Film Reviews by Steve

This is a shaggy dog story about the rise of a dishonest lunk who becomes State Governor solely because his shameless lawbreaking is a perfect match for American politics. This façade is managed by wealthy syndicates who run candidates on either side so they always win. The film is a comedy, perhaps because it was the only way of getting this cynicism past the censors.

By being receptive to corruption, McGinty (Brian Donlevy) goes from panhandling for dimes in the street to signing off public money to graft, getting rich in the process. Even his marriage to his secretary (Muriel Angelus) is a sham. Only once does McGinty behave with integrity, and it finishes him completely.

Which is a nice ironic sleight of hand from Preston Sturges on his debut as writer-director. It's a pretty dark comedy. With the expressionist shadows it even looks like a gangster film. The leads are acceptable, but as often with Sturges, the memorable performances come further down the cast list; among the gallery of Runyonesque reprobates, Akim Tamiroff excels as head of operations.

So, politics is a front for powerful interest groups, usually illegal. Sadly, it is all too believable. The film is fast moving and sharp with plenty of arresting dialogue. Full of irony but rarely actually funny. The slapstick is perfunctory. It's more of an interestingly satire about the US political system than a lot of laughs. But it is a clever, entertaining and even subversive film.

Breathless farce which is completely unlike any other Frank Capra comedy. There is no inspiring underdog here, it's pure comic mayhem. Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant) gets married. So it was a bad day to discover his two dotty aunts are serial killers who bury their victims in the cellar of their spacious New York guest house.

There are slamming doors, hidden bodies, unexpected guests and a vicar. So it's a proper farce. The best moments are a bit more subtle and reference Brewster's job as a famous theatre critic. The key gag is that Brewster's entire family suffers from hereditary insanity, implying drama critics are also nuts.

It all gets exponentially more frantic until in the last act...  when Cary Grant, the greatest ever comedy actor, is reduced one basic function; the double take. It's overkill. Grant performs with complete abandon. He deserves credit for being a sport, but he's too classy for this. The support comes off better, especially Josephine Hull and Jean Adair as the batty spinsters.

On Broadway, Boris Karloff played Brewster's sinister brother who has cosmetic surgery which leaves him looking like... Boris Karloff. Sadly he wasn't cast and Raymond Massey stood in. The film is fun and there are a lot of uncomplicated laughs. It's rated a classic Hollywood comedy but rarely gets mentioned among Capra's best films. Which is fair enough.

The universality suggested by the title is misleading. These are fashionable trophy wives of the Park Avenue wealthy elite who spend their lives shopping and being pampered and gossiping about each others' infidelities. And living in unspoken fear that as they sink into their thirties they will be replaced by a younger model.

While the film dallies with the trivial competitiveness of these mannequins in their natural habitat of fashion shows, lunch dates and beauty parlours, it's hilarious. When the film gets darker it loses its lustre. There are some long, tearful scenes between the divorcing Norma Shearer and her daughter which are hard, unpleasant work.

When the girls are pulling each other apart, it's thrilling. The film has no male actors. Every part (130+) is a woman on an MGM contract. My favourite is Rosalind Russell as the ultimate queen bitch who finds sport in wrecking Norma's marriage. Though there is a letdown when the promised superbabe who has her talons in the husband turns out to be a frumpy Joan Crawford...

George Cukor directs the abundance of dialogue with a light touch and a lot of style. There are fabulous, grandiose sets. It's great to see this amazing cast working together, with astute performances all the way down the credits. The Women satirises some pretty shallow people. With the world marching to war, Hollywood would change. These stories never stopped getting made; but not with all this glamour

This is a screwball murder-mystery like the earlier Thin Man series, but funnier. Miss Manton (Barbara Stanwyck) is a dizzy Park Avenue heiress who finds a body while walking her pedigree dogs. The police don't believe her because she's always pulling some madcap publicity scam which has the Lieutenant (Sam Levene) pulling his hair out.

So she investigates the crime herself with her gang of scatterbrained high society it-girls and a cynical crime editor played by a very well groomed Henry Fonda in a top hat. Manton's girlfriends roam the set like a herd of cats. Watching these forgotten Hollywood starlets bouncing around the faux-naif dialogue is a joy.

And Hattie McDaniel is typically polished as (yes) the sassy maid. The first half is pure comic whirlwind. The latter part focuses more on the mystery, which is less fun. Director Leigh Jason has no reputation, but it's a fast moving story and looks great, with an atmospheric, pre-noir look (Nicholas Musuraca).

