Film Reviews by Steve

This is the last of Jacques Tourneur's trilogy of B horrors made with Val Lewton at RKO. A travelling showgirl (Jean Brooks) in New Mexico uses a leopard in her act on the insistence of her publicity manager (Dennis O'Keefe). When it goes missing, the small community fears that the cat is responsible for a series of grisly deaths. O'Keefe has other suspicions.

There are so many memorable scenes. When a girl goes to shop on the other side of town, she is swallowed up in the darkness of the underpass, which feels like the locus of her emerging adolescent fears. When she returns to her mother's locked house she is savaged by, something... As the parent frantically unbolts the door to her child, blood copiously tracks along the cracks in the floor.

A Mexican dancer Clo-Clo (played by 'Margo') seems to be cursed. As she walks through the town, the people she interacts with will perish; seemingly killed the escaped cat. The construction of the film is unusual; the narrative continually diverts to whoever intersects with Clo-Clo, which will end in death. There is a powerful impression of an inexorable, malign fate.

When the real serial killer is revealed, that illusion of destiny disappears. The deaths have no motive. And we have little knowledge of the mysterious forces that control our lives. This is a pessimistic, shadow world where people enter into the darkness from which they may be released. Or may not. 

There had been Hollywood films about satanism going back to the silents, but this was new in depicting a devil cult in contemporary New York among ordinary people doing unremarkable jobs. Cuts imposed by RKO left problems with plot continuity, but it hardly matters. This is mainly a work of atmosphere and psychological anxiety.

It shows the apprehensive journey of a young woman (Kim Hunter) into sexual maturity. The film subtly suggests that what lies in the darkness and behind doors is her unease over her erotic awakening. Her quest is to find her sister (Jean Brooks) who joined the satanists, but broke their code of silence. And so must die, like six others before.

 There are some brilliantly innovative moments of suspense, most potently a scene on the subway where the girl witnesses a man she has just seen murdered held up between two heavies, as if they were all drunk. There is also a very interesting shower scene which may have influenced Psycho.

This is a film of dense emotional dread, of despair. The lost sister is portrayed as a figure of extreme moral emptiness, without will. Her last scene with a dying neighbour (Elizabeth Russell) is astonishing. It is an intensely pessimistic film which offers little hope. It is unique in '40s Hollywood, and an intelligent, audacious horror landmark.

When RKO asked Val Lewton to take charge of their new B horror unit, they expected monster movies similar to those made at Universal but on a lower budget. Instead, they got a new genre- psychological horror- set in realistic, modern city locations. Its fears were drawn from the darkness and superstition and the unknown. Secret personal anxieties.

The studio just gave Lewton the title. Simone Simon plays a commercial artist in Manhattan, who believes she has inherited a curse. If she is sexually aroused she will turn into a predator. Desire will make her bestial. Her rejected husband (Kent Smith), encourages her to try psychoanalysis, but rationality proves to be inadequate.

This is horror noir. It was shot and lit by RKO's great noir photographer Nicholas Musuraca. There's an extremely imaginative script which invents a rich folklore for the woman's psycho-sexual anxiety to inhabit. Simon is poignant as this outsider, tortured by her need for love but fearful of its consequences

This is one of the best and most influential horror films ever made. It was a revolution, a Freudian allegory heavy with shadows and symbolism. It is one of Jacques Tourneur's greatest noirs. It was a huge hit and allowed Val Lewton to make another eight high quality B horrors for RKO. 

During the opening scenes it feels like this may be a gritty exposé of the incapacity of US healthcare; a sort of Hollywood neorealism. But then it wanders off into melodrama, and its portrayal of a psychiatric hospital failing due to lack of funds and facilities becomes secondary to the lead character's psychosis.

Still, as melodrama, it is very effective. Olivia de Havilland is a married, middle class schizophrenic who gets snagged in the net of American public health, which is portrayed as extraordinarily incompetent. Her only hope of getting better rests with a handsome pipe smoking psychiatrist, played by Leo Genn.

Early on, there is plenty of soap box editorialising, but the story eventually becomes so conventional that by the end, all the residents are singing Goin' Home together led by a Broadway standard vocal from one of the patients. Olivia is deglamourised,  but it is still quite a photogenic breakdown.  

