Film Reviews by Steve

Pacifist thriller set on the Irish border during WWII. The conflict between the Republic and the UK has often been an awkward subject for film makers. Partly because it's complicated, and the bias of the home and American markets are so polarised. Basil Dearden tries to look from both sides, but principally makes an appeal to put down the guns.

John Mills is an IRA soldier who grows weary of violence during a period in England. But he has to watch out for his brother (Dirk Bogarde) who is still fighting for the cause. Their mission is to spring two political prisoners being moved to a jail in Belfast. The accents of the stars are unreliable, but Bogarde is fine and there's decent support from the Irish actors.

And there's a lot of talk, particularly from a blimpish Englishman on holiday, who represents the British tabloid point of view. Dearden made many subtle films about social justice, but these arguments are quite simplistic. Screenwriter Robert MacDougall ultimately advances a pro-union perspective. But this isn't a polemic.

Apart from a couple of botched manoeuvres, the events take place in a rural hideout, like a play. The production was shot in the studio, with a noirish look. There's a satirical script and witty dialogue, which help underplay the political stakes. The portrayal of the conflict is dated, but it still works as an engrossing suspense film.

Social-realist crime story made in the style of the Hollywood police procedurals which began to appear after WWII. This was shot on location on the mean streets of Paddington. There's a familiar narrative about an old copper coming up to retirement (Jack Warner) breaking in a new constable (Jimmy Hanley).

Warner's PC George Dixon is a landmark in British cinema, and he survived the film to feature in a long running BBC series. He's a light touch local bobby who knows his beat and keeps the peace with paternal common sense. The film assumes that community policing works, and makes a case for more resources. Now, this long ago London is barely recognisable.

Famously, Dixon is murdered by a juvenile armed robber, with 40 of the 80 minutes to run, and the narrative evolves into a pursuit of the killer leading to a fine climax at White City. Dirk Bogarde isn't all that credible as this psychopathic kid from the streets, but he is charismatic, and this was a breakthrough role for him.

Though writer TEB Clarke was with the Met in WWII and the action is shot documentary style in the streets, time has robbed The Blue Lamp of its realist credentials. Still, it's an entertaining and immersive experience of a vanished country, and representative of a kind of policing to which many British people still feel emotionally attached.

Jolly farce set in an English public school. Its chief merit is the pairing of Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford as the cranky Heads of two schools, for boys and for girls, who find themselves having to share the same premises after the Ministry for Education gets its files in the wrong box. This is sitcom... 

Most of the humour is drawn from on the chaos of trying to keep the snafu hidden while the school is inspected by fussy parents and assessors. A classroom of boys must be instantly transformed into a gym session for girls... There aren't many great gags, most of the fun comes from watching the perfectly cast stars.

Sim and Rutherford built reputations as expert scene stealers, but this time they are aced by Joyce Grenfell in a small early role as a sexually repressed games mistress. Shame she didn't get more lines as she is a real standout. Obviously, there is crossover between this and the more anarchic St. Trinian's films.

Some gentle satire is lobbed at the hapless bureaucracy of the men from the ministry, a common target for comedy writers after WWII. Maybe it's awkward that these inhibited spinsters and fusty bachelors are such fair game. And it's a bit sad that the sexes pitched in together is assumed to be an absurdity! But! This was England...

Exciting submarine drama based on a true story. HMS Trojan is damaged by a mine which has been floating in British coastal waters since WWII. Many die in the explosion, but a few survivors are able to escape with the limited safety equipment. Which leaves four men waiting for the laborious rescue manoeuvres...

That's John Mills as the calm but flawed captain. Nigel Patrick plays his informal, rakish sidekick. James Hayter is an idiotic grunt. And Richard Attenborough is the hyper-panicky claustrophobic. The outcome is surprisingly bleak, but interestingly each character is given a reason for why they might not want to be saved.

Even among the last four living men on board, the dynamics are rigidly enforced by class. There is a great deal of awkward talk as the men drift very slowly into oblivion. After the rules are relaxed sufficiently for the lower ranks to be invited into the stateroom, Mills can barely tolerate Hayter's rambling stupidity.

