Film Reviews by Steve

Arthouse fantasy about a couple of mysterious characters who seem to have become unstuck from time. Or is there's a rational explanation? It's the kind of ghostly tale of the uncanny which became popular after WWII, and owes an obvious debt to French surrealist director, Jean Cocteau.

Which is curious as this is the debut of Terence Young, who went on to make Bond films. Eric Portman is cast against type as an androgynous aesthete who meets a black haired beauty in prewar London (Edana Romney), who is the image of his renaissance painting.

While the supernatural events have a kind of opiated logic, this is foremost about about the dark atmosphere, with elaborate sets in deep shadows, dreamy symbolism, and motifs of fetishism and sexual ambiguity. George Auric's modernist score makes a big contribution to the ambience of hazy romance.

The sound is bathed in reverb for hypnotic effect, which makes the dialogue difficult to follow, despite Portman having the clearest diction in films. Romney is the lead and she looks fine as a hallucinatory apparition of a medieval aristocrat, though not a great actor. It's a curiosity which is sometimes absurd, but ultimately, haunting.

Supremely well cast version of Terence Rattigan's 1946 play, based on a famous incident; the presumed theft of a postal order by a boy in a naval academy, who was expelled. It's usually assumed the play is a celebration of British justice, though the themes are more complex, or muddled, than that, and the case is arguably a decadent folly.

This adaptation retained many of the stage actors. The most significant change is the introduction of Robert Donat as the barrister defending the child's right to a trial. And Donat dominates in this showy support role. Cecil Hardwicke is quietly impressive as the boy's father.  

 The play is terribly dated. The servant is an idiotic comic stereotype. The motivations of the comfortable middle class are taken as those of the country. There is absolutely zero class friction. Or gender. And indeed, if Rattigan intends to extol British human rights, often the events prove the opposite.

The period is just before WWI, but there is no impression of mankind on a precipice. But there is still much to enjoy, with unusually precise dialogue and fine staging by Anthony Asquith. Plus a signature Donat performance. Rattigan's England is superbly realised, and there is some pleasure to be taken in that. But it feels a very distant shore now.

Intelligent and very suspenseful adaptation by Graham Greene of his own short story, the first of three high quality collaborations with director Carol Reed. It's the story of a romantic, adulterous affair between the married housekeeper of the French embassy in London (Ralph Richardson) and one of the secretaries (Michèle Morgan).

Only events are seen and heard from the perspective of the ambassador's lonely child (Bobby Henrey) who idolises this gentle, wise employee, and hates his shrewish wife. But the adult world is a puzzle and the boy can't read the code. Through his eyes, we observe how people learn to deceive to shelter from emotional pain.

So when this naive witness tries to protect his father substitute from the charge of murdering his unloved wife, the child just incriminates him further, even though it was an accident. The final half hour, as the fate of the innocent man balances on the good intensions of the boy, is extraordinarily suspenseful. And brilliantly scripted.  

And the artistic photography is persuasive, and striking. This is one of the great British films, eloquently directed, with understated but moving... no, agonising performances from Richardson and Morgan. The crew all said Bobby Henrey was hopeless... but Reed actually pieces together an effective performance.

Slender and well organised drama set in a modest English boarding school on the picturesque cliffs of Cornwall. It is superficially a conflict between teaching methods. But it is more meaningfully a confrontation between two ways of being, and a head to head between the excellent leads.

A heavily made up Marius Goring is Mr. Perrin, an old fashioned, conservative head of mathematics, who still lives with his mother. David Farrar is Mr. Traill, the virile, progressive newcomer who hurries the traditions of the established master. The younger teacher is more charismatic and easygoing, but there is sympathy for the older man too.

This is partly because Perrin is mentally abused by the manipulative headmaster (Raymond Huntley). And because he is rather pitifully unaware of his own homosexuality. When Traill gets engaged to the pretty school nurse (Greta Gynt) who Perrin fancifully presumes admires himself, the older man switches from petty provocation to psychopathic malevolence.

It's easy to read a political subtext. The undisciplined boys and masters are in constant conflict. The headmaster is a social Darwinist who perpetuates and exploits this division. Effectively a fascist. Perrin is unfit to survive, so is swept away by history. Huntley plays the villain with antiseptic viciousness. It's an eloquent, compact film most memorable for the two stars.

