Film Reviews by Steve

Violent action thriller set on the bayou of southeast Georgia. It's a confrontation between a progressive lawyer (Gregory Peck) and the vicious thug (Robert Mitchum) who was sent down by his evidence. The hoodlum strolls into town straight from prison to destroy the family of his nemesis. 

The noirs of the 40s/50s were liberal films, but this is an update of a conservative frontier western. The law won't help. Legislation protects the criminal. The women can't protect themselves. A killer can't be reasoned with. He isn't a psycho because of the failure of urban planning projects. He's just a human devil and a man must defend his family with the means available.

Which is ultimately a handgun. This is remembered for Mitchum's performance as the repulsive, inexorable head case. He spends the last part of the film bare chested. We believe completely in his brawny depravity. The men hired to beat him up scatter in horror. His menace is muscular, but also also malevolently psychological.

J.Lee Thompson was inspired by Alfred Hitchcock, but this leans more on Mitchum's malign charisma than techniques of suspense. Though he does have a score by Bernard Herrmann! By '62, the dogs of censorship were being called off. The threat of rape and paedophilia are explicit. Today, thrillers about a father protecting the domestic bubble from omnipotent malice are everywhere.

Ultra-realistic and harrowing adaptation of Nigel Balchin's novel which explores the mental traumas of research and development staff during WWII. The boffins. David Farrar plays a bomb specialist who leads a group of scientists working in munitions. They are a small department which has to fight for resources and status.

It's an entirely masculine environment. And all the men live with extreme stress. Farrar lost a foot in an explosion, and is in a constant struggle with the whisky that brings him oblivion, while being called out to investigate the German trick bomb which has been killing his colleagues.

The men suppress their emotions and have no way of communicating their fears. Farrer needs to determine the mental state of one of his team, but is only able to hold a short discussion on detonators. There is sense that there is no way of knowing how broken they are because their customs are entirely built on not showing how they feel.

This must be Farrar's best performance. Kathleen Byron is his girlfriend, and unofficial therapist. Her emotional aura has an uncanny mystical strength. While the story is procedural and realistic, the visual style is expressionistic. This might have seemed overwrought, if Powell and Pressburger hadn't created such a convincing hell.

Made by Warner Brothers, the home of the prison film, this is the best women-in-prison picture ever made! The story is familiar: a naive and exploitable first offender (Eleanor Parker) arrives at the Big House as a 19 years old. She is consumed by fear, but among the crazy lifers, the mentally sick and the dumb victims, she transforms into a tough convict. A survivor.

It has a liberal perspective which asserts that punishment further harms these luckless dupes and a progressive approach would be more effective. But there is no money for therapists and teachers. It creates a powerful impression of the institution: the brutal hierarchy, the crooked officers, the insensitive parole board.

Eleanor Parker is phenomenal as the inexperienced girl who goes into prison pregnant and is forced to give up her baby by law. She breaks down and rebuilds herself in a new shell, like the more resilient cons. Hope Emerson is formidable as the butch screw who runs the wing. Jan Sterling excels as an uneducated sex worker.

The slang is dated, but this is a credible drama which was intelligently researched (by screenwriter Virginia Kellogg). Yes, there's a shower scene, but this is no exploitation flick! Though surely it invented some of the genre cliches. It's so powerful because of the pitiful and futile realities of the penal system, and Parker's heartbreaking performance.

This was Elizabeth Taylor's first dramatic role as a grown-up actor. She was 17 and while she doesn't have the gravity to match Montgomery Clift, their star power is a big part of the film's legend. Partly because they look so magnificent. Taylor's pristine beauty made her perfect casting as the rich dreamgirl that Monty's penniless outsider aspires to marry.

Clift is a poor relation who gets a job on the shop floor of his wealthy uncle's factory. The money that he aspires to is beyond his reach, so he dates a girl from the production line (Shelley Winters) and gets her pregnant... just as it appears a rich bombshell (Taylor) is in love with him. So, he can stand by his rainy day girl...

...Or he could get rid of her in a boating accident and marry the wealthy, lovely debutante... There's a lot of film noir in the story, but George Stevens' film seems to consciously steer away from the laws of noir. This is a prestigious studio production with A list stars and is framed as straight drama. Unfortunately this approach is sometimes ponderous.

