Film Reviews by Steve

This untypical Frank Capra romance starts in the Chinese Civil War but soon becomes an unrequited love story between an American missionary in Shanghai (Barbara Stanwyck), and a Chinese feudal warlord (Nils Asther). This is an unusually lavish and beautiful production, epic in the early scenes of conflict, and then opulent at the palace.

 The missionary is saved from the chaos of the war by the powerful general. It's a vicarious adventure, as the horrified outsider becomes seduced by the brutal but sensual oriental. As she falls under his influence, she sees him less as an archetype and becomes absorbed by his eroticism.

She fits a common pattern for Americans abroad in cinema: evangelist, naive, hubristic and out of her depth. In trying to save his soul she destroys him utterly even while she falls in love with the man and his aristocratic luxury. He takes poison while she returns home merely chastened by her experience, a more sophisticated woman.  

This is a classic of the pre-code era. After 1934, even implying an affair between people of different races would be forbidden, as would the suicide. It's an imaginative and complex film. There is undeniably plenty of racial stereotyping, but actually by the fade out it is the American's intrusive Christianity which seems the more inexplicable, eccentric philosophy.

Fritz Lang's penultimate Hollywood film is a pulpy satire of American news services. Vincent Price is a media mogul who sets up a contest among his management team to compete for a new role in overall charge of his empire, leaving him free to play carpet golf and spy on his unfaithful, pneumatic wife (a blonde Rhonda Fleming).  

The Lipstick Killer is a psychopath murdering young women living alone in New York. Whoever impresses the boss with the most sensationalist coverage will get the job. They are eclipsed at every turn by Dana Andrews' Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and broadcaster.

 This is a lively, cynical, sexy film noir which is pessimistic about human nature and the media.  Everyone in the film is grifting everyone else. They would sell out anyone for story recognition or a step up. It's about the perennial themes of noir; greed and sex.  

Andrews is a little stiff in the lead. Perhaps appropriately as his character is drunk throughout. Ida Lupino shines as a sexy older woman hired for the 'female angle' but who mostly angles after Dana. It's a suspenseful thriller which climaxes with an exciting chase through the New York subway. Not Lang's best, but still a lot of fun.

This is the best MGM comedy of the thirties. Spencer Tracy is the editor of a tabloid that accuses rich girl Myrna Loy of infidelity. She and her father Walter Connelly are going to sue. Because it's not true. Tracy calls in his libel specialist William Powell to marry Tracy's girlfriend Jean Harlow, and then be gotcha'd with Myrna...  

So it's a farce! And that's a brilliant screwball set up. Naturally there are complications. Harlow falls for Powell and Powell falls for Loy. There's a superb script full of fast talking wisecracks set around the newspaper offices.  It was surely influenced by The Front Page, but I prefer this one...  

That's a hell of a cast, but it's Powell who excels. He shares a chemistry with all the other stars. No surprises that he is so good with Myrna, given they starred in 13 films together. This is a genuinely funny film. The angling scene where he tries to blag trout fishing with her and Connelly is a standout.

There is insight into the privileges of the super-rich; their cocktails hours and cruises and expensive hobbies and publicity headaches. It isn't too interested in the depression. The only working class character (Harlow) is treated shamefully. It's a classic social comedy, but it without the depth of Frank Capra's contemporary work.

Claudette Colbert- for my money- is the greatest female comedy actor in films. This is mainly a vehicle for her comic sparkle, and flair for suggesting a little bit more than she says. She plays an American showgirl who arrives in Paris in the rain wearing just a fabulous gold evening dress but without luggage or money.

She is picked up by a taxi driver of limited means (Don Ameche),  but soon is pretending to be the wife of a Hungarian aristocrat... for complicated reasons....  It's the Cinderella story. The charade will end at midnight. Will she be uncovered as penniless gold-digger by a high society superbitch (Mary Astor)?    

The film is a glorious dream of screwball fantasy. There is superb script by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett full of wit and innuendo. The director Mitchell Leisen proves a reliable imitator of Ernst Lubitsch. But everything is elevated by this cast, with John Barrymore very much at home in this kind of continental farce.

