Film Reviews by Steve

Based on a scandalous true story about the murder of a woman by her aristocratic husband, which got entangled in the 1848 revolution in France. Bette Davis stars as the notorious Henriette D-, the governess to their children, rumoured to be having an affair with the Duc (Charles Boyer). Warner Brothers intended this to be a rare sympathetic role for Bette.

It doesn't entirely work that way. The neurotic Duchess goes crazy with jealousy over the impeccable Henriette, but the tutor does actually entirely take over the household and win the love of the husband, even if they don't share a kiss. Davis captures the eye, as she always does and Boyer is compelling. They have a decent chemistry together. Oscar nominated Barbara O'Neil overacts terribly as the Duchess.

 This had a big budget and it is a visual banquet and a sumptuous recreation of the interiors and costumes of Restoration Paris. Colour might have been a worthwhile choice. Like many productions intent on touring you around the scenery, it is a little slow, stiff and formal.

Much of its long running time is spent watching the acting talents of a large number of Hollywood kids, and this appeal is very much to taste. Personally, this ranks with religious awe as the stickiest features of classic cinema. Especially when one of the moppets gets sick. It's not the best of Bette's Warner Brothers melodramas, but there's a fine score from Max Steiner and first rate production values.

This offers an insight into the lives of rich sophisticates in thirties America; a celebrated and entitled -but alcoholic- lawyer (Lionel Barrymore) and his reckless, free spirited daughter (Norma Shearer). It is interesting that with fascism gaining influence in America and Europe, MGM gave us heroes who see themselves as above the law and normal standards of behaviour.

Barrymore successfully defends a prohibition gangster (Clark Gable) from a murder rap and Shearer falls in love with him and his expensive lifestyle. And if that's starting to look like an impressive cast, there's Leslie Howard second billed as a well heeled polo star in love with Norma. They stand around expensive apartments in swanky clothes drinking cocktails as their laissez faire decadence reaps a whirlwind.

Barrymore won the best actor Oscar and Shearer was nominated, which is a bit of a stretch. They give stilted, mannered performances. Much of the problem is in the direction of Clarence Brown who abandons his stars to lengthy long or medium shots, like actors on a stage. Brown's work got nominated too and he became a star director of soaps at MGM.

The main interest in A Free Soul today is to see Norma Shearer, a huge star of the early talkies, and the frivolous precode hedonism. The film opens with a discussion on Norma's scanty lingerie. The writing is unpolished, the sound is poor and it has a flat, uninteresting look. But it's fascinating to hear what Hollywood was talking about before the censors took over. And to see the costume design, by Adrian.

More foreign intrigue from Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg, set in the mysterious east during the Chinese Civil War, though naturally shot at Paramount studios. Sound technology had advanced since they made Morocco two years earlier and the camera moves with greater freedom. But it's still all shadows and cigarettes and shooting though diaphanous nets.

There's a cast of chain-smoking western fugitives with dubious pasts who might not be all they appear. Marlene used to be the respectable Madeline, but now she's a notorious adventurer. As she unforgettably clarifies: 'It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily'. Clive Brook is an old flame who was burned by Madeline many years ago.

So will the spark reignite as they travel by train though the hazards of war to Shanghai, and a ship for home? Clive Brooks was a terrible ham in everything he did and this is his signature role. And yet, the stiff, terse, detached Englishman is such an archetype in early talkies that he actually seems perfect casting! Anna May Wong makes an impression as a Chinese courtesan.

There's a remarkable moment then the director holds a close up of his star looking up into a light for a long thirty seconds... The story is very slight and slow and predictable. The film is more about the director's eye for an artistic image and Marlene's glamour at the peak of her allure. On those terms it doesn't disappoint.

Marlene Dietrich wrote the story for Blonde Venus and it seems she made an attempt to broaden her exotic appeal. She's still a cabaret singer. And she meets her husband (Herbert Marshall) while she's swimming naked in a lake in Germany... but then the narrative diverts towards a more conventional Hollywood soap with Marlene suffering poverty and disgrace while having to provide for her son alone.

The best (and most famous) scene is a night club number when she passes through the tables in a gorilla costume, only to remove the disguise and sing the excellent 'Hot Voodoo'. But the glamour and the naturalism clash. Dietrich complained the film was damaged by censorship and it's possible to see that her descent into the gutter might have been intended to be more realistically brutal.

Josef von Sternberg wasn't the director for social realism though. When his star is compelled to live in a flophouse, he creates the most beautifully lit flophouse in cinema. The milieu is exotically sleazy. Marlene does a lot more acting than usual rather than being a model for von Sternberg's adoring lens.