Stanwyck and Fonda would go on to star together more famously in The Lady Eve. And they share some chemistry here too. There's a hilarious, frothy script (Philip Epstein) and the stars don't waste a line, including many sardonic remarks about class differences. It's an archetypal thirties mystery-comedy with plenty of Manhattan glamour and just a glimpse of the New York underworld.

The title of this oddity from Universal Studios  gave a name to a sub-genre of the horror film. It's a reflection on the state of England after the great war, crossed with a monster film.  On a stormy night, five contrasting characters stumble on a remote residence occupied by inbred grotesques. 

Which has a lot in common with Deliverance and many other fish-out-of-water horror-thrillers. The visitors must survive these human monsters, and their own, personal demons. They have to make it through the night, much as England had to survive its own existential darkness after WWI.

It's is a faithful adaptation of JB Priestley's novel, which is set in Wales, but here recreated on a Hollywood soundstage. James Whale directs with a really eccentric sense of the absurd, casting a mixture of oddball English expats like Boris Karloff and Ernest Thesiger, who are transformed by the legendary Universal effects team.  

Sadly, the film runs out of credibility on the hour and often soft pedals on its social themes. What remains is ultimately a fright film. Whale's peculiar sensibilities won't appeal to everyone. But there's pleasure to be had from watching this cast work together. Apart from the crazies, Charles Laughton brings the energy, Lilian Bond provides the heart and Gloria Stuart, the sex appeal.

In the same year as 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, Warner Brothers followed up with another musical comedy with many of the same cast, notably Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler. Busby Berkeley again arranged three extraordinary set pieces at the climax of the film to the songs of Dubin and Warren. Many critics consider this the best of the three.

Instead of Broadway, this one is set in a small film studio which makes live action 'prologues' for cinemas. James Cagney is the director/producer who is struggling because his shareholders are pocketing the profits and some heel is leaking ideas to a rival. Jimmy puts on his dancing shoes for the climactic Shanghai Lil. 

The story is familiar, but still functions. There's a brilliant gag when the censor gets caught in a clinch with a girl and exclaims: 'I was just showing her what you're not allowed to show in Kalamazoo!' Maybe there's an impression that Harry Warren is having to recycle tunes and the dialogue isn't as sharp as before. We miss Ginger Rogers and the sassy chorus line gals.

But Footlight Parade still triumphs, mainly because of Berkeley's amazing final trilogy: Honeymoon Hotel, By a Waterfall and Shanghai Lil . He's operating at the top of his range. The aquatic ballet, By a Waterfall, is one of the outstanding musical numbers in thirties cinema. Which means, in film history.

This was Astaire and Rogers' first co-starring musical, adapted from a show that Fred Astaire had played on Broadway. The Gay Divorce established the archetypes of their early films. There's the splendidly unctuous Eric Blore, the idiotic toff played by Edward Everett Horton and the excellent Erik Rhodes as a very flawed Italian lothario. Alice Faye plays Ginger Rogers' customary comic sidekick.

There is the usual glamour, the exotic studio locations of Paris, London and... Brighton. Big deco sets, fabulous clothes, sophisticated romance and some of the greatest ballroom scenes every captured on film. The dialogue is just fair but the mistaken identity plot is excellent. Ginger intends to force a divorce by being compromised in her room by a stand-in lover.

Only for Fred to turn up instead. And much farce ensues. But fans mainly bought a ticket for the musical numbers and they are brilliant. And not just the stars... An irresistibly peppy Betty Grable does a featured ragtime solo Let's K-nock K-nees which is a riot. Fred is so suave performing Needle in a Haystack as he prepares to hit London in his bowler hat.

Fred and Ginger are stunning in the eighteen minute epic The Continental, which won the Oscar for best song. But for the sheer joy of just seeing them together, the best part of the film is the duo presenting Cole Porter's Night and Day. It's a seduction. They go into the dance as prickly strangers and emerge as lovers. After Top Hat, this is the next best of Astaire and Rogers.

The title promises the jazz age hedonism of F. Scott Fitzgerald but this is actually quite a conventional romantic comedy which matches virginal smalltown girl Irene Dunne with metropolitan wolf, Melvyn Douglas. She has anonymously written a racy best seller as escape from her boring life in a rural southern backwater.

Douglas designs her book cover and then has designs on her virtue as he follows her back to Connecticut. He encourages her to shrug off the constraints of convention, and once liberated, she helps him escape from the influence of his wealthy, corrupt family. It's pertinent social history as censorship brought Hollywood under the control of conservative puritanism through the Production Code.

