Film Reviews by Steve

What used to be a model of middle class Englishness now seems a very strange place indeed. Yet the film remains a widely loved tale of unrequited love. A heartbreaker. Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard are married, but not to each other. They fall deeply in love after a chance meeting at a provincial railway station, but separate because it is the right thing to do...  

It's a slight story given depth by the use of Rachmaninoff on the soundtrack and Robert Krasker's truly exceptional images of romance among the steam engines. It is beautifully edited too. But what we most remember the film for are the performances of the two stars as the reserved, scrupulous strangers. This was Howard's big break and he is haunting, but it's Celia Johnson who brings the tears.

It now feels like a remembrance of the bourgeois emotions- forbearance, shame, decency... The couple are paralysed by convention. It was loosely adapted from a play by Noël Coward and a popular analysis is that the gay playwright used a female character as a stand-in for a sexually conflicted man who is tempted from his marriage into an affair with another male... And that interpretation is a good fit.

So while orthodox, it is also ambiguous. After WWII the theme of sacrifice must have felt close to home. Especially when Celia's stolid husband (Cyril Raymond) famously, and kindly says, 'Thank you for coming back to me'. They will live until death with the unspoken trauma of her experience. But now it feels the message is the opposite; that life is short and happiness is fragile, so take love gladly, however it comes.

Supernatural melodrama which is a surprisingly faithful adaptation of a Victorian gothic romance by Sheridan le Fanu. A sexy but undead aristocrat (Ingrid Pitt) visits her malign legacy of vampirism on the countryside of 18th century Austria. And she ingratiates herself into the family homes of pouty female virgins in order to covertly feast on their blood...  

This is popularly remembered for its nudity and lesbian themes. Hammer was surfing a wave of change in British censorship and this represents a new direction for the studio. In the sixties and seventies, directors across Europe (Jean Rollin, Jesús Franco) launched a tide of erotic horror. But few are of the quality of The Vampire Lovers.  

The undress of its nubile cast is tasteful, and muted by present standards. There are some feeble models of castles and a graveyard, but beyond budget constraints, this is an absorbing and atmospheric folk tale. The acting is limited, but conveys the hypnotic strangeness of the occult. This is all about the female stars. Peter Cushing has barely a cameo.

There are a couple of beheadings, and a staking, but no blood. Le Fanu's story Carmilla has been raided by horror directors going back to the silents, but few tell it as coherently. Despite the limited finance, Roy Ward Baker directs with a little flair. Hammer's preoccupation with erotic exploitation soon got repetitive, but this is one of the best films they ever made.

Well, a bit more than wicked. Margaret Lockwood, as the arriviste aristocrat turned highway robber, kills in cold blood as well as offing rivals on the turnpike. Including James Mason as a thigh slapping bandit who becomes her accomplice for a while in crime and in the boudoir. This was the most successful film at the box office as Britain came out of war.

It's probably the definitive Gainsborough melodrama, set during the infamously lawless Restoration period. Most of it had to be reshot for the US market, and not only because of the ostentatiously low cut gowns. This broke the Hays code in every direction, with adultery and crime committed for pleasure and without repentance.

It was a huge personal success for Lockwood who as well as the mayhem gets to deliver some venomous dialogue. James Mason is reliably lusty as a villainous sidekick . If Griffith Jones and Patricia Roc are anodyne back up as the moralistic good guys, well that's their role and besides most of Roc's support is in her costume.

Shame there wasn't a better director, because although this is a lot of fun, the pacing is a little slow. But it is incredibly salacious. The period is recreated well, though much of it in the studio and on back projection. The cross-dressing heroine gives the film transgressive cult status, though the fetishism is muted. It's a bawdy romp and welcome escapism after WWII.

Solid low budget thriller loosely based on the notorious crash of a de Havilland jet aircraft in Rome in 1952. It is very similar to the 1951 aviation disaster film No Highway, but viewed from the perspective of the pilots, rather than the boffins. And it's not as starry as that production by Fox.

Following a few near misses and the write off of a passenger plane, an inquiry (by George Sanders) concludes pilot error. This lets off the manufacturers and the airline, but is bad news for the meticulous, experienced skipper in the hot seat (Bernard Lee). Michael Craig is the suave flight instructor who seeks to clear his name.

Much of the action is knocked up in the studio with models, which isn't really a weakness. While some may find the subject of ground atmospherics and take-off technique a little dry, there are also terrifically suspenseful moments of life and death as the planes struggle to get off the ground on the runways of some of the world's most exotic capitals.