It's a sensitive and well-meaning film, which uses expressionism to suggest the woman's hallucinatory state. De Havilland gives one of her great performances of the postwar era when she was among the best dramatic actors in Hollywood. There is an attempt to be naturalistic and unromantic but this was made in the studio system and it proved impossible at this time. 

This broke new ground for big screen science fiction. It was the first major studio production to take humans into space and land them on another planet. It's a re-telling of Shakespeare's The Tempest, with Walter Pidgeon as its Prospero and Anne Francis as its Miranda. A super-intelligent robot- Robbie- stands in for Ariel and the awesome id-monster for Caliban. The brave new world is space travel.

The studio set planet looks artificial but is hugely impressive, particularly its modernist-deco machinery. The bright, pastel shades of its terrain and star-scape create the dominant image of fifties sci-fi worlds. The special effects are astonishing, particularly the combat between the space crew and the invisible id-monster. The completely electronic score, was revolutionary as well as gloriously futuristic.

There is a strong comic element to the film which contrasts the innocence of 'Miranda' with the red blooded astronauts confined to the C-57D. There is a flirtation between the skipper of the spaceship (a deadpan Leslie Nielsen) and the exaggeratedly naive girl. This might look a bit creepy from a modern perspective, but in 1956 it was just space-screwball.

Much later this was turned into a stage musical which was campy rock and roll nostalgia for the '50s. It feels like this has reflected negatively on the film, which is not sending itself up at all. It is one of the best and most original sci-fi releases of the decade. This is clever and imaginative and stows some pretty dark themes within its state of the art visuals.

Behind the schlocky fifties exploitation title, this is an intelligent science fiction action film. Grant Williams plays a middle class everyman who is accidentally exposed to radiation and begins to lose size. As he does, his relationship to his comfortable, materialistic lifestyle begins to shift.

Experimental medicine arrests his decline, for a while. He again starts to lose mass and eventually falls into his cellar and is presumed dead by his despairing wife. This last third of the film below ground is about his fight for survival, particularly a brilliantly staged combat with a (relatively) giant spider.

He finds meaning within confines of his new universe which he had lost as diminished man in the normal sized world. Eventually he loses sense of his physicality and becomes a transcendental being, freed from the limits of his human perspective.  It's astonishing that Universal allowed the film to end like this. They actually wanted him to be cured and to return to normality! Which would have been absurd.

This is easily the best film by sci-fi/horror expert Jack Arnold. It was Twilight Zone regular Richard Matheson's debut screenplay, adapted from his novel. The visual effects of the shrinking man's changing relationship with his environment are impressive, but it is his interior, philosophical world that leaves the deeper impression.

There is a preface by journalist Alistair Cooke which informs us that what we are about to see is all true! It is adapted from a case study by psychiatrists of a woman with multiple personality disorder. This documentary style approach helps prevent the film from occasionally falling into unintentional comedy.

The real patient actually claimed over twenty personalities. The film gives her three. She challenged this version of events. Of course, this is just screen melodrama. The psychiatrist (Lee J. Cobb) ultimately cures Eve (Joanne Woodward) through some extremely unconvincing Hollywood Freud. But it is fascinating and fabulously entertaining.

The film leans heavily on Woodward's performance. She deservedly won an Oscar. Without her credibility it would be too difficult to suspend disbelief. She plays three working class characters from the southern states. Eve White is a repressed introvert. Eve Black is an extroverted good-time girl. Jane is a kind of balancing superego. Woodward slips with fluidity between each.  

It's not a visually impressive film. The director- Nunnally Johnson- was usually a screenwriter, and he tells the story well. There's some comedy when Eve's husband explores the possibilities of being married to three contrasting wives! But any frivolity is balanced by the impassive narration. It does touch on the consequences of mental disability, but this is chiefly offbeat escapism.

This was made for a family audience, or children, and while it's unlikely any kids now will sit still for this typically paranoiac '50s science fiction with home made effects, there is plenty to interest genre fans.

It was the first sci-fi film released in colour, rushed through to pip The War of the Worlds. Director William Cameron Menzies was best known for art direction. And this is the main attraction. It's a low budget production but the expressionist set design makes it feel surreal and illusory. And it looks great.

This story is a child's dream. A science and sci-fi fanatic (Jimmy Hunt) is up all hours watching the stars. Late one night he sees a flying saucer land at the back of his house, near the rocket research facility... When martians take over the bodies of his parents and his community, the boy has to find support among the unpossessed to rally opposition until the army arrives.

