Film Reviews by Steve

Warner Brothers adapted a true story from WWI, to make a case for why America must fight again. Alvin York was an uneducated farmer from rural Tennessee. He was a conscientious objector on religious grounds, but went to the Western Front and used his gift as a sniper, plus his extraordinary bravery, to silence machine gun nests and capture 130 German soldiers.

He became a decorated hero and a legend. Gary Cooper was well cast and he won an Oscar. The first half of the film is about his conversion to Christianity among the enduring poor of the American south. Howard Hawks creates this world with humour and affection. Margaret Wycherly is excellent as the steadfast and durable mother.

This isn't typical Hawks. There is zero screwball fizz, no fast talking dames. The slow, introspective hero is an anti-Hawks character, a loner. The director performs a miracle in largely avoiding sentimentality, helped by Max Steiner elegant score. Though the film is unashamedly mystical.

This was propaganda aimed at the hearts and minds of ordinary Americans reluctant to fight in another foreign war. The model of the peaceful man who must act for the greater good is a pitch that Hollywood would use extensively in WWII.  Freedom must be defended. After Pearl Harbour, Hawks' film became a popular vehicle for patriotic American interventionism.

William Wellman's low budget adaptation of the classic classroom text is set within the framework of the western, but really it is a polemic against mob justice. In Nevada, 1885 a popular rancher is reported dead and three cowboys passing through the territory are summarily lynched on insubstantial evidence.

Some of the men react to the rumoured death of the local man with a lust for instant revenge. This desire passes through the group, but each has his own personal motivation for their reckless, unlawful action. Even those who oppose the lynching are reluctant to speak in case the mob turns on them too. Once the urge is in motion, it must be satisfied.

Of course, the local farmer isn't dead and the strangers were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Several of the mob are charged with murder. This is a brief film which makes its case with little diversion, which enables its impact to be precise and powerful. There is a fine ensemble cast, with Dana Andrews particularly effective as on of the victims.

Henry Fonda is the lead, as one of the few who stand against the vigilantes. It is interesting to place his role as a forerunner of 12 Angry Men (1957). This is a low budget film. There is no incidental noise on the soundtrack, no extras, hardly any set decoration. The studio look is artificial. It's a skeletal, dark, schematic tragedy that lingers and haunts the memory.

Guadalcanal was the first land battle in the Pacific War between USA and Japan. This film was released in the same year as the events. Sure, there is plenty of patriotism and propaganda, but for a Hollywood combat film made in the war years, this is relatively understated. It warns that Japan is a formidable enemy and victory for the US military will be hard won.

This isn't war as hell. It is a morale booster intended to reassure the homefront. It is narrated by the character of a war correspondent, adapted from a book by a journalist reporting back for a news service. It follows the US Marines for six months, from landing on the beaches to being relieved by the US army. The voice over contributes strategic and philosophical context.

The focus is on the ordinary soldiers, who are presented as classless and multi-ethnic. It's a vehicle for a range of fine ensemble performances. William Bendix stands out as a brave, determined but slightly dim GI Joe from Brooklyn, a role he would play a few times. These men are not really fighting for strategic gain or country, but for each other. And to survive.  

The film has a practical message for the homefront: send mail, give blood and buy war bonds. It warns them of what the returning soldiers will have experienced. By rowing back on the heroics, the film feels even more moving because it is credible. It shows death and suffering and told their families, and people of the future, that their sacrifice was worthy of respect.

There is so much knockabout farce and harmonising of Irish ballads in the third of John Ford's cavalry trilogy that it's as much a sentimental musical comedy as a western. When the Apache attack finally arrives in the last reel, it gives the film an action climax but this isn't really about the 'Indian' Wars. There is nothing about the aims or the justness of either cause.

The plot actually rests on the rekindling of a long ago romance between a cavalry officer (John Wayne) and his estranged wife (Maureen O'Hara). There is some chemistry, and O'Hara smoulders effectively. They would have a bigger hit with Ford in 1952 with The Quiet Man.

The battle is well staged, but the best of the action is a boisterous though incongruous episode with the troops 'roman riding' during their initial training. That's standing on two horses simultaneously, while circuiting the corral. Apparently Ford got the actors to do this rather than use stuntmen.

