Film Reviews by Steve

This kicks off with a bang and never lets up. A blonde, big city sex worker (Constance Towers) is slapping down her pimp for the £75 dollars he held out on. Her wig falls off revealing the bald scalp he left her with. And as she peels only the 75 off his roll, we know this is an honest woman.

She leaves the metropolis and pitches up in small town, USA. Working in a hospital for children she falls in love with its benefactor (Michael Dante). This is a film about appearances and reality and the deception and hypocrisy that lie between. He is a paedophile who uses his largesse to snare vulnerable victims. There are no fairy tales or happy endings.  

There is an amazing scene when the reformed hooker and the kids from orthopaedics sing a sentimental lullaby, which is so elusively peculiar that it is actually incredibly moving (especially given the threat to these children). The film is set in a hyper-idealised fantasy of America that we would one day call Lynchian. 

Every dream has a mirrored heartbreak. Nothing is what it seems. This is Sam Fuller's masterpiece. It is brilliantly written, dense with dark wit and disingenuous hope. Towers is in every scene and her performance of exaggerated sweetness is aptly, unforgettably strange. It's a fascinating, sorrowful experience.

The film that spawned a decade of horrors about the birth of an antichrist. It draws on the classic premise of psychological terror, that you can never be sure whether the horrific events are actually happening or if they are the dubious fantasies of a vulnerable, disintegrating mind.

Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and her actor husband (John Cassavetes) move into an apartment intending to start a family. He falls in with the elderly kooks next door (Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer) just as his career starts to turn around. When Rosemary conceives, she suspects that the neighbours are satanists and her husband has sold them her reproductive capacity.

This was Roman Polanski's American debut. He is faithful to Ira Levin's novel which is a problem as the set up is slow and there is a lot of exposition. But once baby is on board, is suspenseful and psychologically twisted. The coven is a support cast of old Hollywood faces. You know Rosemary is in trouble when even Ralph Bellamy is in league with the devil!

Cassavetes is terrifically oppressive as the ambitious, mercenary husband. Mia is well cast as the fragile, neurotic mum-to-be. In the end, we are persuaded that this is really happening and Rosemary has been raped by satan. Which makes it very dark indeed. Especially when she eventually shows interest in nurturing the demon baby.

The return of Inspector Clouseau from The Pink Panther isn't as much a sequel as a fresh start. And all the changes are improvements. Most obviously, this is now unambiguously a Peter Sellers' film. There is less plot and much more physical comedy from the star. Clouseau's comical French accent is even more exaggerated.

The new characters are also bonuses. Herbert Lom makes a classic partner for Sellers as his traumatised boss, Commissioner Dreyfus. The introduction of Burt Kwouk as Cato is a big plus, but there's something inspired in Graham Stark's strange role as Clouseau's taciturn sidekick. Like he's completely emotionally shut down.

Henry Mancini wrote a lush new score, including a glorious pastiche of the easy listening theme songs of the period. The script is a lot of fun and it's with this that The Pink Panther series begins to be quotable. Including Dreyfus' killer line: 'Give me ten men like Clouseau, and I could destroy the world!'

It's a harsh criticism, but Elke Sommer doesn't make much of the thankless role of the love interest/stooge. Maybe eventually the accident prone Clouseau's pratfalls get predictable. But mostly they are hilarious. This is a film that passes or fails on its laughs, and there are many famous gags to be enjoyed.

Attractive sixties proto-feminist drama based on Mary McCarthy's popular novel about eight privileged female friends who graduate from a prestigious girls' school in 1933, and their experiences from the depression up until WWII.

The focus is on gender issues such as contraception, free love, childbirth and inequality in the workplace. Of course these are as pertinent to the sixties as the thirties. The women are intellectuals, but this isn't an academic film. It's a melodrama about their social experiences.

 Sidney Lumet and screenwriter Sidney Buchman do a fine job in telling a coherent story with so many lead characters, particularly as the actors were all relatively unknown at the time.  There are a lot of debuting female performers here and they give sensitive, sincere interpretations.

