Film Reviews by Steve

Low budget true crime story about two teenagers who murdered 11 people without apparent motive in 1950s South Dakota. The ages of the characters were raised to accommodate the lead actors, Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, who are sensational. Terrence Malick's script isn't all that faithful to the exact events; it creates an ambient impression of the killers' altered reality.

The names of Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate are changed to Kit and Holly. For a while they live in a treehouse and then they shoot a lot of people. Holly's detached narrative voice suggests she has no understanding of the world, and feels zero responsibility for their actions. They are like unsupervised children, making up the rules of their games as they go.

Much of the film is about their accumulating celebrity as they drive through the American heartland and murder mercilessly and impassively. Even the police, who had two men shot down in their pursuit, bask in the reflected notoriety of Kit's fame. The midwest is presented as a wretched wasteland; arid, barren and ugly. The rural poor are depicted as an ignorant people with a moribund culture.

Badlands is one of the key pictures of its decade and has become a model for a crime subgenre; the romance of two inexperienced lovers living on the road, triggering a wave of terror. It's all atmosphere, mostly shot at night with a score of twangy old time rock and roll and Nat King Cole. Everything happens slowly and without apparent purpose. It has been prodigiously ripped off, but this is definitive.

Landmark dramatisation of Truman Capote's non fiction novel which reports on the capture and execution of the murderers of a family in Kansas. Two ex-cons on probation, brutally slaughter four people during an attempted robbery. The film recreates the events using actual locations and artefacts. Robert Blake and Scott Wilson are disturbingly credible killers.

While the film argues against capital punishment, there isn't much editorialising. The Capote figure in the story, played by Paul Stewart, talks to the murderers but draws few conclusions. In profiling the killers, the police explain that those who commit motiveless crime are usually young men from a background of domestic trauma.

The killers are ostentatiously mentally sick. One of them hallucinates. The other is is a sociopath who feels detached from the consequences of his actions. They have been through the criminal system but never psychologically assessed. There's a liberal perspective, but the film doesn't underplay how horrific the crime is. The title is ironic; the film itself is unemotional, objective, cold.

This kind of True Crime docu-drama is everywhere now. There had been neo-realism in Hollywood going back to WWII. In Cold Blood is groundbreaking because of the how far it takes the genre. Everything looks and feels  squalid. Its cinema vérité makes few concessions to entertainment.

This is remembered more as a civil rights film than a police drama, but it excels either way. Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), is a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time; he gets hauled in front of the local police chief (Rod Steiger) as a convenient suspect when a body turns up on Main St., Sparta, Mississippi. After Detective Tibbs produces his badge, he stays to supervise the investigation himself.

Sparta might as well have a Welcome to Hell sign posted on the edge of town. Law and order are enforced on a whim. The duo establish a volatile hatred at the start of the film, but the redneck sheriff turns out be be the least reactionary man in a territory where poor black people still pick cotton under the hostile, unbending feudalism of the southern aristocracy.

Maybe there is too much balance in the film, as so often in the civil rights films of the sixties. Is Tibbs' hatred of this apartheid really similar to the oppression he suffers himself? He becomes pre-determined to prove that the bigoted white landowner (Larry Gates) is guilty. The white citizens are presented as victims themselves, of poverty and ignorance. I guess a white audience wouldn't sit still for a polemic.

If it pulled its punches, then it worked because the film sold tickets in the south and won the Oscar. Norman Jewison thankfully pulls up short of the two cops becoming odd couple buddies, but there is still a rapport between Poitier and Steiger. The politics dominate, but this is also a thrilling police drama. Great jazz score (Quincy Jones) and neo-noir photography too.

Micro-budgeted, late period film noir that owes a stylistic debt to the Warner Brothers gangster films of the '30s. It's a revenge story about a boy who witnesses his adored but no-good dad gunned down by the mob and swears to get even. When he grows up to be played by Cliff Robertson, he joins the gang to get close the killers, giving the audience a window into how they operate.

The rackets still control gambling and protection and break unions, but have insidiously spread into juvenile crime, like teenage prostitution and selling narcotics at the schoolgate. As was typical in postwar gangster films, the mafia are a semi-legitimate business which operates in plain sight but keeps some business off the books.

Sam Fuller characteristically punches low. It's set among the the criminals and the jailbirds who prey on the vulnerable. It is compelling because we want to see these sordid pimps and pushers and strongarm killers get summarily sawn off... But the revenger isn't a hero. He's a psychopath driven by his personal demons rather than the greater good. 

