Film Reviews by Steve

Dark, gloomy melodrama surely influenced by the poetic realism of prewar France, with its fog and pessimism and doomed romance. In a destitute South American port- where an accordion plays and the company of a woman can be bought- a lusty mechanic off a ramshackle cargo steamer (Pedro Armendáriz) smuggles a shoeless waif (Elsa Martinella) on board.

And the pouting teenager inflicts maximum distraction on the salty, multinational crew. She ingratiates herself to the infatuated, middle aged captain (Trevor Howard), but really, he's too numb to open up his heart again... Eventually the ship's engine overheats and explodes and deposits the exploited girl and the crew into the ocean...

It's a hot, moody drama and the loneliness of the men settles over the action like a sombre mist. We are human cargo, enchanted by beauty and desire. Nothing can end well. Howard's oppressive, poetic melancholy is as much an ambience as a performance. Martinelli is most affecting as the pitiful stray. And sexy too, naturally.

So it's a ship of archetypes and a familiar plot. But the atmosphere is everything, and thankfully the desolate fatalism survives all the way to the fade out. There's a splendidly hot blooded script and artistic black and white photography of a make believe world where lost souls medicate their isolation with whisky and ribaldry. 

Patriotic version of a historic incident in 1949 when a British warship- the Amethyst- was shelled by a rebel army during the Chinese Civil War. The film takes great care not to be critical of British actions and instead delivers an exciting action film as the crew survive a long siege before making a daring escape.

There's a documentary style approach with East Anglia standing in for the Yangtse River and the Navy supplying actual battleships, including the Amethyst. The b&w photography is rather gorgeous. Eric Ambler's script covers the incident in great detail including tortuous negotiations with a Chinese Colonel (Akim Tamiroff under heavy makeup).

After the bombardment, Richard Todd arrives to co-ordinate the escape and patronise the survivors. He gives the film a big boost with his natural screen presence amplifying the officer's methodical command. William Hartnell emerges with the most dignity from the lower ranks, despite some idiotic- and racist- comic relief.

There is a preface which claims that the events are all absolutely true, though it doesn't define whose truth. But, setting this aside, and certain attitudes which are of their time, there remains a handsome and professionally made war film with excellent, realistic battle scenes and a rousing finale.

Eccentric and very British comedy thriller which was started during WWII and completed afterwards, which perhaps accounts for its uneven tone. Eventually the tension gets lost in farce. Deborah Kerr is a haughty Irish teenager who wants to join the IRA but gets exploited instead by Nazi spies on the mainland. Trevor Howard is the bystander who gets swept up in her misadventure.

A problem here is that Kerr's screwball capriciousness rather subverts a serious political stalemate, which was Ireland's neutrality in the war. Consequently the script searches for a balance which it never really finds. It mocks attitudes which were live problems for many.

The girl is portrayed as radicalised. Launder and Gilliat actually create an interesting pastiche of an extremist; the girl has no self-knowledge or sense of humour or nuance. Everything offends her. But mainly the English. And yet the comedy is mostly drawn from this stubborn fanaticism, which feels awkward.

The pacing is slow for a suspense film. But there are laughs in the witty innuendo expertly delivered by the young star. There is stylish noir photography, and more railway locations from Launder and Gilliat, which take the story all over the British Isles. As often with these writer-directors, there's a lot of Hitchcock, but the master might have stayed clear of the political tangle.

The first screen adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's autobiographical Berlin stories which would be more famously made into Cabaret. Julie Harris reprises the role of Sally Bowles which won her a Tony in the Broadway production. And her star performance is the best part of the film. Laurence Harvey as a prudish Isherwood is the main shortcoming.

This is such a cleaned up revision that it undermines the purpose of the original book, about a group of British expats living self absorbed, insouciant lives in decadent Berlin, oblivious to the rise of fascism. The film even evades Isherwood's homosexuality, which was the reason his circle was there at all. The possibility that Sally is a borderline sex worker is also omitted.

But there are tantalising episodes when the drama plugs in and turns on. There's a sensational scene when Sally and Christopher take a week's rent to a luxury restaurant which she blows in an instant. When her fatuous, hedonistic delusions come into focus. And Harris gives us a glimpse of what might have been.