Which are recreated in the studio of course. It's a low-key procedural film which offers an insight into the aviation industry from a number of perspectives. Lee is excellent as usual. While the production values are no more than functional, there's a brisk, engrossing story, as well as the exciting moments of crisis, during which there is no panic. Because this is a British film.

The first half hour of Powell and Pressburger's wartime propaganda thriller is the most realist footage they ever shot. Six men from across the British regions and social classes fly a bomber raid to Stuttgart then get shot down over the Netherlands. This long scene inside a Wellington may not interest everyone today, but it is beautifully photographed and offers a rare insight into the dangers.

And crucially it establishes the bond between the crew, through the warm camaraderie of Emeric Pressburger's script and the natural performances by the familiar ensemble cast. Once they have parachuted into the low countries, the story becomes more of a suspense drama as the men strive to get home with the help of the resistance.

This allows an opportunity for discreet propaganda at the expense of the Nazis and in support of the occupied Dutch. There is gentle patriotism, laced with humour. The best of the film comes towards the climax as Googie Withers takes the RAF through the final stage of their escape. Her delivery of the morale boosting dialogue is inspirational.

And it would take a cold heart not to choke back a few tears. Like all Powell and Pressburger films, it is unorthodox, an eccentric hybrid of the authentic and the mystic. The effects are pretty good and it is handsomely shot, with Norfolk standing in for Netherlands. It's not absolutely their best work, but still the pick of the Resistance tributes made in the war years.

Of all the bizarre tales from WWII to be exposed in the 1950s and turned into a feature film, none was more strange than the one everyone knew. Douglas Bader was a national celebrity, famous throughout Britain for returning from civilian life and becoming a Squadron Leader during the Battle of Britain...

...After losing both legs in a plane crash during RAF training in 1930. And even less likely, he escaped from a German prison hospital by shinning down a rope of sheets. In real life, Bader was controversial and had the reputation of being cantankerous, but More plays him as a bluff, determined hero. A chap with charm and gusto.

Unfortunately, he still feels difficult to like! Though he commands respect for his astonishing endeavours. More dominates the film in a huge, relentlessly bullish performance. There is a massive support cast, with Dorothy Alison the stand out as the nurse who initially gets the young flying ace back on his feet...

It's a long film which occasionally lacks drama because Bader seems so unsubtle, like a cheerful fool. He just charges headfirst into danger, without much thought for himself or others. Least of all his suffering wife (Muriel Pavlow). It really is a hagiography for a blunt man of great courage, who became a legend. 

Exceptionally bleak psychological police drama in which Sidney Lumet revisits the theme of crime and punishment. Sean Connery is a tough, insubordinate detective who investigates a series of violent sexual assaults on children. Left alone with the creepy middle aged man (Ian Bannen) who is their best lead, the distraught copper loses control and murders him.

The film is based on a play (by John Hopkins) and composed of three long conversations between the investigator and his wife (Vivien Merchant), his superior officer (Trevor Howard) and the suspect. Mainly through rambling, macabre monologues, he reveals how his mind has become corrupted by the horror of relentless, sordid crime.

Connery performs his harrowing disintegration with persuasive gravity, and Bannen is excellent as the accused man who deliberately gets under the skin of his interrogator. The tone of the film is quite disturbing; at times distressing realistic, and then surreal and expressionistic. Lumet uses brief, eerie flashbacks to suggest the squalid burden of the detective's work.

Some may find this abstract approach pretentious, but the director really gets into his man's head. This is an inexorably pessimistic and downbeat experience. There is no humour. It's a passage through the mental sickness of someone who has seen too much that is wretched and hopeless. Who has been contaminated by human corruption.

A British version of those Hollywood coming-of-age jukebox musicals set in the rock 'n' roll years which were in vogue around the turn of the seventies. Only there's no sun, surf and sports cars. This is extraordinarily desolate! David Essex plays a mixed up kid who drops out of school to take a string of dead end jobs while working up the ambition to join a rock band.

So, there's a scene at the beach. But it's not packed with buff teenagers glistening in the sunshine. The surly runaway is working a low paid job renting deckchairs in the relentless English rain! This isn't idealised nostalgia. But it does have the best soundtrack of any of these fifties memory pieces, and the spin off album was a huge seller.

