Film Reviews by Steve

 This is the best of half a dozen excellent, independently produced dramas directed by London born Ida Lupino in the 1950s before she moved onto a career in television. She also co-wrote the tense, laconic original screenplay based on recent real life events.

Two old army buddies on a fishing trip pick up a hitcher who turns out to be the serial killer murdering drivers all along a rural highway in Southern California. He forces the friends to drive 500 miles to a small harbour town where he plans to escape to Mexico.

He will kill them on arrival, but sooner if they don't play ball. It's a race against time while the cops close in as the men drive south through the desert. It's mostly a three hander.  Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy are perennial support actors who seize a rare chance to lead. William Talman is sensational as the manipulative psychopath.

This is an incredibly suspenseful film which makes a virtue of desolate desert locations as  it plots the shifting balance of power. Every stranger triggers a crisis. The pals are tough and resourceful, but it is Talman as the menacing killer with a fascistic worldview who stays in the memory.

Humphrey Bogart visits the family of the dead soldier he fought beside in Italy: his father (Lionel Barrymore) and widow (Lauren Bacall). Bad timing. The hotel they run on the Florida Keys is taken over by gangsters led by Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) while the building is battered by a mighty hurricane. Escape is impossible.  

It's the same set up as The Petrified Forest (1936) in which Bogart played the outlaw Duke Mantee as the last gasp of the wild west, an individualist. But Rocco is far more insidious. He buys the political process and operates in plain sight, subverting justice, raking profit out of the system.

This time Bogart is on the right side of the law.  He plays his signature role, the loner who won't stick out his neck for anyone (but then does). But his status as an outsider is no longer a symbol of American isolationism in early WWII, as it was in Casablanca. It is because having survived  the war, he is disillusioned by the hold men like Rocco have on America.

Crime is now organised and corrupts legitimate business. This would become a key theme of fifties mob films. The politician on the make and gangster bosses protected by the cops and City Hall would become familiar film noir personnel. Bogart and Bacall's last film together is a classic. Kudos too for Claire Trevor's well deserved Oscar as Rocco's boozy moll.

Poverty row cult film based on the Bonnie and Clyde legend directed by Joseph H. Lewis who shot many classy low budget noirs. John Dall and Peggy Cummins are dynamite together as two outlaws compelled in different ways by their fatal obsession with guns.

She is a poor, sexy circus shooter who acts by reflex, triggered either by violent crime or lust. He is a working class kid who finds status through his talent with a gun. Driven by his desire for her, he is drawn into crime, holding up stores, and then banks, leading to murder.  

Dall and Cummins are sensational. They are made for each other, except, he can't kill, and she has to kill! Cummins is a revelation. She is hot trash, so happy when she is stealing, so fulfilled when she is killing. It's a miracle that she got this part. It's unlike anything else she did.

There's a sassy script from the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo and the direction is ostentatiously stylish. It is set in a timeless rural west it has the feel of a depression era gangster film, all getaway cars and shoot outs. The wild, desolate locations in poor rural towns conveys a powerful ambience of encroaching despair.

It's is a face off between a detective (Cornel Wilde) and sociopathic mob boss (Richard Conte).  The gangster defines high achievers as those most able to hate, as they will destroy others to reach their goals.  But that also applies to the cop, who will take his adversary down by any means .  

He will even sacrifice Conte's traumatised moll (Jean Wallace) who Wilde has fallen in love with. She is a cultivated, educated woman in an environment where those accomplishments have no value. The detective exploits his murdered, stripper girlfriend too: 'I treated her like a pair of gloves. If I was cold, I called her up'.

The gangster's deputy (Brian Donlevy) is a traumatised punch bag who can't take it anymore. Or dish it out. Empathy is his tragic flaw. His demise, shot in silence when Conte removes Donlevy's hearing aid is classic noir: 'I'm gonna give you a break. I'm gonna fix it, so you don't hear the bullets'.  

This is expressionist art, photographed by noir legend John Alton. There is a tough, ominous screenplay from Philip Yordan which is sometimes tender but usually brutal. By '55, censorship was being eased. The murders are violent and onscreen, and there's a pair of obviously gay hitmen. It's one of the best B films ever made.

This violent true story may be the nearest Hollywood got to the style and daring of Italian neorealism. It was shot with a documentary crew while the real world events were still taking place. There is no incidental music, just ambient sound. It was filmed on location at the actual places where the events happened.  

The film begins with interviews with local people who attest to the authenticity of the film. Director Phil Karlson even got actors to wear the clothes of the people they portrayed! The cast was resolutely unstarry. Kathryn Grant would become well known but this was her debut.

The incidents in the film are hard to believe. A city in Alabama was controlled by a criminal gang who used violence and murder during elections to control the public, and ran the police to ignore vice and to suppress reform. There was no law and order. The film was made while the court case trying the killers was still in progress.  

This is an inspiring story of bravery and determination.  It's a rare example of a film about organised crime being defeated through democratic processes, rather than a single heroic vigilante. It is a classic work of cinema vérité made at almost no cost. 

Hard to imagine that this folksy, corny biopic could work without the everyman qualities of James Stewart. Sam Wood returned to baseball- after Pride of the Yankees- and miraculously manages to excise nearly all the sentimentality from the life of Monty Stratton, a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox in the thirties who recovered from an above knee amputation to play again.

It's the ultimate Hollywood Americana, the story of a country boy from rural Texas who makes good in the major leagues. The rags to riches narrative of the first part of the film draws on the myth of the American dream. And the star gives us a character we can unconditionally root for. It adds up to cheerful optimistic cinema.