It was made at an unfortunate time: censorship prohibited much of the impiety in Theodore Dreiser's great American novel, and McCarthyism kicked its critique of capitalism into touch. It won six Oscars, but no longer feels like a landmark. What remains is a signature performance from Clift and a star making role for Taylor, and they do make screen magic together.

 This is one of those few films which is more loved than merely liked or appreciated. Much of that affection is courtesy of Audrey Hepburn's charming, luminous performance in her Hollywood debut. She stars as a fashionable princess constantly pursued by the media and driven crazy by the confines of public life.

 For 24 hours she goes missing in Rome and has an adventure with a reporter (Gregory Peck), and they flirt. He intends selling his story. Eddie Albert is the paparazzo who secretly takes the pictures. Of course, by the end, the newshound is in love with her as much as the audience, and he spikes the scoop.

Blacklisted Dalton Trumbo co-wrote the chic script without credit (with John Dighton). While it deals in innuendo, this is playful and witty. It's the same story as It Happened One Night, but the location work in a touristic Rome adds so much magic to the gorgeous romance. It's a masquerade, with neither of the participants owning their true identity until the finish.

It grows sentimental in the last third, but by then we are utterly under its spell. This frosting of emotion actually makes the film better. It is a stylish fairytale which sells us a ravishing impression of Roman life; with its fashion, and the ancient streets full of vespas. Of la dolce vita staged against the backdrop of the city's staggering history.

Billy Wilder revives the screwball comedy, about 20 years after its golden age. As was typical of his mentor Ernst Lubitsch, the director returns to Europe for his story, a '30s French farce called Fanfare d'Amour, and transplants it to the US, to the Chicago of the jazz age and prohibition.

Two musician pals (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) witness a gangland hit and go on the run in drag as part of a female swing group, fronted by Marilyn Monroe.  Screwball was usually about boy meets girl. Here, the two men drive the narrative. What we now call a bromance...

But their relationship complicated by the predicament that they are in the guise two female jazz musicians and travelling with a party hard girl band. Like most screwball comedy, it is a masquerade; characters pretending to be something they are not. The exception is Monroe, who doesn't know that Curtis is a man, so candidly exposes her heart.

Marilyn was famously impossible on set, but she delivers a performance (and a couple of good vocals), not just dumb blonde schtick. Lemmon and Curtis are inspired. On the threshold of the '60s, Lemmon succeeds Cary Grant as the great comedy star of his era. This is a fabulous spectacle of comic imagination. 

Billy Wilder's bleakest comedy is a very modern tale of urban loneliness and corporate bullying, which features a desolate suicide attempt. There is wit, but this is usually pessimistic. There are plot devises with the gloomy fatalism of a Russian novel... The mood is of overwhelming sadness, with a sexual frankness unusual for its time.

Sometimes this only feels like comedy at all because of the extraordinary performances of Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, whose charm manages to sugar the bitter themes, and obscure their own characters' deep flaws. Though it looks gorgeous, with the gleaming widescreen b&w photography, and stunning set designs.

Lemmon plays the go-ahead corporate wannabe seeking to jump the executive ladder by permitting his bosses to use his apartment to have sex with their female employees without their wives knowing. He also aspires after the lift operator (MacLaine) who is sexually exploited by the CEO (a rather sinister Fred MacMurray).

 Even the relief from this tragic triangle is heartbreaking; an encounter which the inebriated company yes-man has on Christmas Eve with a lonely, ditzy barfly cruising for a one night stand, sensationally played by Hope Holiday. Ultimately, Lemmon learns how to be a mensch. But without the constant, barely audible note of comedy, this would be too painful to bear.

Howard Hawks' clever revision of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs features Gary Cooper as Professor Potts, the stuffy leader of seven elderly academics compiling an encyclopaedia, stuck on the letter S. He invites hepcat vocalist Sugarpuss O'Shea (Barbara Stanwyck) into their bachelor study/living quarters to help with the entry on slang.

