Film Reviews by Steve

Brilliant prison noir which retains the liberal sentiments of the great Warner Brothers penitentiary films of the thirties. But America had since been through WWII and the dynamic between guard and prisoner has changed. The convicts are humanised by flashbacks to domestic life. When the inevitable knock on the door comes, it now evokes images of the gestapo.  

Many of the men fought in the war, and draw on combat experience to plan an escape. Hume Cronyn is the sadistic guard, his torso oiled, polishing his rifle while listening to Wagner, intent on beating a confession out of a prisoner with a lead pipe. No debate about whose side we are on here, though true to the laws of noir, Burt Lancaster and his cellmates are cursed.  

Jules Dassin was associated with the Hollywood ten and this is the work of a dissident. Cronyn plays a political figure. His power is justified by the uniform (which anticipates the Stanford Prison experiment). He is a fascist, who turns his fire on the inmates, or manoeuvres them to self destruction. His sadism is sensual ('I get quite a kick from censoring the mail').

Lancaster is the nominal star, but it's Cronyn that dominates. There is a chilling moment at the end when he is announced as the new Governor, surely a warning from Dassin about how close America is to fascism: 'Kindness is a weakness' he says as he lies to a prisoner that his wife has divorced him, 'the weak must die so the strong can live'.

The greatest ever poverty row feature. It is claimed it was made for $10000 in a week. It sets a standard for what can be done with almost nothing.  Tom Neal plays a jazz musician hitching from New York to LA. He thumbs a ride from a loudmouth with a bad heart and when he dies- this is noir- the pianist steals the dead man's identity and car and gets himself into real trouble.

He stops for a hitch-hiker (Ann Savage), who had also been picked up by the dead driver. She assumes Neal has bumped him off and lifted his wallet. She's not above turning these assumptions into hard cash. Detour made B actor Savage a legend. She doesn't turn up until the last twenty minutes, but she really rips it up. She's not beautiful, but she's so artlessly trashy, she's irresistible. 

These two are as morally and financially bankrupt a pair of sleazeballs as is imaginable and it's not obvious what they wouldn't do for a few bucks. As she says, 'We're both alike, both born in the same gutter'. Neal is great, but Savage is jawdropping as a cheap chiseller without brains or scruples.    

At first glance this is another noir that follows the extraordinary ill fortune of a doomed, corruptible male. But eventually, the penny drops; the whole narrative is a lie. Neal is a tawdry killer who is rehearsing the story he will tell the cops when they inevitably catch up with him. Hell, we've only got his word that he was even in a band. And I don't trust him for a second. 

With prohibition ending in '33 and censorship arriving in '34, the mob film began to slide from view by the mid decade. When it returned in this James Cagney vehicle, it was nostalgic. This is set in New York in the '20s. The crooks run the city and have politicians and the cops in their wallets. Crime offers the only way out of the slums and the racketeers are revered by the kids.

Cagney is out of stir and plans to rejoin his former partner, a slick mafia lawyer (Humphrey Bogart), who holds the spoils from the job that got Rocky sent down. Only Bogart would rather rub him out than share his fortune. So the ex-con forms a loose alliance with his childhood pal (Pat O'Brien), a two fisted, crime busting priest trying to break the hold of the gangs on his parish.

This is more sophisticated than the precode gangster pictures. The sets are better. Michael Curtiz's roving camera opens up the frame and there is a rousing score from Max Steiner. But still the criminal still has to be punished. What makes this special is the scene where Rocky dies in the chair- among the most stunning climaxes in cinema.

Warners was the studio with a social conscience. The title refers to the Dead End Kids, the delinquents who idolise Rocky. The message is, that they can be saved. It is the slums  that make the poor turn to crime. While the tough Irish priest priest seems fanciful, Cagney is a bundle of star energy. And that ending places this among the greatest gangster films.

This Sam Fuller noir kicks off with a bang. A gun is fired in a burlesque theatre. A stripper runs down main street in her heels and is shot dead in a line of traffic. Sugar Torch's murder is tangled up in the LA Japanese community. A contrasting pair of detectives are on the case: the easy going WASP/jock (Glenn Corbett) and a sensitive, cultured Japanese American (James Shigeta).

The core of the film is its inter-racial triangle between these two veterans of Korea and the arts student (Victoria Shaw) who is helping them with their enquiries. Censorship made this still problematic in 1959. So Fuller challenges the traditional Hollywood taboo on race. This was around the start of the civil rights movement.

