Film Reviews by Steve

Heartbreaker updated from Lillian Hellman's 1934 play about two female teachers who are destroyed when a young student falsely accuses them of being lovers. The girl who makes up the lie out of spite (Karen Balkin) is a convincing villain and the rich, small town bigots who victimise the friends are a sinister and vengeful mob. 

Audrey Hepburn is fine as a rather pristine schoolmistress who is deprived of her planned marriage by the gossip. But Shirley MacLaine is the heart of the film, as a kind of soul mate unaware she really is a lesbian. The child''s malicious lie is a scandal, but the teacher's ignorance of her sexualty is a tragedy.

Shirley MacLaine is magnificent. Her performance cuts so deep- not so much her anguish in confronting this fundamental truth about herself, but because she sees her true identity as degenerate and unendurable. Her pain is so pitiful. By killing herself, she sets her friend free, which I suppose is the ultimate expression of love. The climax is truly devastating.

This was still a controversial story in 1961 and time hasn't dulled its impact. Homosexuality is no longer scandalous, but these emotions are still in play. And the capacity for onlookers to cheapen, malign and offend is greater than ever. It's an emotional powerhouse, which features one of the great performances. And an example of William Wyler's cinematic artistry.

This has an aura of nocturnal transience. Strangers cross paths in bus stations, hotels, waiting rooms and pool halls. It traps these nightflies in the frame of its b&w photography, in its noirish lighting, its urban set design and authentic pool hall locations. It is realistic, yet as poignantly mythic as an Edward Hopper painting.

Most of all it catches the essence of this world in its ill-fated anti-hero, the pool shark Fast Eddie Felson who must overcome personal tragedy to beat Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason) in an epic contest at the Ames Pool Hall. Eddie is brilliantly inhabited by Paul Newman with huge intensity and charisma and sadness.

 Newman and Piper Laurie as his lonely, aimless, alcoholic lover are extremely affecting together, captured in the deep, narrow spaces of her apartment. George C. Scott is tough and intimidating as Eddie's manager who shows the hustler how much of himself he has to sell in order to succeed.

The film is all atmosphere. The scenes develop at leisure, assembling the strangers in a sort of ceremony in the pool rooms as the night settles in and the hustle begins. The pessimistic script sounds like beat poetry. Some of the dialogue is thrilling. So lovely, so full of sorrow. 

Perhaps the ultimate triumph of the Hollywood studio system. It wasn't a prestige project. No one knew they were making a classic. But because Warner Brothers had great salaried talent to call on, they transformed an unproduced one act play set in Casablanca during WWII, into something enduring and universal.  

It lacks realism, but it feels true. During the cathartic scene when the refugees of many countries sing La Marseillaise in Rick's cafe to drown out the Germans' anthem, the cast and extras were in tears for real. Many of them really were fugitives from the Nazis. Humphrey Bogart and Dooley Wilson are the only American actors.  

What gives the work cohesion is Max Steiner's famous score and Julius and Philip Epstein's legendary script. What exalts the film is the compelling romance between Rick (Bogart) and Ilsa (Ingrid Berman). She gives the film so much of its emotional intensity, he delivers the sassy humour and famous epigrams with immortal cool.

Maybe the well known production complications contributed to the impression of a precarious world. Casablanca could have been just another film on the Warner's roster. But it is loved, because it captures a sensation of the uncertainty of exile at crossroads in history while touching our hearts and giving us faith in a greater good.

Tennessee Williams' classic of American theatre was adapted for the screen by its stage producer Elia Kazan with reluctance as he felt he had achieved as much as he could with the play on Broadway. It was controversial in New York- in Hollywood, it was a scandal. But, despite the censorship problems, the play survives remarkably intact.

This was the first Hollywood film to feature a jazz soundtrack. Some of it was suppressed for being too sexy! Language and insinuation formed battle lines. While the play is about changes in the American South and the precariousness of enlightenment, it is just as true to say it is about Williams' own heart. He felt violated by the furore.

