian Neorealism, a method and style of political film making which would have an impact across the world. It's an unauthorised adaptation of James Cain's novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice which was sold to Hollywood in the early '30's but considered too hot to make under the Production Code.

A deadbeat drifter (Massimo Girotti) turns up at a shabby, desolate roadhouse run by an flabby middle aged chump (Juan de Landa) with a young, sexy wife (Clara Calamai) and a life insurance policy. And adultery turns to murder. It's not a thriller, and to an extent this is a love story between the two flawed, unscrupulous sociopaths.

Director Luchino Visconti was a Marxist (and an aristocrat) and most of all this is about spiritual corrosiveness of ignorance and poverty. It was made under unfavourable conditions with WWII going badly. The poor film stock and low budget renders a stark, distressed look, like a newsreel. Everything is sordid and authentic.

There are occasional longueurs. But this is a dirty, baleful cinematic landmark. The weak, impulsive protagonists are horrifying and Girotti and Calamai are intensely erotic and sleazy, reduced to their primal emotions; sex and greed. It makes the authorised MGM version (1946) feel like the work of the Children's Film Foundation.

Controversial pre-noir made in France during the occupation based on a real life scandal from the early '20s. A doctor in a provincial town is accused via anonymous letters of carrying out illegal abortions and having affairs with married women. Soon all the residents are persecuted by a barrage of poison pen correspondence.

The film aroused antagonism all across the political spectrum. Most obviously it reflects the collaboration with the enemy; the public who anonymously denounced their neighbours to the Gestapo. Oddly the Nazis didn't stop the release, maybe because it was bad for French morale with its negative critique of national spirit.

The film itself was a provocation, like the poison pen letters. Postwar, it was banned by someone or other for years. Henri-Georges Clouzot creates that shadowy pessimism which came to be associated with film noir; the big final twist is his signature. He got called the French Hitchcock though this hasn't quite the suspense that implies.

It's best as an allegory for France under the occupation and a showcase for some piquant ensemble acting, led by Pierre Fresnay as the doctor. There's a resonant impression of small town life where everyone knows everyone else's business, but has something of themselves to hide. Have to wonder though if Clouzot ever saw the '39 British thriller, Poison Pen...

Lillian Hellman's play was a big deal on Broadway in 1941 and won the New York Drama Critics' Award. By the the time it was adapted into a film, its message- that if the US didn't enter the war, then the war would come to the US- was redundent. America was mobilised. Still, this works as upmarket propaganda which makes a moral case for anti-fascism.

Paul Lukas repeats his starring role from the stage and he's convincing as a member of the German underground who seeks respite in Washington among the complacent family of his American wife. Bette Davis hardly looks like a refugee, but plays more of an activist than was usual back then for a woman in a Hollywood political film.

Herman Shumlin directed the play in New York but had no experience in cinema, as Davis was quick to remind him. He mainly just photographs the play. The production is too pristine- gowns by Orry-Kelly- but that's Hollywood. This is largely about the performances and Lukas gives easily the best of his career.

And he won the Oscar for best actor, despite the nomination of Humphrey Bogart for Casablanca! Both play men compelled to return to the fight. But most of all this is a record of Hellman's skill as a writer of persuasive, high quality dialogue. There were films which argued more passionately for America to commit to the war, but few as elegantly.

Long, cumbersome propaganda excercise inspired by the audacious assassination the previous year in Prague of Reinhard Heydrich- the author of the Final Solution- and the horrific Nazi retribution which followed. Aside from this outline, the rest is fiction as very little else was known to the public.

Brian Donlevy portrays the lone assassin, which indicates some really bizarre casting, including Walter Brennan as a Czech intellectual. German refugees in Hollywood play the Nazis, with Alexander Granach most effective as a Gestapo goon. It works well when styled as a thriller, with an exciting opening and a suspenseful climax.

And the set design is imposing. The problem is that Fritz Lang (with assistance from Bertolt Brecht) overburdens the film with propaganda and a lengthy tribute to the Resistance movement. Some of this is expected, but eventually the plot is abandoned to freedom songs and an excess of editorialising and rousing patriotic oration.

