Film Reviews by Steve

I've seen this on a list of worst ever films. It's nowhere near that bad, but there isn't much of Alfred Hitchcock's signature style. It was made by Charles Laughton's production company as a vehicle for the actor and it's not obvious why the Master got involved. They clashed throughout.

It's the first of three adaptations by Hitchcock of stories by Daphne Du Maurier; this one about wreckers on the Cornish coast who lure cargos onto the rocks. It was filmed on location including the actual Jamaica Inn and there is some nice atmosphere drawn from the scenery. But it's ultimately a bit of a drag.

This is historical melodrama, rather than a thriller. And Hitch doesn't give us many classic visual touches. The best moment is when Laughton as the ringleader of the smugglers jumps to his death from the rigging of a merchant ship, viewed from above. The star overacts shamefully.

There is something wrong when the most restrained performance is by Robert Newton. Margaret O'Hara is feisty in her first leading role (Laughton took her to Hollywood to star in Hunchback of Notre Dame). It doesn't take Hitch long to get her down to her underclothes and into bondage. Which is at least one of his recurring motifs.

An early Alfred Hitchcock curiosity adapted from a stage detective story. For two thirds of its short running time it's like an old dark house horror, full of expressionist shadows and close ups of threatening hands. The last third is a chase, utilising models of various modes of transport, none of them convincing.

The MacGuffin of the search for some stolen jewels is banal, and Hitch offers little to distract us from that weakness. He doesn't tell the confusing story that well. The cast is unremarkable and John Stuart a candidate for the Master's weakest lead. Though there is the signature dark humour and eccentricity.

What is different from earlier films, is there plenty of physical action in the last third, much of it well realised. There are characters holding on to the outside a speeding train. Over the years we would see many Hitchcock heroes and villains clinging on over a precipice or some other hazard.

Hitch didn't want to make this and his relationship with British International Pictures was falling apart. It was his last production for them. The complicated story is a bit of a muddle, but if you manage to follow it, then there's just about enough of the Master here to make this passable entertainment.

This version of a John Galsworthy play is as far from what we came to think of as the signature style of Alfred Hitchcock as he ever got. But at least he does a better job of turning Edwardian theatre into entertainment than with Juno and Paycock a year earlier.

As with the Sean O'Casey adaptation, little is done to open up the events from the stage and many scenes merely assemble the cast around the camera booth. And the narrative has absolutely nothing to offer the Master of Suspense.

It's about the friction between old and new money. Both sides are equally unsympathetic and there is little warmth from the actors to sweeten the class war. The best scene is a bidding contest over a plot of land within the eyeline of the manor, full of fast camera pans and long takes.

When the director does- occasionally- draw on expressionism and his emerging style, it feels incongruous. Once again, Hitch felt  hemmed in by his studio, and shooting projects of scant personal interest. It's not terrible by the standards of early British talkies, but surely of most interest to Hitchcock scholars.

This has a darker mood than most Alfred Hitchcock films in his British period. It's a loose adaptation of Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent, which is reconstructed into a series of suspenseful set pieces and opportunities for black comedy.

The content requires a skilled dramatic lead and the production is blessed by the brilliant, liquid eyed Hollywood star Sylvia Sidney. This is nearly as much her picture as a Hitchcock. How frustrating that Robert Donat was cast to co-star but backed out due to illness.

Saboteurs are active around London (their aims are vague) and plan to leave a time bomb at Piccadilly Station which is... entrusted to Sylvia's young brother. He dawdles across London unaware of what his package contains. But we know the time of detonation, and Hitch cuts ever more rapidly between clocks, the package and the fatal distractions of the big city.

The staging and editing of this episode are widely praised, though the Master often used the outcome as an example of bad film making.  It is a political thriller, and one of the director's best and most suspenseful thrillers with atmospheric location work and many memorable set pieces.

This is punchy social realism about conditions in American prisons. James Cagney plays a crime busting news reporter who is framed for manslaughter after threatening to expose a corrupt DA running for Governor. Sent down for 20 years, he becomes socialised by the violence and demoralising monotony of his environment until he he is locked away in solitary.

It's a liberal Warners' protest story that crusades against a penitentiary system which entrenches its inmates' antisocial weaknesses. The wardens are a brutal, reflexly vindictive gang enforcing ceremonial rules. Cagney enters the pen as a law abiding citizen but is transformed into an unstable nucleus of vengeful fury who sides with the cons. And it's a potent performance.

The innocent man gets attached to a hardcore gangster (George Raft) who busts out and pledges to clear the reporter's name on the outside. He then goes back inside (!) to coerce a confession out of the convict who set up the frame. This part of the film doesn't work as well, mainly because it is hard to believe a tough mobster would stick his neck out so far for a cell buddy, and it's too sentimental.

There are the usual signifiers of a '30s prison film: Cagney has a girl on the outside who never stops fighting, and a heartbroken Ma; the meanest bull gets his just reward at the hands of a con he pushes too far; there's a desperate breakout that ends in a wall of bullets from the national guard. The reporter is reprieved and the prison boss turns out to be a liberal reformer! But this is what the censors demanded.