Kazan took three of his main players with him to Warner Brothers: Karl Malden, Kim Hunter-who is superb- and Marlon Brando. And Brando was a sensation. We'll never know what a shock his performance must have been. Nothing like it had been on the screen before. It's crazy he didn't win the Oscar.

The three other stars did, including Vivien Leigh as the ethereal, vulnerable Blanche. Her and Brando's scenes together are extraordinary. They made two of the great dramatic roles their own. Blanche's fight for survival is a heartbreaker. And she becomes an exotic figure of southern gothic, destroyed by the way the world changes. 

This looks back to Howard Hawks' pre-code film, The Dawn Patrol, which was about WWI flyers and their response to the seeming inevitability of death.  Their survival under pressure forms a bond and an unshakeable code. And it also looks forward to Casablanca whose romance is very similar.      

These men deliver the mail in the fog over the Andes. But they will transit anything, including nitroglycerine! Cary Grant is the boss who hires a flyer now married to the only woman he ever cared about... And the new man is reckoned to have once bailed out of a crash which killed his co-pilot... thus breaking the code.  

This is Cary Grant's first really successful dramatic role. And it is Rita Hayworth's breakout from support parts in B films. Both are excellent. Two out of three ain't bad; Jean Arthur is badly cast as the showgirl interloper who stumbles on this exotic other world.  

There's shadows and fog,  and life threatening heroics with plenty of action and a lot of fast, tough crosstalk. There's a gallery of mavericks who turn up on a mountain in South America determined to get the mail out, no matter what. These are the thematic threads that Hawks would weave over his career, creating a kind of genre of his own.

This is set in a small town in early twentieth century Alabama where little has changed since the civil war. It is a poor community, of low wage workers and racial apartheid, which is resistant to change. The southern aristocracy has atrophied and the new money of American capitalists is about to feed on the corpse of the confederacy.  

The adaptation of Lillian Hellman's play is set almost entirely in a single house. As a woman, Bette Davis' matriarch has to fight for wealth through her husband (Herbert Marshall). He has grown tired of exploiting the weak and is terminally sick. But the wife and her brothers need his money to secure a deal which will make them very rich.

 This is a fascinating film of the decline of a corrupt tradition about to be consumed by the wealth of the few. They are all avaricious monsters who howl and tear at each other as much as those they exploit. Davis is impassive behind her mask of white paint, which conceals her tawdry appetites and sordid ambitions. 

It is specifically about the deep south, which would dominate Hollywood drama in the middle of the century. Hellman's writing is more precise than the poetics of her contemporaries. This is a frank exposure of the physical and emotional violence hidden in domesticity and a society where southern gentility is merely a strategy.

Film historians routinely tell us that during the Great Depression, audiences turned to screwball comedy and musicals for diversion. Sure they did, but they also made hits out of The Grapes of Wrath and this, Pearl Buck's huge epic of Chinese feudal poverty.

It's the story of a woman sold into slavery as a child during a famine and her struggle to endure a proud husband, a hostile environment and an oppressive aristocracy. Luise Rainer gives one of the most moving of all cinema performances as a pragmatic, brutalised, determined survivor. Paul Muni is convincing as her vain, impulsive husband.  

This is a huge spectacle, with vast scenes of revolution. The people are chattels, owned by the rich, and destitute women suffer most of all because they are possessed by their husbands. Wealth is hoarded by the few and the poor are blown about by the winds of history just as the deadly locusts are by capricious thermals.  

It is long and slow, but hypnotic. The realism is horrifying at times, like the period when the family survives by eating earth and the husband sifts the soil for roots. There is also a suggestion that the wife kills one of her babies. There is a little hope at the climax. It's the incredible hardship and hunger that linger in the mind.

This is the best of the many end of the world films made during the cold war. Its premise is that the accumulation of nuclear weapons will inevitably lead to their deployment which will potentially end human life. And we get the pleasure of listening to Fred Astaire explain the concept of mutually assured destruction!  

Gregory Peck plays a buttoned down submarine Commander unable to articulate the pain of losing his family. He eventually falls in love with a party girl (Ava Gardner) who is drinking to forget. They meet in Melbourne in the last inhabitable city on earth, waiting for the winds to bring the fatal radiation.

