Film Reviews by Steve

All of Woody Allen's early comedies draw on the cinema for inspiration. This narrative is very close to the silent Harold Lloyd vehicle Why Worry; a US hypochondriac milquetoast travels to South America and becomes comically entangled in a revolution. And the visual style borrows from the hip underground docudrama, The Battle of Algiers (1966). 

This is less consistently funny than Woody's previous release, Take the Money and Run, but is more typical of his emerging motifs: some of the film is set in New York; Woody's role is foolish (and cowardly), but academic, having completed two days of college which enable him to make absurd observations on philosophy; he has a psychoanalyst and is troubled by his Jewish upbringing.

And his (now ex) wife, Louis Lasser, co-stars, as his partner often would. The gags are erratic, but when they come off, they are hilarious. Such as when Woody visits a deli to order lunch for the revolutionary army. Or when he seeks to inconspicuously buy a porno-mag. Though there are some misfires, as when he visits his parents in an operating theatre.

Woody's persona is an inspired comic construct that transfers brilliantly from stand up to screen. Sure there's some Bob Hope in there, but he's also very contemporary. The anarchic craziness made this a big hit with younger audiences, including many future film makers, and it would be hugely influential in '70s American comedy.

Uninvolving cold war thriller with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews as a pair of nuclear scientists/lovers feigning to defect in order to gather some scientific MacGuffin. At their back Alfred Hitchcock assembles a supporting team of West Germans and expat Russians, but is unable squeeze much trademark humour from these unfamiliar character actors.

The classic production crew Hitch assembled in the late '50s had drifted away, and the problems with dated effects are harder to overlook. He went on to make some excellent films, but this feels out of touch. It isn't just a misfire in comparison with peak Hitchcock. There were many better spy thrillers being made in the mid '60s by others.

The scene usually used to promote Torn Curtain is the death of a Stasi assassin in a gas oven. Was that supposed to make us think of the holocaust and the possibility that some of these German heavies are former Nazis? It's one of the few times the worn out narrative- by Willis Hall and Keith Waterhouse- actually stimulates. 

 There is an uncomfortable element of blunt US propaganda, and the plot diversion towards the end with Lila Kedrova is unfathomable. There are maybe three good scenes, but far too many bad ones. The most startling moment is seeing two Hitchcock stars in bed together, and not even married! Hollywood censorship sure was changing fast.

This is the film Woody Allen released after Sleeper, so arguably it is a slight backward step, being episodic and a little erratic. But it's still funny and entertaining, and benefits from superior photography and music borrowed from Sergei Prokofiev. This is the last of Woody's early funny ones.

It is a satire inspired by the giants of Russian literature, particularly Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov, but visually this is very much a comic tribute to Ingmar Bergman (which Allen makes explicit at the end when he melts a face and a profile into one image in homage to Persona.

Woody style is to parody intellectualism and then puncture its pretentiousness with a low joke. There are long discussions about philosophy and the absurdity of Being in an indifferent cosmos: 'All men go eventually, but I go six o'clock tomorrow morning. I was supposed to go at five o'clock but I have a smart lawyer.

Woody and Diane Keaton suffer famine and existential trauma, fight a duel and plot to assassinate Napoleon. It's a series of sketches which deliver a blizzard of gags, and some hit and some don't, but the stars make it fun. Woody's schtick in his early films often drew on Bob Hope. Never more than this one.

The best of Woody Allen's early comedies. The character of the neurotic New York/Jewish intellectual  is established. He looks to Bob Hope for mannerisms and bursts of poetic gallantry. And the physical humour is inspired by Buster Keaton. Woody imitating a robot butler about to get his head replaced is all time great silent slapstick.

It is a science fiction comedy. Woody wakes up 200 years after a botched operation on his ulcer, still wearing his trademark glasses. This allows for comical comparisons between the now vanished Greenwich Village and the mock-Californian culture of the brave new world which has replaced it.

