Film Reviews by Steve

Lifelong Republican John Ford isn't the obvious choice to direct John Steinbeck's great American novel. But no matter how hard you squint, this is an unambiguously negative critique of American capitalism that promotes government intervention and workers unions. He brings his usual sentimentality, communal singing and folksy performances by the support cast...

But he doesn't bring his politics. Or indeed his Catholic faith. Changes are made because of censorship and there is no attempt to include the long editorial passages, but Nunnally Johnson's script is faithful to the book, which Steinbeck assiduously researched on the road. And in a couple of ways in particular, it is enhanced.

There's Henry Fonda's trenchant portrayal of Tom Joad's transformation from sharecropper to activist. And Gregg Toland's stark, austere b&w cinematography. Today it seems like a folly that apart from a handful of establishing shots, the mythic journey west from the Oklahoma dustbowl to the orchards of California was all filmed in the studio!

The novel was published only a year earlier. It is astonishing to consider that these events were contemporary. Now this is classic Americana, but the issues are still alive. When corporations sack their workforce and hire them back at 50% wages, who doesn't remember Fonda, gaunt and persecuted in the labour camp, making his famous speech?

The key theme of French Poetic Realism in the years leading up to WWII, is entrapment. And the impossibility of escape. The most evocative image of this is Jean Gabin barricaded alone in the shadows of his attic room surrounded by cops. While he delays his inevitable death, he reflects on what put him there.

With its long flashbacks and fatalism and gloomy expressionism, this is the pre-war French picture which most feels like film noir. And Gabin as the ill-fated everyman is a potent noir antihero: whether alone and brooding in the dark of his tenement; or the bruised romantic who dallies with Arletty's world weary moll.

The two stars as the seen-it-all romantic dupes are immensely affecting. Marcel Carné's forlorn imagery and Jacques Prévert pessimistic script deepen this mood of loss and disappointment. Like most pre-war Poetic Realism it was censored and then banned by the French government for being bad for morale.

The solitary man trapped in a hail of gunfire is also a potent image of the coming occupation. There is evocative set design; Gabin's isolation is illustrated by his remote rooftop home. And Maurice Jaubert's downbeat score. All these make for an emotional overload. But most of all, it's the absolute exposure of Gabin's bitter, abrasive performance.

This is the first screen version of a John Steinbeck story. He adapted his novella into a play, which is what we see here. It isn't opened out to show the working farms of California which exploited the victims of the depression. This is an actors film, about the interaction between these rootless wanderers.

Mainly the famous protagonists. Lon Chaney Jr. is Lennie, the simple minded giant who unwittingly kills what he loves, or feels pity for. And Burgess Meredith is his benevolent keeper, George. Chaney's performance is unsubtle, but as a combination they are emotionally unstoppable, as is the pathos of Steinbeck's moral tale.

The rural poor are distorted by what they lack: a home, family, security. And self respect. They are in fear of a lonely, miserable old age and get by on the dream of a better life that will never happen and is as intangible as religious faith. Their (all male) community is as blighted as the survivors of a post apocalyptic wilderness.

This is far from the depression of Frank Capra. Lewis Milestone directs the limited space with fluency, but mainly conducts the excellent performances, with Betty Field a standout among the support. Aaron Copland's score brings shade to the visual austerity. It feels like group theatre but it's my pick as the best of Steinbeck on film.

Sentimental romance about a celebrity playboy (Charles Boyer) and a pampered bride-to-be (Irene Dunne) who travel by luxury liner from Europe to New York to marry into fabulous wealth, but fall in love with each other. So they arrange to meet at the top of the Empire State building in six months if they decide to get together instead...

Which sounds familiar because Leo McCarey remade it himself in 1957 as the hugely popular An Affair to Remember. Which itself was heavily referenced in the smash 1993 romcom, Sleepless in Seattle. The original is the best, though it is uneven and as usual the director leans too heavily on a big emotional payoff.

It splits into three acts. First there's the shipboard screwball, which isn't classic McCarey, but still charming. Next it is a pious moral tale in which the frivolous lovers must pay for their avarice before they achieve their romantic destiny. And then there's a horribly sugary subplot about a choir of orphaned children at Christmas!