With its big band soundtrack (solo clarinet for romantic scenes), chases and punch ups, and seedy, lowlife locations, this is a model for the emerging tv crime series. An oddball stool pigeon is especially familiar. There are no big stars. But Fuller's camera setups are far more interesting than on telly, and there is more background detail, mostly of the LA Japanese district.

The three leads had careers almost exclusively on the small screen. They lack star charisma, but the two cops' friendship is engaging with its odd couple chemistry; Corbett is laid back and self possessed, Shigeta is intense and volatile. We'd see that dynamic again! The race angle is no longer challenging. But Fuller, as usual, directs with ingenuity and cuts with energy. 

Colourful, irreverent update of '30s pulp fiction to the 1960s. It's from a novel by Ross Macdonald, but it's essentially the Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler. Paul Newman's insubordinate Lew Harper is an approximation of Philip Marlowe. The film even starts like The Big Sleep with the detective calling on the mansion of a man worth 100 million dollars. 

The wealthy industrialist has gone missing. His wife (Lauren Bacall!) wants him back. Harper picks up the trail leading from grifter to kook to goofball. From cameo to character actor to special guest star. This has a fabulous cast with Shelley Winters standing out as a gluttonous ex-film star and Pamela Tiffin memorable as the missing man's sexy daughter.

Harper discovers that everyone has a hand in the till, or worse. In true Chandler style, only the detective is spotless and even he has to enter the sewer to solve the crime. Newman gives a cartoonish performance as the freewheeling hero, continually adopting alter-egos with improvised accents. There's a lot of comedy.

Jack Smight was an inexperienced tv director and this is a mixed bag. The photography is attractive, but the film lacks suspense. The lively cast gives it energy. This was William Goldman's debut Hollywood screenplay and he rewards film buffs with many references to classic detective films, while leaving us with a souvenir of the far out nonconformism of the mid-sixties.

This is the role  Bette Davis went to war with Warner Brothers to get, and which made her a star. She is a Cockney waitress who cruelly breaks the inoffensive student (Leslie Howard) who is in love with her. She doesn't care, but humiliates him because she has the power and it is in her nature

And he would rather have her spite than nothing. It's a psychosexual power game. The adaptation was compromised by censorship. So, Mildred dies of poverty and TB- in the book she is a sex worker who contracts syphilis. The difficulty of condensing an epic meditative novel into an 82m melodrama would have meant trade-offs anyway. It's still transgressive.

Howard is studying anatomy. His own physical injury (he has a deformed foot) has marked him as a victim and is a symbol of his emotional inferiority. She is inarticulate and ordinary but has a sexual charisma that prevails. There is nothing else quite as extreme as this in thirties Hollywood, even precode. Her death scene is phenomenal.

Davis is astonishing. Her accent is a disaster. She is raw and wild, but this is one of her stand out performances. Howard is fine, though too old. But Bette is dominant, as she should be. It's like watching a sadistic, predatory creature torment its victim. It's not a realistic portrayal, it's far more than that: it's horrifying and among the greatest performances of the decade.

Sentimental tearjerker set in Philadelphia during the Civil War. Bette Davis has a brief affair with a Union soldier (George Brent) who is killed in action. Their illegitimate daughter is raised as part of the family of a manipulative cousin (Miriam Hopkins). And Bette becomes the austere aunt of the girl who loves instead her assumed mother.

Bette grows old and shrewish, almost a monster. Davis was always better matched by another female star. No one cast Brent opposite her for sexual chemistry. Hopkins is a fine adversary, as she pecks away at her poor cousin's soul. This is something of a horror film, where the terror is for a woman is to grow old without a child or a husband.

And that brings a lot of suspense. Of course the main attraction is Bette's extraordinary star performance as she (tastefully) ages from a girl with dreams into an elderly woman driven by bitterness. She has a powerful, intimidating presence. There's a touch of the gothic in her, many years before Baby Jane.

It's a Civil War film about the home front made right at the start of WWII. So there's a premonition of new sacrifices to come.  Bette's usual costumer Orry-Kelly creates a riot of crinoline and lace. Corsets are tight and Max Steiner contributes a tender score. It's a handsome Warner Brother's production which is utterly conventional, but still a heartbreaker.

Quintessential Warner Brothers soap which is a vehicle for Bette Davis' star performance. She is one of the Trehernes of Rhode Island, a woman of inherited wealth and no responsibilities beyond a whirl of social events and the pursuit of pleasure. Only those headaches, and that blurred vision, are the early symptoms of an inoperable brain cancer.