It is an eerie film, and while the monsters look crude, their leader, a head suspended in a glass dome, has an unsettling, freakish quality. It became a motif of science fiction that a small town would have to make it through the night against an alien foe to reach the safely of the morning, and that started with this imaginative, lurid nightmare.

George Pal's legendary production steered clear of the philosophical themes of HG Wells' classic novel and offered pure, magnificent spectacle. This was a leap forward for the visual reach of '50s science fiction, just as King Kong was for horror in the '30s. The sets, sound effects, models and costumes are phenomenal.

Wells' dystopia of social breakdown proved influential in the sci-fi of the nuclear age. The citizens behave uselessly, resorting to panic and prayer. The mob actually smashes the instruments that might be used by scientists to combat the invasion. The blitzkrieg of the militarily superior invaders is brief and brutal. Cities are abandoned and the left behind are vaporised. 

Wells' estate was so impressed they offered Pal access to any other of the writer's works. But while the film is a visual wonder, including the gorgeous Technicolor, there are weaknesses in the script, particularly the lacklustre dialogue. The characters are archetypes and the unheralded cast does little with them. The pious religious sentiments are badly misjudged.

But this is a film of action, pumped by Leith Stevens hyper-dramatic score. It invented many of the future rules of sci-fi cinema and it still works as a screen filling blockbuster and a landmark disaster film. And yes, the invaders' biological flaw which dooms their conquest is again pertinent in the new age of pandemic.

Title tells all in this ultra low budget sci-fi which boasts flying saucers created by visual effects legend Ray Harryhausen. It aims for a documentary style realism, with voice over narration and lots of pseudo-science, adapted from a non fiction book by Major Donald Keyhoe, formerly of the US marines, who headed up a national committee on UFOs! 

But of course it's just entertaining escapism. It's a B film, but it had the advantage in being made for Columbia pictures who had Harryhausen under contract. He creates a good space ship though his models of the collapsing landmarks of Washington DC are no more than ok.

The story mimics the cold war in that it depicts a rapid escalation of military capability, though there is no nuclear. The humanoid invaders (their home planet is left vague) have an effective ultra-sonic weapon and the Americans invent an electro-magnetic ray gun which interferes with their engines. Although at times a six shooter has to do.

Hugh Marlowe is careworn enough to play a research scientist, but perhaps not sufficiently charismatic for an action hero. But he does have an exceptionally sexy assistant/wife in Joan Taylor. This is pioneering sci-fi. Anyone now showing a sky full of UFOs over the monuments of a world famous city owes a debt to Fred Sears and Harryhausen. It's a must-see for fans of fifties sci-fi.

After editing Red River for Howard Hawks, Christian Nyby got the job of directing this proto-alien invasion classic. But  Hawks produced, and this is typical of his work. The military scientists camped in the Arctic Circle express themselves in tough guy crosstalk. There's even a fast talking dame, Margaret Sheridan, doing a fabulous impression of Lauren Bacall.

The long introduction is fine, but the film only really comes to life when the alien (played by the imposing James Arness) defrosts and reanimates. The last half hour is thrilling. The intruder is nominally humanoid, but analysis proves that it is actually intelligent vegetation which feeds on the blood of mammals. It is more intelligent than us and reproduces with frightening rapidity...

It is tremendous to watch the laws of fifties sci-fi being created before our eyes: the alien that is brought back to life through human error; the attempt to confront the invasion with science; and the megalomaniac boffin who foolishly aids the creature because of its value to science. Arness has a fine presence as the first alien monster of the '50s, with its strange luminous aura and thorny skin.

There's a witty script from screwball specialist Charles Lederer, and an all time great action score from Dimitri Tiomkin. The fifties science fiction wave starts here at the North Pole. At the end of the film, the dome headed newspaper reporter (Douglas Spencer) shouts his article down the phone line to his editor: 'Watch the skies, everywhere! Keep looking. Keep watching the skies!'.

Enduring science fiction classic that benefits hugely from the approach of grounding its fantastical premise in an ultra-realistic environment, which boosts the story's credibility. The alien encounter is observed against the familiar monuments of Washington DC, as well as ordinary suburban streets.