The plot of Powell and Pressburger's critically adored ballet film takes freely from the Warner Brothers' musicals of the thirties, with the ingenue (Moira Shearer) unexpectedly taking over the lead role in the dance of The Red Shoes while being driven obsessively by her autocratic Svengali (Anton Walbrook). She's gotta come back a star! 

It gave back a depth of craft and fantasy which transformed the Hollywood musicals of the fifties. The pinnacle is the staging of The Red Shoes folk tale as a ballet, with Shearer compelled to dance to her death; just as she, and Walbrook, are destructively consumed by their art. Michael Powell said the megalomaniacal impresario was based on Alexander Korda!

The look is intoxicating, from the painted backdrops to the costumes. But most of all, Jack Cardiff's glorious Technicolor. Shearer's vivid red hair was a gift. More so than her acting. All the dancers came from ballet and were not actors, but their natural theatrical egotism actually makes them believable. Brian Easdale's famous score won the Oscar.

This is a vast and complex production. The Red Shoes will be loved more by those who appreciate ballet, which I don't. But it is also an extravagantly imaginative and creative expansion of the Hans Christian Anderson story. It's this ambition to dream much larger, which makes the film special, and so influential.

Spectacular religious drama which impresses through its striking use of colour and light more profoundly than the slim plot. The film presents a rich atmosphere, and a question: an order of Catholic nuns establishes a convent in the Himalayas, but can they impose themselves on the alien environment, or will it destroy them first?

They move into a palace which was once  a harem, and its mysterious ambience begins to undermine the sisters' faith and expose their suppressed appetites. And slowly, the horror is awakened. The misadventure concludes with a breathtaking struggle between the Sister Superior and Sister Ruth over the convent's mountain precipice.

Kerr is the nominal star as the Sister Superior, and she's fine. But Kathleen Byron is extraordinary as the nymphomaniacal Sister Ruth. She fits the role like a lightbulb screwed into a socket. She burns. David Farrar is also heady stuff as the brawny, saturnine facilitator who provokes Sister Ruth; a difficult role that he gets just right.

The stars are offscreen too: Jack Cardiff won an Oscar for his sumptuous Technicolor images; Alfred Junge received another for the vast Himalayas painted into the studio, and the exotic set decoration. The film is a visual knockout, which combines with the haunting, epic score to create a unique, unforgettable masterpiece.

This is a serious and articulate scrutiny of the German brides who came to live in Britain after WWII. But it actually goes much deeper and examines a wider question of what aid should be extended to rebuild the defeated enemy, and whether any threat remains. It's the first of Basil Dearden's many liberal films about social politics.

A German nurse (Mai Zetterling) helps an RAF flyer (David Farrar) escape from a POW camp in the last months of the war. He brings her back to his small English town to marry, out of a sense of duty. His family is reluctantly accommodating, but there is local resentment, ranging from gossip to hostility.

Unusually for a film which ultimately proposes tolerance, the most articulate voice is unforgiving. The pilot's aunt (Flora Robson) is a Labour politician who concludes that after Belsen, German war crimes are too atrocious to endure. Eventually, she concedes that unchecked hatred could destroy herself, and by extension, the country.

It's superbly acted and photographed with an intelligent script, though the ending is conventional. The film explores its themes in great depth, and from many points of view. It doesn't rebuke those who are not able to find peace. The conclusion is that to hate is unsustainable, and everyone forgets in time. But this time, to forget is wrong too.

Many thrillers after WWII hid the motives for a crime in the subconscious mind of a character. But this goes deeper. It is about psychologists who interpret the behaviour of their patients, or each other. Every gesture is a psychological tell. The film seeks to instruct about Freudian analysis and the value of non-medical psychotherapy.

Although this is fascinating, it does feel a bit phoney. Maybe even naive. However, the film stands up brilliantly as a work of suspense, and an offbeat film noir. Burgess Meredith plays a troubled analyst who is unable to kill his own demons, though he seeks to heal the minds of others. He takes the case of a violent former POW (Kieron Moore).

And we discover that our greatest danger comes from our repressed experiences. Which is especially problematic because these Brits shut down their emotions behind a rigid facade. But eventually, the therapist and his disturbed patient are clinging onto a precipice that is both real and symbolic in an extraordinarily exciting climax.