Critics assumed that the anti-hero is based on John Lennon, which doesn't flatter the former Beatle one bit. Essex portrays an abominable scumbag! Fortunately he has enough superficial charm to make plausible his incessant sexual conquest. But behind the star's good looks, this man is a monster.

Ringo Starr is pretty good as his dodgy rocker mate, and there are a few cameos by other rock stars, like Keith Moon and Billy Fury. It's interesting how the film takes a normally romantic genre and makes it so pessimistic. But of course, the fifties in the UK was a time of austerity. It's an interesting curiosity, but not a feelgood experience.

This landmark of British folk horror isn't really a scare film at all, more of a dystopian thriller. Only the inspired twist is that the machine of oppression isn't the remote, indifferent state, but the free, self-governing citizens. Edward Woodward plays a sexually repressed policeman who visits a remote Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a young girl.

But instead discovers he is the fall guy. In their isolation, the islanders have adopted pagan rituals, which revolve around an uninhibited approach to sex and the fruitfulness of their crops. Soon the christian copper is being tempted by an enraptured Britt Ekland dancing naked and banging on the locked door of his hotel room.

Presumably there is some satirical intent, with the collective delusion of the free loving heathens reflecting the values of the seventies hippie movement. But also their beliefs have the effect of spoofing the pious sergeant's own faith. There's an original and intelligent script which constantly delights with its use of historical pagan traditions.

Woodward is perfect casting as the persevering dupe. Christopher Lee is ideal as the autocratic Lord, and the impudent, provocative- and naked- Britt Ekland is unforgettable. The photography of the sunny Scottish landscape and the evocative score of folk ballads both make crucial contributions. And the thrilling climactic appointment with the wicker man is the stuff of horror legend.

Nerdy update of the fifties creature feature which feels fairly realistic thanks to its low key production design and subdued performances, but actually conforms to normal genre rules. Following a mysterious cosmic accident, the behaviour of desert ants is transformed. They show signs of a hive intelligence and hostility towards humans. And build intriguing, geometric earth structures.

It's the kind of sci-fi where mankind seeks to understand the threat through technology. Though the budget only ran to two ant specialists, with Nigel Davenport as the mad scientist, and Michael Murphy as his more sensitive sidekick. Lynne Frederick is the barefoot local girl who ends up in their remote desert laboratory by chance.

But there are no giant ants or ray-guns. It's a slow procedural film which utilises painstaking blow-ups of insect photography to illustrate the apocalyptic narrative. So not for the bug-phobic. Though the story is interesting, really it's the experimental synthesiser score, the psychedelic computer graphics and the eerie desert setting which give the film its identity.

It feels like a weird trip, or a head movie. The director- Saul Bass- remains most famous for storyboarding the shower scene in Psycho. But though Phase IV bombed at the box office, it had a second life on television and became quite influential. Not only among experimental film makers, but it's reckoned that the crop circles made by the ants were copied by real life pranksters.

Nerve shredding action thriller which should be far better known. This sort of brawny, incendiary blockbuster was hugely popular in the seventies, often adapted from fat bestsellers typical of Alistair MacLean, or Hammond Innes. Juggernaut has an original screenplay, based on a real event on the QE2. It's the best of the decade.

Much of the credit goes to director Richard Lester's control of suspense. Actually, the plot is quite familiar. An anonymous terrorist has smuggled several massive bombs into the cargo of a luxury ocean liner and wants half a million from the company or else. A team of rugged bomb disposal specialists must defuse the explosive and save the 1200 people on board.

Meanwhile, back in London, the police attempt to track down the bad guy with a grudge. By the time we get to the red wire/blue wire climax, the tension is extraordinary. Kudos is due to Richard Harris for a terrific star performance as the fatalistic expert with the pliers. The location shoot on the turbulent ocean gives the hokum a touch of grey realism.

The set up is like a disaster film with a support cast of diverse character actors playing the frightened public and crew. But it becomes more about the co-ordinated action plan to stop the explosion. The cutaways to the panicky passengers are a slight weakness. There's far too much of Roy Kinnear. The real drama is back with the naval officer hunched over the anti-tremor mechanism.

This was released a few months after the last Monty Python series was broadcast on tv, and already there is a huge leap in quality. The main difference is the sketches are linked into a loose narrative; King Arthur (Graham Chapman) assembles a band of knights to join his quest for the Holy Grail. This single overarching plot is more satisfying over the length of feature film.

