Film Reviews by Steve

One of the better films about the romantic adventures of American women in a touristic Europe that were popular at the turn of the 60s. And there is an interesting premise. Olivia de Havilland is a rich American taking an extended holiday with her beautiful daughter (Yvette Mimieux) who attracts the attention of a young, prosperous, handsome Italian (George Hamilton).

Only the girl has a brain injury and the mental age of a ten year old... and as she is such a blonde head turner, her mother has to keep her one step ahead of the constant attention she gets. Mimieux does well with the part, which is pure Hollywood daydream, though Hamilton's clumsy Italian caricature is a big negative.

When the mother captures the attention of the suitor's father (Rossano Brazzi), she re-evaluates her own marriage and expectations and this is the best part of the film. There's a long standing motif in cinema, the woman who finds herself in the liberating Italian sunshine... And maybe that's a convention, but Olivia and Rossano are so good together that it succeeds yet again.

The film makes an equivalence between mental disability and the assumed simple Italian love of life! Which is an amazing insult. But the film works for a typical reason; the photography and locations are sublime. It's possible to feel a little emancipation, just watching. It's a fantasy and the screen is filled with convenient magic, where the daughter can meet a rich husband, and the mother can find freedom.

This was supposed to be a rematch between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford following their success in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, but early in the production Joan threw in the towel, so Olivia de Havilland strapped on the gloves. Olivia wasn't as combative on set, and she and Bette got on, but she's well cast as a ruthless villain operating behind a mask of respectability.

Charlotte (Davis) was assumed to have cut off the head and hands of her married beau back in 1920s Louisiana. Now she's a rich old spinster, going crazy. Her cousin (Olivia) aims to gaslight her into a madhouse so she can profit from the property development taking over Miss Charlotte's plantation. There's an audacious climax which will stun anyone who's never seen Les Diaboliques.

It's the sort of sixties family horror that traded on re-situating the great stars of the golden age in a kooky contemporary context. Joseph Cotten supports and there's an appearance from Mary Astor. Agnes Moorhead does some scene stealing as Charlotte's cranky maid. But they are all ultimately merely context to Bette Davis' self-parodic scenery chewing.

It's Southern Gothic, with plenty of atmosphere and genre archetypes and gossiping townsfolk. There is a house full of shadows and the big scenes are scored with thunderstorms rattling the blinds. It's mainly a battle of the divas between Bette and Olivia, but credit to director Robert Aldrich for keeping such a ripe confection so digestible. And it's a lot of fun for fans of the stars.

Vivien Leigh's penultimate screen appearance was a return to Tennessee Williams, after her Oscar for A Streetcar Named Desire in 1951. And she plays another vulnerable woman seeking refuge from the passing of time and her fear of death. Karen Stone is a middle aged American actor fleeing artistic failure to the ruins of Rome.

Where she becomes reluctantly absorbed into a human marketplace where rich Americans of a certain age, travel to Italy to find sexual diversion among the gigolos and ingenues of a country still palpably defeated and impoverished by WWII.  Warren Beatty is a beautiful, penniless aristocrat who pursues Mrs. Stone for the luxuries that his birthright no longer provides.

There is an impression of fallen dynasties. Karen is a stage legend who feels the grasp of time on her shoulder. Her lover is an aristocrat with no land, compelled to hustle for dollars and jewels. They drift through the ruins of the capital of an ancient empire like ghosts. They have no real function, so they lash out and hurt each other.

It's a haunting experience. Mrs. Stone is literally stalked by death! There's a moving performance from Leigh, as her own life was beginning to unravel. The script is poetic, and the portrayal of Rome before the era of mass tourism is spectacular but poignant, even pitiful. It's a political film which reflects on the buying and selling of humanity. And it's a human tragedy about the last days of a lonely woman.

The film asks how prepared was the US station at Pearl Harbour for the Japanese bombers in 1941. And it's a damning report. The military was at war with itself, undermined by incompetent officers and undisciplined soldiers. It's surprising that the US army co-operated in its production, but they did demand major changes to James Jones' bestseller.

The film centres on a pair of GIs (Montgomery Clift and Frank SInatra) who are far more interested in heavy drinking and hanging out in a brothel than doing the day job. Burt Lancaster is their tough sergeant, the kind of competent enlisted man that each company needs to keep the engine running.

Clift stands out among the actors in uniform, but the film is stolen by a stunning and moving performance from Deborah Kerr as a lonely woman on barracks, isolated by her womanising husband. And of course, her love scene with Lancaster in the Hawaiian surf is cinema legend. She creates a powerful impression of a damaged woman grasping at romantic lost causes.