This is a low budget film big on ostentatious style. When the dying vigilante staggers down main street with a bullet in his back and crashes into a bin marked 'Keep Your City Clean' we could be back in the symbolist, b&w world of Little Caesar. It's shot in the studio on threadbare sets. Robertson is too old and there is an obscure support cast. But Fuller- as always- makes plenty out of very little.

Nicholas Ray's stylish debut is set in Texas in the 1920s. It's a road noir which starts out like it's going to be about rootless, rural outlaws but detours into a study of adolescent love, superbly played by Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell. The film looks realistic with the support cast all convincing as the poor of the depression 

Three criminals escape from jail and go on the run holding up small banks in hick towns. Granger is a naive kid who has been inside since he was sixteen. His associates are tough, dumb career crooks. They get wounded in a raid and hole up at a safe house where the boy falls in love with a lonely rural teenager.  

They live outside the law, like Bonnie and Clyde. There are longueurs and the narrative swerves all over the road but this is an elegant, innovative film, from the famous opening helicopter shot to the slow, sad final fade out on O'Donnell's face. Ray always finds interesting and artistic perspectives for his camera. 

They Live By Night recalls the social protest gangster films of the thirties. The youngsters have no alternative but to break the law. Crime is the class they are born into, with its own etiquette. Ray makes his stars immortal as the gentle, doomed lovers who are forced to survive, while they can, in the only way they know.

Adaptation of David Goodis' pulp classic. Delmer Daves sticks faithfully to its plot and themes: an ordinary joe gets banged up for the murder of his wife. But he wasn't guilty. When he busts out he gets his face fixed and ends up being played by Humphrey Bogart. Working to clear his name he relies on the kindness of strangers, especially the do-gooder socialite played by Lauren Bacall.

Goodis was a fatalistic poet of the unlucky schmuck. That doesn't sound like a Bogart and Bacall vehicle but Daves works hard to keep the story realistic. Bogart is hapless and scared and not a hero. We don't actually see his face for the first hour; the action is shot from his point of view. After Bogart removes the bandages, his vanity-free performance is excellent.

Bacall dresses down but is far too glamorous. There are moments when the love story might have been dialled back but there is still a powerful feeling of despair. This is Goodis' nocturnal city, inhabited by the lonely taxi driver, the unemployed musician, the discredited but altruistic doctor. And the perjured busybody and the cold blooded, menacing blackmailer. The convict's fate is in their hands.

During the hour of the film shot through Bogart's eyes, the other characters stare into the camera's gaze. Of course, this had been done before but Dark Passage does it better; it magnifies the criminal's fear of scrutiny. It has an expressionistic quality. The studio was furious that audiences only saw their big star for the last 40 minutes! But they did get an unusual, intelligent film noir.

The opening credits roll over a still of long legs in heels, promising salacious glamour. But nothing in all of film noir prepares us for how sleazy this film is. Maybe the censors were asleep; the narrative is occasionally sluggish. But Born to Kill lands a low punch of astonishing brutality. Even the good guy, the droll investigator (Walter Slezak) will let the murderer walk for a price.

It's a hard boiled noir about two insatiable sociopaths: Lawrence Tierney plays a violent, egotistical killer; Claire Trevor is a poor relation who wants some of the family fortune and doesn't mind how she gets it. They absolve each other's guilt. He murders a woman, and she covers up. Tierney then marries her wealthy step-sister (Audrey Long) but prefers sex with his broadminded accomplice.

Everyone is compromised in some way. The psychopath has a (plainly) homosexual relationship with his submissive, scuzzy sidekick, brilliantly played by Elisha Cook, who will kill to clear any obstacles to his boyfriend's desires. The spoiled step-sister will protect her dangerous husband from the police to satisfy her sexual obsession.

The dialogue is startlingly frank. When the moll tells an old woman how it will feel when the psycho kills her, she seems to experience physical pleasure. The lovers take a sensual thrill from how corrupt they are. This is a morally and visually dark film, with a rich film noir look. Tierney and Trevor are phenomenally trashy as well as degenerate. This one has to be seen to be believed.

Rural Warner Brothers gangster film which broke Humphrey Bogart as a Hollywood star. He is Roy 'Mad Dog' Earle, a stick-up man who is sprung from prison by a crime syndicate to pull off a heist in an exclusive mountain resort. Roy is an outlaw of the old school who knocked around with John Dillinger in the midwest of the depression. But now the wild country has been tamed and turned into health spas and hotels. Just another racket.

Earle is the most interesting gangster of the American pre-war era. He is violent, menacing and unpredictable but also sentimental, and often kind. When his resentful and righteous anger boils over, he doesn't recognise this brute as himself and soon forgets. He is a man running out of time. Doc says it best: 'Remember what Johnny Dillinger said about guys like you and him. Said you were rushin' toward death'.

