Film Reviews by Steve

Occult face off in rural Austro-Hungary between an architect/satanist (Boris Karloff), and a vengeful psychiatrist (Bela Lugosi) who has just been released from 15 years in a Siberian prison after his betrayal by Karloff in WWI, who then married Lugosi's wife and later his daughter... It is the first pairing of the two great horror stars of the '30s.

It's a startlingly transgressive story. As well as the satanism, there is a suggestion of necrophilia. Karloff, inhabits a modernist mansion built on the site of the historic castle where he oversaw genocide. The contemporary style is most unusual for '30s horror. But in the old cellars he keeps the bodies of women he has loved, preserved in their youth, including Bela's family.

The slow pace is its main weakness. Plus the vacuous newlyweds (David Manners and Jacqueline Wells) who stumble upon this house of insanity. She reminds the two rivals of the woman who married them both, and they play chess for her. Karloff intends to sacrifice his prize in a black mass and add her to his gallery of beautiful corpses!

So who wins the battle of the stars? Both overact splendidly.  Lugosi is a limited actor but there is a wonderful moment when he delivers some lengthy dialogue in his own language and he suddenly sounds natural. But Karloff with his lisp and his deco-effect makeup is more memorable. I'll give it to the Englishman.

Charming screwball fantasy about a Puritan in Salem in the 1600s who condemns a young woman to burn for witchcraft. She curses his descendants to suffer from miserable marriages for evermore... In 1942, the spirit of the witch (Veronica Lake) is loosed to spread havoc with the latest heir of her spell (Fredric March) as he plans to marry a spectacularly ill tempered tyrant (Susan Hayward).

Of course, the wedding is called off and the star crossed adversaries fall in love and marry instead. The husband has his eyes on the Governorship of the state and his new wife will use all the guiles of her witchcraft to help him. Yes, it was the inspiration for '60s sitcom, Bewitched.

Some of the fun to be had may depend on a tolerance of Veronica Lake, and I have little. It seems neither did Fredric March... But there is much else to enjoy. Hayward is marvellous and the support is well cast. The script is witty and genuinely funny. The many effects are well done.  

René Clair's touch is light and enchanting, like a Parisian Ernst Lubitsch. He draws a congenial performance March, who is usually known as an intense dramatic actor, and confects a most delightful comedy. Clair had a gift for making decorative frou-frou, and this is a sweet, sugary treat.

Erle Kenton mainly directed Universal monster sequels, but has his name on one masterpiece. Richard Arlen plays a two fisted man of action, shipwrecked on the remote jungle island of the sinister Dr. Moreau, who aims to evolve animals into humans through genetic experimentation. Maybe the castaway can be persuaded to mate with his panther-woman (Kathleen Burke)?

This precode version of the HG Wells story is artfully photographed, and its world of shadows and fog gives it an expressionistic look. The white tropical suits contrast pleasurably with the deep pools of darkness. There's a flavourful picture of the south seas, full of loners in transit, drunk sea captains, discredited medics, way off the map of normal human behaviour.

At the centre of all this atmosphere is Charles Laughton's superbly offbeat portrayal of the mad scientist, his untethered and megalomaniacal moral sickness, naturally, hidden behind a cherubic mask of utter reasonableness. He wears the goatee of evil with distinction and cracks his whip with conviction.

We see the mutations and failed experiments either exhibited or doing the most laborious tasks. The half-human beasts are brilliantly realised by makeup and costuming. It would be amazing to see more of them. But we do witness their famous ceremony of laws: 'Are we not men?'.  This is a horror classic whose transgressive themes never impede the fabulous spectacle.

Faithful adaptation of Oscar Wilde's famous novel with major studio production values. Hurd Hatfield- in the title role- is gifted his most solemn desire, that he may stay young and beautiful while he enjoys a hedonistic lifestyle, and the inevitable signs of debauchery are displayed on the enchanted painting hidden in his attic.  

Hatfield is impassive- little more than mask- which is appropriate for a story about appearances. The epigrams are delivered by George Sanders who does pretty well with dialogue that is easier to read than speak. Angela Lansbury as a Cockney music hall entertainer, and Donna Reed, as an aristocratic beauty, are both archetypes, but ideal for gothic melodrama.  

There is an evocative recreation of Victorian London, particularly the expressionistic dens of vice where Dorian goes slumming. There's a scene in an opium dive/brothel towards the end of the film which is so engorged with louche decadence that it steals the film.

 It is in black and white, but there's a striking use of colour when we first see the portrait and later, when it has absorbed all of Dorian's wickedness. This is the best of Oscar Wilde on screen. While it is heavy with period atmosphere, Albert Lewin doesn't let it slow down his narrative. Despite the typically provocative Wildean irony, it is an enduring and compelling moral tale.

Influential expressionist horror about a serial killer who strangles women with physical infirmities. The murderer ritualistically pulling on his leather gloves before asphyxiating his victims is a  motif often repeated in the Italian giallos of the '70s. And Alfred Hitchcock must have been impressed by the voyeuristic theme suggested by the extreme closeups of the killer's eye observing his victims.

It is set in New England in the 1910s. The story begins in a cinema with a silent melodrama showing a heroine in peril, which anticipates the terror of a mute servant (Dorothy McGuire) in a gothic house of shadows. When she closes the heavy door of the old, dark mansion it is evident that rather than barring the killer's entry, she has locked him inside.