The film explores the craft of decision making. The style is documentary realism, with no score. There's a small amount of underwater photography, but the action is mostly shot in a single interior of the submarine, betraying its stage origins. While understated with an abundance of talk, the gathering suspense is overwhelming.

Compelling thriller which has periodic shifts in style and atmosphere but maintains suspense all the way- boosted by its popular stars. Trevor Howard plays a burned out operative laid off by MI6. So he takes a low stress job in a country estate, cataloguing butterflies for a collector...

Where he finds the pretty young niece (Jean Simmons) of the avuncular lepidopterist is being gaslit over the mysterious suicide of her parents. When the hunky gamekeeper (Maxwell Reed) turns up dead, the jittery teenager gets the sinking feeling she is being fitted up for the noose. So she and the demobbed spy go on the run.

Which gives her time to remember what really happened to mum and dad all those years ago. The on-location photography is a huge strength as they flee to Newcastle, the Lakes and the finale in Liverpool. Barry Jones and Sonia Dresdel are splendidly menacing as the guardians. Kenneth More is a genial presence as the hero's secret agent pal.

But the laconic Howard is best of all. The early scenes are suggestive of John le Carre's Whitehall Circus, before the film turns into the psychological noir of the house of shadows. Then finally, a Hitchcock inspired pursuit. The actual mystery isn't a big asset, but Ralph Thomas' direction makes a fair approximation of the Master.

Powerful adaptation by Terence Rattigan of his own one act play about the last few days in post of a pompous, unprosperous classics master in an English public school. The middle aged teacher is forced to evaluate his humiliating marriage and dismal career, and unexpectedly elicits a little hope before the final fadeout.

The overwhelming strength is a showpiece performance by Michael Redgrave. He starts the film as a shuffle of sterile mannerisms, but then gradually colours in the whole of the man, inviting our understanding without resorting much to sentimentality. Jean Kent also excels with her portrayal of his ruthless, unfaithful wife.

Rattigan's script reveals in painful clarity the awful process through which the promising scholar became the inert, complex oppressor of the lower fifth, backfilled with disappointment and forfeiture. He becomes a ghoul who purveys boredom, because that is the only sphere left in which he excels.

It's a brilliant fusion of character and performance. The film also advocates for education as a kind of socialisation rather than the mere passing on of knowledge. Anthony Asquith (like Rattigan) fell out of favour over the next decade. He may not have a critically approved visual signature, but he directed so many classic British films.

Alan Paton's adaptation of his own famous novel about South African apartheid, is only a partial success. The main weakness is a long diversion into Christian self analysis. And because the film strives for balance when surely a polemic would be more appropriate. Also the casting of amateurs in minor parts slows the film down.

The technical film making is rudimentary, but there is such a strong impression of this country at a turning point in its history. The book was published the year apartheid began in 1948. Three years later, the film was made under duress from the government, particularly to the black actors who travelled to star in the film.

Canada Lee plays a (black) country minister who undertakes an odyssey to Johannesburg to find members of his family who have disappeared into its underworld of prostitution and crime. Sidney Poitier is a more streetwise city priest who helps in the quest. While the country is ostentatiously rich, the black majority is exploited for profit while living in squalor.

This is the first draft of history, and sometimes it's unconvincing, though the raw location photography is realistic. Paton's script exposes endemic racism, but mostly vindicates the church. The film ultimately leaves us with hope... But, there would be 46 years of apartheid.

Formula fifties farce, but with funnier, more plentiful gags than most. A quality cast of British light comedy pros squeeze all the laughs out of a pretty good premise: the will of a dead practical joker makes some unusual conditions of its four beneficiaries. And so they all learn life lessons.

It's an anthology of four intertwined tales. The film is actually quite conceptual, as it explores a single comedy formula; the fish out of water story. These contrasting heirs are compelled to carry out a task that is contrary to their character. So, George Cole is a spineless clerk who must hold up his bank with a water pistol.