And the gags and situations are better, and funnier, though just as absurd. Ideas in this comedy have broken free into the wider culture. Public figures who back down at the first hint of opposition are taunted with 'brave Sir Robin'. People who obstinately refuse to admit they are beaten are likened to the Black Knight, who won't concede defeat even though his limbs are hacked off.

Most of the best ideas are in the first half, but it sustains itself quite well for such a ludicrous fantasy. There is broad satire, but it's not really political. The anarcho-syndicalist peasant who lambasts King Arthur's right to rule (Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system!') is a sendup of student politics as much as the iniquity of monarchism...

The film still works because there is knowledge behind the foolery, which spoofs the customs of the middle ages. Personally, the animation is a drag, though part of the Python image. Fortunately there are few songs, though it was turned into a musical. Humour is subjective and some will find this too silly. The majority will laugh their socks off.

My pick for the best film project for a rock or pop act, ever! And one of the most effective portraits of the seventies in the run down industrial wastelands. This was made just as Slade were going into decline. Presumably it was conceived as promotion for the band, but it is incredibly gloomy; all raw social realism with a few tales from the road worked in.

Even the two hits from the soundtrack, How Does it Feel and Far Far Away are unusually downbeat and find the boys in reflective mood. It's a rags-to-riches-to-rags story arc set in a Britain of bingo, working man's clubs and the dogs. In classic rock and roll tradition, Flame (Slade) are screwed by the dodgy gangster who is their manager (Johnny Shannon).

When they wriggle free they are taken on by an agent of a multinational corporation (Tom Conti) who treats them like another commodity. Which is worse. The members of Slade are directed thoughtfully, usually paired with with a professional actor. Dave Hill is mostly hidden away, but Jim Lea, Noddy Holder and Don Powell offer a trenchant, fatalistic commentary on their rise and fall.

Everything is shabby and fake and cheap. Flame's brief success doesn't allow their escape but confirms their cynicism. Most of all, it's about that most British of themes, social class. If this had been a conventional rock and roll vehicle, it would be barely remembered. But it has acquired a cult following because its dirty pessimism captures the period, and the country.

Energetic and very clever update of the old fashioned country house mystery which is adapted with a light touch by Anthony Shaffer from his own stage success. But this isn't really Agatha Christie revised for the seventies. Beyond its scintillating and playful wit, this has plenty to say about contemporary Britain, particularly the class system.

Laurence Olivier plays a middle aged writer of detective stories about the kind of amateur sleuth who was typical in the golden age of crime fiction in the 1930s. Michael Caine is the much younger lover of his trophy wife; a second generation immigrant with a developing chain of salons. So the famous author devises an incredible screwball revenge.

And the parvenu hairdresser fights back in similar fashion, until their escalating hostilities end in tragedy. This evolving war of ego and oneupmanship expressed through role play is the main attraction. The stars are excellent in demanding roles and Joseph Mankiewicz's camera captures the spirit of the theatrical production with verve and insight.

The play/film also operates as a reflection on how the establishment protects itself from outside threat. And there is an impression that the new arrival is learning how to belong. This is exceptional in almost every way. The only negative is the awful period fashions. Caine went from wearing the coolest suits in film history, to Man at C&A in barely six years.

One of the last, and the best of the horror anthologies that were popular around the turn of the seventies. The title comes from an American comic series of the 1950s from which some of these stories were taken. The others were from its sister publication, The Vault of Horror. So this is a selection of five tales of the grotesque, each with a deft climactic twist.

This is normally the domain of television, like in The Twilight Zone, but these collections were in widescreen and in colour. With extra gore. There is an excellent cast of well known British film actors. Ralph Richardson is the mysterious keeper of the crypt who hosts the round of story telling and then reveals to the miscreants their ultimate, dreadful fate.

All the stories are engaging and gradually become more gruesome, building to the final episode when Nigel Patrick is devoured by his own dog, at the hands of a gang of blind, elderly men! There's a pretty good retelling of The Monkey's Paw. Peter Cushing is quite poignant as a lonely, impoverished widower who is driven to suicide by his yuppie neighbours...

Until he emerges from his grave to take revenge on the ringleader. Most of the stars were coming to the end of their careers, but bring an abundance of ripe panache to their roles. The constant humour keeps the horror playful rather than cruel. While this is all extremely formulaic, it's also entertaining and obviously made with respect for the genre.