Anthony Kimmins is best known for George Formby vehicles. But, given a budget, a fine script by Nigel Balchin and decent actors, he directs a complex film of ideas which examines social issues, like the mental trauma of returning war veterans and the vogue for unlicensed psychoanalysts, smuggled into a darkly compelling thriller.

Slender adaptation of Graham Greene's classic novel, which everyone remembers primarily for Richard Attenborough's performance as Pinkie, the insidious, baby-faced killer on the mean streets of Brighton between the wars. The film creates a heavy climate of fear, in which the numb, sociopathic gangster can thrive.

While the plot is slight, the perennial Greene theme of Catholic doctrine gives the film extraordinary weight, even when soft pedalled in apprehension of US censorship. Pinkie marries a naive, devout believer so she can't testify against him. She is so vulnerable, willing to live in a state of sin, because she loves, even though hell is very real to her.  

Carol Marsh was an artless and inexperienced actor, but well cast as the wife, and she is as haunting as Attenborough. The conclusion (changed from the novel) when she plays a recording of Pinkie's misogynistic hate, expecting to hear her love echoed, is shattering. The chief weakness is the role of Hermione Baddeley as a kind of amateur sleuth.

The shoot was on location around a squalid, seedy Brighton, which is a symbolic hell. There is an interior set of the filthy slum where Pinkie's gang lives... This has the pessimism of film noir but looks ultra-realistic. The mood is subdued, banal, rotten and utterly evil. There's a case for Brighton Rock as the best ever British gangster film.

Between 1946 and '51, Herbert Wilcox directed half a dozen films starring Anna Neagle (his wife) and Michael Wilding, which were huge hits with the British public. In the social revolution of the fifties and sixties these were disparaged by the next generation of film makers. In particular the attitude to class became outdated.

The first and best of these is Piccadilly Incident. The stars meet cute in the blackout and hastily get married before she is posted to Singapore. Only she gets torpedoed in transit and spends the rest of the war on a desert island with the navy. When she is rescued and returns home, her husband has has an American wife and a baby daughter.

It's a familiar tale which is normally played for laughs, but this is sentimental. These people are so bourgeois that when Neagle is injured in an air raid at the end, it feels like she dies rather than cause a scandal. Wilding has a batman who, when he is not serving tea, is dispatched to the roof on watch duty. His death barely merits a line of dialogue.

The past is a foreign country. Yet, the film evokes well the separation and loss which was the familiar ache of the war years. Interestingly, it conveys a feeling of nostalgia for the horror of the blitz, now war is over. And Anna Neagle gives a sincere performance much better than the material deserves. Despite the many absurdities, it's a quietly moving film.

This is an adaptation of Howard Spring's best selling novel about the rise of a Labour politician in the nineteenth century and the slow sell out of his principles leading up to the crisis of the Great Depression. Michael Redgrave plays a flawed idealist whose principles come from philosophy rather than a love of the people.

He gives an excellent, epic performance, from a self taught teenager growing up in the slums of Manchester to a stubborn, thin skinned mainstay of the establishment. He has to face down the entrenched interests of capital and the aristocracy, but ultimately he also becomes a malign influence on the poor.

The obvious question is, why was this film made midway into the radical Attlee government? Boulting's film has little regard for the left. Or indeed any political party or class. But the MP's long life intertwines with a capitalist from his own streets (Bernard Miles) first seen rather grotesquely selling rats, and he is even less sympathetic.

The film runs out of puff as Redgrave ages. But it's full of period atmosphere from the dawn of the Labour movement; all cobble streets, austerity, Karl Marx and male voice choirs. There's a fine performance from Rosamund John as the supportive wife, who would have made a superior politician. If the film ever takes a side, it's with the Suffragettes.

In 1944 the Ministry of Information and Ealing Studios assigned Harry Watt to Australia make a film acknowledging their contribution to the war effort. Watt was a former documentary maker at the GPO and he found his story in the land and people. It was based on the huge cattle drive across Northern Territory in 1942, to ensure livestock didn't fall into the hands of the Japanese.