It's a typical John Ford western, for good and bad. Victor McLaglen ineptly drills yet another set of raw recruits. The Sons of Pioneers sing a sweet lullaby.  There's yet another comical punch up. The era is plausibly recreated and Ford captures many fine images of his cavalry photographed against the Utah landscape.

One of a pair of films directed by Sam Fuller during the Korean War. The other is The Steel Helmet. This could as easily be set in WWII, but it is staged against a real incident, a long retreat by American soldiers. A rearguard of 48 men is left behind to protect the retreat and to keep Chinese soldiers tied up in the snow of a strategically critical mountain thoroughfare.

 Richard Basehart plays a Corporal who lives in fear of command and who must suffer the anxiety of seeing everyone senior die during the conflict, leaving him in charge. Fuller fought in the US 1st Infantry in WWII from North Africa to the concentration camps so his war films have an implied authority.

The men have little individuality or back story. We see their response to the intensity of fear, and demoralising hopelessness. It is staged on a small studio set in artificial snow, with no music or ambient sound (like wind), with Fuller's camera mounted on a crane, searching out pockets of US soldiers trapped by fire into their tiny ice caves.

This is a psychological war film. Most of the dialogue is a back and forth exchange of trench wit, a way of not confronting the danger. It's not about the pity of war, or anti-war, or a propaganda film. It attempts to authentically capture the impact of combat on the men who are made to fight. Their interior war.

Strange, eerie low budget western shot entirely on studio sets. The lack of realism gives the film a unique atmosphere. The painted rural exteriors look like landscapes by Salvador Dali. And the narration is provided by a melodramatic country ballad. Lang's direction is way classier and more visually striking than is usual for a B film.

Though a western, and in Technicolor, it feels like film noir. It looks so dark. The blackness of the shadows seeps into the inky, nocturnal colours. Like noir it is full of flashbacks, mainly into the backstory of Marlene Dietrich, the impassive femme fatale who runs a refuge for outlaws.

Arthur Kennedy is the relentless, borderline crazy cowboy searching among these gunfighters for the killer of his girl. His obsession eventually makes him seem a lot like the fugitives who hide from the law at the Spanish colonial ranch, particularly the saturnine Mel Ferrer, a kind of alter-ego for Kennedy, and Marlene's top gun.

 The action scenes are well staged, particularly a convincing punch up in a saloon and a climactic shootout. The performances are all enjoyably intense, especially Kennedy in a rare starring role. There's some good terse, bleak dialogue and Marlene has a song. But it's the pessimistic noirish theme of compulsion that makes it so memorable.

Melodrama set around the rodeo circuit of the new west in the 1950s. Robert Mitchum plays a busted up ex-bullriding champion who coaches Arthur Kennedy to riches and celebrity and sees him make the same mistakes... while the old hand falls for the rookie's combustable wife (Susan Hayward).

It's a bit like a trashy airport novel. It depicts the west as a place where working traditions have been transformed into leisure and entertainment. There are a few bum notes; Susan Hayward is a great actor and she brings a lot of energy, but she is too polished for a shack reared rodeo wife making do in budget trailer parks.

But it's a fun, volatile performance, and Robert Mitchum is easily a match as the brooding, bruised former champion. He was always a convincing cowboy. There's some fine low-rent poetic dialogue. Roy Webb's orchestral score evokes the big skies of the west without resorting to cliché, and gives the film an epic quality.

 It presents a vivid impression of the wild west carnival, populated by drunk stars and their suffering wives and transient groupies. The riders compete for finite prize money, which they spend on the road until they drop out with broken bones, or punchy- or worse- and empty pockets. The ending is a dud, but we get to visit a credible, unfamiliar world.

 A western which tells a story similar to the gunfight at the OK Corral. Henry Fonda is the Earp-like Marshal and Anthony Quinn is his stand-in Doc Holliday, played as a drunk, disabled, gay gunman. But there are interesting differences. Everyone in the film is an ostentatiously ambiguous character...

The Marshal paid to protect the citizens from homicidal outlaws is a gunfighter without any legal status; the actual law (Richard Widmark) is a former member of this gang of ruthless killers. Some critics claim this moral relativism is an expression of director Edward Dmytryk's status as the only one of the Hollywood Ten to name names to HUAC.

