Film Reviews by Steve

The final part of Hammer's early seventies trilogy of sexy vampire horrors is a return to form after the disappointing Lust for a Vampire. It's mostly remembered for casting identical nineteen year old twins who had been featured in Playboy a few months earlier. Mary Collinson plays the pure, obedient sister. While Madeleine is the vampire.

I think. They're not easily identified, even without clothes. Actually, there's little nudity, but as a gimmick, this stunt casting really works. Otherwise there's a pretty good gothic horror story. Peter Cushing is quite compelling as a witchfinder who tortures and murders the powerless villagers while averting his gaze from the Satanic aristocrat (Damien Thomas) in the old castle.

Which of course the villagers storm in the rousing climax. The film really scores with the beautiful sets and authentic-seeming costumes, which must be among the best Hammer ever put together. There's a thumping score which often feels like it's about to drift off into a mariachi number.

While there's no gore, there is a sadistic edge to some scenes which is horrific and subversive. Neither god nor the devil is much help to the poor. The trilogy is supposed to be based on the stories of Victorian gothic writer Sheridan le Fanu, but this has strayed far from the source. There's occasional narrative drag, but the production alone makes it worth seeing.

An instant remake of the German musical-comedy Viktor und Victoria (1933) which was later adapted as a vehicle for Julie Andrews in 1982. Admittedly, the theme of gender fluidity was probably more congruous to Weimer Berlin than thirties London, but it still works and it's interesting to see British attitudes to sexuality in the period.

Jessie Matthews plays another starving, out of work showgirl in the depression. She finds success when filling in for Sonnie Hale's female impersonation act when he loses his voice. So she is a girl pretending to be a boy, pretending to be a girl. And there's plenty of opportunity for Jessie to exhibit her diverse talents for dancing, singing and light comedy.

Sonnie Hale was her husband in real life, and they make a fine double act, occasionally slipping into the kind of broad comedy routines typical of Laurel and Hardy. Anna Lee in particular offers quality support as a waspish aristocrat who wants to expose the deception. She's actually quite broadminded, unlike her fiancé (Griffith Jones) who resents his attraction to the fake boy.

He eventually gets the girl- it's the same thing!- so he is not punished for his prejudice. The film doesn't have an agenda, it's just an entertainment. Though it is quite liberal. While there are some good songs and choreography and decent gags, it principally survives because of the star quality of Jessie Matthews, who again delights with her offbeat screwball x-factor..

Charming social comedy which once in motion achieves a kind of sublime, friction free state of entertainment. It draws upon the public persona of its big box office star Rex Harrison, who had a reputation as a womaniser. He plays an amnesiac who finds himself in Wales without memory, only to discover that his condition has resulted in six marriages and no divorces.

Harrison actually was eventually married six times and his philandering led to real tragedy. But this is a light comedy. They all want him back. The ballbusting lawyer (Margaret Leighton) hired to defend the bigamist, falls in love with him, as do the women on the jury. In a case of life imitating art, Rex began an affair with his co-star, Kay Kendall.

This might be overkill if it wasn't for the sublime touch of everyone involved, including Harrison, who is brilliant this kind of cheerfully ludicrous fluff. There's a genuinely funny script and an experienced comedy director in Sidney Gilliatt. The lovely Technicolor adds a little sweetness. Cecil Parker as the dismayed psychiatrist is just a bonus.

It's possible that in the era of #MeToo some will find this indulgence of the male ego a turn off. But watched in the spirit of the times there is one of the wittiest British scripts of the decade. And the cast squeezes all the laughs out of every line. This is is the comedy of manners made by experts; the kind of grown up frou-frou that Lubitsch used to make.

Tough, low budget heist drama which upends the moral code of fifties British WWII films and anticipates the anti-establishment values of the sixties counterculture. Two disaffected combat veterans team up with a Polish explosives expert to raid an army safe stocked up with cash to pay for an operation overseas. Something like Suez.

The trio break into barracks while the soldiers are leaving. As former grunts themselves, they know how to salute, but they are the foreign body which jams normal army machinery. No one stops them, but they keep breaching regulations. Stanley Baker is the leader with the sort of improvisational daring which would be invaluable in wartime.