There's a pre-stardom Cary Grant as an unlikely gangster. Sidney Toler is good in a cameo as a squalid, shifty detective. It's an unusual film. No one else can walk on the wild side with Marlene's insouciance, but it just doesn't compute when she washes dishes to make ends meet. That's what Lillian Gish does in a Griffith film, not Dietrich in a von Sternberg. It's an interesting digression but only intermittently successful.

Bette Davis didn't get an Oscar nomination for her sensation in Of Human Bondage and it seems standard to assume that a year later, the Academy gave her the award for Dangerous to make up for the oversight. But this scenario ignores that Claudette Colbert deserved her win for It Happened One Night, and that Bette was pretty good in Dangerous too.

There are signs that this film was jigged to offer the audience a few echoes of her star-making role, but her character is completely different. She plays an intelligent, high class girl, a great stage actor who has fallen on hard times and into alcoholism but finds a way back through the support of Franchot Tone's principled, wealthy, playboy-architect.

It is a melodrama and there are many sacrifices made before the characters manoeuvre towards a conclusion acceptable to the new Production Code. This hasn't the prestige of a Somerset Maugham adaptation. The plot is clumsy, though there is a splendidly witty script. The direction is dreadful, but this is Warner Brothers and there's enough talent on board to compensate.

Bette is fabulous and makes many archetypal situations a lot of fun. Including when she manipulates the engaged Franchot to kiss her for the first time in a thunderstorm. She is the sort of predatory girl you don't leave alone with your man. Her solution to her inconvenient marriage is to accelerate herself and her husband into a tree and see who survives! It's that crazy. And it's that irresistible.

Handsome, Hollywood adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's novel about Germany after WWI, and the pacifism which gives way to poverty and the emergence of the Nazis. Three young men return from the western front to build a new country but find themselves swept up in the rising tide of a new tyranny. Robert Taylor, Franchot Tone and Robert Young have a palpable rapport as the friends.

Taylor falls for a penniless aristocrat, played by Margaret Sullavan. Sullavan has a strong screen presence; slim, poised, husky and cool. She looks elegant in a beret. Frank Borzage turns their relationship into the ethereal hyper-romance which was his speciality. The normally lightweight Franchot Tone brings gravitas in support, in perhaps his best performance.

The novel was adapted by F. Scott Fitzgerald, his only screenwriting credit. Sullavan complained she couldn't speak his dialogue and the script was rewritten by the producer, Joe Mankiewicz. These difficulties are not apparent; the writing is poetic and has depth. There is some editorialising. The Hollywood censors wanted the riots to be led by communists rather than the fascists, but Borzage held firm!

Still the message is politically vague given it was 1938. It's a pacifist story set in a studio's idea of middle Europe. Today the film works best as a lyrical romance; a Borzage film, full of atmosphere and suffering. Sullavan's death in a sanitarium is protracted but it gives the film its mystical weight. It's certainly a weepie, but a relatively sophisticated one.

The 1920s was the era of jazz and Anything Goes, and the films of DW Griffith and Lillian Gish started to go out of fashion, with their Victorian moralising and sentimental melodrama. Gish was surpassed by urban jazz babes like Clara Bow and the austere exoticism of Greta Garbo. This is set on a farm in small town, rural America.

But a hundred years on, Griffith and Gish's films still live. This is partly because Griffith was such a good director and he was particularly talented at creating suspense though his editing. He always kept the drama in the frame. And he makes the most of Gish's wan beauty, with her huge eyes, bathing her in gauzy light in long close ups.

And Gish is such a fine actor. More naturalistic performers would emerge in the later silent period, but she is very effective here, telling the story through her pale, suffering face as well as creating a moving impression of her vulnerability. The theme is the hypocrisy of a society which allows sexual freedom to men and prohibition to women, which would be a key preoccupation of the coming decade.

It's actually exactly the same story as Tess of the D'Urbervilles, but with a happy ending! And it's that spectacular climax which stays in the memory, with Gish swept away in the ice floes of a frozen river. It's a long film. The comedy is a little homespun, but the drama is harrowing and engaging and Lillian breaks your heart a dozen different ways before the fade out.

Lavish historical epic which places its characters within the events of the French Revolution. It failed at the box office, perhaps because of its lengthy and complicated narrative. The picture is further confused by DW Griffith's position on the uprising. The film was made four years after the Russian revolution and this is primarily anti-Bolshevik propaganda. By the end of the film it feels like the aristocrats prevailed.

The films of Griffith and Lillian Gish were starting to go out of fashion by 1921. And this title came to stand for the excesses of Victorian melodrama. But Orphans of the Storm succeeds as a spectacle. The recreation of Paris is magnificent. The cast of extras is vast and the costumes are fabulous. Griffith manoeuvres Gish into a fresh cliffhanger every ten minutes and disentangles her at the last possible instant.