The irony being that the Australians were launching a scorched earth policy in one of the most barren habitats on earth. Rather than shoot and burn his herd, a resolute drover (Chips Rafferty) recruits a team to take it 1,600 miles across the interior. This is a epic story of the people against the wilderness.

It's an Australian western. Except, when the cattle are driven across the river, the crew have to clear it of crocodiles first. It is a realist film, and it's possible to pick up a surprising amount about the transport of cattle. There is mostly an amateur cast of locals, led by Rafferty (in his fifth feature) who makes a convincing outdoorsman and is a natural on horseback.

Some of the accents are suspiciously posh for a gang of Aussie rednecks. Otherwise this is low key, documentary film making, which is a stirring tribute to an immense real-life enterprise which took three years to complete. Though it's an Ealing film, it's a landmark in Australian cinema, and an authentic adventure story which still inspires.

The first British film about WWII prisoners of war is still the best. It introduces what would become the standard motifs of the POW film: the suspicion of a German mole; the escape detail; the concert party; and the irregular lifeline of letters from home, and Red Cross parcels. But The Captive Heart excels because, apart from the reportage, there is also a great premise.

This was loosely based on actual events. A Czech dissident (Michael Redgrave) escapes from Dachau and adopts the identity of a dead British officer. Then is taken prisoner. As part of his cover he begins to write to the wife of his new identity, unaware the two were estranged. And they fall in love with each other, with her ignorant of the deception.

The soldiers are taken prisoner after Dunkirk and incarcerated until the end of the war. The film reflects on the psychological and emotional consequences. Often this is sentimental as they idealise home. Jack Warner is the heart of the ensemble support cast, but it's Redgrave's repressed trauma that cuts deepest.

Some of the actors had actually been POWs, and part of the location shoot was at a real stalag. But while there is realism, the mood is lyrical. This is a hugely moving film. What emerges most starkly is the prisoners' fear of being forgotten. And an impression that in a time of such instability, miracles really do seem to happen.

My choice as the best British film adaptation of a story by Charles Dickens. The long novel is freely cut down to under two hours of screen time with some skill while retaining a strong flavour of the dialogue. Young Pip's (Tony Wager) confrontation with Magwitch (Finlay Currie) on an expressionist Kent marshes is one of the great opening scenes in cinema.

And this quality is sustained through Pip's encounters with Miss Havisham (Martita Hunt) and young Estella (Jean Simmons) in the old gothic house. But, after 35 minutes, John Mills takes over as the older Pip and some intensity is lost. Maybe because such excellence is hard to maintain, but also as Mills is miscast.

He's 20 years too old, and is far too rigid to capture any sense of being haunted by the ghosts of childhood. But Dickens always provides plenty of scope for the character roles. My pick is Finlay Currie, but the support cast is uniformly phenomenal. The film won well deserved Oscars for b&w cinematography and art direction.

The Victorian society presented is brutal. To survive and be happy is good fortune. The class system is a conveyance for cruelty and a justification for unwarranted pride. There is nothing at all to arrest the misery of the unfortunate. Surely this delivered a jolt to a country then inventing the welfare state? This is brilliant Dickens, but in 1946, it was also a lesson from history.

Funny murder mystery set in a hospital in south-east England at the end of WWII, which features the unusual gimmick of doodlebugs constantly harassing the characters. When a patient dies during anaesthetic and the nurse who announces she knows who was responsible is stabbed to death, suspicion falls on the close knit theatre staff.

Everyone has a motive, and as often in whodunnits, it's fairly random who actually did the crime. The surgeon (Leo Genn) has had affairs with all the nurses, and now has his roving eye on sultry Sally Gray, the fiancée of the short tempered anaesthetist (Trevor Howard). Yes, the doctors are all men and the nurses are women.

The early scenes of comic intrigue get a huge boost on 37 minutes when Alastair Sim appears as the waspish and unorthodox Inspector from Scotland Yard. Sim gets an 'and presenting' credit, even though he had been in British films for over ten years. Still, it is his ungainly eccentricity that most makes the film such a pleasure.

There is lots of atmosphere in the pristine clinical areas, and the dubious figures in gowns and masks. Writer-director Sidney Gilliat keeps the finger of suspicion moving smoothly around the extremely well spoken medical staff. Though the mystery of the means of murder won't puzzle many for long, the abundant suspense makes this escapist fun.