Film Reviews by Steve

Tough psychological western set around the time when the civilising of the west was threatening to end of the age of the outlaw. After many years of peaceful living, an ex-gunfighter (Gary Cooper) by chance runs into his ruthless former gang. He gets sucked into a bank job, while he tries to devise a plan to to extricate himself and co-travelling chanteuse (Julie London).

When the bandits stage the heist they discover the bank is now in a ghost town. They leave a few of their own bodies behind. It is an apt location for their futile shoot out. They are the phantoms of the old west, the anachronistic spirits of men who have outlived their ascendency with the arrival of law and order.

Cooper is 20 years too old, even for a reformed gunfighter. He looks unwell. Consequently Lee J.Cobb is buried under a heap of cosmetics in order to play his uncle. Julie London is for long stretches mostly employed as decoration. But they all still deliver memorable performances.

This is a bleak, brooding western. The family of outlaws are all vicious grotesques. There's some humour early on, but this becomes a bitter, violent experience, with an authentic look. Perhaps it was the film's brutality which meant it didn't find an audience at the time, but it has subsequently become a critics' favourite.

This is a cynical, tough war film which deals with the complex dynamic of soldiers fighting within a defective hierarchy. The Lieutenant (Jack Palance) is a classic square jawed GI, but his bravery is undermined during every crisis by his incompetent, cowardly Captain (Eddie Albert). 

The Captain is kept in position by the Lieutenant-Colonel (Lee Marvin) who seeks to gain politically from his stooge's family after the war. But how many casualties will he allow before he intervenes? This is a dystopian vision of the US infantry in the Battle of the Bulge which portrays the officers as a privileged elite, who benefit from the same preferment they expect back home.

Its weakness is that Palance is too much of a hero and Albert too much of a gutless zero, which makes the film schematic and less realistic. The sets are basic, though Robert Aldrich finds striking imagery among the ruins. There's plenty of talk, but with good action too. The usual running commentary of pessimistic infantry wit is punchy and funny. And there is nerve-shredding suspense...

Palance leads a dozen lightly armed soldiers into a heavily fortified village held by hundreds of Germans, with tanks. His superior doesn't even man the radio.  The Lieutenant's isolation and abandonment is excruciating. This was ahead of its time. Its motifs of disillusionment and mercenary individualism would become more typical in the war films of the '60s.

Motor racing melodrama about a driver who wins on the track but can't control his life when he's not behind the wheel. The racer falls in love with a regular girl but his obsessive compulsion to succeed shunts her off into the arms of a competing driver. Which sounds a lot like a pulpy airport novel.

The couple is played by the real life married team of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and they are so convincing that it feels a little voyeuristic watching them together. When Newman catches a ruggedly handsome circuit star (Robert Wagner) in bed with Woodward it feels suddenly, shockingly transgressive!

This works as a period piece, with the cocktail hour jazz of Dave Grusin's soundtrack, the ostentatious focus-pulls, the racetrack heat-haze rising up through the Panavision, and even the sad, isolated characters. The intense, introverted loner is such an archetype it feels like an omission that Newman doesn't return home to a fridge containing just a carton of rancid milk, and a hungry cat.

This is from the golden age of the motor racing film. The director doesn't capture the excitement on the track too well, but the drama away from the circuit is interesting. Newman is as charismatic as ever. He and Woodward give quite complex performances as older, experienced people who seem destined to be alone.

A cold war film about an error in the entrenched missile systems of USA and the Soviet Union which triggers a nuclear exchange. A computer malfunction fails to step down a resolved warning on America's satellite surveillance, releasing warheads which no human is able to recall. Still a relevant scenario.

Critics feel that this bombed at the box office because Dr. Strangelove was released earlier the same year and satirised a plot that Fail-Safe played for real. But it may also be because Sidney Lumet's film is quite cerebral and loaded with theory. Every aspect of the ethics and efficiency of the nuclear stand-off is discussed. Walter Matthau's character even delivers a lecture!

Though the themes are complex, they are interesting and accessible. And once the missiles are in transit to Moscow this becomes nerve wracking as the President (Henry Fonda) ironically tries to help the Soviets shoot down American bombers. And then tragic as he negotiates a horrifying recompense for American nukes and the loss of five million lives.