Michael Rennie plays Klaatu, a humanoid space-traveller who parks his flying saucer outside the White House and informs mankind that in the nuclear age, it presents a threat to the rest of the universe and must pull back from the edge. Or else. The tall, angular Rennie is wonderful casting as the Christ-like visitor, an alien who presents an intellectual otherness that didn't need hours in makeup..

Bernard Herrmann's influential, futuristic score- featuring theremin- is atmospheric and eerie. The visual effects are superb. Robert Wise presents our political leaders as suspicious, territorial, insecure and narrow-minded. When Klaatu goes among the ordinary people, he finds they are the same!

Rennie/Klaatu is a fabled figure in science fiction and his instructions to Patricia Neal, Klaatu barada nikto, live on in other books and films. Curiously the solution of the other civilisations of the universe to the threat of nuclear war is basically Mutually Assured Destruction, which is where mankind was heading anyway!

Whimsical and spooky fantasy/ghost story produced by David Selznick to star his soon-to-be wife Jennifer Jones in the title role. It's a hyper-romance about how some people are destined to be together, no matter what, even if it breaks the laws that bind the universe.

Joseph Cotten plays a struggling artist who sketches Jennie as a child. And begins a portrait... He occasionally meets her again but makes the unsettling discovery that she seems to come back to him from the past, and always a few years older. They fall in love even though it appears she died in an accident at sea many years ago.

This is sweet, crazy hokum with the kind of lush orchestral score (Dimitri Tiomkin) typical of Hollywood romantic fantasies. There's even a choir of angels. It is all atmosphere. Jennie's theme (by Bernard Herrmann) is suitably haunting. Cotten and Jones are glamorous as the lovers who find each other across time. 

The b&w photography is lovely with fine locations. William Dieterle sometimes shoots through gauze which makes the picture look like a canvas. The climax with a tsunami off the coast of Massachusetts is evocative and powerful. And the final shot of the portrait- in colour- of the sad/lovely Jennie hung on the wall of a gallery, is a heartbreaker.

This only cost $30000 and was shot guerrilla style in the street with hand-held cameras by a five person crew. Maybe the audio and overdubs aren't professionally recorded, but their strange resonance just makes the film more detached and dreamlike. If the director had spent his budget processing the sound to give this effect, it would have been money well spent.

A car drives off a bridge and emergency services can't recover the passengers in the muddy river. Hours later, a girl (Candace Hillgoss) pulls herself from the water. She starts work as a church organist, but her reality is distorted. Some people don't see her. At dusk she is attracted to a deserted amusement park where ghostly apparitions congregate and freakishly waltz.

This looks like German expressionism. There are distorted close ups and long shots of eerie stillness. Figures appear and move unnaturally. One of its great merits is an amazingly gloomy and oppressive organ score. Hilligoss is ethereal as the living ghost who has cheated death- the only professional actor in the film.

The only strand which doesn't really work is the uncomfortable attention of a predatory man towards the girl. He is rather too effectively repellant. But this is one of the great horror films. Herk Harvey was an industrial documentary film maker. This was his only feature film, and it wasn't even released. It found an audience on tv. Its existence feels like a small miracle

The popular image of this film seems to have been swallowed up by the long public dispute of its two elderly stars. A legend has grown around the rivalry of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford which nourishes the film's eccentric horror, which in turn fortifies the myth of their enmity.

Baby Jane is a child star in the era of vaudeville, the sort of awful, sentimentalised poppet popular in America between the wars. Later on, sister Blanche becomes a famous actor in '30s Hollywood making the women's pictures that Bette and Joan appeared in back then. So the story goes, Jane paralysed Blanche in car crash when she was drunk. Out of jealousy. But maybe Blanche has something to hide.

Thirty years on, Jane (Davis) is going crazy. She torments Blanche (Crawford) who is trapped in a wheelchair within a room of her Hollywood mansion. They are freakish curiosities, hidden away from the California sun in their dusty mausoleum. Like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd. Joan suffers effectively, but Bette is phenomenal as a dissolute, spiteful monster who never really stopped being Baby Jane.

 Robert Aldrich creates an airless, antiquated cage for the former stars to inhabit, sheltered from the sunlit materialism of the real world. Victor Bueno is lavish as another grotesque, the venal, obsequious pianist Jane enlists to recreate her old musical act. To be her new daddy. But this is Bette's film. She gives an uninhibited, once in a lifetime performance, making Baby Jane Hudson one of the legends of American Gothic.