Bette gets to explore the many sides of her star persona: a socialite who believes in the superiority of her breeding; the chastened bride-to-be who faces life saving surgery; a reckless thrill seeker intent on blocking out the reality of her relapse; finally, the selfless wife in snowy Vermont who accepts her death, compensated by a brief experience of love.

To allow Bette to shine more brightly, she was paired with her frequent leading man, George Brent as the brilliant brain surgeon who can't save her, but does at least marry her. The film is a tribute to the medical profession, but this is Hollywood pathology. Davis' symptoms are crafted to fit the requirements of the plot.

It's pure escapism. We get a tour of the privileges of the upper class. There are oddities. Humphrey Bogart plays an Irish stablehand and Ronald Reagan a drunken playboy, which suggests it was someone's first day in casting. But Max Steiner's score is typically superb. The choral swell when Bette bids farewell to her dogs is a sentimental heartbreaker. As is the film.

This confirmed Fred and Ginger as a starring double act. It was the first musical created for them, rather than being cast into an existing project. It is a continental farce set in London and an extremely artificial art deco Venice with the classic device of mistaken identity keeping the sparring Americans abroad apart until the final reel.

 Fred handles the screwball dialogue pretty well, though Ginger is given little to do outside the dance spectaculars. The support cast is very much at home among the frou-frou of the plot, particularly Eric Blore as the unctuous valet of a bemused toff  (Edward Everett Horton). They seem far more married than Horton does to his wisecracking wife (Helen Broderick) .

Of course, when the stars are dancing, particularly together, the film is a beautiful dream and they have some wonderful Irving Berlin songs to perform. There's the chic swing of Top Hat, White Tie and Tails with Fred backed by a male chorus line. The star dancing in his tails with a cane implies a sublime world of sophisticated style.

The routine for Cheek to Cheek, with Ginger in that fluffy feather dress, is legendary. They present pure elegant romance and insinuate an unmissable sexual rapport. Astaire and Rogers together are among the most enduring images of Hollywood in the 1930s. They are the eternal essence of golden age Hollywood glamour.

In American films of the '30s, comedy is a courtship that ends at the altar. For Berlin émigré Ernst Lubitsch, that's when the fun starts! Romance is a masque of deception, intrigue and impulse. His musicals in this period were set in a sort of Paris of the mind. In the context of early sound Hollywood films they were alien, exotic and a revolution...

...Until 1934 when censorship closed them down... Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald are happily married. So happy that they talk in rhyming couplets and break into song. Their relationship is so fertile with innuendo that it's their matrimony that seems salacious, and the affairs of their friends which appear the dull convention.

In the face of such conjugal joy, what can Genevieve Tobin and Roland Young do but try to break them up? Her, by seducing Maurice, Roland by exploiting this dalliance to divorce his unfaithful wife.  The suggestiveness of this film is astonishing, and hilarious.

Chevalier has a unique charisma, addressing the camera directly and audaciously, singing in his boulevardier style songs of sex and infidelity. Like Oh That Mitzi! and What Would You Do? Lubitsch's films are groundbreaking, gravity free celebrations of the great game of love.

This Buster Keaton classic  is strikingly similar to Harold Lloyd's earlier The Kid Brother, but on a different scale. Keaton's location shoot is more striking and his sets and stunts more ambitious. I think Lloyd's film is funnier. Both play ingenues, though in their mid thirties. Harold makes a romcom. This is more of an action comedy.  

Buster is a bookish milksop brought up by his mother on the east coast. He leaves to work on his dad's ramshackle river boat, and falls in love with the daughter of the owner of a fleet of state of the art steamships. A situation desired by neither father. Love conquers all, but not until Buster has proven himself by saving everyone from drowning in a cyclone.  

The film is best known for its astonishing final 25 minutes when the town is ripped apart by the high wind and washed away in a great tide. Including the famous gag of the front panel of a frame house collapsing over a hapless Buster, saved by an open upstairs window. It was a stunt he had used before, but not as impressively.   

Credit to the scenery and props department, their work on the storm scene is phenomenal, and complements Keaton's extraordinary performance as the man fighting nature. It is a tour de force and one of the great passages in cinema. Just watching him walking into the wind is worth your ticket. And no one falls as well as Buster.