There is no action but lots of tension. Fonda was born to play the US President, and pre-stardom Matthau is convincingly malevolent as a war games consultant who recommends exploiting the accident to start a conflict to end Soviet communism. It seeks to educate, but is also a suspenseful encounter with the ultimate catastrophe.

Anti-war film set in the '50-'53 conflict in Korea which presents an astonishingly unflattering view of the US military. Sadly the clarity of the message was compromised by a loss of nerve in post production and by its star/producer Gregory Peck's refusal to portray his character as the less than heroic figure that was written.

Peck plays an officer commanded to lead three platoons to reclaim a stronghold from the Chinese army. The terrain has no strategic value, and the war is coming to a close with the politicians negotiating a treaty, but both sides feel that the territory changing hands would influence the balance of the ceasefire.

We see the US Government and military brass trading American lives for diplomatic leverage. It presents these leaders as not only indifferent to casualties, but incompetent. The soldiers are poorly trained and unmotivated. No one can explain the mission. Strategy is outdated, communications don't work and logistics are appalling. Out of 132 men, around a dozen survive.

There is an impression of what might have been. Peck took the film off Lewis Milestone and re-edited it, and the protest was muted. But even so, this condemnation of the American army was at least a decade ahead of its time. It's portrayal of events that are so baffling they actually feel crazy, anticipates the more satirical war films of the '60s.

This saga of the ancient Roman world remains relevant, unlike many contemporary historical epics, because its themes are timeless and universal. Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) was a slave and gladiator who went to war with Rome to gain the freedom of his class. When he rouses his army before the battle he is obviously also speaking to the emerging US civil rights movement.

And Dalton Trumbo's brilliant script references the McCarthy witch-hunt of the '50s. Trumbo was one of the Hollywood Ten who refused to co-operate with HUAC. The famous scene when the Roman general (Laurence Olivier) commands the survivors of the uprising to identify Spartacus and they all respond "I am Spartacus" must have gone straight to the heart of US audiences.

Douglas' performance is immense. He is matched by Olivier who evokes decadent cruelty without overacting or a flicker of camp. The whole cast is excellent. Peter Ustinov steals his scenes as an unctuous, mercenary slave merchant. Alex North's innovative score does a lot of the heavy lifting. The Roman world feels plausible, whether the intimate interiors or the huge hillside battle scene.

It's a grand spectacle which demonstrates that political miracles are possible. And it continues to inspire. This is the best film of its genre, not because of the epic scale but because of its powerful evocation of humanity and brotherhood. And Douglas' production broke the stranglehold of HUAC on American cinema, which may even be the film's greatest legacy.

Western melodrama leading up to the famous shootout in Tombstone in 1881 works best as an odd couple buddy movie between Burt Lancaster (Wyatt Earp) and Kirk Douglas (Doc Holliday). Earp saves Doc's life so Holliday trails the lawman across the famous towns of the old west to pay off his debt.

This is a study of the western gunfighters, so a few famous hot shots turn up who weren't really present. It concludes with Wyatt delivering a lengthy homily about the perils of the gunfighting life to one of the Clantons (Dennis Hopper). Who is shot anyway. The concluding face-off is excellent, but there's quite a lot of discursive chat in getting there.

It looks more like a western of the '60s. The palette of matt creams, browns and greens is muted compared with the more fluorescent Technicolor of the '50s. And Burt needs a shave at times and the impressive set of Tombstone feels relatively realistic. It's procedural even though the history is pure fantasy.

This is an urban western, but when the stars do leave town, the blue Vistavision sky is magnificent. Besides the action, there is romance and a few comical touches. Most of its big box office clout is down to the rangy leads. Burt and Kirk are a powerhouse combination as the legendary lawmen. 

Entertaining comedy thriller set in what seems to be '40s England, but is more identifiable as a Hollywood fantasy London of cobbled streets and gaslight. A wisecracking American taxi dancer (Lucille Ball) gets entangled in a Scotland Yard investigation into a serial killer who contacts his victims through personal columns, while taunting the Inspector (Charles Coburn) with provocative verses.

So Lucy is recruited by the cops to meet up with oddball lonely hearts. Ball may lack the glamour her character is assumed to possess, but she's fine at this broad comedy. As she closes in on her dangerous quarry, the film actually becomes effectively suspenseful. Douglas Sirk makes an exciting whodunit with an attractive expressionist look, even if the plot gets a little crazy.