Eventually, Isherwood addresses the Nazi threat as Hitler is about to come into power. Most of the film is pitched as a comedy. But, no matter how diluted the divine decadence- or limiting the lack of location footage- it is still a curious portrayal of a fascinating, careless subculture at a crossroads in history. 

Quintessentially English black comedy which is elevated by a sublime comic performance from Alec Guinness as the mastermind of a gang of crooks, and the inspired casting of Katie Johnson as the little old lady who foils them. The dangerous heavies rent a room in her gloomy chambers where they pretend to rehearse a string minuet, while they plot a heist.

And they would have got away with it, if not for her meddling. The film eventually becomes a morality tale as they meet their demise at each others hands, leaving the law abiding landlady with the swag. Guinness clearly draws on the screen persona of Alastair Sim, who was originally cast as the Professor. It's a stunning transformation.

With his bloodless complexion and sickly eyes, he looks sketched from German expressionism, like the lopsided house, skewed by the blitz. The streets are dark, painted in soot. His mob (including Peter Sellers, Herbert Lom and Cecil Parker) are all exaggerated caricatures. Danny Green is the best, playing an idiot heavy.

It's a gothic comedy. Most of the humour comes from contrasting the London of genteel, distracted widows and kindly police with the desperate, ill-fated lawbreakers. It's not hilarious, but it creates an aura of dry incongruity which fills the sombre Technicolor darkness. It's the last great Ealing comedy, and one of the most loved British films.

World War II action film which approximately recreates an audacious raid by a squad of marines in kayaks on German battleships docked in the French port of Bordeaux. Which was little more than a suicide mission from which only two men returned. Both the survivors advised on the production, though the script strays some way from the facts.

This is an example of the durability of the WWII special operations genre, because there's a lot wrong with the film but it still ultimately delivers. There was a troubled production which is exposed in uneven writing and direction. There were many hands on the tiller. Some of the script is distinctly good, but plenty is pretty poor.

And American José Ferrer is curious casting as the freethinking creator of the project. Trevor Howard gives it his best shot as the long serving officer aghast at the permissive methods of the amateur enthusiast. There is an impression of difficulty getting the slim premise up to feature film length, because there is a lot of filler.

However, as soon as the lightweight canoes are launched into the French estuary with a cargo of limpet mines and the Nazis in pursuit, the adrenaline kicks in. Someone had faith in this film, because as well as Technicolor, there is early use of CinemaScope. The scenes on the river at night are gorgeous. And the film lives as a tribute to the bravery of the marines.

Landmark British sci-fi adapted from writer Nigel Kneale's hugely popular live BBC broadcasts. The camera effects, models and makeup for the Hammer version are rudimentary, though still an improvement on the homespun creations on the telly. But the key difference is the serial lasted for three hours, and the film barely 80m. So everything is speeded up.

Which gives the action energy, but unfortunately squeezed out Kneale's intriguing pseudo-scientific detail. Professor Quatermass' (Brian Donlevy) experimental rocket project goes awry when the spacecraft loses contact with base before crashing to earth with two of the crew missing and a third visibly mutating. Who then goes AWOL.

There's an exciting scene when the team of national emergency bigwigs- led by Quatermass- watch grainy CCTV footage of a mysterious incident during the flight, which is classic Kneale. But it's mostly narrative, which Val Guest portrays as realistically as possible. So there is a pretty basic sci-fi premise imaginatively shot on a shoestring.

Donlevy comes in for criticism as a tough, scruffy, Irish American version of the Professor. Admittedly, it's a bit disappointing that the head of British rocketry isn't actually a Brit. Or at least a German. Still, Richard Wordsworth is excellent as the mutant. The budget defeats the visual effects, but this is still irresistible, with plenty of imaginatively staged shocks.

Slim gothic thriller which updates the classic themes of the Edwardian gaslight melodramas to a sunny Brighton in the 1950s. So there is an endangered female, (Margaret Lockwood) the latest older bride of a psychopath (Dirk Bogarde) who murdered his first wife for money. When the inheritance turns out not to be all he hoped for, he decides to kill again.

Director Lewis Gilbert dials down the atmospherics. So there isn't much of an expressionist look, or any thunderstorms. It is an adaptation of a stage play (by Janet Green) which alludes to the genre conventions of period melodrama. So the first wife is killed with gas. And there is the usual country mansion with a locked room.