Billy Wilder's most obvious homage to Ernst Lubitsch is- of course- set in Paris, though on location rather than in the Paramount studios. And there are a couple of Lubitsch associates in lead parts. Gary Cooper plays a rich American tycoon/lothario and Maurice Chevalier is a private detective specialising in divorce cases. So dedicated is Cooper to philandering, that Chevalier has a thick file of investigations involving him.

When the Frenchman's inexperienced but precocious daughter (Audrey Hepburn) falls in love with Cooper, she uses cases from her father's archives to make her lover jealous. It is a very cynical film, and even at the end we are never sure if this much older man really sees the girl as much more than a diversion.

Few characters are sympathetic, and we rely on the charm of the cast to make them palatable. There is a problem with Cooper as a romantic lead with Hepburn. The disparity in their ages unbalances the film; it makes him more exploitative than he should and so Wilder can't find an ending we can root for. But the director does a fine job, filling each scene with interesting subtext and character insights.

It is so lovely merely to see Audrey walking through Paris at night in a Givenchy dress, or even just smiling. And Maurice still vibrates with charisma at 69 years old; a living, breathing, winking Gallic shrug. It's a witty, charming very adult comedy and it's fun listening out for the echoes of Lubitsch.

Everything suddenly clicks for Alfred Hitchcock in the film which began his long sequence of suspense classics. A couple on holiday in Switzerland (Leslie Banks and Edna Best) find their daughter (Nova Pilbeam) has been kidnapped by a ring of spies to prevent them going to the cops with information about an assassination attempt at the Albert Hall.

Michael Balcon gave Hitch his first chance in pictures back in the silents, and he rescued the Master's career after a string of substandard- often strange- productions. This is a welcome return to form. Charles Bennett's screenplay contributes some sophisticated and witty dialogue.

The ensemble playing is good, with Peter Lorre a superior villain. We get European locations and political intrigue and a quite shameless McGuffin. It's the start of a series of Hitchcock suspense thrillers in the mid '30s, which convey a premonition of political threat from Europe.

It's not flawless. Banks and Best are a touch frumpy. But it's a fine Hitchcock thriller. And the famous climax at the Albert Hall is sensational, with the assassin ready to shoot on the clashing of the symbols... Hitch reshot the story in Hollywood in '56, but the original is best.

Boosted by decent budgets, Alfred Hitchcock's early Hollywood films are objects of polished beauty. The editing acquires a poetic beat, the camera is liberated and penetrating, the perspectives are striking and persuasive but unpretentious. This is a chilling suspense thriller, with a touch of film noir. It was the director's favourite of his own work.

 It's American gothic, based on a real life serial killer and co-written by Thornton Wilder, the laureate of small town America. It is one of those thrillers where some terrible wickedness is visited on an idealised, artless backwater.  This provincial innocence is epitomised by Hume Cronyn and Henry Travers' comic double act as a pair of bickering true crime enthusiasts.

The danger comes from the more sophisticated serial killer (Joseph Cotten) who calls on the family of his sister. He establishes a bond with his teenage niece (Theresa Wright), but brings the horror of the world in his trail.  There's a superb scene at the dinner table when the murderer seeks to dispossess the girl's naivety with a bitter, cruel monologue.

Uncle Charlie wallows in the dark side. He takes her to a lowlife bar where they are served by a careworn waitress (Janet Shaw) who once was Wright's classmate. She is already trapped in a life of poverty, in contrast with the sheltered privilege of the niece's family. It's a brief, empathetic insight into human suffering, of a kind we don't necessarily go to Hitchcock for. 

This is loosely adapted from a couple of Somerset Maugham's Ashenden spy stories; three British operatives in neutral Switzerland are detailed to assassinate a German agent before he leaves to meet contacts in the middle east. While Europe drifts towards another war.

Though it draws from contemporary anxieties, this is chiefly an Alfred Hitchcock comedy thriller, with a sliver of moral deliberation on the themes of war and espionage. There's a classic moment of visual commentary when the wrong man is murdered by Peter Lorre, viewed distantly by a morally passive John Gielgud through a telescope.

The main debit is a disinterested contribution by Gielgud as Richard Ashenden, who mysteriously fails to shine in the reflection of another feisty performance from a stunning Madeleine Carroll. The German double agent played by Robert Young shares far more chemistry.

It's fine entertainment, with many characteristic touches from the Master, inventive use of sound, some invigorating visual flourishes. And a thrilling climax when the train leaves Switzerland to expose the British spies to sudden danger without the protection of neutrality. 

In The Man Who Knew Too Much, 15 year old Nova Pilbeam played a child abducted by an international spy ring. Two years later Alfred Hitchcock cast her once again, as the romantic lead; the young blonde entangled with Derrick De Marney as the innocent man who is wrongly accused of murder.

It's mostly remembered for a set piece near the end when Nova and Edward Rigby are looking for the real murderer in a hotel ballroom, only knowing that his eyes twitch. Hitch's crane shot sweeps the room and then tracks in on the drummer in a minstrel band, until his eyes fill the screen... and then they twitch!

