Film Reviews by Steve

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.

Musical version of Ferenc Molnár's Liliom which was adapted by Frank Borzage and Fritz Lang in the '30s. Gordon MacRae stars as a fairground barker of superficial charm and foul disposition who ill treats his new wife (Shirley Jones). He dies while robbing a local big shot, leaving her pregnant and alone. In the afterlife, and with his family in peril, he gets the chance to live for one more day...

There's a lot that doesn't work in Carousel. The main role is such an unrepentant and contemptible lowlife that it's hard to care about his redemption. His wife is too sweetly virtuous to easily accept as a working girl growing up in poverty. The beautiful locations in Maine carry no impression of a realistic, working fishing port where lives are traded for a few dirty coins...

The film retains too much of the play's realism  to be credible within the conventions of a fifties Hollywood musical. And its acquiescence of domestic abuse makes it too difficult to want to suspend disbelief. The story is too dark for this kind of treatment.

Of course the songs are excellent, and You'll Never Walk Alone is one of the great showstoppers. It is performed twice. The Cinemascope is thrilling, particularly in accommodating the dance routines. The locations are lovely and the colour is bright and deep and luxurious. But none of that is really harmonious with the story that's being told. 

Jack Finney's timeless science fiction concept is often assumed to be an allegory for Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist witch hunts in post-war USA. Others suggest a near opposite, that it was intended to be a warning of the spread of communism. Don Siegel testified that he intended his film to comment on the brainwashing effect of materialism in the contemporary economic boom.

It is a brilliant vehicle for critiquing any kind of conformity. There is an alien invasion from seeds blown in from space which grow into pods which mimic the exact appearance of the hosts.  Once established, they take over their being and memories. Then the pod-people attack the freedom of others, claiming they will be happier without individuality or emotion.

This is the start of a wave of sci-fi films about conspiracies which tap into paranoia about a perceived hidden threat. By the end, Kevin McCarthy is running on the freeway shouting about the danger to us all: 'you're next, you're next'. But no one stops to listen. Is he insane? Or is it true? Sadly, the studio insisted on a couple of framing scenes which remove that ambiguity.

Seigel's only science fiction film is a legend, and part of our cultural language. It has a stylish film noir look and while the meagre budget may have left limited funds for special effects, they are still good. Kevin McCarthy has become exclusively famous just for this role, and with the beautiful Dana Wynter forms an unusually permissive relationship for the '50s.

Psychological ghost story set in New England, though shot in UK. Robert Wise is obviously influenced by head of RKO horror in the '40s, Val Lewton, who gave Wise his debut as director. The idea is that terror conjured up in the mind of the audience is more daunting than any screen monster. So the horror is offscreen, mostly suggested by sound.

 The set design of the haunted stately home and the expressionist shot compositions are brilliantly unsettling. But we don't see any ghosts. In fact, the ambiguous script implies that the haunting may be happening inside the fractured psyche of the pale, neurotic medium (Julie Harris), who is an unreliable narrator.

Richard Johnson plays an academic who wants to prove the existence (or otherwise) of the paranormal, so enlists two women who have experience of the supernatural, Claire Bloom plays the other, a chic socialite who has the gift of ESP, so knows what everyone is thinking. Russ Tamblyn is a sceptic, who brings the wisecracks and the martinis.

This isn't unlike the kind of B horror William Castle was famous for in the 50s-60s. But there's a bigger budget, and it's more sophisticated... And scarier. The ensemble cast is excellent, but Harris excels as the lonely, unstable conduit for the spirits who possess the old house. Who want her to remain. It's her vulnerability and suffering that stays in the memory.

Zero budget cult horror fantasy, shot along the California coast, and set in an empty amusement park, which evokes a dreamy maritime ambience. It is slow with a bare, prosaic script, but it has that strange, ethereal mood that amateur productions sometimes have because they are made in unconventional ways.

There's a cast of mostly tv support actors, but Dennis Hopper leads as Johnny, a sailor in the US navy who falls in love with a mysterious stranger (Linda Lawson), who poses as a mermaid in the fair. She is being investigated by the police as two of her boyfriends have been found dead...

The old sailor who runs the mermaid attraction (Gavin Muir) tells Johnny that the girl is a siren from the sea who tempts men to their death... The fortune teller thinks the sailor is in deep peril. So who is crazy? Maybe it's even Johnny who keeps having nightmares about the sea.

This is an atmospheric, homemade film which demonstrates what can be done with very little money but plenty of imagination. The eerie music is effective, particularly the echoey flute themes. The lack of budget for extras makes this a deserted, lonely world, with a melancholy that stays in the memory..

This was adapted from a 1961 tv play, also starring Cliff Robertson. His role in the film version won an Oscar, as a lonely, blue collar worker with learning disabilities who is chosen for an experimental operation which will make him more intelligent. More than that, he becomes a genius. But the process is only temporary...

For an hour, it is a feelgood fantasy, shot in a documentary style. But when the dream begins to unravel, the picture is fragmented, telling much of the story through hallucinogenic split screen montages, scored by Ravi Shankar. It all gets very summer-of-love. This method tells the story quickly, but avoids following up any thematic proposals.

It relates a uniquely human experience. We are educated until we understand the fact of our mortality, and nothing we can learn afterwards can change this truth. But the film overlooks the complications. What if everyone had the operation? Surely it is more likely it  would be sold to the rich rather than given to those in need? What are the ethics of using this man as an experiment?

Robertson plays an outsider, someone who sees the world having first experienced its cruelty. There's a very strong scene where he word associates with scientists at a press conference and we glimpse his subconscious trauma. It feels credible that one day, something like this could be attempted. And that's what good sci-fi does; it draws on the almost believable