There's a wonderful cast of British expats in support, with George Zucco fun in a rare comedy role. Poor old Boris Karloff plays a whispering nutcase who meets Lucille in order to feature her in the fantasy fashion show he intends to stage in his deranged imagination. George Sanders contributes his usual droll, cynical libertine to good effect.

When Sanders gets banged up in error, it's possible to wonder if Lured is making a modest point about the unreliability of circumstantial evidence. But it never gets that serious. This isn't one of Sirk's classic melodramas, but it is the sort of hugely enjoyable froth that the major studios of the golden age produced so reliably.

This is a minor studio production which has become a B film legend. Nina Foch takes a job as a secretary to a family of nutcases who abduct her and lock her up on a remote estate in Cornwall (shot in California). They need her to stand in for the woman who was murdered by her psychopathic husband (George Macready).

They parade their prisoner as the dead wife for the benefit of local witnesses, claiming her protests are part of her psychosis. OK, it's a crazy story, though no more than many other golden age mysteries. It succeeds because director Joe Lewis stages it so well. No screen time is wasted, and there's a brilliant noir house-of-shadows.

Foch is plausible in the difficult title role, but the crazy kidnappers make a bigger impression. May Whitty is the eccentric but ruthlessly pragmatic mother of the simple-minded Macready. He is splendidly menacing as the killer who relishes their plans for the stand-in, while also enjoying having her as his wife, for a while.

It is set in England where, in the minds of Hollywood producers, these things happen. Like Gaslight. Critics like to flag up the doomed males of film noir as a key postwar motif, exploited by predatory females. But there are many women like Julia too; lonely, vulnerable and manipulated. This is among the most typical and successful of these woman-in-peril films.

Spy melodrama from a story by Eric Ambler, with plot points which anticipate Graham Greene's The Third Man. Peter Lorre is a Dutch writer visiting Istanbul who hears of a ruthless, inscrutable agent for hire called Dimitrios, who has washed up in the Bosphorus with a fatal stab wound, and decides to research his past for a possible novel. 

This proves hazardous because the trail leads to Dimitrios himself (Zachary Scott), who isn't as dead as he is supposed to be. There's an episodic plot made up of flashbacks to international scandals from which the agent provocateur vanishes without capture.  Ultimately, Lorre allies with Sidney Greenstreet, one of Dimitrios' former gang of murderers, assassins and spies. 

Lorre and Greenstreet made eight films together in the five years after The Maltese Falcon. And they are always good value. Zachary Scott makes his debut in the title role and he is ideal as the outwardly charming, inwardly unscrupulous conspirator, gaming the volatile capitals of the Balkans between the wars.

Hollywood routinely used this kind of foreign intrigue for their many serials. This is a class above that. There's a more coherent story. Production values are decent for a moderately budgeted ensemble thriller with no big stars. And the art direction and photography are full of shadowy atmosphere.

This tough Warner Brothers road film takes the premise of the Bette Davis vehicle Bordertown and welds it onto the chassis of AI Bezzerides' pulp novel, The Long Haul. George Raft and a subdued Humphrey Bogart play wildcat truck drivers forever getting gypped by the  corrupt buyers.

Ann Sheridan contributes the sexy, snappy backchat that's compulsory for a waitress in a diner in a Hollywood film. The sassy hash-slinger wins Raft's attention away from Ida Lupino, the wife of the wealthy company boss who she's looking to turn into an insurance payout. The last third of the film is stolen wholesale by Lupino as the deadly femme fatale.

She is willing to destroy herself to take Raft down with her. Her disintegration in the witness box is a stunning tour de force. Alan Hale is excellent as the unlucky husband. It's similar to Jules Dassin's noir classic Thieves Highway (1949), also from a Bezzerides story. But it swerves around the politics.

This just a haulage melodrama, loaded with atmosphere and interesting social history. Raoul Walsh keeps the action always rolling forwards. The laconic dialogue is classic Warners. There's a weary, gloomy pessimism on board which gives this the haunting despair of film noir, though a few years short of the noir big bang.

One of the great Hollywood films. Credit is due to Dashiell Hammett's wonderful novel, faithfully adapted by debut director John Huston. The story and dialogue is all Hammett. He was a former Pinkerton Agent who knew what he was writing about. In Sam Spade, he gave us cinema's first authentic PI. And a breakthrough role for Humphrey Bogart.