What seems groundbreaking, is that it was a story about women which wasn't patronising or satirical. It also began a sub-genre of films about the experiences of a clique of graduate friends.  In '33 the group left college in search of an opportunity to play a full part in society. By '66, they were still waiting.

Faithful adaptation of Horace McCoy's inconsolable political allegory of American capitalism. It is set at a dance marathon in LA during the long American depression. Destitute couples dance around the clock for weeks to win a large cash prize, without knowing that the last pair will pay for the event out of their winnings.

It is a grotesque depiction of social Darwinism. The strongest survive, but the game is crooked. The poor pay to watch other poor people suffer. Jane Fonda plays a struggling actor who laments, 'maybe it's just the whole damn world is like central casting: they got it all rigged before you ever show up'.  

This was a breakthrough role for Fonda as the strong minded agitator, helplessly mangled in the gears of the free market. Like the rest of her community, she is at liberty to make a choice; take it or leave it. The film is most memorable for Gig Young as the cynical, manipulative, indifferent MC and Susannah York who is heartbreaking as a vulnerable wannabe actor driven to madness.

Sydney Pollack ornaments the Cinemascope with imaginative impressionist touches and haunting close-ups. The period recreation is wonderful and the soundtrack of standards adds atmosphere. It is a tragedy. When Jane can't go on, she asks her partner (Michael Sarrazin) to shoot her. It is a mercy killing. She is in too much pain. The last line of the film is devastating. It is the title.

WC Fields retains Kathleen Howard from It's a Gift as his shrewish wife, but this time has a more loving daughter (Mary Brian) to sweeten the dish. It's a Gift was hilarious, but awfully cold. Again there's a collection of sketches built around a loose narrative. Ambrose Wolfinger just wants to go to the wrestling...  

The best episode is the opener when the great comedian is forced down into the cellar by his wife to confront two burglars who are getting mellowly drunk on his applejack. Fields, the intruders and a cop end up harmonising sentimental Irish ballads together. For all of them, this is brief moment of respite, seized from the hell of domesticity.

 It's such a funny film because Fields' comic persona is so identifiable. His interminable suffering is revealed so succinctly, with a sudden nervous reflex or a mumbled aside. He has grown to accept his malign fate. And there's nothing he can do about it.  

Fields is always doing what he is asked, however absurd. Then is admonished when the outcome proves to be unsatisfactory. He acts without complaint or hope, and then gets nailed for it. And who doesn't know how that feels?! This is my pick as his best film. 

This adaptation by William Gibson of his own stage play retains its two wonderful Broadway leads: Anne Bancroft as Annie Sullivan, the educator of the deaf-blind and near mute seven year old Helen Keller played by Patty Duke. Sullivan teaches the wild, unreachable child to communicate through applying pressure to her teacher's fingers.

Sullivan went to live with Keller's family in Alabama, 1887, with the South still destitute from the Civil War. Arthur Penn frames the story and its characters in the terms of the kind of heroism normally seen in war films or epics. And that feels appropriate. Sullivan's astonishing enterprise is an act of audacious bravery, even though achieved in a domestic context.  

There is an expressionistic look, with noirish lighting and distortion. Sullivan with her pale, traumatised face, her own near blindness hidden behind black glasses looks like a visitation from a horror film. She is haunted by her agonising past in a Victorian asylum, tortured with guilt for the handicapped brother she left behind.  

This is southern gothic; it is full of atmosphere. There are long scenes of little or no dialogue or cutting, and without music. It looks artistic, but feels real. Most of all, it's Bancroft and Duke that endure, locked in the confrontation of their anguished, intimate darkness. They both won very well deserved Oscars.

Meticulous and and detailed version of Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize winning classic. The casting is inspired, from Gregory Peck as the wise lawyer Atticus Finch, all the way down to Robert Duvall's debut as inarticulate recluse, Boo Radley. There are lovely child performances too, particularly from Mary Badham as Scout.

The first half is a character study as the children learn about life from their small southern town. The relationship between Atticus, a widower, and his daughter Scout, is sensitively sketched. The latter part relates to the lawyer's defence of a black farm labourer (Brock Peters) who has been set up by a mob of bigoted smallholders.  