Like Bananas, it's about an underground uprising which plots to replace a totalitarian dictator (Diane Keaton even sings the rebel song from Bananas). Woody scored the film and recorded the ragtime soundtrack which is used to great effect during the speeded up slapstick scenes.

This is a giant leap forward for Woody. It isn't inconsistent; it all works. There is nothing of questionable taste. Best of all, this is the first film he directs with Diane Keaton. She's a comedy great and even introduces a glimmer of genuine romance. When she is on, everything is more fun.

Woody Allen took the title and some of the chapter headings from a contemporary non fiction book addressing sexual anxiety and constructed a collection of comic sketches on the theme of erotic diversity.  Time has taken the edge off how outrageous they once seemed, but that's partly because this was so influential.

It's Woody at his most farcical. There's little verbal wit. They are pastiches which operate on the edge of good taste; what we now call gross-out comedy. Like Gene Wilder's affair with a sheep. The characters explore their ludicrous fetishes and the actors play it very straight and the comedy is the contrast between the two.

My favourite episode is the one where where Woody and Louise Lasser engage in public sex, in a very close pastiche of the arthouse films of Michelangelo Antonioni. More typical is the Universal horror send up with the locals smothered to death by an enormous rampant breast.

 It works because the cast gets the surreal tone of the comedy just right. Lynn Redgrave stands out as a medieval queen stuck in her chastity belt- having been given an aphrodisiac. It was a genre that arrived more fully with the National Lampoon franchise (such as Animal House) and The Kentucky Fried Movie in the late '70s. 

 For his penultimate film Alfred Hitchcock returned to London and the east end where he was born. And he was rejuvenated. This is a superb exhibition of Hitchcockian suspense with one of the tightest sewn up of all his wrong men. Jon Finch looks set to pay the price for Barry Foster's necktie murders.

There is one of his least glamorous environments; shot around Covent Garden when it was a busy, shabby vegetable market. This is far from Cary Grant and Grace Kelly on the Côte d'Azur. There's a grimy location for a disturbing story. The sexual assault is hard to watch, and arguably lacking in taste. Though scarcely by the standards of the present day.

There is bravura camerawork, with many fascinating tracking shots and startling close ups. And there's a classic example of the Hitchcock gallows humour in the tussle between Barry Foster and a corpse in the back of a potato truck culminating in the serial killer breaking its fingers to get back some incriminating evidence.

Credit to Anthony Shaffer for the downbeat humour of his screenplay- adapted from a novel by Arthur La Bern. There are superb comic performances from Alec McCowen and Vivian Merchant as the investigating police inspector and his gourmet wife. I wanted to see a lot more of them. This is a late return to form by the great director.

Alfred Hitchcock's longest film is another cold war thriller. He was inspired to make his previous film, Torn Curtain, by news stories about the Cambridge spy ring, but really this is more similar, though with French government officials handing over secrets to the Soviets in Cuba.

It's tempting to compare Hitch's two cold war thrillers, which oddly get criticised for not being what the other one is. Torn Curtain is typical Hitchcock and got negative reviews because he was repeating himself. But Topaz gets overlooked because it's an outlier. There are no stars, no romantic subplot and no bravura set pieces.

 The most memorable image is a view from above of a gunned down Cuban counter-revolutionary, her dress pooling beneath her like spreading blood. The ensemble cast is mostly made up of French actors. There's a a nice atmosphere and it looks appealingly unglamorous.

Hitch tells the convoluted story- from a novel by Leon Uris- reasonably well. But this is the forgotten Hitchcock. While it doesn't add anything to the director's considerable reputation, it is still an interesting period piece which leads up to a satisfyingly cynical and understated twist. But it's a bit long and slow in getting there.

This unofficial remake of The 39 Steps was made shortly after an update of The Man Who Knew Too Much, which maybe gives an impression that Alfred Hitchcock was running short on inspiration. Though that proved illusory  a year later when he changed everything with Psycho.

The feeling of repetition is amplified by Ernest Lehman's threadbare dialogue. Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll (in the 39 Steps) traded infinitely more sophisticated sexual innuendo than Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint, who share zero chemistry. The two stars don't even share neighbouring generations.