There are depths. Colbert starts off as a mercenary, but inevitably she must settle for something other than wealth and title. The charade must end.  She finds love with the cab driver, but the film is very clear that for the poor, love is usually not enough. This is one of the great comedies of the '30s.

 Frank Capra gives us an unlikely American hero, a rich man who wants to give all his money away! Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper) is an everyman from Hicksville who inherits $20m and moves to the bright lights of New York. Mr. Deeds is taken for a ride, but surely he can trust the fast talking newshound (Jean Arthur) he is falling in love with?

Cooper gives a signature performance as the provincial, tuba playing writer of greetings cards who grows disillusioned by ambient corruption. Arthur became a star as the tough cynic who repents. As ever, Robert Riskin's dialogue is full of sharp political wit, and he's brilliant at voicing Deeds' idiosyncratic wisdom.      

Some of the commentary on America in the depression feels like editorialising. Unlike other Capra/Riskin films, the message isn't spun into the thread of the narrative. They hammer away at the point that America needs to find a unified solution to the depression which includes the rich and the poor. At times the film seems as unworldly as its hero.

There are many incidental pleasures, like the unflattering portrayal of the Algonquin round table of New Yorker critics. Its theme is that a corrupt society will always make good people appear naive, even dangerous. Which is fair enough. Deeds wins out because Capra can't send his audience home without hope. But the fascists had seized power across Europe.

The boxing film was always an apt metaphor for the Hollywood left in the era of film noir. They expose the corruption of the system as the boxers fight each other rather than those with power. Their willing participation in their own exploitation and destruction made the sport a potent symbol for the myth of the American dream..  

This is is the best of these. Robert Ryan plays a no-hope puncher nearing the end, vaguely aware he will never be a champion. His next bout has been fixed by his manager, who doesn't even tell him because he thinks his man has no chance anyway.  He is literally the fall guy. He fights, but he fight isn't fair. He has been sold.

 The film plays out in real time over a terse, tense 70 minutes. Ryan (a boxer in college) is magnificent as a decent man who has never been corrupted by the hell he lives in, and so must destroyed physically. The outcome is heartbreaking. Audrey Totter is also very moving as his suffering wife.

The fight game is powerfully evoked: the brutal contests; the punch drunk veterans ; the wealthy racketeers. Hard-up punters pay rich promoters to see other poor men beat the hell out of each other. The hostility of the crowd towards the losers is so powerful and shocking. Robert Wise places us in the seats, among these voyeurs, another one of the mob.  

This is an adaptation of a novel by one of hardboiled fiction's most pessimistic writers, David Goodis, a poet of impoverished lives ruined by dumb misfortune. It is glamourised a little for the screen, but is still subdued, like a sad, heartbreak ballad.  

Aldo Ray tells the story with a catch in his voice like a corny torch singer; a sentimental ill fated deadbeat. He is being tracked by a pair of relentless killers convinced he has pocketed the loot from their bank raid. Rudy Bond and Brian Keith are a fine double act as the menacing heavies.

There are relishable support performances from Anne Bancroft as the low rent model Aldo Ray picks up in a bar and James Gregory as a resourceful detective chasing up the stolen money.  Stirling Silliphant's screenplay conveys the weariness of Goodis' prose and the threadbare lives of his characters.  

It is mostly set in Los Angeles and the oil fields of California, but concludes in the winter snowdrifts of Wyoming. Like On Dangerous Ground the film contrasts the dirty city with white rural snowscapes. The death of a villain by snowplough must be unique in cinema! This stylish film is one of the classic LA noirs.

Fritz Lang's final Hollywood film is anti-death penalty. A novelist seeks to prove the fallibility of justice by planting clues to indicate that he is the killer of a burlesque dancer. He intends his publisher to then reveal the evidence was faked, proving circumstantial evidence is too precarious to justify capital punishment.  

No such luck. This being a Langian world, subject to the indifference of fate, the writer's accomplice is killed in a car accident the day the jury is to deliver its verdict! With the writer (Dana Andrews) on death row, his estranged fiancée (Joan Fontaine) works to clear his name.