 Which suits Ms. O'Shea as she is trying to disappear so she doesn't have to testify against her gangster sugar daddy (Dana Andrews). And so the moll teaches them hep-talk and in turn they expose her to a few of the kinder human values. The film dwells on themes around the letter S, like sex, Saturn and Shakespeare

 The big problem is the lack of combustible chemistry between the stars. Cooper is inert and Stanwyck lacks spark. She doesn't have the sass or the glamour to give this life. But she does get to mime a fine swing number, played Gene Krupa and his orchestra. And the support cast is an A-Z of classic Hollywood character actors like Oscar Homolka, SZ Sakall and Henry Travers.

The Billy Wilder/Charles Brackett script gives us one great line. As she struggles with her zip, Sugarpuss wisecracks: 'You know, I had this happen one night in the middle of my act. I couldn't get a thing off. Was I embarrassed!' But this isn't their best work, and is a touch slow by Hawks' usual standards. It's worth seeing for the clever concept, the support cast, and what might have been.

My view is that Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn are not great comic actors, though they did have a run of hits together in the '40s and '50s. She is too strident, and he is a touch menacing for lighter roles. But this is their best comedy and those traits actually help their performances this time.

It's not the funniest sitcom, and much of the humour is at the expense of its lower class support characters from the point of view of the Manhattan elite. But it is an interesting contemporary battle-of-the-sexes review of women's rights which mostly stands up today. There's more drama than screwball.

 A mother of three (Judy Holliday) has shot and injured her unfaithful husband.  Tracy is the public prosecutor in charge of the case, but his lawyer-wife (Hepburn) defends the accused, enraged by the gender hypocrisy of attitudes to adultery. And she won't back down, no matter how furious her husband gets.

There's a fun setting among the postwar Manhattan cocktail and dinner party set. They even have a foppish neighbour who drops in to play their piano and sing a Cole Porter number! But, George Cukor hasn't the Lubitsch touch, and the comedy fails to get off the page. Still, the sexual politics remain of interest.

With the fighting now over, Ernst Lubitsch revisits prewar England for this class satire, made in Hollywood. Charles Boyer is a Czech dissident wanted by the Nazis, who finds himself at a country house where everyone, above and below stairs knows their place. He is an unconventional, insouciant free spirit, which makes him incongruous in this sleepy backwater.

So he forms a bond with a vivacious lady's maid/plumbers daughter (Jennifer Jones) who also struggles to accept the straitjacket of tradition. England before WWII is satirised and made to look absurd, whereas the interlopers are lively and iconoclastic.  The servant often wields a hammer.

 This was made in 1946, when the old world order was being questioned, by men coming back from combat and the women who sustained the home front. The film implies that society and the feudal restrictions of class have to change. It damages and trivialises everyone, either side of the divide.

Boyer and Jones are marvellous, and there's the usual excellent support of Hollywood Brits in character roles, notably, Una O'Conner as a grotesque old busybody who communicates entirely by coughing. There's some really funny dialogue too. It's the last film Lubitsch completed. He signs off with a clever, funny classic.

With America now at war, George Stevens would soon be shooting documentaries in Europe and the Pacific right up until '45. Screwball comedy began to fade out in Hollywood. This is a comedy drama with a serious theme appropriate to a global population threatened by fascism; the state of law and justice.

Ronald Colman plays a pompous, unbending- Kantian- academic who visits New England to write a book before his appointment to the Supreme Court. Cary Grant has a more utilitarian view of the law, and is a fugitive from justice, having been fitted up for arson to stop him opposing local graft.

And Jean Arthur is the slightly screwy landlady who mediates and influences Colman to defend the accused. This is styled as a romance and a farce but the love triangle doesn't come to life. The slamming doors are a distraction. Grant plays a more serious role than was customary; essentially a Communist.

Which must have been noticed by HUAC once fighting was over. The screenwriter (Sidney Buchman) was blacklisted. The drama turns on Colman realising that he has to take a side in the fight for civil liberties. It would be a theme of many Hollywood films in peacetime. This articulates the conflict well and the stars make it one of the better comedies of the war years.

This is Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy's first post Hal Roach film, at which point they are reputed to go into decline. And while most of the jokes feel like repeats (and it is in part a remake of their '31 two reeler Beau Hunks) this is an interesting film because it is so mythic. It's about two friends who are fated to squabble and endure eternally for the sake of companionship.