This was a huge hit, and while hacked up by the Production Code, it lightly touches on the kind of adult themes that would become established in Hollywood dramas of the late fifties, including a frank depiction of adultery. It won eight Oscars, including for Sinatra and for best film. It's not the sensational exposé of army life it might once have seemed but it still lands some big punches.

The role of film diva Alexandro Del Lago, seeking refuge from the reality of her lost youth, has become a favourite for female stars of a certain age. Geraldine Page played the 'princess' first on stage and screen and she's pretty definitive. It's a familiar Tennessee Williams persona, a vulnerable artist running away, and running out of time.

The princess is burning up on drugs and booze after her screen comeback ran aground on a disastrous close up. She finds herself serviced by an ambitious gigolo who aims to use her to break into Tinseltown; Paul Newman as the ominously named Chance Wayne! He takes her to his hometown where he has unfinished business with Heavenly (Shirley Knight), the daughter of a shady politician.

The best part of the film is the interplay between Page and Newman... two monsters who claw at each other in pursuit of sordid self interest. The lesser subplot concerns the schemes of the hypocritical, Trump-like Boss Finlay (Ed Begley) who corrupts everyone and everything. It's a cynical film about the American dream, its imperious winners and downtrodden victims.

Inevitably there were problems with the Production Code which undermined the ferocity of the message, but it's still surprisingly frank in places and its political and existential themes survive. It has a beautiful look too. It's not as intense as most Williams adaptations but there is characteristic poetry in the lines and Page and Newman make a volatile screen duo.

This is an adaptation of a Theodore Dreiser novel set  America at the turn of the Twentieth Century, but without the political bite. It follows a riches to rags story arc typical of silent and depression era melodrama. But its great director, WIlliam Wyler, elevates the material somewhere closer to tragedy.

Jennifer Jones has the title role, a country girl who moves to Chicago where she starts a disastrous affair with a middle aged man (Laurence Olivier) who steals and commits bigamy to keep her. They escape to New York where they live in poverty. Jennifer was a very beautiful woman, so it's easy to accept the obsession of the man who destroys himself for her. 

But Jones was also a limited actor and she is eclipsed by Olivier who performs wonders with a dreadful archetype, trapped in a midlife crisis and a loveless marriage, desperate for another chance. There are fascinating thematic complications with Carrie utterly dependant on mediocre men, and harmed by pointless social conventions.  

The film benefits from Wyler's intelligent direction and visual storytelling. He fills the frame with fascinating detail. It's a prestigious production with excellent sets and costumes. There's too little anger on screen (thanks to the Production Code) but it is still pessimistic about the myth of the American dream.

Weighty melodrama adapted from Clifford Odets' social realist Broadway play about an adultery. Of course, at the height of the Production Code there was only so much a Hollywood film could say and show on this subject and the ending especially is compromised. But Fritz Lang shades the film with some noir atmospherics and the interesting cast makes the film worthwhile.

A hard-luck dame (Barbara Stanwyck) returns to her home town, a fishing port on the California coast. On the rebound, she marries a dull stalwart (Paul Douglas) but then falls into a stormy affair with his boozy braggart best friend (Robert Ryan). That's already a decent cast-list, and a pre-stardom Marilyn Monroe also appears...

...as a worker in a fish processing factory! But glamorous. She's clearly a star in waiting but hasn't yet created her trademark sexpot schtick. Stanwyck delivers a handful of great lines with vinegary aplomb. The first half is slow as she is reluctantly courted by Douglas, but comes to the boil when Stanwyck and Ryan are whooping it up.    

Lang laces the melodrama with documentary footage of a working fishing port which lends some authenticity. There is a realistic impression of damaged survivors shuffling their dwindling chances of happiness. In 1950, audiences had just seen A Streetcar Named Desire which instantly dated this. But it comes alive still when Monroe is on, or Stanwyck casting her spiky epigrams.

After their success in Smash Up in 1947, Stuart Heisler and Susan Hayward re-teamed for this routine drama about the early days of the oil boom in 1920s Oklahoma. Indeed it gives the impression of being financed by big oil, emphasising how well regulated their industry is. There's even a voice over telling us how green they are!

It's a film about the transformation of farmland and territory occupied by Native Americans into oilfields. It has a startlingly liberal view of their rights and cultural traditions for 1949. Susan Hayward is Cherokee Lansing, whose ancestors occupied the land appropriated by American western migration.

Hayward is the best part of the film, playing a feisty, ambitious landowner who is changed by her good fortune from a small scale cattlewoman into a ruthless capitalist willing to destroy the territory to satisfy her relentless greed. And she will alienate Robert Preston as the studious, ecologically minded geologist who helps her locate the liquid gold in the first place.