This works because the director is so good at suspense, and also because Lillian Gish is such an immense screen presence. She transcends the classic archetype of early cinema; a virtuous woman who must suffer because the world is hostile, but who is rewarded for her purity.

Griffith doesn't frame Gish in close-up as much as usual. We see her in long shot, a fragment trapped in the whirlwind of events. Inevitably the film climaxes with Lillian on the guillotine and Danton riding to the rescue... As melodrama it is formulaic, though entertaining, as history it is bunk, but as a spectacle and a vehicle for Lillian's poignant fragility, it is a triumph.

This follows the classic three act structure of the heist film: preparation-execution-disintegration. It is focused on the contrasting/conflicting personalities of three men who bust into a small bank in Albany, New York. Ed Begley is an ex-cop looking for a big payoff to set him straight after a stretch inside. He recruits an unlucky gambler in hock to the mob (Harry Belafonte) and a volatile redneck no-mark (Robert Ryan).

See the problem! The theme is the ongoing racial war which dooms the caper. There is plenty of raw, unsubtle symbolism. The pair face off on adjacent petrol tanks and literally blow each other up leaving behind corpses which, with the skin burned off, can't be distinguished. Though this sounds simplistic, the situations are complex and interesting.

It's an ensemble film. Ryan is especially strong as another of his combustable, stubborn bigots. Gloria Grahame is memorable in a cameo as a dumb, overripe tease. Harry Belafonte produced and he gives himself an elegant blues song.  Its unique atmosphere is also down to a fantastic cool-jazz soundtrack by the Modern Jazz Quartet.

What most elevates Odds Against Tomorrow is its phenomenal photography. This is visual art and one of the great picture books of New York City. It has an expressionist look, not because of the lighting, but the distorting effect of the lens. It's one many classic genre films Robert Wise directed before he made blockbusters, but, beyond its film noir fatalism, this is arthouse.

Beautiful looking late period film noir with the familiar premise of a vulnerable woman terrorised by a menacing, unknown male assassin. Lee Remick works in a bank and lives with her school age sister (Stefanie Powers). An assailant who can only be identified by his asthmatic breathing says they will be brutally murdered unless Remick robs her employer of $100,000. And don't tell the cops.

The panicked clerk immediately calls the FBI and Glenn Ford throws a huge team behind her protection, which climaxes with the wheezy psycho gunned down on the outfield of the LA Dodgers.

The first casualty of the investigation is logic. It's incredible that the FBI would commit such extensive, round the clock resources to the protection of a single tax payer for a crime that hasn't yet happened. And it's implausible that the maniac who threatens to kill her if she tells a single person, and has her entire life staked out, doesn't notice there are a dozen G Men watching her every move 

Unfortunately this also undermines the suspense as it makes the stalker a bit of an idiot. However, the film is an eyeful with imaginative camera set ups and impressive locations (including the set piece at Candlestick Park) and the b&w photography is sensational. It never gets as tense as is promised in the early scenes but this is still an entertaining thriller with attractive stars.

Sam Fuller took the American gangster film to Tokyo and turned its classic b&w expressionism into brilliant Technicolor. It is a remake of the 1948 film noir, The Street With No Name. Robert Stack goes undercover in occupied Japan to infiltrate a gang of former US soldiers who have established a syndicate.

While the film is set against a backdrop of national regeneration, it isn't political. It's a straight thriller. It captures Japan in the spasm of great change, but its vision is more touristic. There's a fabulous lingering shot of Mount Fuji. There's the Imperial Hotel, and an exciting (Hitchcock influenced) finale on the rooftop of the Tokyo Amusement Park.

The racketeers are led by Robert Ryan, who has the hoodlum's customary vanity; his gunmen wear some amazing suits and look as stylish as any screen gang, ever. There is an unmissable homosexual relationship between Ryan and his number one boy, which makes a stronger impact than the tepid inter-racial romance between Stack and Shirley Yamaguchi. Both were contrary to the production code in 1955.

House of Bamboo isn't immersed in the sleazy lowlife typical of Fuller's work, or have his usual energy. It wasn't a project he initiated or his screenplay. But there are some stunning camera setups, a fair amount of suspense and great locations. It wasn't the first colour crime film of the fifties, but the striking use of CinemaScope makes it groundbreaking and Fuller adapts the technology with flair.

This incredibly gloomy road noir is the best of the low budget crime pictures Anthony Mann made after the war. It's a love triangle. Joe (Dennis O'Keefe) escapes from prison and flees with a reluctant member of his legal team (the excellent Marsha Hunt), and his jealous moll (Claire Trevor) who loves him submissively and unconditionally.