The best of these features Alastair Sim as law abiding crime writer who has to get banged up in stir for 28 days. The complication is he is due to marry a frightful officer in the women's army at the weekend, played by an ultra-toothy Joyce Grenfell. As always, they are a fine comic match.

And there's the bonus of a brief cameo for Audrey Hepburn, who gets an introducing credit as a cigarette girl. It's an undemanding, entertaining comedy with a twist ending which will surprise no one. But the splendid cast is given space to bring their schtick to the amusing scenarios, and they transform it into a minor classic.

This stands apart from most suspense thrillers because it draws quite realistically on scientific theory. The author of the 1948 source novel, was Nevil Shute, who had previously been an aeronautical engineer, and the hazard of metal fatigue to aircraft safety would result in a real life tragedy a few years later.

James Stewart plays a research scientist concerned about the sustainability of the aluminium frames of a new line of commercial aircraft. He predicts the tails will fall off after 1440 flight hours. And then it happens. While traveling to Canada to examine the crash debris, he discovers the plane he has boarded is approaching the crucial time span...

So for all the boffinry, this settles down into a disaster film. Stewart is a complex character; autistic, a widower, and a loner. But essentially a loose screw on a commercial flight which he claims is about to fall out of the sky. Meanwhile head office insist there's nothing to see, fearful of the bottom line.

Among the fellow flyers, Marlene Dietrich packs some incidental glamour, but Glynis Johns' flat performance is a negative. Stewart is solid as a shy, unheroic man made eccentric by his extreme intelligence, and suffering from his own stress fatigue. While there's a thoughtful production, its best factor is Shute's exciting plot premise.

Handsome but sedate production of Alexander Pushkin's story from 1834; a supernatural allegory of greed set in the St. Petersburg barracks during the Napoleonic Wars. Director Thorold Dickinson creates a powerful sense of macabre superstition, though doesn't relate the narrative as effectively, and the story drifts at times.

A lowly born engineer in the Russian army (Anton Walbrook) will go to any length to learn a formula for winning at cards from an elderly, grotesque former beauty (Edith Evans) who is said to have sold her soul for the secret. And he either goes insane with his obsession, or the old lady tricks him from beyond the grave. Your choice...

Either way, he loses his life savings to the degenerate officers he envies, and resents. The first hour of the film is very slow and interest rests on the supernatural atmosphere and period clutter. It's all carefree gypsies and decadent aristocrats. There's some fascinating detail related to an ancient book of souls that Walbrook discovers.

The acting is quite theatrical, but then the events take place in an illusory realm. Edith Evans plays a contender for the most disagreeable character in films, ever. The story comes eerily to life in the last third, as the engineer's superstitious dread envelops him, and the momentum builds to a thrilling climax, which is well worth the wait.

Edward Dmytryk was a pioneer of American film noir, and after becoming one of the first casualties of McCarthyism, he moved to England and directed Obsession, among the most authentic looking British noirs. And it's a terrifically suspenseful thriller.

Its preoccupation is the perfect murder. An egotistical psychiatrist (Robert Newton) is intent on killing his wife's lover (Phil Brown) and locks him in a hidden room. But the garrulous shrink plans to keep his rival chained up during the investigation into the disappearance, and murder him when the heat is off.

 Which will give the captor time to fill a bath with acid, while he toys expansively with his victim. Regrettably, Newton gives a typically bumptious and tiresome performance. Sally Gray though, is a most effective floozy; a victim of her husband's psychopathic jealousy but without being sympathetic either.  

Naunton Wayne gives the film a big lift in the second half as a proto-Colombo who turns up unexpectedly, asking awkward questions. It's such well directed and exciting thriller that it's possible to overlook Newton's histrionics. And his really strange accent. This is one of Dmytryk's best films.

Eccentric social comedy adapted from the HG Wells novel, which is pretty much a one man show for its star and producer John Mills. He plays a genial, self-effacing Edwardian slacker, who lacks ambition. His life is occasionally blown off course by a major event, but eventually drifts back into inertia.