It's my favourite single shot in all of his films. The film has all the hallmarks of a quintessential Hitchcock thriller. There is the wrong man trying to clear his name and the blonde whose initial mistrust gives way to screwball romance. And there's the rural locations typical of his early years; this is the first of a few set in Cornwall.

There are laughs and there is the legendary touch of the Master of Suspense. He made more auspicious films in his British period; while the leads are fine, they were not major stars. There's an impression of a limited budget. But it boasts a good script and is still fine entertainment.

This is one of three films Alfred Hitchcock made in 1931 and my favourite of the oddities he directed between his sound breakthrough with Blackmail in 1929 and his emergence as the Master of Suspense with The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934. It is unique among his work.

A married couple bored with suburbia and the rat race come into money and take a cruise around the world in search of excitement before concluding... that they are happy to be a boring suburban couple! Joan Barry is quite appealing as the wife, though Henry Kendall is a bit of a disaster as her spouse.

The key moment is the scene where a Chinese sailor gets a foot trapped in a rope and is very slowly lowered into the sea to drown- yet another man in Hitchcock falling to his death- while the rest of the crew passively observe. It is perhaps the most shocking, eerie and bizarre sequence in any of his films.

As with The Ring in 1927, Hitch had more control over story development... and again it flopped! It is strange indeed. Although a talkie, much of it is silent, and features title cards. It evades genre definition, being too desolate for comedy. It has a mood unlike any other film he made; not so much of suspense, but of sadness.

For Alfred Hitchcock's ninth and final silent film he found a female star of charm and exceptional beauty just as she was rendered obsolete by the arrival of sound. She is the blonde Anny Ondra whose strong middle European accent made her suddenly and sadly unsuitable for the talkies.

 Maybe that is an apt misfortune for a story whose theme is the paradox of fate. The key scene relates to bitter irony of a husband (Carl Brisson) celebrating his wife's pregnancy, with the man (Philip Christian) who was the real father. The tangled plot is actually quite engrossing.

 It might be a stretch to describe Anny as a classic Hitchcock blonde, as this is a romantic melodrama rather than a thriller. It's a love triangle which concludes with one of Hitch's few tragic endings. There is relatively little comic relief and it's unrepresentative of the Master's signature work.

This is a curiosity which spotlights that at the end of the silent era, Hitch was still an artist in search of a medium. But for a British silent melodrama, this is still decent enough and helped by the local atmosphere, with Cornwall standing in for the Isle of Man. 

This is a silent screwball comedy about a feckless it-girl  taught a lesson by her rich father who pretends to have lost the lot on the stock exchange, so she has to get a job! Alfred Hitchcock might not quite have the Lubitsch touch, but it is pleasant enough frou-frou with a couple of real laughs.

The English actor Betty Balfour plays the American heiress in France and she is the big weakness. The former revue artist was only 25 but already looks too matronly for the role and lacks the star charisma of Clara Bow who was making this sort of jazz babe comedy in Hollywood.

Gordon Harker takes the acting honours as her crafty dad, a Wall Street high roller. Which was not the sort of part he played after the coming of sound! Hitchcock was seen by British International Pictures as a comedy director and they refused to allow the Master to develop his own ideas.

There is little of his trademark style. The best is  a point of view shot of a pair of tango dancers seen through a glass of... champagne. The film wasn't a success, though it isn't bad by the standards of British silents. But something had to give.

 Alfred Hitchcock signed with British International Pictures in order to develop his own projects, but that lasted just one film. A year after The Ring flopped he was back to adapting stage comedies. The legendary Master of Suspense was dormant.

This is a charming and genuinely funny comedy of manners which doesn't include any trademark point of view shots or much visual style at all. Hitch does a decent job at adapting the play's dialogue into visual humour, though the cast is unremarkable.

A  middle aged farmer and widower (Jameson Thomas) of limited visual appeal decides it's time to remarry and so proposes to each of the similarly alluring spinsters in the village only to find they aren't interested in spending the rest of their lives with the cantankerous blowhard.

Fortunately, his attractive, astute and congenial housekeeper (Lillian Hall-Davies) sees through all his faults and after being overlooked for years, agrees to be his wife (and take over the farm). Gordon Harker steals the film as a rather repellent factotum cum freeloader.

This is Alfred Hitchcock's only sporting drama, though he would stage an extended tennis match in Strangers on a Train. It's a boxing film which doesn't land too many punches, yet is admired by critics. This is the only release for which he has sole writing credit.

But if he signed with British International Pictures in search of greater creative control, he fluffed it. This is his follow up to his breakthrough hit with The Lodger but not a suspense film. It's a love triangle which concludes in the ring with the two rivals literally fighting over the girl (Lillian Hall-Davies).

Former real life boxer Carl Brisson lends his scenes some welcome charisma. Gordon Harker makes yet another appearance in a Hitchcock silent as his trainer. The Australian adversary (Ian Hunter) is a bit unscrupulous, so there is someone to root for. Though there isn't much star quality to lift the drama.

The climactic bout is well edited but the boxing choreography doesn't stand up. We get some impressionistic point of view shots when one of the fighters takes a punch and loses focus. There is some period interest, but it drags all too often and is too long.