Chill Wills provides sardonic commentary and country songs in the style of Hoagy Carmichael. There's a pretty impressive oil fire action climax in Technicolor. It's worth seeing for fans of Hayward's star vitality but otherwise, it's entertainingly bizarre to see the oil industry presented as the virtuous blood of America's future.

Patrick Hamilton's gothic play gave the English language a new verb, which makes it particularly relevant for our times. It's a film about domestic abuse,  shaped into historical drama and noirish thriller. A manipulative and ominous Victorian gentleman (Charles Boyer) means to use his psychological dominance over his timid new wife (Ingrid Bergman) to drive her insane.

Boyer wants the jewels he knows are hidden in her house and Bergman's mental frailty will allow him to deliver her to an asylum and keep the loot. He uses the building itself as an instrument of duress. Some of the audience might be wondering if it's him who is crazy, so extraordinarily beautiful is the female star.

Ingrid got an Oscar for her suffering. It's a vivid and expressive performance. But there's something amiss in the chemistry between her and Boyer and the film only comes to life when Joseph Cotten appears as the conscientious detective who works to save her. Maybe it's too difficult to watch a vulnerable woman be tormented at such length. And Boyer is so patronising.

George Cukor was a great director, but not of suspense films. The 1940 UK adaptation has a meagre budget but is more exciting. Still, Gaslight is a handsome production with beautiful set décor and an unforgettable film debut for the 17 year old Angela Lansbury as a rather mercenary maid. Plus the luminous star power of the exquisite Ingrid Bergman.

This is the kind of romantic supernatural fantasy which was popular just after WWII. It's set at the start of the twentieth century in England, Hollywood. Gene Tierney is a recent widow, and moves to a picturesque seaside town in order to find herself and escape her oppressive in-laws. There, Mrs. Muir meets the ghost of a sea captain (Rex Harrison) who narrates to her a best selling tale of the oceans.

Maybe in the years after the war, it was likely there would be an audience for a story about a bereaved woman who falls in love with a man who (probably) only exists in her thoughts. And about a widow who must find the strength to go on alone. There are many interesting themes on the subjects of loss, and also the creative process.

But mostly the film is a charming comedy-romance. Rex Harrison is engaging as the salty, barnacled sea-dog. The beautiful Tierney is extremely sympathetic as a woman searching for a second chance in life, which is sadly unfulfilled. When she seeks to re-engage with the world through George Sanders' decadent rake, she is badly let down.

Joe Mankiewicz creates a rich period atmosphere from his studio sets and the shadowy, expressionist photography. And there's a superb score from Bernard Herrmann. Sure, it's a sentimental tearjerker, but there is intelligence and craft too. The stars are wonderful together; they elevate the whole film and make you care, which makes the magical ending a real heartbreaker.

An archetypal portrait of life in the English home counties in the first years of WWII, and a sanitised vision of the shock and havoc unleashed by the Luftwaffe. The Minivers are an upper middle class family in a rural village hardly changed since the Domesday Book, where everyone knows their place. Much of the narrative centres on the competition for the best rose at the village fête...  

Mrs. Miniver (Greer Garson) is a frivolous but kind and resourceful woman of the type that would become the unsung heroes of the home front. She captures a grounded Nazi pilot at gunpoint! Her husband (Walter Pidgeon) sails with the light rivercraft over the Channel to Dunkirk. Her charming son joins the RAF, and marries the daughter of the local aristocracy.

They adapt through courage and sacrifice. It's typical for UK viewers to be sniffy about Mrs. Miniver because it creates an Americanised impression of little England, with its arcane customs and preoccupation with class. But this was the actual model for many British homefront films made in the war years. And William Wyler's images would be copied many times before VE Day.

Mrs. Miniver was a gift from Hollywood, from MGM, to the British war effort. Production was started before Pearl Harbour, before the US officially entered the war. It helped reverse American isolationism. It's a sentimental film, but brilliant propaganda. Greer Garson won the Oscar and she's perfect casting. Of course her character is an ideal, but she became a symbol of the war effort.

This is the classic Hollywood adaptation of Jane Eyre, but in editing Charlotte Brontë's lengthy novel down to 97 minutes, it isn't all that faithful. Still, there's a brief outline of the story and it is a rich gothic melodrama with some evocative visual expressionism. And there is a stark representation of the hardships of Victorian life for the poor and powerless.

The plot is so episodic that it feel like watching a video game as Jane passes through the levels of hardship and shame necessary to become the wife of Mr. Rochester: her uncaring family; the brutal school; the scorn of the spoiled gentry; Rochester's insane wife. There's little idea of the ruthless determination Jane needs to survive, or of her own egotism.