Which is surely only there to expand the narrative to feature length and allow Irene to sing. The story actually recovers for a pretty good ending. McCarey was a strong Catholic and the hand of god is in control of the action at every turn, which makes it feel sanctimonious. But the studio era know-how and irresistible stars make this the superior version.

With the implementation of the Production Code in 1934 Hollywood films didn't only become less salacious, they were also more conservative. The censors were strongly allied to religious groups and asserted their role was to enforce 'American values'. Plus the '30s was a foreign country and they did things differently there.

Some directors pushed back and some didn't. And it seems Mark Sandrich was one who didn't. The screwball plot of Carefree is regrettably sexist and perverse, with Fred Astaire as a psychoanalyst who uses his professional prerogative to influence the romantic choices of Ginger Rogers. Sometimes under hypnosis.

OK, this is screwball, but it is also creepy. Even allowing for 90 years of social change, this is the Fred and Ginger series in decline. The few dance routines are not among the duo's best and are set to some of Irving Berlin's lesser songs. Ralph Bellamy is one of the great comedy support actors, but there's not much for him here.

Set against all that, there are some big laughs and Luella Gear is fun as Ginger's sassy older sidekick. Rogers gets an equal share of the spotlight for once. The romantic dance duet for Change Partners may not be one of the stars' greatest hits, but it's still pretty good. There are merits for hardcore fans, but it's a guilty pleasure.

This looks fabulous on paper. It's directed by the maestro of the sophisticated, studio era sex comedy, Ernst Lubitsch, who as usual adapts his story from a successful European play. There's a script by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. It stars the  doyenne of '30s screwball, Claudette Colbert. And Gary Cooper was as big a star as anyone in the studio era.

Unfortunately it doesn't work. The contrived situations are heavy with salacious gags, but they fail to go off. Possibly because the slow and lugubrious Cooper is miscast. Lubitsch can't bring a sparkle to Wilder and Brackett's trademark cynicism and eventually the ironic tone gets tiresome. Though there is the most famous and inspired meet-cute in pictures.

An American tycoon (Cooper) on the Côte d'Azur is frustrated in his quest to buy pyjama tops as the posh department store won't separate them.  He encounters a penniless French aristocrat (Colbert) looking to purchase just the bottoms... At their wedding she discovers his seven previous marriages. So she- basically- withholds sex until he learns not to be a toxic male.

There's a regrettable male on female slap, though the wife wins the battle of the sexes through her wits. It's insubstantial frou-frou. There's some light subtext about the friction between US capitalism and European aristocracy but reality hardly intrudes. Colbert almost rescues it, and wears some eye-catching fashions. But everyone's best work is elsewhere.

This is the second of six films directed by Marcel Carné between 1938-46 which are the foundation of French poetic realism. Though without his usual screenwriter  Jacques Prévert, there is more realism, and less poetry. It's an ensemble melodrama set among the residents of the title address.

What makes this most like other Carné films is the romantic pessimism of the central story about a juvenile couple who can't make a living in the depression, so check in to execute a double suicide. Annabella and Jean-Pierre Aumont are extremely beautiful and affecting in the roles.

There's a wonderful support cast of French character actors, but the emphasis of their stories is unbalanced by the charisma of Arletty and Louis Jouvet as a sex worker and her pimp. Watching them bicker while shacked up in bed spotlights how much more adult late '30s French cinema was than Hollywood.

There is an awful lot of infidelity going on! The huge set of the Canal St. Martin and Maurice Jaubert's romantic score bring atmosphere. It's arguably the least of Carné's releases around the war years, but the image of the young lovers wresting with malign fate in the dark of their temporary room is among his most potent.

This masterpiece of French poetic realism exists in a world of myth and premonition, which is a product of the synthesis between Marcel Carné's stunning gallery of sombre imagery and Jacques Prévert screenplay of rich romantic symbolism. Which allow no relief from the vision of life an instant of passion surrendered in a fog of despair.

In WWII, Vichy said France was lost because of Quai des Brumes. Has any bigger claim ever been made about the impact of a film! Carné replied that you don't blame the barometer for the weather. But even though the occupation was two years away, the shattered, weary fatalism seems to anticipate the impotent shame of the war.

