Film Reviews by Steve

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.

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.