The main interest in the film now is that, at 38, it launched the comedy career of Irene Dunne, who was nominated for an Oscar. Next year she became a comic legend in The Awful Truth. Theodora Goes Wild isn't in that class. The script lacks wit, the direction is flat, and Melvyn Douglas plainly isn't Cary Grant. But there are flashes of her potential.

The support cast is capable rather than inspired. It has merit as a morality tale about the interface between responsibility and freedom. But crucially for a comedy, there are very few laughs. It creates a plausible, even poignant, impression of small town hypocrisy, suppressed emotions and wasted lives, but it is probably mainly of interest to students of screwball comedy.

Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper had starred together in Morocco (1930), her Hollywood debut. And it's a pleasure to see them reprise their partnership in Desire because they are both so suggestive of thirties A-list glamour. She is exotic in her shimmering white costumes, he is saturnine in a dinner jacket as the bewildered American adrift in European romance and adventure.

Frank Borzage was a great director but Desire is much more representative of its producer, Ernst Lubitsch. The story commences in his Paris of the imagination, among jewel thieves posing as aristocrats, before taking the screwball road to Spain. The audience is vicariously placed in Cooper's brogues as the naive tourist gets a fast education.

It's similar territory to Lubitsch's peerless Trouble in Paradise (1932), except by the mid thirties, censorship had put mitts on the famous Lubitsch touch. There is no real sexual risk taking here which makes the film much less exciting. The incidentals of the genre are still in place; the sophisticated stars, the amazing clothes, the swanky hotel suits. But there is no je ne sais quoi. And even less frou-frou.

By 1936, the screwball comedy had taken to the highways of America. Lubitsch's scenarios of elegant crooks posing as phoney toffs was old hat. Desire is fun but a little tired. There's some decent sitcom. And Marlene sings. But this kind of film was done better in the pre-code era when the Countess' gown could be a little more risky, and her innuendo too.

Screwball comedy about the diaspora of the Russian revolution... A married pair of destitute Russian aristocrats exiled in Paris take on a job as servants to the frantic family of a banker, and find living in the home of a capitalist to their liking. But when a prominent Bolshevik comes to dinner, old resentments are revived.

The problem with Tovarich is that the play by Jacques Deval is so wholeheartedly sympathetic to the aristocracy. Which probably suited Hollywood's anti-Red agenda going into WWII. The story completely whitewashes them and demonises the Communist. The film partly overcomes this impediment thanks to sensational performances and an unusually witty script.

Claudette Colbert and (a slimmed down) Charles Boyer are the émigrés forced into service. She is in a class of her own with comic dialogue of this calibre. The support cast is excellent, featuring an ominous performance from Basil Rathbone as the Soviet consul. There are evocative studio sets of the Paris ghettos which contrast with the wealth of the bankers.

The film ultimately gets bunged up with dubious politics. The best and funniest parts of the film are when the refugees ingratiate themselves into the rich French household, far more luxurious than they knew back home. Anatole Litvak's direction is mechanical, but the film remains viable thanks to the brilliant screwball stars.

The standard view of The Cocoanuts is that it is a dated revue and only bursts into life when the Marx Brothers are on. But actually, the synchronised dancing is excellent, and anticipates Busby Berkley. There are no hits among the Irving Berlin songs, but they are still enjoyable. It is a string of sketches by variety acts, orbiting the premise of running a dysfunctional hotel in Florida.

Still, obviously, everyone goes to this to see the Marx Brothers' debut film, a reprise of their 1925 Broadway success. It's a very early talkie and apart from the musical number, the actors stand around the static camera to say their lines. Groucho doesn't do his walk. The direction is perfunctory. But in spite of the impediments, their chaotic energy still entertains.

There is an hierarchy of insanity. Groucho antagonises the normal characters, but is rattled by Chico. And Harpo menaces everyone. Anyone watching for Zeppo should know that most of his scenes got cut over the years. Plenty of credit is due to the writers who gave wit to the anarchy and composed Groucho's streams of sardonic absurdity (Morrie Ryskind adapted George Kaufman's stage play).

In the early Paramount films, the brothers aren't necessarily likeable. They connive, they purloin, they dupe... They are an irrepressible vortex of illogicality which we enter for 90m and depart feeling a bit frazzled. There's no way of processing this whirlwind of farce in one watch. It's that rapid pace that gives this very early comedy its energy. There would never be anyone else like the Marx Brothers.

It is apt this film came at the back end of the cycle of post-war southern melodramas influenced by Tennessee Williams, because it is a story about the end of things. Natalie Wood is a sex bomb living in a small Mississippi backwater who falls for a stranger (Robert Redford) who arrives from New Orleans in the 1920s to shut down the railway works. He represents the escape she dreams of.