There is a big final reveal, which though unlikely is still enjoyable... The weakness of the film is its stars. Andrews gradually ossified through the fifties and Fontaine is about 20 years too old. And the film looks awfully low budget. The bonus is its trashy burlesque setting and the sassy dialogue of its support cast of strippers.  

The police don't seem too bothered when they find out they were building a case against a writer researching a book. But though the story is improbable, it is still suspenseful and its many twists pay off.  And the film does actually make a reasonable case against capital punishment.

Robert Wise's polemic against capital punishment is based on the real life case of Barbara Graham who was executed in San Quentin in 1955 on unreliable evidence. It's a procedural film which explains how the prisoner is processed from her conviction, all the way to the death penalty. The system is characterised as barbaric and legally hazardous.    

The story casts doubt on her guilt and argues that she was ill-used by a defective judiciary and the parasitic media. It was based on Graham's letters, and articles by a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who initially condemned her, but eventually tried to save her from the gas chamber.

Graham was a prostitute with a history of petty crime. She lies by reflex. She is also represented as an affectionate mother who a victim of domestic abuse. Susan Hayward- one of the very best dramatic actors of the fifties- is superb as the complex, condemned woman. 

Wise actually puts us inside the gas chamber with Graham, trapped within the voyeuristic gaze of the press and representatives of law and order. The film makes a powerful case (though has been criticised for altering facts) but it's Hayward's intense, kinetic performance that ultimately dominates.

With Dr. X (1932), one of a pair of horror films made by Warner Brothers in the early '30s, shot with mostly the same cast and crew and both in 2-strip technicolor. The greens and browns of this process give The Mystery of the Wax Museum an unusual and exotic look, allied to the striking deco sets (even in the morgue!). Fay Wray gets top billing, but is in a supporting role.

The film is carried by Glenda Farrell as the sort of fast talking girl reporter that got her typecast.  Lionel Atwill plays a waxwork sculptor in London whose creations are destroyed when his partner burns down the gallery in an insurance scam. These statues were the artist's closest confidents, and his face and hands are scorched in the blaze.

He reopens in New York years later and overcomes his disability by ordering corpses that look like his lost works and coating them in wax. Fay Wray looks the image of his long ago favourite, Marie Antoinette. The horror is mostly confined to the last ten minutes, particularly when Wray pulls off the maniac's wax mask to reveal the hideous distorted face beneath.

This is a wonderfully entertaining film. While we're waiting for the exotic horror of the climax, the tough, fast talking dialogue is a delight. Farrell is a blast and establishes a rapport with everyone she shares the screen with. The wax museum premise became a horror staple, but this is the best version and a marvellous swan song for the 2-strip colour process.

WC Fields used his feature films to recycle favourite sketches from his stage act, so they are inevitably episodic. This feels like his first masterpiece because his tragicomic persona crystallises perfectly. He is a timeless, suffering everyman whose plans are always thwarted. He only wants to go to California to run an orange grove...  

Fields' is a middle aged man whose wife has become alien to him. He is aware that he has been left behind by a changing world. His coping strategies have made him weary and unfulfilled. There is a residual charm which is evident to the kindhearted, but looks grotesque to most. Traumatised by domesticity, he is much kinder than his times.

 Like all film comedians, Fields creates a strong visual image: his cigar, white flannel suit and boater, the ruined nose. The opening episode is the funniest with his grocery store destroyed by the blind/deaf Mr. Muggles, who after wrecking the glassware, hilariously crosses the road outside untouched by the speeding traffic.

Such are the frustrating laws of the Fieldsian universe. He can see every disaster as it approaches, but is powerless to resist. All he can do is palliate with whisky and cigars. It is a standard strategy in comedy to place your protagonist in the last place he wants to be, which is exactly where his immortal alter ego lives his life. 

When comic acts from vaudeville got to make Hollywood films they were usually stiffed with B directors and budgets. The Marx Brothers fared better than most and here rated multiple Oscar winner Leo McCarey. Harpo, Groucho and Chico (and Zeppo in his last film) worked their act for years, and finessed their strong visual image and contrasting comic styles.