This is a sweet boy-meets-girl romcom, until the amazing last twenty minutes of action when Harold Lloyd rousts a huge redneck who has stolen public money from his dad. Harold plays the weakling youngest son of a family of tough rustic musclemen led by his father, the sheriff. The boy admires them devotedly, and dreams of being just like them.

The virtuous Jobyna Ralston comes into town with a crooked medicine show, and her associates steal the town's savings.  So Harold goes to get the money back, employing the inventive intellect that no one else in the family or community has any interest in; they being thick in the arm, and in the head.

Lloyd plays his usual archetype, a skinny, optimistic do-gooder we can root for. The film is dense with charming, clever gags and the set-piece climax on a wrecked ship gives the hero plenty of opportunity to display his wholesome determination as well as the star's genius for physical comedy.

 Lloyd made more at the box-office in the 1920s than any of his great contemporaries. But it's 1927 and the talkies will change everything.  Lloyd did better than some, though his clean-cut hero went out of fashion in the screwball era. But, for me he is the funniest of the silent comedians.

This kicks off like a typical late fifties noir as Elmer Bernstein's big band scores a familiar montage of the neon lit streets of Manhattan. Then James Wong Howe picks up his camera and, wanders through the avenues and backstreets, clubs and theatres of Broadway. This location tracking was completely new for film noir and it  still looks fabulous.

Despite the human corruption and the noir aesthetic, there is no actual legal crime.  JJ Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) controls Broadway through his popular newspaper column and the secrets he holds over its players. He owns press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) because Falco needs the column. In turn the agents court Falco for his access to Hunsecker.

The screenplay was written by Clifford Odets, the liberal who named names to HUAC. The cynical showbiz food chain of Broadway represents the iniquities of capital and politics. The big cat feeds on the vulnerable minions of the neon jungle. Hunsecker has an unspoken incestuous obsession with his sister and leans Falco to break her engagement to a jazz guitarist

Manhattan is controlled by the syndicate which means Hunsecker, a populist with a god-complex who brazenly drums out his phoney patriotics and dares anyone to demur. He has a logo which gives him the eyes of Big Brother. There are no good guys and no sweeteners at the fade out. It is an intelligent, artistic work of overwhelming pessimism.

Buster Keaton perfected his Great Stoneface persona over years in vaudeville and dozens of shorts dating back to 1917. By Sherlock Jr. he was at his peak. He plays a projectionist who aspires to be a detective. Unfortunately he is fitted up by his unscrupulous rival for a girl to appear the thief of her father's pocket watch.

Then Buster falls asleep while showing a film about a jewel thief, and dreams that he enters the screen and solves the crime. As it is a dream, the events become increasingly surreal. Other silent comics used incongruous back projection, but here Buster interacts with his fantasy, distorting the events.

It's a brilliant set up. Keaton was also an extraordinary physical comedian, and the action is full of amazing acrobatics. Like when he stands on a huge water-pipe as it swings across the road and deposits him in the passenger seat of a getaway car. Which actually broke his neck...

 The contrast between Keaton's deadpan exterior and his outrageous escapades is the key to his comedy. It is hard to watch Keaton's extravagant, show-stopping stunts and not be overwhelmed by his ambition and craft. He is the most enterprising and gifted of all the '20s comedians. Sherlock Jr. is his masterpiece.

Though made in the 50's, this is typical of the film noirs of a decade earlier. There is a femme fatale, portrayed by the incomparable Gloria Grahame. Glenn Ford is the ill-fated male dupe back from the war. Only now it's Korea rather than WWII. He returns to resume his job on the railways.

Gloria plays a traditional enough archetype, a sexually distorted looker motivated by greed. She seduces the engine driver to persuade him to murder her violent, abusive husband (Broderick Crawford). For most of the film she seems a victim who is physically and mentally tormented by this jealous brute. And she was sexually assaulted at sixteen by her guardian.  

Eventually we learn that much of the web the wife spins to entrap the fall guy is lies. She is damaged by exploitative men, but our sympathy finally snaps when we see the moral vacuum she has learned to conceal. She's quite a horrifying figure. Though ultimately unredeemable, we see that as a woman in that period, her options are limited.    

No one played hot sleazy trouble like Gloria. The noir plot is interesting, and Fritz Lang exploits the railway setting for suspense and shadows and symbolism. GG and Ford are incandescent together- as they were a year earlier in another Lang noir. It's not quite as great as The Big Heat, but still a genre classic.