The film is expanded from a one act play by Williams and the closer the script stays to its elegiac poetry and symbolism the better. The screenwriters (including Francis Coppola) produced an uneven adaptation. The story is told by the siren's sister (Mary Badham), a child who has been left behind to live alone in the closed down guest house once run by her mother.

The property is condemned when the town fails to survive the loss of its industry. Natalie is property too, bartered for the value of her body by her rapacious mother. To her death. It's a story of the impact of the depression on the decline of the poor rural south, the land Williams grew up in. 

There are his familiar themes of guilt and escape, and particularly the failure of the impractical, romantic south to survive the realism of capitalism. There is a powerful evocation of humid summer nights on the river: Natalie Wood is so hot she is continually trying to lower her body heat! Of course she and Redford are beautiful leads. Not a critics favourite but a treat for fans of Williams.

This is an adaptation of the stage musical version of Federico Fellini's 1957 Italian drama Nights of Cabiria. Fellini's film is better, but this being a musical there are compensations. Which are three great songs and a couple of dance spectaculars; these coincide for the stunning staging of Big Spender, performed by the cast.

It's a perfect star vehicle for Shirley MacLaine, who back then was was the queen of kook. She plays Charity Valentine, a taxi dancer/prostitute who passes through contemporary New York looking for love and a future but only finds heartache. It's astonishing how often she played sex workers in the sixties! There is plenty of interesting guerrilla style shooting on the streets of Manhattan.

MacLaine is funny, and touching and appealing enough and squeezes all the laughs out of Neil Simon's Broadway script. But legendary choreographer Bob Fosse's debut job as director is uneven and the film falters badly in places. Even the choreography is variable. Rich Man's Frug is stunning, but the staging of Shirley's signature song, If My Friends Could See Me Now, is a drag.

The star's performance eventually gets crowded out in a narrative told without skill or insight. MacLaine was a cinch to play the dumb optimist with a big heart, yet it was fumbled. There are moments that make it worthwhile, but Fosse wasn't yet a film director. And the 150 minute running time for such a frothy confection is crazy.

There was an unusually tortuous path from Christopher Isherwood's 1939 collection Goodbye to Berlin to the Oscar strewn classic musical Cabaret and many changes made along the way. This film strays from Isherwood's stories, but captures their spirit. There is eloquent work from director Bob Fosse and a fabulous career defining performance from Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles, singer in the KitKat Club.

It's a character led drama which places Liza centre stage all the way, performing many legendary ragtime showstoppers including the title number and The Money Song. Michael York is well cast as Sally's inhibited, naive, bisexual English lover, and Joel Grey memorable as the cabaret MC. While the couple live in exile in divine decadence, way off downstage the Nazis are taking over Germany.

The scene where the reality crashes through their delusion is brilliantly conceived by Fosse, with a blond boy singing Tomorrow Belongs to Me in a rural bierkeller, gradually revealed to be Hitler youth, enthusiastically endorsed by the gathered revellers. The tolerance and political satire of the twenties cabaret is now an anomaly.

The weakness is there is little impression of the poverty which was the context for the Nazi's rise to power. But it is frank about the way Sally and her sometime lover lived which wasn't possible in earlier versions. It uses music only where it might naturally occur and the choreography is restricted to the stage. Which helps maintain an impressive impression of social realism.

Glossy, irresistible romance which successfully reimagines the 'women's films' of the Hollywood golden age. It's a wish fulfilment as a homely New York Jewish liberal agitator (Barbra Streisand) falls for an impossibly handsome WASP/jock (Robert Redford). Although they make a life together, inevitably their differences make them incompatible.

But they will always have the memories, so cue the lovely, sentimental Oscar winning title song. If this sounds like a story about stereotypes, the brilliant script (by Arthur Laurents) actually works hard to make Katie and Hubbell rounded characters. And it doesn't take sides. There are a few laughs, but even more tears and the ending is a heartbreaker.

The subplot about the effect of the McCarthy blacklist on Hollywood is interesting but regrettably shifts the focus from the two stars, and it isn't given time to resolve anyway. While Streisand and Redford are magnetic and we really want them to be together, this is really all about the woman and we see everything from her point of view.

Barbara gets the Bette Davis role, and Redford the George Brent, in a story that takes them from the depression to the seventies. She gives a moving performances, conveying the humiliation, bargaining and vulnerability that comes with being the junior partner in an unbalanced relationship. It's one of the great Hollywood romantic films, and a triumph for Streisand.