Jean Gabin plays an army deserter, who stumbles on a gathering of lost souls in a dockside bar in Le Havre. Including Michele Morgan, so beautiful, so young, in her transparent raincoat (costumes by Coco Chanel!). The slender plot isn't paramount; it is all about feeling, and the peerless chemistry between the lovers.

Morgan runs up and down the emotional scale with the ease of a precode Barbara Stanwyck. And we get another compelling performance from Gabin. They are properly sexy. There is an oppressive melancholy drawn from Maurice Jaubert's bluesy orchestral score and a gloomy pre-noir look. It's my pick as the best French film ever made.

This landmark gangster flick isn't so much about shoot outs and chase scenes as philosophical themes relating to France on the precipice of another horrific war. And the brutish/fragile performance of Jean Gabin in the title role which made him a name outside his home country. Though Charles Boyer starred in the instant Hollywood remake, Algiers.

Gabin plays a Parisian outlaw hiding out in the dirty, mysterious Casbah (in Algiers), only emerging to carry out a jewel raid and then disappear back into the labyrinthine alleys and secret passages. When a rich, beautiful Parisienne (Mireille Balin) comes slumming in the ghetto, he's unsure whether he wants her, or her diamonds.

This is poetic realism, a movement in French cinema before WWII. It was filmed in the studio with a distorted, expressionist look. As Pépé begins to yield control, the picture loses focus. There is a sense of France drifting into a shadowland of pessimism and decline. Everyone talks of better times, but in the past and far away.

The gangster is king of the underworld; but it is a decaying slum. He wants to be free, but... this is an illusion, a memory. It's not difficult to see all this angst and atmosphere as an omen of the Hollywood film noir. So consuming was the impression of dread and fatalism, it was actually banned in France in the approach to the '39-'45 war.

When Leo McCarey won the Oscar for best director in 1938 for The Awful Truth he said he should have won it for this one. He was mistaken, but this ultra-sentimental story about the struggles of a couple in their seventies after they lose their home in the depression is a big favourite of critics and other film makers.

Though this is Hollywood realism. The house the couple (Beulah Bondi and Victor Moore) have to give up is a country mansion... We're expected to believe that having lived in extraordinary wealth, they are suddenly plunged into absolute poverty and forced to sofa surf with their reluctant children.

It's unusual territory for a golden age studio film, but McCarey is no social realist. The performances are too folksy and it strays into whimsical fantasy and the cutes. Most damaging of all is the sentimental music score. Japanese director Yasujirô Ozu did all this better as Tokyo Story in 1953, which is even more celebrated.

The obvious conclusion is that USA was in need of national insurance so its people might not live and die in poverty. Which Roosevelt introduced. But McCarey was a Conservative and welcomed Senator McCarthy's blacklist. He was a hugely successful director of christian Americana, but was all wrong for this. The Awful Truth though, is a must.

Superior Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers screwball musical which is utterly typical of their collaborations while including a few curious departures. There's nothing new in the mistaken identity set up with Fred as an American in Paris posing as Russian ballet dancer, who gets snagged up with Ginger's hot jazz babe on the luxury liner back to New York.

Still, the plot is entertaining, and there's an above average script with some pretty good gags. There's even some lightweight thematic content which compares classical and modern dancing. The main difference is one of tone; George and Ira Gershwin's romantic songs have a comical touch. And they are all time classics.

Rogers sings They All Laughed; Astaire performs the Oscar nominated They Can't Take That Away from Me; they duet on Let's Call the Whole Thing Off and deliver a routine on roller skates! It's always great to see Eric Blore doing his unctuous hireling schtick. French actor Ketti Gallian adds a little chic bitchiness.

This is the seventh Astaire-Rogers musical so maybe they wanted to freshen up the formula. Regrettably we don't get a climactic ballroom romance number. Instead there's some mock-ballet. The box office was slow and Ginger sometimes looks bored... But there are only ten of these! Anyone who loves the '30s musical will adore this.

While this was released at about the crest of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers' box office popularity it's not among their greatest films together. Some of Irving Berlin's musical numbers are legend and the staging reaches the high standard we expect from the stars, but the comic plot is disappointing.