The film delivers its anti-nuclear message clear and stark. We are less moved by the two stars finding solace in the path of inevitable death, than the premonition of the destruction of ourselves. Stanley Kramer is critical of the forces that divide us, including class and religion, as well as the nationalism that provokes the war.  

The production utilises its Australian locations evocatively, the black and white photography is beautiful and there is a quite superb script in which people communicate through implication and evasion. It is a study of how people behave when there is no hope left. 

 The action explodes into life as a speeding train delivers a one-armed war veteran (Spencer Tracy) to a remote desert town to take a medal to the father of a Japanese soldier killed in WWII.  Tracy discovers this farmer was murdered by one of the locals and the crime covered up.

The suspense never really eases off. But what makes the introduction (scored with great vigour by André Previn) so stunning is the artistic spectacle of the Cinemascope-plus the gorgeous colour- which captures the epic grandeur of the Mojave Desert and its great white sky.

The film is set in '46 and seeks rapprochement for the victimisation of Japanese citizens in the US after Pearl Harbour. It warns of the consequences of hate. A man is violently killed for his race. And the disabled veteran is next. No stranger was ever made less welcome. 

Spencer Tracy leads effectively, but the film is carried by its all time great support cast of western rednecks: Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine, Lee Marvin, Walter Brennan. The sense of threat is very potent. We empathise  so completely with Tracy's outsider/victim that it makes the anti-racism of the story's message extremely powerful.   

Short and very sweet musical fairytale set in France after WWII, but really an idealised provincial fantasy town of button shops and circuses. Leslie Caron stars as a homeless orphan who joins a carnival and falls in love with a philandering magician while distantly admired by Mel Ferrer's inhibited, saturnine  puppeteer.  

As common with folktales, the story conceals a trauma. We never discover what past sorrow causes Lili to retreat in her mind to a make believe world of puppets, but its burden is palpable. Ferrer was disabled in an accident, but there is also an impression he remains distressed by the war. And the film acutely captures the pain of unrequited love.

 OK, Leslie Caron played many gamine ingenues in her career and Lili is that persona pushed to its extreme. But she is very moving as we watch her mature from shunned waif to a beautiful girl with a trusting but discerning heart. It is a story of wish-fulfilment, of a child learning how to love and becoming a woman.  

The puppets and the carnival world are wonderfully realised. The photography is lovely, with the primary colours of the sunny days absorbed into the inky blues of night. It is a whimsical, enchanting and optimistic film where virtue triumphs over cynicism.

In 1949, James Cagney returned to Warner Brothers for an update of his early '30s prohibition films. He plays Cody Jarrett, a crazy, mother-fixated killer, like he is one of the most-wanted of the depression. There is a tension between this outlaw throwback, and the modern scientific police methods used to track him down.

This is primarily a gangster film. When Jarrett wants to break out of jail, he doesn't have a hidden map of the building and a plan; he busts out with a gun and improvises. But it has the look of film noir. When Cody comes after his disloyal heavy (Steve Cochran) and unfaithful, degenerate moll (Virginia Mayo), it is as dark as The Big Sleep.

The characters are more nuanced than the pre-code gangster films, and the cops are smarter. It is a genre landmark which marries the punchy gangbusters of the early mob films with the gloomy introspection of post war film noir.  And it is as tense and exciting as a thriller.

There's a phenomenal star performance from Cagney, but the support is also superb. Especially Edmond O'Brien as a G Man who goes undercover with the most volatile crook in films, to plan a heist in an oil depot. The incendiary ending when Cagney literally burns up the set is film legend. 

A clique of New York intellectuals is unable to apply the ethics and philosophy they constantly reference to their own lives, in even the most basic way. Their narcissistic, moral shiftiness is sugared by some witty dialogue, Gordon Willis' gorgeous black and white Panavison, and the Gerschwin score. But there is a lot of satire here.