The tale even touches on death and the possibility they will be together beyond their lives. There's a scene where they are literally tied to each other, planning to both die simultaneously, dismissing the possibility that one of them might go on alone. There are routines that could be cut from Waiting for Godot, not yet written.

 Stan doesn't look well and has put on weight. As has Ollie... They are older men. Ollie joins the French foreign legion (with his pal of course) to forget about a girl (Jean Parker). When  he gets over his heartbreak, the duo decide they may as well go back to civilian life, only to discover it ain't that easy and they will face the firing squad at dawn.

Before the fadeout, Ollie dies, and actually comes back from the other side to be with Stan, though unfortunately as a horse! This is full of moments that can be dismissed just as gags but maybe, are an attempt to capture what is legendary about their alliance. And of course, through their films, they (sort of) really did achieve immortality.

Somewhere in these two hours is the moment when Frank Capra's films stop being comedies at all, and the humour gets swallowed up in the moral darkness.  It opens with a traditional comic premise. James Stewart plays a fish out of water who is, out of his depth... a scout leader promoted to be a US Senator. He discovers that the whole barrel is rotten, and he must fight for the soul of his nation.

 With the world at war between fascism and the free world, the Italian born Capra sounds a grim warning to home audiences. He shows us politics is owned by graft. An industry magnate (Edward Arnold) runs a corrupt Senator (Claude Rains) who has abandoned his ideals. And they take the quixotic newcomer down when he opposes the crooked misuse of public money.

 In support, Jean Arthur is excellent as the tough spad insider who cynically attaches herself to Stewart. She changes sides. But as so often with Capra, it's the threat which represents the real world, and the resolution is just the illusion of hope we all need to carry on. In an unlikely turn of fortune, the conscience of the dishonest Senator finds its voice.

 This was a big breakout role for Stewart and establishes his persona as the conscience of the American silent majority, which is a presumed integrity. It's a beautiful looking film, with the then-novelty of deep focus photography. But mainly it is a warning to all that democracy and freedom are precarious and have to be fought for, or they will be lost.

There's an irony in Preston Sturges directing such a preachy and didactic story to protest that comedies had become... too preachy and didactic. Joel McCrea plays Sullivan, a director of light entertainment who goes off the map to research social realism set among the victims of the depression. He is a tourist who travels through the despair of the poor.

His conclusion is that the destitute need more laughs. Which is facile and patronising. We are encouraged to sympathise with the human cost of this vast wave of hardship, but then the super-rich Sullivan cracks a joke lamenting his income tax. We are asked to recognise the dignity in poverty of black communities, but then Sturges writes in an abhorrent racist character.

Some of the problem is McCrea and Veronica Lake- as a failed actor- aren't great comedy actors, and she is too glamorous for a never-was. But, this does work as insider's account of the real Hollywood. While there are the director's usual abundance of  pratfalls there is a dusting of decent verbal comedy, though plenty of editorialising too.

Screwball comedy was over by '41, for the reasons Sullivan gives: war in Europe; the rise of fascism; global economic decline. And because its motifs were worn out. Sullivan/Sturges' theory that people need to laugh in the shadow of crisis wasn't true. Over the next decade, comedy got darker, more diverse, and (arguably) less funny. The golden age was over. 

Italian farce from Woody Allen, set in Rome. It intercuts between four sketches, which is surely intended to be a homage to the comedy anthologies Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni made in the '50s and '60s. There are some proper laughs, a little romantic fantasy and some opera.

The best episode features Woody as a retired music agent who promotes the father in law of his soon to be wed daughter, who sings opera magnificently, but only in the shower. The least is a skit with Roberto Benigni as an office drone who suddenly and mysteriously becomes famous for being famous.  

Arguably the best of the cast is Woody himself who spars enjoyably with Judy Davis as his psychoanalyst wife. There is some of the repetition typical of later Allen films. Lines are repeated from Anything Else and Ellen Page basically reprises Christina Ricci's role in that film.

 It was financed by Italian producers and delivers a gorgeously touristic vision of the historic city of Rome. At the end, we are encouraged to visit! The photography- by Allen's frequent cinematographer Darius Khondji is so beautiful. It's amusing froth. Few will be bored, or have their life changed.