The plot is actually quite theatrical, with the elaborate McGuffin of the Knight Templars' falcon, and the band of colourful crooks in pursuit. That the three male conspirers are obviously gay, is a remarkable detail, given the censorship of the period. It's a caper film, but with the darker shading of the emerging film noir style.

The stars are phenomenal, especially Bogart as the fast talking, morally ambiguous antihero. Mary Astor as the deliciously duplicitous femme fatale, is a noir legend. Elisha Cook and Peter Lorre are adorable as the gaudy henchmen. But trumped by Sidney Greenstreet as their huge, loquacious, dangerous boss.

It's an exciting thriller, with its cast of totally untrustworthy criminals, and a hero you are never sure of. The photography is artistic. The script is full of memorable, quotable dialogue, particularly in the long, thrilling final scene. This was a huge leap forward for the Hollywood crime film, and it seems to keep getting better.

The last of the '30s Warner Brothers gangster films looks back on the organised crime of the '20s with nostalgia. There's a declamatory newsreel style narration which takes us from the armistice to the repeal of prohibition. James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart play doughboys who turn to bootlegging to get rich during the depression. Priscilla Lane sings hits from the period.

Because this era is being filed away into history rather than the present threat it was in the early '30s, Raoul Walsh is allowed to be relatively frank about how the gangs made their money, and spent it. We see the speakeasies, the fashions, the machine guns and sedans. Real people from the period are featured, and infamous news stories are re-enacted.

Walsh keeps the story moving forwards and the stars are excellent. Cagney and Bogart repeat their good gangster/bad gangster dynamic from Angels With Dirty Faces. It feels like Bogie has now arrived as an actor and is just waiting for a better role than Warners' were willing to give him. But he still dies a quivering coward on the end of Jimmy's shooter.

The usual bases of Warners' social realist mob pictures are covered. There is a progressive ethic which condemns prohibition and supports Roosevelt's new deal. Aside from the tough guys, the nostalgia is quite sentimental. WWII ended the gangster film's first classic era, and it's great to see Cagney still at his peak, as the genre he dominates, fades to black.

Neorealist prison drama shot at Fulsom State Penitentiary, which used inmates as extras. One of the leads, Leo Gordon, had served five years in San Quentin for armed robbery! The title covers the plot pretty well but the action is a vehicle for social protest. While there is balance, this is a liberal film which argues for the kind of progressive changes usually resisted by the tax payer.

Producer Walter Wanger had just served time for shooting his wife's lover and wanted to make an exposé of his experiences. We witness the systemic thuggery which leads to the (costly) violence and vandalism which a more enlightened approach might avoid. The mentally ill, the sex offenders, the first timers and the lifers are all kettled under the cudgel of the demoralised staff.

There was a glut of films in the decade after WWII in response to news reports about prison riots. There is a lot of editorialising, but this is easily the most realistic. Its cast looks authentic even if at times the cons are too articulate. Neville Brand and Gordon are convincing as the leaders of the unrest, with contrasting methods.

Gordon is a psycho who just wants to waste the screws from the start. Brand,  who is usually cast as a thug, actually has a strategy! This was Don Siegel's breakthrough as a director. It is a work of procedural social realism, modelled on a real prison riot, and it still feels relevant.

Lengthy courtroom drama based on a real life criminal trial which scrutinises the condition of the US legal system. It was adapted from a novel by a defence attorney based on one of his cases. And if that sounds like homework, it really isn't. This is an absorbing film made with a light touch by Otto Preminger with a fine jazz score by Duke Ellington.

It is shot around coastal Michigan where the actual events took place. An unambitious small town lawyer (James Stewart), defends an army lieutenant (Ben Gazzara) who shot the man who raped his flirtatious wife (Lee Remick). The soldier is charged with murder and claims temporary insanity.

The story is fascinatingly ambiguous and it is impossible to be sure, even by the end, what really happened. Which is true for the jury who must reach a verdict. The audience wants the lawyer to win the case as we see through his eyes, and we like his sassy secretary (Eve Arden) and the alcoholic gumshoe seeking redemption (Arthur O'Connell). So we are partial.

The point is that everyone involved is influenced by expectation, personal interest and past experience. Justice is at the whim of the dark arts of the lawyers. It's 160m of exposition voiced by static actors mostly framed within a single interior, the courthouse. The superb cast really brings this to life. This is Preminger's masterpiece.