Unless the audience can suspend their cynicism, this isn't going to work! But it only once strays into mawkishness: when Monty shoots off his leg and commands his dog go for help... There are familiar archetypes; the unconditional love of his stoical ma, the drunk former star who cleans up to mentor Monty to the big time. This is the first time peppy June Allyson plays James Stewart's romantic interest.

There are cameos from major league baseball stars to convey a little authenticity on the field, though Stewart is clearly no demon pitcher. There's a great script which allows Monty far more wit than the usual Hollywood country boy. It's easy enough to mock its good hearted ideals, but for me it's the best baseball film of the studio era.

This is one where Jane's clothes keep falling off! When not swimming naked, Jane was shot in a two piece. In the later sequels, the censors ensured Maureen O'Sullivan wore a dress, after a fuss created by the Catholic League of Decency... She has a wonderful chemistry with her still-slim Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller) which is ostentatiously physical.  

The attraction today is for its pre-code exotica and the prestigious production values. There are acrobatics, magnificent sets, underwater scenes and a run out for MGMs zoo animals. Tarzan wrestles a mechanical crocodile. Viewed from today, he seems an ecological hero, as he seeks to defy the European ivory trade in his carbon zero, off grid wilderness...

Unfortunately this is no longer the fabulous family entertainment it once seemed: partly because of its antiquity; but mainly because of the racism. Not so much the British hunters treating Africans with such indifference, as that may be realistic. But because the indigenous people are stereotyped so grotesquely, as was usual in 1930s Hollywood.  

It is the best of the Weissmuller Tarzan films, with O'Sullivan a most beautiful Jane. Tarzan was never more monosyllabic, a kind of parody of fantasy machismo, but Johnny has a pleasant comic touch and the stars create plenty of screwball sparkle. But for all its various merits, the racism makes the film now a transgressive experience.

The best of the '30s Hollywood adventures. It's an improbable fantasy but so romantic that this hardly matters. Ronald Colman plays dual roles: the king in-waiting of a small middle European state who is kidnapped on the day of his coronation; and his distant, but identical relative, Major Rudolph Rassendyll, formerly of the British army, who steps into the royal shoes on the big day.

The Major is soon up to his neck in courtly intrigue, and dallying with the king's beautiful betrothed (Madeleine Carroll). The support cast is superb, particularly Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as a sort of wicked mirror image of the Englishman. Alfred Newman's score is alternatively rousing and tender. The solo violin motif that accompanies the love scenes is a wonderful tearjerker.

The film is so irresistible mainly thanks to Ronald Colman. He is phenomenal; so gallant and polished. Naturally... as an English gentleman, he possesses an instinctive regard for virtue, which he defends with an insouciant gift for adventure. Colman tosses off his self deprecating daring with an arch of the brow.  It's an endearing performance of limitless charm.

In the end, everyone left alive does their duty. The elegant princess gives up her love for the imposter. Maybe this was meant to invoke the recent British abdication crisis... Sure, this film is superficial and sentimental, but it is a fantasy of huge appeal, with a definitive action hero performance from its star.

Billy Wilder coldly picks away at the soul of Hollywood in this dark meditation on the film business: half horror, half thriller. It is a typically cynical Wilder vision, famously narrated by a dead man. William Holden is the minor screenwriter floating in the pool of forgotten silent film star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) face down with a bullet in his back.

The mansion Norma shares with her former director/husband, now servant (Erich von Stroheim) is a fascinating location: part morbid dream; part mausoleum. It is a kind of Hollywood purgatory, a development hell. Holden tries to finagle a deal with death, but he is doomed. He is a ghost writer.

There are many gorgeous gothic touches from Wilder and co-author Charles Brackett, like the funeral of Norma's dead chimp, or the wind that blows low eerie echoes through an old cinema organ. The film is full of delicious insights into cinema and its history. And there are fascinating cameos from legends of the silent era.

Holden is fine as the hubristic, cursed intruder, but Gloria is something more; she is truly strange. Norma entraps the writer in his journey through the moral emptiness of his desire to succeed at any cost.  There is the expressionist look of film noir, but it's Wilder's pessimism about human nature that most makes Sunset Boulevard a legend.

MGMs ambitious historical drama is one of the grandest productions of the 1930s. It recreates the brutal conditions on a British merchant ship in 1787, the year of the famous mutiny against William Bligh (Charles Laughton) led by Fletcher Christian (Clark Gable). Laughton overacts to huge effect, making Bligh one of the great screen villains, but also a caricature.

Ships' companies were sometimes press-ganged, or co-opted convicts who had their sentences transmuted. This Bounty is crewed by a gang of expat British character actors who have to combine providing the comic relief, singing nautical ballads and dancing the hornpipe with contributing a growing background noise of justified resentment.

 It's an epic adventure yarn that tells the broad outline of history faithfully. It only really slows during the sojourn to the tropical island of Tahiti, but we do get to see the surprisingly homoerotic cavorting of the bare chested Gable and Franchot Tone. It is the unbuckling of traditional order during this stopover that makes Bligh's resumed malevolence finally unbearable.

The story looks for a balance between its two protagonists. It must ultimately side with Christian but it doesn't overlook the harmful consequences of mutiny. The film tidies up its themes too conveniently to be credible. But as a spectacle, this is magnificent. It puts the historic, seagoing way life on screen with a lively vigour. It's still the best version of this story.

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.