Roy is an anti-hero. He is a gunman, but almost everyone else in the film is a monster in some way! The sympathetic characters are the old timers. After Roy arranges for a surgeon to fix the foot of a girl he meets on the road, without her disability she becomes spoiled and cruel. Roy has a woman, a no-luck dame, a taxi dancer from LA. She's played for maximum heartbreak by Ida Lupino.

High Sierra is an intelligent story, a road film heavy with pessimistic, noir atmosphere set in vivid rural locations. The climactic shootout is a blast. There's a poetic, slangy script from John Huston and WR Burnett (from Burnett's novel). It's another tough, fast-paced triumph for Raoul Walsh who made so many classic action melodramas in the golden age.

One of the great films of the '30s; a classic of social protest which played a role in ending the chain gangs in the US southern states. Paul Muni plays a bum wrongly sentenced to hard labour by a corrupt and sadistic penal system. Loosely based on a true story, the message is that this isn't merely an unjust destiny for an innocent man, but for anyone. 

Robert Burns (Muni) returns from WWI to penury; one of the forgotten men. A bystander in a petty crime he is sentenced to ten years on a Georgia chain gang. He escapes to become a successful engineer, but having been tracked down to Chicago he agrees to return to jail on the understanding that he will be pardoned after 90 days.

The state is offended by Burns' public criticism and sends him to the foulest chain gang in the south and withdraws its promise. I can picture Muni's face now, his pardon denied, sent back into hell. Muni is magnificent. Some of the support acting creeks like a haunted house, but most are convincing and very moving.

I Am a Fugitive... delivers a subtle appraisal of the purposes of the prison system. It's a gripping polemic about human dignity and the kindness of strangers delivered in the punchy, concise style of Warner Brothers in the thirties. There are many unforgettable scenes. And the famous ending is a heartbreaker. 

Sparkling and very entertaining Hollywood comedy-drama... about Hollywood. This was shamelessly ripped off in 1937 for A Star is Born. Constance Bennett plays a Los Angeles waitress who becomes a big star while the drunken director who discovers and marries her sinks into oblivion. It's full of cynical insider snippets about the trials of showbiz life: the obsessive fans, the paparazzi, the gossip columns.

Bennett is especially good at the comedy. She performs an understated Marlene Dietrich impression when she sings a ballad on a night club set. She's an appealing personality for the audience to identify with while she scales the hierarchy of celebrity. There's some screwball, but the character is not as dizzy as that suggests and the story becomes increasingly melodramatic.

The star re-marries to that ultimate signifier of early talkie male glamour, the polo playing millionaire. The support cast is capable but not prestigious. Louise Beavers makes an impression as the archetypal black maid with a sassy tongue. George Cukor was perhaps Hollywood's ultimate director of quality soaps and he keeps it light and frothy.

This is one of the more amusing examples of Hollywood self-analysis. There's a polished script which is relentlessly witty. There's some art deco interiors. Max Steiner's score is sophisticated. Bennett was one of the biggest stars of the early talkies. She's not remembered so much now, but this is a wonderful vehicle for her gift for romantic comedy.

This isn't a sequel to Frank Borzage's Three Comrades made a year earlier, but it follows on from its historical timeline, as the Nazis come to power in Germany. Margaret Sullavan returns to star. Both films are set in a similarly artificial studio recreation of middle Europe. The most significant change is that this film names the Nazis, and portrays them as a threat to humanity.

Which makes this a landmark Hollywood film, and of course it was banned in Germany. The narrative starts with the news that Hitler has become Chancellor. Instantly, the population of this small, idyllic Alpine town becomes infected by hostility. It's like a  disease that passes through the community. The aura of threat is appalling.

Though a drama, this is one of the great horror films of the decade. The people are possessed by militarism, populism and racial hatred. Those who are immune have no one they can trust. Every stranger is a threat. Eventually Sullavan and James Stewart, flee over the Alps to seek refuge. Robert Young as their former friend turned Nazi is extraordinarily ominous in their pursuit.

It's a Borzage film, so this is about the primal, transcendent nature of love. Humanity is the mortal storm. Stewart and the ethereal, agonised Sullavan as the lovers caught up in its turbulence are pitifully moving. The film doesn't attempt to suggest reasons for the rise of the Nazis, because there is no justification for the madness. It mattered because Hollywood, and MGM, had taken a side.

This is Bette Davis' signature role- as an inhibited, lonely spinster who escapes from the persecution of her mother and blossoms into a confident, independent woman. It's pure escapism for the women on the homefront in WWII. She is freed from domestic duty and escapes to a liaison onboard a ship to Rio with an attentive but troubled architect (Paul Henreid).