The white agricultural workers of depression-era Monroeville, Alabama are destitute. They have nothing but their perceived superiority to even poorer black people, which they guard ruthlessly. The accused is found guilty of raping a white woman, not because he has a case to answer, but because he pitied her. Which strikes too deeply into the farmers' conviction of primacy.    

The rural south of the '30s is superbly realised. This is a memory film and there is an impression of time and events being distorted by the act of recollection. It's a remarkably subtle and intelligent film which made an issue of southern apartheid as the civil rights movement in America was coming into being.

Period recreation of the 1925 Scopes monkey trial (with the names changed) which prosecuted a tutor for explaining Darwinism in a Christian fundamentalist school in Tennessee. Spencer Tracy defends the jailed teacher against an unrecognisable Fredric March as a prosecuting lawyer who believes in a literal interpretation of the Old Testament.

But there is a deeper issue on trial. The prosecutor claims that religion is a comfort for communities made wretched by poverty. Even though he is is a politician, he offers no insight into how suffering might be relieved by other means. Besides, solace isn't the role of the faith we see in Hillsboro, Tennessee. Christianity is a means of suppression and of spreading ignorance, bigotry and hate.  

Some of the observations pass by a little too quickly. But for a film which is about a contest for the supremacy of ideas, it is extremely entertaining and the performances are a lot of fun, including Gene Kelly as an acerbic, loquacious news journalist. The real flaw is the film seeks to find a balance between Christianity and science, which isn't possible. 

There is a caustic, witty conclusion to the long scenes of dialogue, which really sums up its themes in an instant: when the frenzied prosecutor collapses in court,  a voice passionately shouts out "Pray for a miracle and save our holy prophet" while another yells "Get a doctor"!

Merian C. Cooper started with an image of a giant ape on top of the Empire State Building, with fighter planes swirling overhead. Edgar Wallace wrote most of the rest of the plot, though it borrows from Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. Willis O'Brien worked on modelling for that film in 1925, and returns to lead the incredible monster animation of Kong on Skull Island.

Robert Armstrong plays a megalomaniacal film producer who takes a crew into uncharted waters to research and exploit a legend about a land of giant creatures. He keeps his real mission a secret, especially from the starving ingenue (Fay Wray) he finds fainting in a queue for a soup kitchen in New York, who he proposes should star in his film.  

King Kong feels like an extreme experience, not just because of O'Brien's inspirational effects, but also the sheer amount of death. Its body count is off the chart. And because of the crazily entitled behaviour of the movie mogul who takes Kong back to wreck New York.

The use of sound is a landmark. Fay Wray's screaming is legendary. The cries of the beasts are fearsome. And Max Steiner's thrilling, groundbreaking score is all over the climax. King Kong is a triumph of technical achievement, but it is also a wonderful tale of exotic exploration, anthropological hokum, crazy entrepreneurship, two fisted action and, Fay Wray in her underwear. 

Comedy-drama based on William Faulkner's novel set in the American south of distant memory. A car is delivered to a rich family in a small rural town in Mississippi. Steve McQueen and Rupert Crosse play stable boys who 'borrow' the vehicle and drive the family's 11 year old boy (Mitch Vogel) to Memphis where bawdy adventures take place and life-lessons are learned.  

The narrator (Burgess Meredith) declares that the citizens of his youth were a 'pleasant courteous people'. This was a time of apartheid, religious fundamentalism and awful inequality! There is racism in the film (and free use of racist expletives) though it is stripped of menace. There are rednecks, a stupid fat sheriff, ribald sex workers... all the archetypes of southern comedy.

Perhaps this nostalgic idealisation of the past is more credible because it is a memory film. The suffering has been forgotten. If that hurdle can be overcome, and McQueen's rather grotesque, broad caricature, then there is a warm coming of age story set in the endless summers of all our pasts.

The photography is beautiful. There is a folksy score by John Williams, all banjos and fiddles, and a sentimental orchestral theme for those special moments. There is a sense of the past being a place of safety and childhood a time of adventure. Which has a certain innocent, naive charm. 