I love Cary Grant but he could have performed this in his sleep and at times appears to be doing so. The best performances are by James Mason and Martin Landau as an all time great double act of villains. And yet. This is still an exciting, chic thriller with some of the Master's most brilliantly constructed set pieces,

Of course there's the crop dusting scene which grows out of nothing in a rural wilderness to a stunning crescendo of action. The denouement on Mount Rushmore is cinema legend. There are weaknesses and the MacGuffin of the trafficking state secrets is horribly perfunctory. But as a summation of Hitchcock's cinematic art, it is a triumph.

Alfred Hitchcock said farewell to Hollywood aged 77 with this rapid paced and suspenseful comedy thriller, which leaves an evocative flavour of '70s west coast America.

The labyrinthine plot- from a novel by Victor Canning- originates in the deep history of Californian aristocracy and then resurfaces in a present day crime located in a Los Angeles of charlatans, unreliable chauffeurs and dangerous heavies; it's pure Raymond Chandler.

And the Master tells the story with a typical lightness of comedic touch. Bruce Dern and Barbara Harris make for a wonderful pair of screwball leads. Her funny, adorable performance steals the film. It's a big shame that she didn't work with the Master again.

Karen Black is top billed and gets a nice in joke. She's a brunette but wears a blonde wig... So the last Hitchcock blonde is a fake! His departing shot in pictures is of Harris looking into the camera and winking. This wasn't intended to be his own final fade out, but given that it was, it's a sweet and felicitous goodbye.

Alfred Hitchcock's second purely comic film- after the screwball of Mr. & Mrs. Smith in '41- is a farcical black comedy about an inconvenient corpse who the eccentric inhabitants of a small village in rural Vermont have alternating reasons for burying and digging up again.

The macabre premise (from a novel by Jack Trevor Story) is played for laughs, principally through the deadpan reactions of the characters' to the absurd situations. It's very understated, very dry, and that's always been very Hitchcock. And it is funny, with many big laughs.

As ever, Hitchcock's support cast adds so much to the humour, particularly Edmund Gwenn in his fourth and final collaboration at the age of 82, having started with The Skin Game in '31. Shirley MacLaine makes her screen debut, and what an inspired choice. The is instantly the Queen of Kook.

One of the main pleasures is the picturesque setting of autumn in New England, filmed in Technicolor. Another is Bernard Herrmann's first soundtrack for Hitch, which the director said was his favourite. Not a typical Hitchcock suspense thriller of course, but entirely successful.

Stunning crime drama in which in some ways hardly looks like an Alfred Hitchcock film at all.  It feels more in accord with the wave of b&w vérité which swept American cinema in the '50s in the wake of Italian neorealism. The premise of the innocent man accused of crime is classic Hitch, but this is much more naturalistic.

During the opening credits at Stork Club, a woman suddenly looks into the camera, to stress that this is intended to look like a documentary and a long, long way from the Hitchworld of spectacular set pieces and sexual innuendo with an icy blonde on a speeding train. He then throws in some jump cuts, to show his style is up to date.

Henry Fonda plays a musician at the club, wrongly accused of robbery by a negligent and mediocre judicial system. And his life and marriage fall apart. Fonda and Vera Miles give deeper performances than we expect from Hitch. And Robert Burks photographs New York on location- in that realistic Weegee style- at least as well as anyone else in the period.

Hitchcock introduces the film personally to emphasise this is a true story. There are familiar themes of guilt, mental instability and the imperfection of justice, and it's as suspenseful as his thrillers. But this is different. Instead of a MacGuffin, we get social realism. This is Hitchcock goes New Wave. And he succeeds completely.

Like in Spellbound, the MacGuffin is a trauma locked away in a character's subconsciousness, exposed by certain dramatic indicators (red, storms) in her everyday fears. Her anxiety is sublimated by deviant actions like kleptomania and frigidity. So it's a psychological thriller, adapted from a novel by Winston Graham.