The narrative is related by Trevor like a sombre dream, accompanied by the joyless drone of a theremin. Her introspective reverie is ethereal, like she is already dead. The real star of the film is the cinematographer (John Alton) who fills the screen with looming squares of inky darkness which have the oppressive expressionist dread of a Mark Rothko painting.  

The fugitive searches for the gangsters who sent him down with the promise of a financial sweetener. Only they have decided not to pay up. Raymond Burr and John Ireland are hugely intimidating as the hit men who try to rub out their former partner while the police chase him down to Mexico.

Luckless Joe is another poor sucker lost on the dark roads of film noir. It is a powerful, melancholy film, with its compromised, cursed figures always moving in and out of the enfolding shadows. The familiar story is slim but its heavy, clinging fatalism has a way of staying in the memory.

Ultra-low budget action thriller which spent most of the bottom line on its stars, including film noir legends Lizabeth Scott and Dan Duryea. There's a familiar set up; a comfortable married couple (Scott and Arthur Kennedy) are out driving when a man in a passing car throws a blackmail payoff into their back seat. The sleazy extortionist, (Duryea, of course) comes after them for his mislaid $60,000.

The swaggering Duryea is a man you love to hate, but he is outclassed. Scott plays one of the most relentlessly vicious femme fatales in noir. She will hold onto that windfall at any price. When her honest husband acts to hand it in to the cops, she shoots him and sinks his body in a lake. It's possible even to feel sympathy for the blackmailer when he is ruthlessly poisoned to settle who should keep the loot.

Scott plays a materialistic, suburban American housewife. Surely the extreme lengths that she goes to satisfy her greed is meant to be satirical. She has never been poor, she wants money to give her status in the middle class. So she is not outgunned by the other wives. There is even a hint that she may have helped along the suicide of her first husband when he proved to be an insufficient provider.

The sets and back-projection are pitifully cheap but the film's strengths dwarf its limitations. Scott is wonderfully degenerate in another of her noir bad girl roles. Sex is merely a negotiating stategy. There is something dreamy about her hushed, slurred delivery. She is aroused by wealth. Plausibility isn't always a priority, but this is a compelling morality tale, with a tasty script.

Short but thrilling film noir set in a news office. It was adapted from a Sam Fuller novel and it punches like his films, with an extrovert swagger and dialogue that sounds like headlines. The star editor (Broderick Crawford) kills the wife he left twenty years earlier when she threatens to expose his past to the rival tabloids, which are as rapaciously unprincipled as his own.

The newsman is conflicted. He wants to hide his crime and his sleazy background, but he can't deny the populist urge to sell papers. So he puts his top reporter (John Derek) on the story of the dead woman and blows it up big. A lavish bonus has been promised to the editor. Sales go through the ceiling but the trail leads right to his desk.

This is a fabulously entertaining film, driven by a lively, hardboiled script and unpretentious direction. It pulses with energy, especially in the fast talking newsroom scenes. The cast lacks a little sparkle in places, with Donna Reed insufficiently sassy, but Derek is effectively sordid and Henry Barnes is memorable as a former Pulitzer prize winner who has drunk his way down to skid row.

The locations are anchored in the New York lowlife, among the drunks and bums, hock-shops, scummy hotels and, well, tabloid newspapers. It's a light satire on the press. Derek finds redemption when he rejects their corrupt methods. Crawford's constant justification for dealing in murder and vice is 'it will sell papers'. In the end, he flogs his own dirty washing and makes his biggest sale. He can't deny his nature.

Unusual, code-busting melodrama which can be read as a parable on American capitalism. Tyrone Power plays a charismatic narcissist who works up from a fairground conman to the lucrative spiritualism racket. He exploits everyone in his path until he is destroyed by a similarly fake psychotherapist (Helen Walker) who sends The Great Stanton into a spiral that ends at absolute zero; a geek in a sideshow.

This is the performance of Power's career as the unscrupulous, ambitious clairvoyant who seems to see into people's souls, and can turn it into cash. He is matched by a sensational portrayal from Helen Walker as the well bred shrink to the rich Chicago elite. When one of them must be sacrificed, Stanton's lack of class ensures it is him.

All the cast are exceptional. Ian Keith is devastating as the alcoholic deadbeat whose demise Stanton's story arc will imitate. His pitiful death is appalling. Joan Blondell is Oscar-worthy. This should have been a big award winner, but was just too unorthodox. It was an ambitious production though; Fox built a large fairground and filled it with real carnival acts. The noir photography is another big plus.

Nightmare Alley is pessimistic and disturbing and psychologically complex. It is surprising it was passed by the censors, especially as it equates religion with spiritualism... and Power and Blondell's relationship is unusually sexually frank for the time. Director Edmund Goulding usually made romances but this allegorical noir is one of the great films of the fifties.