The main pleasures are the performances of the small cast. Lockwood is easy to root for as a brassy, pragmatic widow who gratifyingly pushes back against her idle new husband's manipulations. Bogarde pulls off the trick of being foul, without being too loathsome to bear. Though Kathleen Harrison plays the most idiotic servant in fiction.

There is a mood of malign decadence, principally generated by Bogarde's dark charisma. His trophy husband's homosexuality may be a banal motif, but Dirk absorbs it perfectly into his portrayal. The characters are archetypes, but enormous fun to watch. The public stayed away and it flopped. They missed a grand melodramatic entertainment.

Another brief encounter for David Lean. Katherine Hepburn plays a loud but lonely and introverted American tourist in Venice. She makes friends with a barefoot child before falling in love with a handsome, romantic antique dealer (Rossano Brazzi) who encourages her to embrace life. So it's a kind of fantasy, except the poetic Italian is married with four children.

Kate gets top billing, but Venice is the star. The bright, sunny Technicolor is joyful. And the rich sound is evocative. The middle aged sightseer films everything and we see through her eyes, a city of history, romance and miracles. A place where the shell of her new world pragmatism might crack and a painful emotional rebirth take place.

There were many films after WWII, about a single American woman of a certain age finding adventure in a touristic Europe. And there are no real surprises here. But while this is formula, it is supremely crafted. Its strengths are the spectacular location photography and a salty performance by Hepburn... but also a feeling of euphoric optimism.

I much prefer the acting of an older Hepburn. Though it is obvious what is coming, it is easy to empathise with her brittle solitude. Brazzi is a very smooth and wise seducer who seems to stroll around tourist sights looking for lonely travellers. Lean attempts to create an impression of Venice at the dawn of mass tourism. He should see it now.

High tension disaster-thriller with a twist, which grips in the opening scene and won't let go. At a dinner party in Hong Kong, a visiting brass hat (Michael Hordern) tells a gathering of military officers and colonial staff his nightmare about a plane of 13 passengers and crew who crash in hazardous conditions on a remote coastline in Japan.

When it emerges that most of the people in the room are travelling the next day to Tokyo on a light aircraft, a germ of unease is sown. And then some minor details begin to come true. The key character is an administrator (Alexander Knox) who is so superstitious that he has published a book denying the existence of fate or premonitions!

And it's his growing panic that drives the suspense. Until the plane is circling a small island through a snowstorm in the dark with the fuel tank empty... There's an engaging crew of British stalwarts filling out the cast, led by Michael Redgrave as a rational RAF officer. It's mostly one for the chaps, with Sylvia Sim peripheral in her last film.

There's some informative chat about the psychology of superstition and fatalism. Today this wouldn't survive the edit, but it adds to the richness of the tale. The inspired premise is brilliantly realised on both sides of the camera. It's among the most suspenseful action films ever made, and afterwards, it feels a bit like a dream.

This is the earliest big screen version of George Orwell's classic dystopian novel, released only seven years after its publication. Michael Anderson's adaptation is an interesting offshoot of the 1984 phenomenon, rather than a great political film. It's all there though, the Thought Police, Newspeak, Room 101, Big Brother...

The source is a novel of ideas, a work of political philosophy and there are limits to how much a film can actually replicate Orwell's prose. It looks like fifties sci-fi, though the sets are appropriately grim.  Much of the dialogue is exposition, but the relative lack of nuance and depth makes the screen version less immersive.

So instead the narrative focuses on the subversive romance between Winston Smith and Julia. For commercial reasons there were American leads. Edmond O'Brien is too chubby and toothy, and his desperation never feels real. Jan Sterling is strange casting, but she's better and has a long close up at the end which is the best moment in the film.

However, it does seem that liberation for her is the freedom to be a fifties American housewife. There isn't the dirty horror of Nigel Kneale's famous BBC adaptation of '54. This film was financed by the CIA as anti-Soviet propaganda, but it more strikingly echoes Nazi Germany than proposes a vision of future dystopia. 

Philosophical catholic noir adapted from Graham Greene's autobiographical novel. It presents a dilemma of faith within an interesting narrative framework which tells the same story twice. First from the point of view of a bumptious American novelist (Van Johnson). And then his ethereal lover (Deborah Kerr) who is married to an insipid drudge (Peter Cushing).