This feels tenuous, but it does give an impression the complexity, even though the story is familiar. This is a fascinating film with great performances which exploits the dramatic Utah scenery at least as well as John Ford. The female characters are peripheral, though Dorothy Malone's former sex worker driven by revenge, Lily Dollar, has a great name.

It's another western about the obsolescence of the gunfighter, which were abundant at the end of the fifties. As Widmark says: 'civilisation is stalking Warlock'. The interests of disparate groups will become codified under the law. Among these films, Warlock stands out for the continually shifting moral landscape of its ambiguous anti-heroes.

Civil war western which has the usual John Ford signifiers: manly baritone singing; comical Irish soldiers in a constant search for strong liquor; a gratuitous punch up... and the competing males leads.  John Wayne is the veteran cavalry officer leading his column south to sabotage Confederacy railways. He butts heads with an army medic played by William Holden.

Constance Towers is inserted into this confrontation of contrived machismo as a southern aristocrat who has listened in on the cavalry plans and so is taken along to keep her quiet and adorn the horse soldiers with some decorative glamour. She starts off promising ruination on all Union soldiers and ends up falling in love with their Colonel.

The comic tone of the early part of the film gives way to the conflict. But while the battle is photogenic, Ford doesn't reveal much of the human cost. A potentially quite poignant attack by children enlisted into the southern army doesn't extract any sense of absurdity or pity for the horror of war. The scene ends with one of the boy soldiers being spanked.

The actors do well under the circumstances, particularly the urbane Holden who is surprisingly at home in the old west. Ford frames his cavalry soldiers attractively, but there has very little authenticity. There is no impression of poverty or famine, or that the black people the Union soldiers encounter are actually slaves. A lesser John Ford, I suppose, but not untypical.

Febrile southern melodrama (from William Faulkner) about the barnstormers of the 1930s who toured shabby exhibitions of hazardous flying stunts around the impoverished towns of the depression. Robert Stack plays a traumatised WWI flying ace who can only sustain himself through the habit of danger, while spurning his sexually frustrated wife (Dorothy Malone).

Into their orbit comes a poetic, drunken reporter (Rock Hudson) who is empathises with the reckless flyer while regretfully falling in love with his wife. Hudson is subdued and melancholy. Malone is blindingly sexy. Stack steals the film in a support role. They are all human wreckage. Stack conveys his reckless pessimism mutely, with his haunted thousand-yard stare.

The flying scenes in b&w Cinemascope are exciting, but Douglas Sirk is far more interested in the psychology of his characters, the living debris of war and economic futility. The grinding, tawdry poverty of the travelling carnival and its exotic, fatalistic performers is palpable and pitiful and seductive.

It's the kind of breathy melodrama that Sirk directed better than anyone, full of sex and pessimism. And disillusion with American capitalism. Hudson's scene when he drunkenly explains an airman's death to his editor is a classic. He and Malone prowl around each other like jumpy cats. It all ends quite cheerfully, but that's Hollywood.

Heartbreaking drama about pitiless military justice on the western front in WWI and the corrupting insanity of war. This is one of the great anti-war films, but it isn't talky, or worthy. It is a fascinating, brilliantly acted polemic that burns on the energy of its anger.

It is based on a real life incident. A senior French officer is offered promotion if he will order his men across no man's land to take and hold a heavily defended German stronghold.  The men fail against impossible odds, so three low ranking soldiers are tried and shot for cowardice, to encourage the others.

Many Kubrick classics have an epic quality, but this is the opposite. It dissects a single episode from conception to conclusion in forensic detail and indicts institutionalised cruelty and bigotry. We are shown that the trenches were an extension of civilian life gamed to protect those with privilege and to facilitate their advancement.

Its genius is that it works as an allegory for any hierarchy. It is brilliantly shot by Kubrick, particularly the long crane shots of the futile assault on the enemy positions. Kirk Douglas is incredibly intense as the lawyer defending his men. It is a classic of political cinema and Kubrick's best film. Prepare to be horrified.

This transfers the conventions of the sport film to a circus. Burt Lancaster plays an embittered, alcoholic former trapeze flyer who was grounded after an accident attempting the ultimate, the triple somersault. Tony Curtis is the young gun who arrives in Paris to learn the triple off the master, and perhaps save him from self destruction.