There's Groucho's fast talking wordplay, Chico's garbled malapropisms, and Harpo's destructive, primal mime. Groucho takes over the corrupt oligarchy of Freedonia which is slipping into war with neighbours Sylvania for whom Harpo and Chico are operating as spies. With populist governments emerging in 1930s Europe, this was satire.

But it's mainly an opportunity for the trio to unleash their trademark anarchy. There's a great visual joke with Groucho playing both sides of a mirror. Margaret Dupont again scores as their uncomprehending stooge.  Marx Brothers films are best when Groucho is reeling off sardonic, convoluted, rapid-fire gags and not so much for the musical interludes of the other two.

Which makes this their best film, dense with immaculate Grouchoisms.  It's the pick of their early Paramount films and it bombed at the box office, badly. The remaining three brothers left for MGM thinking that they were finished. But Duck Soup has become an influential comedy (there's plenty of Monty Python here) and is now rated their masterpiece. 

With 42nd Street a hit, Warner Brothers made Gold Diggers in its image. Busby Berkley arranges the dance numbers and the brilliant songs are again by Dubin and Warren. There are familiar faces on screen with Dick Powell as a blue-blood composer romancing Broadway showgirl Ruby Keeler, to the outrage of his stuffy Boston family.        

If the comedy, script and situations aren't quite to the standard of 42nd Street, Berkley's musical numbers are still sensational and the best part of the film. It opens with Ginger Rogers singing We're in the Money as the rented scenery and costumes are reclaimed. Broadway is feeling the impact of the depression.  

There's Shadow Dance and the amazing Pettin' In the Park. This time it's Powell who has to go on at the last minute after the juvenile wrecks his back, and he ends the routine trying to get Keeler out of her steel corset with a tin opener. There's some fizzy, salacious dialogue from Joan Blondell and Aline MacMahan. This is still a year before the production code.

Remember My Forgotten Man is the showstopper with a phenomenal vocal from Etta Moten,  mimed by Blondell. Berkley cuts from the stage to scenes of men queuing at a soup kitchens. Warner Brothers supported the New Deal and Roosevelt. Berkley's numbers are usually exquisite confections, but here he shows us how to dance the blues.

This civil war comedy-drama is now considered Buster Keaton's classic though it wasn't well received at the time.  He plays a rebel engine driver who isn't allowed to enlist and so is shunned by his fiancée. When his train, with his girl on board, is stolen by Northern spies, Buster must retrieve the locomotive, rescue the girl and secure a strategic advantage for the South.  

 It's an ambitious film, with armies of extras staging huge battles, with spectacular stunts, shot in remote locations in a period setting. Keaton was thinking bigger than his comic contemporaries. Sadly, its failure meant his independence was compromised and he would soon sign a disastrous deal with MGM which sent his career into a spiral.  

But he was still at his peak. His gymnastics around the engine are graceful and breathtaking, with many truly hair-raising stunts. He still performs his familiar persona, the Great Stoneface, but also inhabits a believable character. Marion Mack gives an appealingly ditsy performance as his capricious sweetheart.  

While the film is spectacular, it isn't among Buster's funniest films. It doesn't help that so many people are dying on screen. It's an action film. The period detail is persuasive and the star gives a brilliant demonstration of his prodigious talent as a physical actor and comic artist.

When the Marx Brothers signed with Irving Thalberg, he asked them if they would take a pay cut as Zeppo had quit. Groucho replied that without him they were worth twice as much. It's a shame that no one brought similar insight to the musical numbers that stretch their MGM debut over 90 minutes and introduce longueurs to their manic, fast talking comedy.  

The act was revised, toning down the anarchy, and making the trio more likeable by having them roast the bad guys, rather than just anyone. The difference is obvious, but there are still some long sequences of fabulous wordplay, including the legendary Sanity Claus sketch.

 There is also the famous crowded stateroom scene. Margaret Dumont adds a little continuity by leaving Paramount with the remaining trio to play their stooge.  The vocals of Kitty Carlisle and Allan Jones are, I guess, a matter of personal taste.

It's tempting to lean on the FF during the musical numbers. Harpo and Chico's recitals are actually more of a challenge than the opera. Hard to be too critical as this was the biggest box office hit of their careers, but my preference is for the earlier, crazier Paramount comedies.