He and Tom Bell are fuelled with the resentment that leads them to take on the system, but also makes it difficult to co-operate with each other. The two leads are excellent. German actor Helmut Schmid has less to do as the safe-breaker. It'd be interesting to know whether the makers considered him as a former Nazi soldier, but maybe that would be too subversive...

This is a really thoughtful, brooding crime story, which is given a touch of class by Baker's star quality. Three years earlier, The League of Gentlemen touched on similar themes, but this is a much angrier film. When Baker walks through the army camp burning it down with his flame thrower, it's not just a dramatic visual image, it's also a metaphor. Welcome to the sixties.

Landmark black comedy which is one of the key films of the sixties. Stanley Kubrick audaciously satirises the nuclear arms race between the cold war powers just two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis. And in particular, the strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction, which theorises that the outcome of a nuclear exchange would be so destructive it could never happen...

But there were near misses... Sterling Hayden plays a crazy, anti-communist US General who unilaterally launches H-bombs at Russia. This will trigger the Soviet Doomsday Machine which responds via a computer without human intervention. Yes it's a comedy... and it is genuinely funny mostly because of Peter Sellers' performances.

He plays three characters, including the ineffectual American President and a rather self-effacing RAF officer. But most sensationally, he is Dr. Strangelove, a sinister former Nazi now working in the Pentagon. Presumably the character's barely suppressed insanity is intended to suggest that US politics is slipping into fascism.

This is still a fine picture, though it doesn't feel as subversive as it once did. What is now most unsettling is that Hayden's certifiable extremism is no longer a joke. In the Age of Internet, fake conspiracies are central to American politics. How dystopian can the film seem once Donald Trump has been in the White House for real.

WWII submarine drama made during the Battle of the Atlantic. The propaganda is unusually realistic. The perilous pursuit of a battleship called the Brandenburg is fictional, but the film gives a potent impression of what combat in a submarine must have been like, but backed by the comical make-do typical of British war films,

It also informs the home front of the incredible risks which are routinely being taken by ordinary people. And to expect those who fight to come home changed. John Mills is the skipper, but the most prominent role goes to Eric Portman, a resentful loner who ultimately saves the crew through an act of selfless bravery.

This isn't a prestige production, but Anthony Asquith's accomplished direction makes it a cut above the glut of low budget action films made during the war. While the episode when Portman almost singlehandedly seizes a Nazi fuel depot with his practical German and a lot of pluck is unrealistic, the skill of the cast and creatives make us want to believe.

The crew represents a cross section of regions and classes. These are ensemble roles, though the credits list the cast in order of rank! The home lives of the men are a turmoil which they occasionally revisit on leave, but are unable to resolve. They walk away to execute extraordinary acts of courage. Asquith acknowledges their sacrifice.

Few of the many musicals released in the UK in the 1930s offer much entertainment today. The exceptions are the ones made by Gaumont, usually directed by Victor Saville and produced by Malcolm Balcon, which were better budgeted than the rest and looked to Hollywood for style and inspiration.

And crucially they starred Jessie Matthews, the biggest personality in British films during the depression. She was also in the stage version of Evergreen in 1930, a musical by Rogers and Hart, written and set in London. The daughter of a famous singer in the Edwardian music hall secretly poses as her dead mother in a nostalgia revue.

The plot rests on mistaken identity, and is indisputably crazy. But then, normal for a musical. At heart, it's typical of a Warner Brothers storyline, as the starving chorus girl becomes a star. The dance scenes are not in the class of Busby Berkley, but they are still distinctly good. There are some fabulous gowns too.

Jessie could dance in multiple styles, with her trademark high kicks prominent. She was a fine screwball actor and counterintuitively sexy. Her singing voice feels dated now and she has that strange, obsolete posh accent they all had back then. But her incredible star presence is undimmed. Gaumont never allowed her to go to Hollywood, which is cinema's loss.

Lance Comfort again fashions a compelling suspense film out of a meagre budget. There are no stars, no elaborate lighting arrangements. The set decoration is dismayingly threadbare and flimsy. And yet this is an unusually absorbing B feature.

And Comfort scripts a compelling premise from a forgotten novel by an obscure writer. A suave, married suburbanite (William Franklyn) works for a firm which designs safes for banks. He staggers home after an assault in a bomb site, to find he has been missing for three weeks and has no memory of where he has has been.