They are joined by another archetype. Gina Lollobrigida is a hot tempered Italian acrobat who wants to break into their team. She gets between the two men and threatens the purity their act with her showbiz glamour. They become a threesome in the air and on the ground. The implication of homosexuality between the men is subdued, but still present.

It's the best circus film there is. While it is full of genre clichés (we don't get a sad clown) these are made fun by great star performances, and spectacular action photography, in Technicolor. Carol Reed captures the flaking exoticism of the ring and the seediness of their assignations in trashy Parisian hotels. It's a sexy melodrama.

Gina is fabulous in her sequinned leotards. The sassy dialogue uses the ecstasy of the high wire act as ominous innuendo for sex, which makes the film feel quite noirish. Maybe not one of (former trapeze artist) Burt Lancaster's more prestigious roles, but it's entertaining and a reminder of his imposing physicality and athleticism.

During the 1960s WWII films typically became big budget action blockbusters and began to seem less real. The Train has that kind of scale and spectacle but manages to remain plausible. It is expanded from a real incident about the French Resistance preventing the Nazis from removing priceless art to Berlin as the Allies closed in on Paris.

 Burt Lancaster is a railway worker, one of the army in the shadows. This star billing risks undermining credibility, but Lancaster seems completely at home in the grime of the machine shop. This is a conflicted hero, who places little value on the masterpieces but is driven to oppose the similarly obsessive but degenerate SS officer (Paul Schofield) who seizes them.    

The Train is an impressive looking film with the deep focus, widescreen photography lending it an epic feel. It feels authentic. The heavy black engines have an imposing physicality, a weight. The soundtrack of the clang and clank of metal (and the percussive score) and the ubiquitous shading of grease create an environment of heavy, sooty industry.

It's a great film about trains. But it's principally a tribute to the heroism, bravery and sacrifice of the proletariat fighters of the Resistance. It stops being about the paintings, or national identity, or patriotism and becomes about the need to fight oppression as a principle. It's entertaining and suspenseful; and one of the very best WWII films.

Released a year after, this is clearly modelled on Little Caesar. They are similar because both draw on the life of Al Capone, and are shaped by the same pressure of censorship. Scarface stops the action for a couple of minutes while support actors representing public bodies discuss the social damage caused by organised crime.

But Scarface differs from other early gangster films in its style. Ben Hecht's script features much more comedy, usually at the expense of the idiot mobs. Howard Hawks creates an expressionistic look, rich with raw symbolism, like the shadowy crosses that foretell each death. And there is more spectacle, with car chases and epic shootouts on large sets.

Paul Muni delivers a potent, unsubtle performance as the uninhibited killer who wages a one man war on his rival gangs and the police. There's a great moment when he gets his first Tommy gun: 'Outta my way. I'm spittin'! Ann Dvorak is Muni's equal as the sister who is tortured by his incestuous jealousy. Karen Morley lacks fizz as the mercenary moll.

The big weakness is the reactionary sermonising. Its solution is... to send in the army, rather than finding cause in prohibition and America's economic crash. It scores with Muni's weird charisma and Hawks' atmospherics. This is a visually stunning film which shows evidence of the studios emerging from the inertia of early sound.

A majestic production which is convincing in its period look but also epic in scope, which pitches the brawny action against the vast landscape of the Californian desert. The costumes, the weapons, the authentic steam train... the film is dense with evocative detail which is artistically photographed.

It is a landmark action film for its once in a lifetime cast of tough, dirty, rawboned soldiers of fortune who are sent into revolutionary Mexico to retrieve the kidnapped wife of a filthy rich cattle merchant: Burt Lancaster (explosives), Woody Strode (tracking), Robert Ryan (horses) and led by Lee Marvin (weapons/strategy).

When they arrive in Mexico, the wife is the improbably beautiful/sexy Claudia Cardinale who further illuminates the screen. The weakness (though it has advocates) is the script which lacks wit. The actors really struggle to bring it to life. There is too much philosophical diversion which takes a fair while to say not much.

This is all about its vision of mythic, transient heroes captured against a prodigious, timeless panorama. Oh, and the groundbreaking action sequences. A lot of scenery gets blown up for sure, but with finesse. The Professionals has often been copied, but even if the ultra-lavish production can be matched, there will never be a substitute for these stars.