For the first time, Fred and Ginger are in America the whole way through. He is a sailor in the US navy on leave in San Francisco and she's an old flame with a nightclub act. And shipmate Randolph Scott has an on/off romance with a frumpy schoolteacher (Harriet Nelson) whose makeover transforms her into a knockout.

The star duo's plots are always flimsy, but this is extended to over 110 minutes. Of course, we're all here for the songs, and the dance routines. These are variable but Rogers belts out Let Yourself Go to good effect. She does a rare solo tap which is decent and Astaire does one which is peerless.

And then it all climaxes with Let's Face the Music and Dance, one of their best ever ballroom romances. And this plugs straight into the heart of the depression as they abandon their suicide attempts and elect to carry on, but with style. No cuts, all one shot. And the screen shimmers with stardust.

Sumptuous and expansive MGM production of Alexandre Dumas jr's 1852 novel about a courtesan who is destroyed by the hypocrisy of high society and her virtuous, transgressive love for a younger man. It's principally another vehicle for Greta Garbo which makes some sort of accommodation for her non-American accent.

She doesn't sound French, but then... neither does anyone else! She gives an impassioned but nuanced portrayal and thanks to sensitive direction from George Cukor her romantic scenes with Robert Taylor have an intimacy. Among a capable support cast, Henry Daniell is an effective bad guy as Camille's rich, ruthless patron.

Given this was released at the high tide of the Production Code, the script doesn't go into detail on the realities of life for a 19th century high society sex worker. But there is an impression of the iniquities of the period, especially for women, when the financial securities of the demi-monde are not even an afterthought.

Those born into the precariat either sell themselves to the aristocracy, or feed off each other. But this isn't social realism, it's a period melodrama with wonderful costumes and set decor and a superb score, which is the context for Garbo's baroque performance. Cukor keeps the mood buoyant. Until the famous death scene, at least.

Following the huge box office failure of The Scarlet Empress the previous year, Paramount slashed Josef von Sternberg's budget for his final release with his great muse, Marlene Dietrich. And it feels like the series is running out of time. The introduction of the Production Code in '34 undermined their dalliance with taboo themes...

And Dietrich looks a bit mature to still play the imperious goddess of love. Here she's a sex worker in turn of the century Seville who is so irresistible she destroys every man who loves her. Mostly Lionel Atwill as a blimpish aristocrat and Cesar Romero as a dashing freedom fighter. Naturally, they fight a duel over her.

And there are the usual signifiers of exotic Spain: with the flamenco and the bullfighters; the carnival and the hot passion. The staging of the masquerade with the grotesque costumes is the best and most characteristic part of von Sternberg's visual design. The story is familiar, basically a loose reshuffle of Carmen.

Dietrich sings a bawdy song which doesn't sound at all Spanish, and her German accent is a poor fit. Though no one goes to these films for authenticity. This marks the end of Marlene's tenure as one of the great Hollywood stars. Von Sternberg too was out of fashion. It is worth seeing for fans of their collaborations, but maybe best that this was the last.

Classic example of how the Hollywood studios would take a successful premise and disguise it in a different setting or genre. It's a retelling of Red Dust which was a big hit for MGM in 1932. An American adventurer slums around Asia pursued by an illiterate, unsophisticated sex worker only to be tempted by a refined lady from his past.

They even retain Clark Gable as the macho tough guy and Jean Harlow as the tart with a heart. Rosalind Russell stands in for Mary Astor as the high class dame and the whole adventure is relocated to a merchant ship operating out of Hong Kong. The main negative is the director Tay Garnet, who isn't much of a stylist.

But there's plenty of entertainment to be had with a droll script and an action climax as Wallace Beery attempts to relieve the shipping line of its cargo of gold. The stars and support cast make it fresh and fun. Robert Benchley brings abundant comic relief in his usual role as a habitual drunk.

Maybe this recycling betrays a lack of ideas. Or it's an example of how the studio system, with its roster of writers, technicians and stars was able to lavish gloss on almost any project and make it sparkle again. China Seas is formulaic, but also an unpretentious lively diversion. And no one does romantic foreign intrigue this well anymore.