The wife suddenly disappears from the writer's life without explanation, leaving him to obsess over her deceitfulness. Her version is more of a confession. During a doodlebug raid towards the end of WWII, the writer appears dead. On a desperate whim, she prays that if he would only survive, she will give him up and go back to her husband.

When he lives, she is left to wonder about the mercy of god. The narrative twist is that the abandoned writer is motivated by egotism, but the woman he doubts is inspired by a profound, intense, unconditional love. But she suddenly discovers herself in a world designed by an interventionist god. Greene was a catholic, but we can choose to interpret her faith as a delusion.

The heart of the film is the haunting realisation of the power of her unceasing love. Kerr is extremely convincing in the unusual role. The weakness is Johnson, who isn't able to register his huge internal conflict. And it should have been a British actor. Edward Dmytryk shoots the long scenes of dialogue like film noir, but really this is a tragedy.

Extravagant historical melodrama of the kind that made Stewart Granger a star a decade earlier. Here he appears opposite his real-life spouse Jean Simmons as an unscrupulous, aristocratic brute who murders his rich older wife. Simmons is the Cockney maid who uses her insider knowledge to rise up the household hierarchy with a view to assuming the title of mistress.

But master has his eye on another wealthy woman, an imposing blonde (Belinda Lee). The only sure solution is for him to bump off the inconvenient servant. The emotional fluctuations of their power struggle occasionally defy probability. But this is melodrama, so that hardly matters. The film is a rich indulgence, and fast paced, with a splendidly ghoulish climax.

Arthur Lubin was a minor director but he creates plenty of suspense and atmosphere. Theres a lavish production shot in Technicolor, with splendid interiors and costumes and horse drawn carriages. Admittedly the external location footage is perfunctory. Most of all, it's the two stars who give the film class.

Their roles are melodramatic archetypes, but Granger and Simmons make them hugely enjoyable. Particularly Simmons as the whipped underdog gamely standing up for herself, but not too wisely. It's an unheralded Edwardian costumer, but immensely entertaining, which generates enough goodwill to overcome its occasional contrivances.

The western stalemate after the Battle of Britain was fertile territory for British film makers in the fifties. The war effort turned to daring special operations, often derived from unusual and hazardous plans. These were written up as best sellers in peacetime and adapted into popular films over the next decade, usually featuring the same pool of actors.

This is based on an attack by three mini-submarines on the German battleship Tirpitz, docked in a Norwegian fjord. John Mills is the paternal but vigilant leader of the operation, supported by officers Donald Sinden and John Gregson. But really it's an ensemble cast of familiar faces, with Michael Medwin standing out.

The film meanders through the training programme, but sparks suddenly to life during the suspenseful, dangerous mission, featuring extensive underwater photography. The men wear their bravery lightly; most of the dialogue focuses the usual grumbles of the lower ranks, of rations and home. But the team pulls together for the cause.

Ralph Thomas' direction is strong on the comic backchat. He splices in the newsreel footage with some skill. And the authentic risks of the plan brings natural tension into the story. The film attests to the generally high standard of the fifties special-ops genre. It is a well made, realistic war feature, with actors who often knew the territory from their own service.

Entertaining POW film which makes a great virtue of its location shoot in the famous old castle. It is based on the memoirs of Pat Reid (John Mills), who escaped from Colditz. The film doesn't attempt to be a realistic portrayal of men in captivity. So the prisoners are not scared, bored or lonely. They are too focused on planning their escape.

The castle is for officers who have already tried to abscond. So it becomes a pan-European hothouse for those most motivated to break out. When their competitive schemes lead to chaos, an escape committee is set up under the aloof but droll Eric Portman. Mills is the English representative, until he walks out the front gate dressed as a German guard...

For a film set in a high security prison, this is a superficial diversion with an anecdotal touch. The English are self effacing, the Poles are excitable and the French are unfriendly. And crucially, the Germans are mostly genial idiots. There are no meaningful consequences of escape; the prisoners are just returned to their cells.

A preface assures us that the film is entirely based on true events, so we get to see real life escape plans. Naturally there is an informer, but he is sidelined without bloodshed. And there is a concert party in which Ian Carmichael and Richard Wattis channel Flanagan and Allen! But no one has a nightmare or even complains about the food. This an amiable vision of war. Pure escapism...