A jowly Orson Welles draws Rochester in dark, deep lines. There is a genuine spark with Joan Fontaine's pale, vulnerable Jane. It's yet another Fontaine vehicle where we are advised by the script that she is a plain looking woman. Which she isn't. She does dress down though. Eventually her silent anguish stalls the film but it's a definitive performance.

When Jane is sent to a dismal, isolated institution as a child she is well played by Peggy Ann Garner. It's startling to see an eleven year old Elizabeth Taylor as her sickly friend. It's a shame that the studio exteriors of the moors are so poor, but the menacing, shadowy interiors are excellent. It's an entertaining historical romance, with the profound horror of the novel replaced with noir atmospherics.

Delirious southern soaper set in New Orleans in 1852. Bette Davis is a headstrong, vain aristocrat of the slave owning class who loses her industrious, progressive fiancé (Henry Fonda) when she wears a scarlet dress to a ball when the convention was for maidens to wear white. After her capriciousness leads to the death of Fonda's brother in a duel, she seeks redemption during an epidemic of yellow fever.

The deep south setting allows an exotic, febrile melodrama even before the disease arrives. It's all top hats, billowing petticoats, neoclassical architecture and southern hospitality. Davis' blue blooded belle isn't likeable, but she gives star performance, creating a profound personality. The male characters are just context, even Fonda. She deservedly won the Oscar.

The portrayal of the slaves is uncomfortably careless. The North leaning Fonda is obviously a more liberal thinker, but the scene when the black characters express their excitement to be back on the plantation is hard to forgive. There is some mitigation. William Wyler portrays the haughty, rich southerners as misguided, even stupid, and about to be swallowed up by history.

The end when Davis accompanies the dying Fonda to the plague island is plainly preposterous but it gets by because of the exalted climax to Max Steiner's score. There's a handsome production generally. The ballroom scene is classic Hollywood. Jezebel is the work of a talented director at a great studio but the iniquities of slavery are less a concern to Warner Brothers than Bette's costumes.

Still the biggest box office hit ever, adjusted for inflation, David Selznick's lavish blockbuster is the ultimate Hollywood production of the studio era. It's a faithful adaptation of Margaret Mitchell's bestseller of the American Civil War and the epic romance between tempestuous southern belle Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) and rakish soldier of fortune Rhett Butler (Clark Gable).

It's a spectacular landmark, but flawed and the cracks now dominate the picture. Scarlett survives the burning of Atlanta, but the film doesn't, and the second half is episodic and repetitive. There's a birth or serious accident or death along every five minutes like a speeded up soap opera. Characters change and then forget they've changed. The portrayal of the slaves is heartbreaking and unforgivably cruel.

There is a sumptuous, colourful production. Max Steiner's score carries the second half of the film. Otherwise it's the performances that keep the film alive. Scarlett is an absurd archetype, but Vivien Leigh just about makes her credible over four hours through sheer star willpower. Gable has little to do other than twinkle roguishly but Hattie McDaniel and Olivia de Havilland at least make you care.

The troubled pre-production shows. There were many writers and three directors. The film has fallen apart. Politically it is hard to stomach. Late in the film it is strongly implied that Butler and a few male cohorts have joined the Ku Klux Klan! Now the film has become sucked into controversy it is promoted as an opportunity to reflect on the values of a vanished civilisation. But that's too much to ask.

Six years after Of Human Bondage, Bette Davis starred in another Somerset Maugham adaptation. But this time, with the Production Code at full tide, greater compromises had to be made. Davis empties her revolver into the body of her lover because he has has married a Chinese woman in colonial Singapore, but she cannot go unpunished as she does in the source play.

Bette gives one of her best and most interesting performances. Her character is lying for most of the film and she performs behind an inscrutable visage which doesn't signify a stiff upper lip, but her intent to not betray her guilt. And the suppressed Malayan locals are similarly impassive, unable to express themselves honestly before these corrupt, entitled occupiers.

The scene between Gale Sondergaard as the grieving wife and her husband's murderer is a meeting of masks. The unctuous facade of Victor Sen Yung as a Singaporean lawyer acting as a go-between for the two women is another deception. James Stephenson is excellent as Bette's biddable British lawyer who hides behind a mirage of ethical purity. The message is plainly anti-empire.    

The studio recreation of the east is exotic but plausible. Davis' costumes by Orry-Kelly are elegant. The camerawork is mobile and eloquent and very artistic, with the expressionist photography painting the fluttering, white-laced and guilty heroine within its shadowy net. Though censorship was an impediment, this is one of William Wyler's greatest films.