Their hypocrisy contrasts with a teenager (Mariel Hemingway) who is Woody Allen's younger girlfriend. She is the only one able to apply a system of values to her actual choices. Woody plays quite an amoral anti-hero. But she gives the story some optimism, including the sweet wisdom of her fabulous closing line.

The real hero of the film though is Manhattan Island, magnificently captured for all time. Including that famous, beautiful shot of Woody and Diane Keaton against the 59th Street Bridge at dawn. Sometimes the background overwhelms the dramas of these urban creatives in tide of romanticism and nostalgia.

The performances are all brilliant and the script is outstanding: 'My analyst warned me, but you were so beautiful I got another analyst'. Diane is always special in Woody's films. Possibly the artistic serenity of the surface style has obscured its distressed depths. But that makes it a fascinating film to rediscover.

Preston Sturges' best film is a very funny vehicle for comedy legend Claudette Colbert, but stolen adorably by crooner Rudy Vallee in a (mostly) non-musical role. As is usual with Sturges, this adapts familiar screwball scenarios: Claudette runs away from home and matrimony and flees across country without money or luggage, hoping to pick up a rich benefactor.

She is adopted by an eccentric oil millionaire (Vallee) while Colbert's husband (Joel McCrea) races her down to Palm Beach to save their marriage. The story kicks off at maximum speed and never lets up, the baffling opening scene satisfyingly resolved in a crazy finale.

 There is less physical humour than usual for Sturges, though a motif of Colbert continually breaking Vallee's glasses with her feet is actually pretty funny. There is a typical support cast of oddballs, such as the very deaf Wienie King and the rifle shooting members of the Ail and Quail Club*.

 But it is the opposites-attract chemistry of Colbert and Vallee that makes the film so special, with the rich man's naive, homespun philosophy up against the runaway's streetwise wit. Arguably this is last great screwball classic, which brings to a close the golden age of comedy. 

*there are some racist caricatures.

Some bright young things are on a scavenger hunt among the homeless of New York. A ditzy socialite (Carole Lombard) explains this 'is like a treasure hunt, except... in a scavenger hunt you find something that nobody wants'. She attaches herself to 'forgotten man' Godfrey (William Powell) in the most cynical meet-cute in pictures.

He becomes the butler to her anarchic family. The father (Eugene Palette) earns big in the stock exchange, but his dependents spend it bigger; his idiot wife (Alice Faye) and her freeloading protege (Mischa Auer, who is hilarious). The girl has a dangerous sister (Gail Patrick), who has the potential for the kind of political extremism sweeping Europe.

The butler survives the family, and inevitably saves them, teaching them humility and (by implication) the value of Roosevelt's new deal. Powell is sensational; charming, with an underlying dignity which is never tarnished no matter how reduced his circumstances: 'The only difference between a derelict and a man is a job'.

It is a romantic comedy, and Powell and crazy Carole are adorable as a very odd couple. It is funny, and it is heartbreaking and it is also about the political dangers of the depression. It is a classic example of how skilled '30s screwball got at reflecting America back to itself.  

One of many fifties southern dramas influenced by Tennessee Williams,  which employ similar archetypes: the photogenic drifter; an ailing, corpulent patriarch obsessed with legacy; a cerebral, inhibited (but beautiful) ice-maiden; and a hot, earthy coquette. Plus the sickly remnants of southern aristocracy.

 All these are present in The Long, Hot Summer, which is freely adapted from short stories by southern laureate William Faulkner. These opulent, atmospheric films are soundtracked by orchestral scores and the chirping of crickets. Usually there is the cry of a lonesome steam train, though here it is a paddle-steamer.

 Paul Newman is charismatic as the ambitious, mysterious stranger, ingratiating himself into the secrets and lies of a rich family of cotton planters while romancing a repressed schoolteacher (Joanne Woodward). Lee Remick plays a sexy and manipulative siren married to the shiftless son of Orson Welles' overbearing patriarch.  

This is a dreadful performance from the hugely overweight Welles. He is unintelligible. But I really like this genre, full of poetic, philosophical digressions and obsessed with sex. The film has a wonderfully rich, dreamy ambience but it's a mostly a star vehicle for the young, handsome Paul Newman.