Film Reviews by Steve

Supernatural western obviously influenced by Clint Eastwood's past association with Sergio Leone, but not as stylish, artistic and intelligent which is why it hasn't aged as well. There is also a problem with the presentation of a revenge rape which is especially difficult to accept because the tone of most of the film is comic.

Eastwood's mysterious man with no name turns up in a remote mining town to avenge the death of the Marshal. This drifter may be his brother, but there's a more intriguing possibility that he is the spirit of the dead lawman returned from hell to kill the three hired guns who whipped him to death, and to terrorise the citizens who hired them.

The ghost story is satisfying and there is a nice frisson to be had from watching the avenger turn the town into an inferno before taking his revenge. Eastwood's star persona is of its time, and while views will differ on his mute brutality, the aggressive misogyny is hard to tolerate.

This is a parable, a mythic western. It is derivative but there is still plenty to enjoy: the trio of grotesque killers are memorable; the story is vivid and haunting; the direction might be an inferior copy of Leone, but it still works. Eastwood gives his charismatic, laconic macho performance which was so popular back then, but it is this which most dates the film.

Pioneering early sound gangster film. Credit to WR. Burnett who wrote the source novel, based on Chicago mafia boss Al Capone, which shaped the genre for the next ten years. It's a rags to riches story. A crime empire is built through violence, which is destroyed by violence- and the anti-hero's hideous flaws. This is the dark side of the American dream.

It invented the look of the mob film: the loud, expensive clothes; the big black sedans; the platinum moll in silver lingerie; the Tommy guns. But it is dated. Scenes with dialogue are static and most of the support performances are creaky. A weeping Italian mother is unbearable. There's not nearly enough of Glenda Farrell, as a pugnacious, fast-talking night club dancer.

There are the thumbprints of the studio lawyers all over this. Rico (Edward G. Robinson) can't be a charismatic figure, so he is the worst man possible: vain, disloyal, stupid, arrogant. And just in case the audience doesn't get the message there is a written homily scrolled down the screen before the film starts. The moralising is too intrusive.

Robinson dominates the screen and he creates one of the defining visual images of thirties Hollywood. There's some punchy tough guy talk but we don't see much of the prohibition or how the mob makes its money. There is fascinating social history and it's a groundbreaking film but limited by censorship and primitive technology.

This remains a classic because of the pugnacious script, William Wellman's pacy, artful direction and James Cagney's dynamic, star making performance as an ambitious Irish gangster who rises on the prohibition crimewave only to crash into a spray of rival bullets. And then dumped in a bloody parcel on his mothers doormat.

Cagney delivers the tough guy dialogue brilliantly, and he is on a different level from the rest of the cast. He is utterly believable. He turns many startling, offbeat scenes into film legend: when he steals his first gun; when he shoots his boss' racehorse; and most famously when he pushes a half grapefruit into the face of his moll (Mae Clarke).

This is one of the great early sound films. The pacing is slick, the camera moves and the frame is filled with exciting action. The main weakness is the stiff acting of the support cast. In particular, the strange performance of Jean Harlow as the high maintenance good time girl the public enemy aspires after. She seems to be in a trance.

One of the surprises is how frank this is about how the gangs make their money. The film looks like a guide for how to get into prohibition crime! And it's unusually liberal. OK, Cagney plays a psychopath, but the film implies that crime is a product of poverty and the slums. It blames prohibition for organised crime. It's a miracle how candid it is, despite the censorship.

Maybe Fritz Lang's best Hollywood film, with the atmosphere of despair and malign destiny which would influence film noir. After a stretch inside a two time loser marries one of his legal team. But going straight in the depression is a luxury he can't afford. When he's framed for murder and armed robbery, they go on the run, supporting themselves through crime.

Like Bonnie and Clyde. The film also excels thanks to the star performances. Henry Fonda plays the ambiguous ex-con. He is sympathetic because he struggles to provide for his family, but he is marked by his past. He is also resentful, threatening and deceitful. Lang doesn't entirely rule out that he might be guilty of the heist.

Sylvia Sidney is outstanding as a good girl who falls for the wrong guy. The impression she gives of unconditional love is frightening. Her liquid eyed beauty is haunting. She is all emotion. Together, they are heartbreaking because of the seeming impossibility of them having even the most basic dream of life: a home, a job, a child.

This is liberal social protest which holds poverty, prejudice and inequality accountable for criminal activity. It is critical of the prisons and the legal system. But it's Fonda and Sidney who resonate, stripped of hope and fleeing down the dark highways of rural California, sticking up gas stations, holed up in truck stops as they inexorably run out of road.

The first (and only non-musical) version of the durable backlot classic. The story won the Oscar, even though it's a rip off of the 1932 film What Price Hollywood? And they also share a sharp satirical edge aimed at Hollywood life. Esther Blodgett (Janet Gaynor) is the small town girl who makes it on the big screen as the American sweetheart, Vicki Lester.

She is given a break, then a wedding ring, by an alcoholic has-been (Fredric March) who must then watch as her career eclipses his own. Gaynor, a legend of silent cinema, was only 31 when she made this but feels a little old fashioned for a star of the late thirties. The Oscar she accepts in the film, is the one she won in real life a decade earlier.