And the detective hired by his wife (Moira Redmond) to find him has turned up dead. Which is an excellent film noir set up! Pure Cornell Woolrich. Sadly there's no money for expressionist visuals. Franklyn lacks real star charisma, but he is still fine as a noirish everyman caught up in a plot beyond his comprehension.

Nigel Green stands out among the support cast of likely suspects, though it's more memorable to encounter Anthony Booth as the head of the criminal gang! The easily listening soundtrack isn't typical of this genre but fits in with a key plot feature. Comfort has been reappraised as a key director of British Bs. This isn't his best, but still an effective thriller.

Exuberant adaptation of Henry Fielding's epic satirical comedy, published in 1749. This won the Oscar for best film, with nine other nominations. Possibly much of its critical success was down to the fresh, innovative style inspired by the French New Wave. Those novelties now look a bit gimmicky. They give the film motion, but don't lock gears with the substance.

But it works brilliantly as a broad sweep of Georgian Britain, whether in the town or the country estate, with its support cast of thieves, ladies of dubious virtue and lusty squires. Albert Finney is well cast as Tom Jones, a foundling of sound heart and good countenance. He is fundamentally moral and the trouble he encounters indicates a corrupt society.

My pick of the three female actors who were nominated in a supporting role is Diane Cilento as an incredibly lecherous strumpet. While the film is a festival of uninhibited camera trickery, it is also an actors film. Their characters are all archetypes which are mostly made memorable by an exaggerated, comic grotesquery.

Except for Finney and his pure true love, played by Susannah York, who are beautiful. John Osborne's script inevitably takes liberties with the extremely long novel. The comedy isn't actually funny and leaves the impression that the film may have been more fun to make than it is to watch. But, its satire on the hypocrisy of fine folk still finds the target.

Droll supernatural suspense film which was scripted by Nigel Kneale as a comedy but eventually shot by Hammer as straight horror. Consequently the tone is quite uneven. It's genuinely spooky at times, but slips into farce towards the end.

Joan Fontaine stars in her final big screen performance. She doesn't create the kind of camp, gothic monster other female survivors of the studio system were conjuring up in the sixties, but conveys a sensitive, affecting impression of a vulnerable woman.

She plays a spinster taken on as the headmistress of a rural school after recovering from a mental collapse. The village church fell into disrepair years ago... and she suspects the locals are practicing witchcraft. But who would believe her? And what if the suspected sacrifice of a schoolchild was just a ruse to entrap the chaste newcomer?

Which is just as good a narrative as it was seven years later in The Wicker Man. Unfortunately, The Witches ultimately pulls up short of the horror potential of the climax. There's a splendid support cast playing the village of inscrutable/inbred oddballs, led by Kay Walsh as the completely nuts head witch. It's a minor genre picture given a touch of class by its star.

 Eerie ghost story adapted by regular Twilight Zone writer Richard Matheson from his own novel. Presumably he had read Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House because the set up is similar, as well as the title. A team of experts in the paranormal are hired to spend a week in a cursed castle and produce definitive proof of malign possession.

The key personnel is Pamela Franklyn as a jittery medium and Clive Revill as the rationalist who proposes to throw science at the problem. It is immediately clear that this isn't all happening in someone's head. Eventually the boffin wheels out his supercomputer with which he intends to rid the house of its degenerate demon.

The premise has lost some freshness in recent years, as there has been a glut of ghost stories. What distinguishes this one is the really unsettling photography and set design which gives the film the feeling of a nightmare. There's a spooky score of electronic atmospherics. And the effects are state of the art for the period.

There's a sensational moment when Franklyn's body starts to produce ectoplasm! The final explanation isn't a strength, but the late appearance of Michael Gough as the mummified body of an evil Edwardian gentleman is quite disturbing. There is a touch of the grotesque to the horror. It's not as stylish as The Haunting, but it's much more macabre.

At the turn of the sixties there was a glut of low budget British crime films, short enough to play on the bottom half of a double bill. The sort of b&w police drama which was becoming a regular on tv. This is among the best of these. Production values are threadbare, but there is a fine script and imaginative direction from Cliff Owen in his debut feature.