This is a medical melodrama which draws on Hollywood psychiatry. Bette's initial neurosis is swiftly treated, mostly with wisdom, by Claude Raines' fatherly doctor. The homely girl blossoms into a stylish and wealthy Bostonian. Curiously, the film doesn't give us completion; her love isn't consummated because the man cannot be free of his diabolical wife.

But, they mustn't ask for the moon, when they have the stars. So Davis takes care of the architect's daughter who is mentally tortured by her own mother. And so the film becomes about sacrifice, a common theme in the war years. OK, this is a soap and some of the situations are unrealistic, but Davis does create an impression of a whole person.

Henreid is too lightweight to stand up to the vortex of Davis' performance. The best of the support cast is Gladys Cooper as the domineering mother.  Now, Voyager is also remembered for Max Steiner's legendary love theme. And for Henreid's trick of lighting two cigarettes simultaneously. It's one of the great Warner Bothers melodramas and the ultimate Bette Davis vehicle.

Musical melodrama which sets Bette Davis' wealthy landowner up against the Oscar winning Mary Astor as a celebrated concert pianist. So there's plenty of rousing Russian classics on the soundtrack to stir the emotions. George Brent is the (unconvincing) playboy aviator that the two divas fight over, but it's really all about the female stars.

Following Brent and Astor's swanky New York wedding they discover that her divorce wasn't finalised and the new marriage is void. So he flies south to marry an old flame (Bette) instead, before crashing his plane in Brazil on secret government business. When Astor discovers she is pregnant, Davis takes her to a shack in the Arizona desert to secretly give birth so Bette can keep the baby in return for dollars.

Which is a hell of a pitch! It starts off as screwball, with Brent plainly uneasy in Cary Grant's shoes, then turns into pure soap. Most of the fun is courtesy of the two female leads wringing all the showbiz out of the preposterous set up. Bette's Maryland mansion is staffed by African American character actors and while there isn't much dignity in their roles, Hattie McDaniel handles the comedy with expertise.

But this isn't so bad it's good. The events happen within the conventions and locations of classic Hollywood melodrama and it succeeds on those terms. It's extraordinarily entertaining, and for that we thank the stars, Max Steiner's soundtrack, Orry-Kelly's gowns and director Edmund Goulding for spinning magic out of such an outrageous premise.

Five years after Laura, Gene Tierney re-teamed with Otto Preminger for another film noir. There are many echoes of the earlier hit including the sour wit of Ben Hecht's script, and the lingering shots of a large portrait over a fireplace which has no impact on the narrative but is a reminder of their previous success. Preminger gives Whirlpool a similarly attractive noir look.

Tierney is a kleptomaniac who falls into the clutches of a cultured but degenerate hypnotist (José Ferrer) who uses her to kill off an inconvenient woman who has the goods on him. It's up to the husband, a brilliant psychoanalyst (Richard Conte) to clear her with a mixture of Hollywood Freud and good luck.

It's possible to see this a forerunner of those eighties yuppie thrillers where an attractive, privileged couple are terrorised by an out of control antagonist just because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like the characters in those films, the successful married duo are too entitled to be sympathetic.

There's nothing like an original story, but the stars make it work. Charles Bickford adds a little weight to the confection as a laconic cop. It's good to see the elegant Gene in contemporary clothing after a run of costume dramas for Fox and her fashions and the des-res sets have a period appeal. Whirlpool is a slender, dark film noir. And while familiar, it's still entertaining.

Olivia de Havilland won her second Oscar for this lavish mid-19th century period drama based on a Broadway adaptation of Henry James' Washington Square. And it's a perfect vehicle for the star, one in a series of exceptional roles she created after WWII, after she escaped from her unhappy contract with Warner Brothers.  

This is also one of William Wyler's many great films. Olivia plays a rich but gauche spinster from an upper middle class family who is suffocated by the authority of her dominant father (Ralph Richardson) who resents his daughter for not being as beautiful and sophisticated as his deceased wife.

When she is courted by an attractive, charming idler (Montgomery Clift), the patriarch seeks to sabotage the proposal by convincing her that no man could want to marry her because she is too plain and dull! We know that the gentleman caller is after her money, so the business of the film is to judge whether it is preferable for this isolated woman to be exploited, if it would save her from a life of emotional emptiness.

Olivia creates a powerful impression of an abused woman consumed by loneliness. She is a study of disappointment and repression. She has no artfulness but she learns how to deceive by finally closing down her heart to love. De Havilland's performance is sometimes raw, but she is also haunting, and tragic.