Astonishingly, the censors actually wouldn't pass the final cut because... the assassin going free contravened the Production Code! The story was also made the same year as Hitler's Madman, and many times since, with greater historical accuracy. This version needed a producer to counter the director's overindulgence. But Lang was the producer.

Knotty hardboiled whodunit which pulls together diverse strands from a few recent box office hits. Brian Donlevy is top billed as a crooked political heavy, much as he was in The Great McGinty in 1940. Alan Ladd- as Donlevy's smooth finagler- and Veronica Lake are reunited following This Gun for Hire earlier in '42.

And it's faithfully adapted from a Dashiell Hammett novel, a year after The Maltese Falcon. Though the context is more like a '30's gangster film. It had been made already back then with George Raft, which is where this convoluted exposé of civic corruption really belongs. There's a whiff of Prohibition.

The political process is ostentatiously run by hoods. There are no good guys so there's no one to cheer for, which may be why it doesn't quite emotionally engage. And there isn't the sadness of film noir. The best features are William Bendix's baroque portrayal of a sadistic thug. And the really stylish direction from Stuart Heisler.

He gives us a couple of astonishing, eye-popping set pieces. And once you have the measure of the serpentine intrigue, there is suspense. Ladd and Lake look good together and there's a lot of fast, sardonic dialogue. It's not in the class of The Maltese Falcon, but still a decent minor crime thriller with something to say about dirty US politics.

This was released the same year as Fires Were Started which is often listed among the great British films. Both are tributes to the bravery of the London fire services during the blitz. Humphrey Jennings' picture is a fake documentary which scripts actual firemen. Whereas this is an Ealing comedy-drama shot in a realistic style with actors.

It was Basil Dearden's first release as solo director and will never make any best-ever lists. There's obviously a pitiful budget and the script is particularly poor. Tommy Trinder's jokes are terrible, he can't act and his gobby-Cockney persona is a matter of personal taste. James Mason is mostly on the periphery of the action in an insubstantial role.

The rest of the cast are Ealing stalwarts who are more at home with the background tomfoolery. Which is mostly about Tommy's greyhound. William Hartnell stands out in a more dignified cameo as a survivor of the Spanish Civil War. All the situations are familiar, whether dramatic or comic.... plus the standard mustn't grumble stoicism.

Yet even despite itself, a palpable hum of realism gets into the circuit. Partly because of how skilfully Dearden cuts in newsreel footage from the blitz. And that impression common to many films made in the war years, that this horror is actually going on, somewhere. And because of the authentic heroism the story reflects.

Noël Coward's key decision as star/producer/writer/composer of this popular WWII naval flagwaver was to appoint David Lean to co-direct. Both made their debut in that role. Lean took control of the camera with Coward left in charge of the actors. And this is what accounts for the huge divergence of quality on the screen.

Visually this is a superb effort and an audacious beginning for Lean as one of cinema's most celebrated film makers. He started as an editor and his montages of the fighting men on the warship are exceptional and bring a touch of poetry to the documentary realism. However, everything Coward contributes is a disaster.

A cast of British national treasures deliver their worst ever screen performances. His script portrays the crew as idiots; the captain (Coward) has to tell his crew to swim to a lifeboat, rather than obediently drown! Kudos to Kay Walsh who wrestles the cloth eared dialogue best and breathes life into her 2D archetype.

The inflexible, inert Coward is worst of all. It was a big hit in the the US, but surely the ludicrously upper class skipper on leave with his posh family must have been like watching aliens. Once it represented a national stoicism in the face of enormous peril; a pulling together. But now, it feels too much to endure.

Despite the post-millennial popularity of age swap comedies which usually squeeze laughs out of inappropriate romantic scenarios, it's a solid bet that this screwball sitcom isn't going to get remade by modern day Hollywood. It stars Ginger Rogers as a small town girl who has seen enough of the toxic male of the big bad city and decides to go home.

She hasn't enough money for a train ticket and so dresses as a 12 year old girl to qualify for half fare. Then falls in love with an army officer (Ray Milland) with bad eyesight. When taken back to his cadet school, the adult imposter becomes the target of all the schoolboy lotharios.

Though arguably the premise lacks judgement, it is delivered in good faith. There's none of Billy Wilder's trademark cynicism. Indeed, the Wilder/Brackett screenplay is critical of the sexual harassment it assumes is the female burden. There is a plenty of comic craft with some big laughs, and satirical points made too. Plus the pro-war propaganda.