Ironically, she is overshadowed by her co-star. March pulls of the trick of being the egotistical drunkard who crashes and burns, and also the husband that Vicki is plausibly in love with. No other Norman Maine quite manages that. His charm penetrates through the self-destructiveness. We feel the poignancy of damaged people.

There's an attractive production in Technicolor with a fine, sentimental score from Max Steiner. And there is the interest of a glimpse behind the scenes in golden age Hollywood. Like the skit when Gaynor does rapid fire impressions of Hepburn, Garbo and Mae West at a party. It's my favourite version.

This sequel to Dirty Harry is usually considered inferior. There is a less auspicious director, with Don Siegel replaced by Ted Post who came from tv. But I prefer Magnum Force, mainly for the interesting premise; if the public wants the pragmatic, instant justice of Harry's 44. Magnum, how far are they willing to go? Fascism?

A death squad of 'Frisco motorcycle cops is executing the Mafia bosses that the liberal courts are unable to touch, because... the law protects the crooks. Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) is their hero, but he has changed. The bigoted lone gun is buddied up with an African-American sidekick and has a Japanese girlfriend. The iconoclast now defends the system.  

The sequel has plenty of what gave Dirty Harry its salacious clout. There's the scuzzy funk-noir of Lalo Schifrin's theme music; the squalid, nocturnal, neon lit urban decay; and Eastwood, without ever threatening to put in a performance is still charismatic. Like the Man With No Name slept through basic training and now has a license to kill.

The main deficit is that in the attempt to exploit the realities of the naked city, it spills over into voyeuristic sadism. Changing Harry into a babe-magnet says more about the star's contemporary box office appeal. But that's the early '70s, and it's actually that period aesthetic which is a major part of the film's enduring attraction.

Eccentric update of Raymond Chandler's best novel met with critical contempt for apparently mocking his legendary detective, Philip Marlowe. Robert Altman called him Rip Van Marlowe, and imagined him going to sleep in the '50s, and waking up in a '70s LA of hippies and goofball gangsters. His identity as a knight in dirty armour is even more incongruous.

Chandler's satirical trick was to portray his hero as a man of integrity who gets into trouble because his environment is so corrupt. In Altman's contemporary parlance, that makes Marlowe a 'loser'. He has no wife, and he has a crappy car/apartment. He is adopted by a cat which the PI goes to extraordinary lengths to satisfy. Much like his clients.

Altman isn't faithful to Chandler's complex narrative; the first 12 minutes are about Marlowe buying his cat its favourite food. In the book, he doesn't have a cat! And yet, there is still a lot of Chandler here and any fan should find this adaptation at least interesting because Altman has obviously thought about him very deeply, even if unconventionally. And about film noir.

Elliott Gould's Marlowe is likely to remain unique as he is so much of its time. He brings depth to the role. Humphrey Bogart and and Dick Powell were wisecracking cyphers, however enjoyable. There's a rich nocturnal atmosphere and a fine score. There's even a first person narrative typical of classic noir as Gould constantly mumbles to himself! It's the best neo-noir of the decade.

With the revolution of the the arrival of sound, Morocco- like many early talkies- imparts a sensation of a medium in shock. The performers speak slowly, leaving pauses between lines. There is no music. Other than the lighting and smoking of cigarettes the impassive actors do nothing while they talk. The imperative is to speak clearly so the microphone picks up the dialogue.

This feels slow and soporific; an aesthetic imposed by the limits of technology. But in films about exotic escapism, this actually works. The studio built Morocco of von Sternberg's film allied to the strange pacing, elaborate shadows and fanciful, expensive decorations create an opiated trance to which the languorous, woozy characters plausibly belong.

Gary Cooper is too prosaic an American to assimilate into this curious dreamworld. But Marlene Dietrich- in her American debut- is ideal. Partly this is because she is young and still so beautiful. There's her exotic accent, and her background in cabaret. Famously she performs in male drag and kisses a girl in the audience, a legendary moment of screen sexual ambiguity.

The film conveys the fascination of pre-censorship values in a medium which hasn't quite worked out what is possible. It is flawed; the plot is perfunctory and the comedy is misfires. Dietrich hasn't quite arrived as the ultimate glamour star of early sound but it is mainly she who makes Morocco a place still worth visiting.

Critics knock this for its deviation from historical events, but it triumphs as an example of late sixties social realism. This is a fascinating and clever film. For the first hour, the Boston police search for the psychopathic killer of women who live alone . Detectives instigate and respond to a backlash of prejudice and ignorance. They also expose a pandemic of neglected mental illness.

Tony Curtis doesn't make his appearance as Albert DeSalvo until the second hour and while it's obvious that liberties have been taken with real psychiatry, the scenes between Curtis and Henry Fonda, as the cop leading the investigation, are compelling. Curtis is convincingly banal as the blue collar family man who lives in unconscious fear of his other, suppressed personality.

Richard Fleischer uses split screen, which offers alternate ways of observing the killer's psyche. It feels a bit gimmicky now, but it doesn't detract from the impact. Otherwise, the hand held cameras produce that jerky documentary look which eventually became standard in docu-drama. And it works. There's intimacy, as well as a sleazy portrayal of the naked city.

The film pleads for more proactive treatment of the mentally sick. The pinched public purse of the Boston police department shown here implies there isn't much hope for progressive public health initiatives. But still, the film makes wider political points with some subtlety, even if inevitably the frank depiction of some of the city's subcultures looks a little dated.

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.