Mills isn't usually comfortable playing outside the middle class, but he's fine here, and stirs up a few laughs with Alfred Polly's verbose pattern of speech: 'Suicide arsonical. Good idea. Right-oh!' Polly's world is dominated by assertive women, but in an episodic film, the female performances are cameos.

Megs Jenkins stands out as the comfortable innkeeper he settles for. Otherwise, Finlay Currie makes an impact as an idler much like Mr. Polly, but violent rather than passive. In their period clothes, the duo's slapstick scenes together recall the comedians of silent films.

Alfred is an unhappy man who seeks refuge from a world of conformity which he lacks the intelligence or gumption to transcend. It's an offbeat film, maybe even unique, full of elaborate, unorthodox language. More whimsical than hilarious. A treat for any who may identify with Mills' portrayal of an ineffectual introvert.

Groundbreaking black comedy which might as well be a definition of the word 'droll'. The film is usually remembered first for the eight performances by Alec Guinness as the various idiotic, aristocratic members of the D'Ascoyne family who a poor relation (Dennis Price) must kill in order to inherit their land and wealth.

Price's trademark plummy froideur makes him perfect casting. This is an incredibly literary film, with writing that is often poetic. Most of the script is Price's acerbic first person narration which is a masterpiece of irony and innuendo and creates a comical tension between what is said, and what is shown. Great final twist too.

Robert Hamer satirises both the aristocracy, and everyone else who defers to them. But there is something deeper. The film pulls together strands of understatement, absurdity and irony which we have come to regard as the English sense of humour. Often this is more whimsical than hilarious, but close attention is rewarded with some big laughs.

It constructs a Victorian facade of genteel privilege, which obscures an underlying misery. This is the best of the Ealing comedies, and one of the great British films. This is mostly because of the tone of the writing and the dry, deadpan performances. Guinness' garrulous but dimwitted vicar is my personal favourite.

From the silent era to the swinging sixties, Butcher's Film Service turned out the lowest budget releases in British cinema, with murky sound and vision, limited sets and short shooting schedules. Almost none of them have any ambition. The Monkey's Paw is a cheap fright film which partly works because of these limitations.

Low budget horror directors say it's the dark that frightens audiences most. Norman Lee fills his frame with shadows, but also the poor quality photography opens up patches of black all over the screen. And, crucially, he doesn't show his monster, but leaves it to our imagination, as it bangs on a jammed door in a thunderstorm.

It is the best version of the famous old parable. A mummified monkey's paw is cursed by an Indian mystic to deliver three wishes. But fate must always deal an ironic joker... Megs Jenkins is a bereaved mother who wants to bring her son back after he dies in a motor accident. But he is returned in his burned, decomposed state.

The cast is a mix of seasoned support actors and enthusiastic amateurs. It lasts only an hour, and there are no lulls, but plenty of gruesome melodrama. The horrifying climax as the corpse escapes its grave and comes home, packs a punch of powerful dread. It's a genuinely creepy experience. And surely Butcher's best film.

Documentary style dramatisation of Robert Scott's quest to be first to the South Pole in 1912, which ultimately proved to be unsuccessful and tragic, with the final group of four men dying 11 miles from return camp. The realist approach accentuates the small details of the expedition, and draws on Scott's diary for the narration.

The use of Technicolor though makes the film look more artistic, and the location footage seem artificial. And the inscrutable facades of the actors and their brittle, cheerful received pronunciation makes the characters difficult to get to know. It's a lot of posh blokes going to the pole, and can at times feel like a Monty Python sketch.

Even their wives are impassively stoic. There is no rewrite of mythology. The men are heroic and uncomplaining. Team spirit is invincible. Every heart is devoted to god and empire. This is a film of surfaces and reportage. John Mills is perfectly cast as Scott, but a cypher. Most of the emotion is imparted by Vaughan Williams' heart pumping score.

Still, it's an exciting portrayal of a brave and ambitious misadventure. As the men grow tired, mistakes are punished and luck runs out. Scott and his companions were beaten to the pole by Norwegian expertise, but their journey- and this film- is a monument to human endurance, and obsessive, imperious ambition.