Marnie (Tippi Hedren) marries into old money (Sean Connery) in a romantic melodrama of wish fulfilment gone wrong (like Rebecca). While she gets wealth and status, her suppressed emotions say no. Hedren does a fine job and Connery could have been a great Hitchcock leading man. But this was their only film together. Diane Baker is ideal as Marnie's waspish rival.    

The best scene is when Marnie steals from an office safe with a shoe about to fall from her pocket to alert a woman cleaning in the next room. It's a pure expression of Hitchcockian suspense. It's the  time-bomb. The passage of the shoe out of the pocket is the ticking clock. But Hitch thought the bomb should never go off as that was bad technique. The shoe falls but the cleaner is deaf...

The big clunking calamity is the matte painting of a ship in harbour in Baltimore which feels so wrong, especially in '64. The back projection on the hunting scene too. Hitch liked to be in the studio. Be warned, the sexual politics are also of their time. It's hokum elevated by the stars and the Master's cinematic know-how.

After four straight box office flops, Alfred Hitchcock was back in the money with this adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's debut novel. The one with the famous premise; two men (Farley Granger and Robert Walker) meet by accident and discuss an exchange of murders, which would obscure their motives...

Granger is the innocent party who gets snagged up in Walker's insanity... Hitch hired Raymond Chandler to write the screenplay. But sacked him- rather than work through their disagreements as Billy Wilder managed on Double Indemnity. So there's a feeling of might have been.

It has a classic film noir look, with many memorable images and set pieces, like the shot of a distant Robert Walker seen isolated against the Jefferson Monument. Or the climactic chase scene on a carousel. The murder of Granger's wife in the reflection of her spectacles is unforgettable.

The big bonus is Marion Lorne as one of Hitch's most wonderfully eccentric mother figures. And yet it doesn't quite succeed. Many thrillers skate round the idea that the stooge should just go to the police! But this more than most. Chandler thought the plot was crazy. But, for those who can suspend disbelief, there is a surfeit of the Master's virtuosity to be enjoyed.

Woody Allen's last American  film (to date) is a simple diversion about a couple of college kids getting separated in the eponymous circumstances and getting snagged up in contrasting adventures. In a way, it takes us back to the director's early New York comedies...

Not just that Timothée Chalamet plays a lascivious, intellectual update of the old Woody persona but, more enjoyably, Elle Fanning clearly channels Diane Keaton in a delightful portrayal as a ditsy naif from small town America. She gives the screen a lot of light and energy.

And it takes us back to contemporary New York after Allen's European period, to the streets that he walked in the early classics. But 50 years on. If it all fades out with the lovers meeting in Central Park in the rain, it would feel appropriate. 

There's little plot, just a loose chain of events evoking the charm and romance of life in the great metropolis and the sweet benevolence of chance. It doesn't feel like the work of an artist running down on inspiration and motivation. It is a film still fascinated by the hazards of the human heart.

Alfred Hitchcock returned to London for this loosely plotted comedy-thriller set in the theatres of the west end. Apparently he made it so he could visit his daughter Patricia at RADA. She makes her screen debut in a small role. And we get proper Hollywood stars and a wonderful British support cast.

It kicks off with Richard Todd telling Jane Wyman he had to clear up after Marlene Dietrich killed her (Marlene's) husband. This is shown in flashback, though it's revealed to be a lie. It's hard to understand the kerfuffle this caused; there were unreliable narrators long before Stage Fright.

The real joy is that gallery of character actors, particularly Alastair Sim and Kay Walsh who steal the film. Todd does well in a civilian role. Michael Wilding performs his usual Cary Grant impression as the detective with an eye for Wyman, as well as the killer.

Hitch always makes much out of a kiss, and the long prelude to Wilding and Wyman's clinch is a classic touch. The big weakness is Wyman's pallid performance. A touch of screwball from her would have brightened the occasional longueur. It's a bit short on thrills, but the cast makes it worthwhile.