A 31 year old Ginger Rogers could more easily pass for middle aged than pre-adolescent... but it would be creepy otherwise. Ray Milland is likably befuddled in a role quite obviously written for Cary Grant. Diana Lynn is fun as a teenage brainiac. Wilder's debut was a big hit, though maybe it hasn't lasted as well as his many other classics.

Exciting espionage thriller which is the first of four features to co-star Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. He actually gets an introducing credit, but plays the lead role of a hired gun paid off with hot money after he executes a contract for a big chemical firm. So the double crossed killer goes in search of revenge in high places.

As the shady corporation is working for the Japanese in WWII, there is opportunity for pro-US propaganda. But this is best as a pre-noir crime drama. Ladd's performance as the executioner is chilling and a prototype for the emotionally numb screen hit man. With that personal kink that almost makes him sympathetic.

The plot is no more plausible than the Graham Greene novel, but it does share a little of its psychological complexity and is well cast, with Tully Marshall extraordinarily disturbing as the frail leader of the fifth columnists. Ladd and Lake share an instant rapport which eclipses top billed Robert Preston as the cop. Despite the gunman being pretty psycho...

The Los Angeles locations bring a touch of realism, and John Seitz (who shot Double Indemnity) gives the interiors a satisfying noir look. Frank Tuttle's direction is assured rather than inspired, but he keeps the diffuse narrative coherent enough; this is a spy thriller with musical numbers! And a sort of a wannabe Hitchcock thriller.

A decade after the golden age of Universal horror, the studio added a new monster to its menagerie. The wolf man wasn't adopted from classic European literature like Dracula and Frankenstein, but directly from mythology. The script by Curt Siodmak invents most of the werewolf folklore we now know.

The estate of RL Stevenson may have wondered if this story about the transformation from gentleman into beast infringed the copyright of Jekyll and Hyde. A comparison which betrays a weakness; this doesn't have the resonance of classic horror. Siodmak claimed he drew on the mass hypnosis the public in Nazi Germany, but it isn't obvious.

The prominent subtext is sexual, with the metamorphosis a kind of puberty. Cat People did something similar a year later, but much better. This is one for the kids. The Universal horrors of the early '30s were made by quality directors. George Waggner usually shot obscure B pictures and he creates no great moments of suspense.

Lon Chaney elicits little pathos in the title role, which is partly Waggner's fault. The really intriguing support cast has little to do. Despite the many hours spent sticking yak hair to the star, this isn't one of makeup legend Jack Pierce's best monster creations either. But what this lacks most crucially, is a decent horror director.

This 1931 version of RL Stevenson's classic novel is definitive for three main reasons; the amazing, innovative transformation of Jekyll into Hyde; its fabulously salacious pre-code content; and for the astonishing camera movement and POV tracking shots. That Rouben Mamoulian manages such fluidity in the era of camera booths is a miracle.

Credit for the above should be extended to cinematographer Karl Struss. They create incredible close ups and impressionistic images that mirror the hero's duality. There is also a wonderfully atmospheric pictorial of Victorian London, all candle and lamplit shadows and cobbled streets in the rain.

Fredric March deservedly won an Oscar for his split performance, but Miriam Hopkins steals the film as the Cockney sex worker living in terror of Hyde's brutality. Stevenson wrote a story about the ego versus the id, but it was Paramount that added the sexual motifs that still feel transgressive. It is a fetishistic film. The Hays office cut a lot of this for its reissue.

It presents a paradox: that Victorian sexual prohibition drove men to the services of prostitutes; but without these restrictions, man's animalistic nature is capable of terrible depravity. Eventually we see Jekyll as Hyde's mask, sanctimoniously obscuring his real nature and using it to mediate with a hypocritical society. It is one of the most brilliant films of precode Hollywood.

This is more a remake of Rouben Mamoulian's definitive 1931 version than a new interpretation of RL Stevenson's story. It keeps the same characters and narrative. And there are a few positives; it is a lavish MGM production with some of their top ranked stars. But it is sabotaged by one crucial factor.