William Sylvester plays a maverick intelligence spook who goes undercover for Scotland Yard to infiltrate a gang of bankrobbers. But he finds a fulfilment in crime absent from regular work. There is camaraderie, and greater independence and dignity. The pay is more rewarding and he soon falls for a crooked moll played by Mai Zetterling.

She gives the most memorable performance, costumed to look like a Scandinavian Lizabeth Scott. The plot is suggestive of those Hollywood syndicate films of the fifties in which the mob operates like a legitimate business. Only this goes further in blurring the lines; licensed corporations are portrayed as similarly corrupt. What's the difference?

There is something unusually compelling about Offbeat. The photography is no more than functional, but the story is told coherently and with genuine suspense. The jazz soundtrack is a cliché, but it still works. The characters are all credible, and there are interesting themes about capitalism and the human cost. This is far better than it needs to be.

Karel Reisz's adaptation of Alan Sillitoe's angry young man novel is one of the key films in the British New Wave, a movement which favoured social realist portrayals of working class life. And like the book, it's a mixed success. The narrative strives for authenticity, but mostly deals in ordinariness, and the events of the story soon became genre clichés.

So there's the drinking contest, the bunk up with a married woman, the inevitable pregnancy and abortion, the trenchant shop floor philosophy... Sillitoe's screenplay labours to present a society he assumes is unfamiliar to us, but conveys little else. His dialogue is intended to be naturalistic, but it is awfully flat.

Still, there are positives. He captures a generation while it was still taking shape, which has disposable income in contrast to their parents, the survivors of war and the depression. Best of all is the voice of his antihero, Arthur Seaton. Paragraphs of internal monologue are transferred into the film. And Albert Finney produces his signature performance.

He has charm and bravado, but a feeling of menace moves under the surface. Unfortunately, Reisz's style is plodding and worthy and he relies heavily on his emerging star. There is some evocative footage shot around Nottingham by Freddie Francis, and a truly exceptional soundtrack from John Dankworth. But this period piece is now more interesting than entertaining.

Low budget account of the Battle of Britain from the perspective of a single squadron based on an airfield in Kent. It focuses on the beginning of hostilities, with the British unprepared and outnumbered. As the Group Captain (Jack Hawkins) points out, the Luftwaffe have greater numbers but the RAF have better aircraft and pilots...

It's a patriotic tribute to the 'few', made long enough after the war for nostalgia to edge out realism. John Gregson plays a resentful volunteer who finds it difficult to assimilate into the public school banter- wizzo!- of the other flyers. There's a slight romantic subplot, but the events are mainly set in the operations room with hardly any actual aerial combat.

And what little fighting shown is quite badly done with models. Some of the problems with the film can be explained by its budget. And there is little flair from the director. The script is showing its age with the constant hijinks of the men sometimes hard to watch. Dulcie Gray solely represents the wives but she seems annoyingly interfering rather than steadfast.

And the lower ranks are unforgivably halfwitted. Presumably for comical intent. And yet... no other Battle of Britain film gets us so close to ground operations. Of course, almost everyone involved had served. Michael Denison as the squadron leader and Hawkins are very convincing. For all its clunky effects and sentimentality, this is one of the best RAF films of the fifties.

Quintessential thirties exotica which is a remake of a silent starring Ivor Novello, based on his own stage play. It's similar to the French classic Pepe le Moko, but set in Montmartre rather than the Casbah. Novello actually got there first... and while this isn't as poetic, or as good, there's plenty to enjoy for fans of romantic melodrama.  

Anton Walbrook takes over as the Rat in his English language debut, and he's pretty good. He is the mysterious and dangerous jewel thief who preys on the rich women of Paris, and then retreats back into the labyrinthine slums of the underworld, to his coterie of sex workers and cutthroats, to break a heart or essay a tango.

Ruth Chatterton is the slumming American tourist who falls for the charismatic anti-hero. She is largely forgotten now, but was a huge Hollywood star in the early talkies. By 1937 she was a little matronly and Bette Davis was getting her usual roles so this was her last film. Rene Ray is better as the teenage ingénue the Rat protects.

Of course, it's all atmosphere, with the fascinating criminal/heartbreaker residing in a distressed garret on the skyline of bohemian Paris. Which naturally he accesses via the window. It's the sort of role Valentino once specialised in; a febrile illusion into which we briefly escape from humdrum realities.