The maniac's obsession is that he must rid the world of people with disabilities. There is a brilliant point of view shot through his eyes of his potential victim without a mouth which exposes his insanity in an instant. Surely the intension was to critique the cult of eugenics, fashionable in the Edwardian era, which nourished Nazi ideology.

This is horror noir, rich in gothic atmosphere and suspense climaxing in a showstopping electrical storm! McGuire is the opposite of the old horror scream-queen. She tries to shout for help, but... isn't heard. It's easy to guess the murderer, and Ethel Barrymore is annoying as the irascible matriarch, but Elsa Lanchester provides comic relief as reliably as ever. And McGuire suffers in silence magnificently.

Val Lewton's final production for RKO's B horror unit is a historical film about the mentally sick inhabitants of an asylum in 18th century London. Boris Karloff is marvellous as the corrupt, devious head of the institution, who shows his charges to the public for tuppence, and is amenable to allowing the enemies of his rich friends to disappear into its dark corridors, for a consideration.

This is an extremely impressive historical drama which isn't scared to show its learning. William Hogarth is given a writing credit and the film recreates frames from A Rakes Progress! The script is witty, intelligent and rich in fascinating historical detail which never even remotely slows down the story. It's not easy to think of an A film that recreates the age nearly as interestingly.

This is a horror film because of the revulsion generated by the enemies of the enlightenment as they not only obstruct change, but imprison reformers within the walls of the living hell. There are brilliant stylistic flourishes: the bare arms snaking out of the bars of the cells in the moonlight; or the flicker of Karloff's eyes as the inmates place the last brick in his tomb.

This is a world of menace and cruelty where evil can be hidden inside a witticism. Where the decadence of the rich is not only accepted, but presumed to be fair. Where the poor suffer unbearably and the pretence of taking care of the sick is a racket. This lost money and Lewton's team was broken up. But his legacy is the best anthology of genre films in cinema.

When the RKO bosses informed Val Lewton he would make his next few films with Boris Karloff, he feared he would have to produce Universal style monster movies. But Karloff didn't change Lewton. The producer wove the lisping Englishman seamlessly into the Lewton style. In return a grateful Karloff gave the best performances of his career.  

This isn't exactly Lewton's usual psychological horror. It is as pessimistic as the earlier films but more conventional. Greece is weary with war. Some travellers are quarantined on a tiny island where plague is killing local residents. The visitors, led by a general (Karloff) are trapped there until the wind changes and the hot Sirocco comes to burn away the disease...

Like all Lewton horrors to this point, this is about rationality against the occult. The officer is a scientist. But as the people die, he puts his faith in the ancient customs of his childhood, and the old remedies. He believes in the Vorvoloka, a malevolent spirit that inhabits and controls the body while it sleeps. Maybe this is causing the deaths, not the plague.

The story lacks originality; the horror set piece is the live burial of a catatonic, which is as old as Poe. With WWII at an end, audiences stayed away from its exhausted fatalism. But it is a haunting experience that leaves behind an uneasy impression of the uncanny, and the appeal of superstition to explain what we cannot understand.

The final two productions from Val Lewton's B horror unit at RKO -with Bedlam in 1946- are not the psychological horrors of the earlier films which are usually located in contemporary America. They are historical dramas set in Britain. They are only in the horror genre at all because of the grotesque themes. Though this may not be quintessential Lewton it is still a magnificent and exciting film.

It is loosely based on a Robert Louis Stevenson story about a grave robber in Edinburgh after Burke and Hare. Boris Karloff plays a cab driver who supplies bodies to a teaching hospital. When supply doesn't meet demand he isn't above creating a few corpses of his own. The hubristic head of the medical school (Henry Daniell), is in too deep with the sinister murderer. 

There are interesting and profound themes not normally found in horror. The script is superb, full of colourful, archaic language, rich period detail, and it looks amazing, borrowing the set of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The noirish pools of darkness are gorgeously sad.

The chilling, supernatural climax is a heart-stopper. The nucleus of the film is the deeply pleasurable head to head between Karloff and Daniell. This is the performance of Karloff's life, as the insidious, leering, morally forsaken killer. And there's a legendary moment for horror fans when Karloff 'burkes' Bela Lugosi in their last appearance together.

This is a remake of a silent film about men who returned from the great war with horrific injuries. RKO updated it to WWII, just as that conflict was ending. Robert Young plays a flyer who suffers facial scarring and paralysis. He finds companionship with the shy, unattractive spinster (Dorothy McGuire) who cares for him as he comes to terms with his injuries.

And they fall in love under the influence of the enchanted cottage, which makes them perceive each other as attractive. He glimpses her inner beauty and she sees the man she distantly loved before the war. Others don't share their illusion, but the lovers are protected by the cottage's mystical, lonely housekeeper (Mildred Natwick) and a blind neighbour (Herbert Marshall).

Clearly, the studio pulled a lot of punches on the couple's appearance. She is so unattractive, soldiers at a wartime dance draw back in horror. But she's just Dorothy McGuire without makeup. He has a scar, but the twisted lip comes and goes. This isn't horror. It's a lush wartime romance which offers comfort to the home-front waiting for its heroes to return. Who may have changed.

It is a lush Hollywood fantasy, conventionally scored by Roy Webb's nostalgic, wistful orchestration, with tasteful photography and visual effects. It's the most sentimental film imaginable, but it conveys a strange ethereal magic, and has developed a small but devoted cult.

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.