And that's the implementation in 1934 of the Production Code, which strips out everything interesting from the Paramount classic. Victor Fleming gives us a longer film which is far less complex. This time, the duality is good and evil rather than the id and the ego. It's a Christian reading which omits all the hypocrisy of Victorian morality.

It sidelines the horror to give us a weirdly soporific melodrama. The transformation scenes are fair, but again, inferior to '31. Spencer Tracy is miscast in either role: he elicits no pity as Jekyll or menace as Hyde. Lana Turner deserves sympathy for a part which asks absolutely nothing, except to be decorative.

Only Ingrid Bergman brings any passion in a hyper-emotional performance as the courtesan brutalised by Hyde. She squeezes a little drama out of her sanitised exchanges with Tracy. The support cast is unusually irritating, especially Jekyll's obsequious butler! Stevenson's premise is immortal but it only just survives Hollywood censorship.

Atmospheric crime thriller which is parked right on the intersection between the '30s Manhattan murder caper, and the incoming film noir movement of the '40s. There is a freshness to the cast with emerging stars in Victor Mature and Carole Landis, and Betty Grable looking for a new direction away from the musical.

That never actually paid off as she became such an icon in WWII that she got typecast as a good girl in a swimsuit. And we see the famous legs. She plays the sensible sister of a murdered showbiz wannabe (Landis), whose slick agent (Mature) has to prove his innocence. Laird Cregar dominates though as the... Well, as a tough cop!

H.Bruce Humberstone was just genre director of B films and he doesn't create much suspense and the pace is sluggish. However, he gives it a classic expressionist look and its a fine showcase for the young leads. Landis shines as the working girl snuffed out in her quest for the big time. Cult favourite Elisha Cook Jr. features as the... Well, a hotel clerk!

There are the motifs from earlier screwball mysteries with the New York nightspots and cocktails and lamé gowns. And sassy innuendo. And there's a premonition of noir with the flashbacks and darkness and pessimism. And Cregar's shadowy menace. It's an interesting genre film which suffers slightly for the lack of a A-list director.

By '41, Hollywood was making films about the threat of Nazis in Germany. But no director was more alert to the menace of fascism at home than Frank Capra. Pressure groups pushed to enter the war on the side of Hitler and Mussolini, with the public made receptive by the depression. He touched on this in '39, with Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

This time, Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin, confront the danger of authoritarianism more directly. An unemployed deadbeat (Gary Cooper) is co-opted by a tabloid newshound (Barbara Stanwyck) as an authentic voice of the American people. But both are exploited by a megalomaniacal industrialist/media mogul (Edward Arnold).

And he intends to be the iron hand he claims the masses need. The film has stature because of its historical significance, but it is flawed. The script is longwinded and Capra directs without subtlety. The veneer of comedy is contrived. Cooper is fine, but Stanwyck's histrionics don't distract from implausible plot complications.

Five different endings were shot, which betrays its lack of clarity, yet censorship prevented the only one that would have worked. Sentimentality is a feature of Capra's style, but here it just dilutes the medicine. He has to leave his audience with hope; but fascism would be defeated with tanks and blood, not John Doe clubs.

By 1941, the Hollywood studios were ready to make anti-Nazi A pictures. So who better to direct than Fritz Lang, who fled Germany in '33 after being offered the role of head of film production by Joseph Goebbels? And this actually leaves the impression of one of his Dr. Mabuse series, with its spies and paranoia and expressionism.

The American censors complained the Nazis were portrayed too negatively and demanded changes! It is loosely based on a contemporary bestseller by Geoffrey Household about an English big game hunter who travels to pre-war Europe to stalk a psychopathic dictator, but is discovered and pursued back to London.

The novel doesn't name the target, but it's Adolf Hitler on screen. Walter Pidgeon is fine as the would-be assassin, though outclassed by George Sanders as his aristocratic adversary and John Carradine as a sinister Nazi agent. Then Joan Bennett fills the centre of the film with sweet marshmallow as a cockney sex worker!

She falls for the fugitive who just feels paternal towards her. Which isn't original or realistic and Bennett's accent is comical. It's just padding. Yet, she's a heartbreaker and the role revitalised her career. This is an interesting chase thriller with luminous noir photography, which makes for effective pro-British propaganda.