A strong candidate for writer-director Val Guest's best film. It's a police procedural about an investigation into a dismembered corpse which is found in a holiday home in a rather seedy postwar Brighton- based on a real life incident.

The detectives on the case are the sagacious, weary veteran Jack Warner, assisted by Ronald Lewis who does most of the leg work. They are a wonderful duo and handle the constant flow of dialogue with finesse. There are rich supporting performances all the way down the cast list.

There is a real flair to this film, with its credible and compelling screenplay, but mostly because of the sinuous, lively gaze of the camera, particularly during the examination of the murder scene. The neglected splendour of Brighton and Lewes and the big skies of the coastal suburbs convey a delightful melancholy.

All this is created with a crew who usually worked on Hammer productions, and without any incidental music at all. OK, Val Guest ended up making a Confessions film, and Space 1999, but at his peak he was a significant talent in postwar UK cinema. This is a classic British noir.

Orson Welles' legendary debut is the most analysed and critically revered film ever made. Charles Foster Kane is plucked from obscurity by a quirk of fate and becomes an immensely wealthy media baron. But the real Kane is so barely known that on his death his own newspaper launches an investigation into his life , and the meaning of his final word: Rosebud.  

The character is based on news tycoon William Randolph Hearst, but clearly also on Welles himself. The director arrived in Hollywood at 25 claiming to know nothing about the business, which is exactly how Kane announces himself on acquiring the National Inquirer newspaper. And at that age.

 This is a visually stunning film with Gregg Toland's glorious photography, and Welles' artistic visual imagination. Herman Mankiewicz and Welles' scenario is inventive and insightful and the dialogue laconic and witty. The performances have an offbeat quality out of step with forties Hollywood. It hums with the energy of innovation.  

Welles' classic is insightful on the dark arts of politics and capitalism and the men who succeed in those fields.  Both the film and Kane have become mythic creations. In our present era of populist/authoritarian leaders, Citizen Kane remains as relevant as it did in 1941. 

Leisurely rural drama set in the Australian bush which owes plenty to the American western but captures enough local culture and landscape to maintain a separate identity. The roving inhabitants of the outback are colourful, though perhaps it's an idealised portrayal of these characters and their far flung settlements.

The setting appears realistic. The costumes and interiors don't feel cleaned up at all.  The terrain is shot on location and the story is drawn from life. In fact the narrative feels like reportage: the 2-up, the bushfires, the sheep shearing contest and the horse racing.  

The performances of Robert Mitchum and, especially, Deborah Kerr are surprisingly authentic. They are a married couple working as drovers, steering sheep between the country towns of Jindabyne and Cawndilla. She and their son want to buy a farm and settle down but he wants to carry on drifting.

There is fine ensemble support from familiar British and Australian character actors (including Chips Rafferty). Most of all, there is an impression of the vastness of the Australian interior, and its people. Of rural loneliness and the vulnerability of isolation, but also of a resilient frontier spirit. 

Faithful version of Tennessee Williams' unsuccessful 1957 play Orpheus Descending, itself patterned on the classical myth. It is an ominous tale full of raw symbolism. For those who enjoy Williams' sad poetry and empathise with his world view, this is a treat. And the dialogue is very quotable.

Marlon Brando delivers a stoned performance as a beautiful nonconformist who blows into a southern town in thrall to racism and violence, and which conceals a guilty secret. The drifter becomes the lover of the suffering wife (Anna Magnani) of a violent, dying bigot.  

It is an allegory about purity and corruption. The capitalist world is intrinsically unholy, where human souls are bought and sold. Only the artist can be free of this contamination and become celestial. Like the visionary painter (Maureen Stapleton) or the newcomer, a free spirit whose guitar is inscribed by the great singers of the blues.

 It is the imagery that matters. The hero wears a snakeskin jacket which denotes he is a wild thing, and which he sheds at the end to become a relic that inspires future disciples.  There is an abundance of abstract talk and little plot. It fared poorly, falling between the eras of the Beats and the Hippies, who may have embraced this cryptic parable.