Film Reviews by Steve

Comedy-thriller which smuggles in a few political themes under its sparkling surface. There is an ingenious premise: a big shot media mogul (Charles Laughton) murders his rainy day lover, and gets his fixer (George Macready) to plant evidence suggesting the killer was the newsroom's ace reporter (Ray Milland). The journalist investigates the crime and finds the trail leads to himself...

The film drops a few hints that the boss' unfettered corporate power implies the fascism that has just been fought in Europe. The ubiquitous big clock symbolises the extent of his malign control. This is the era of HUAC. The Hollywood Ten were charged a year earlier. When Laughton threatens to have Milland blacklisted it must have shot a bolt down the spines of American audiences.

There's plenty of comic fizz. When Milland and the soon-to-be murder victim (Rita Johnson) go on a crawl of cocktail lounges they might as well be William Powell and Myrna Loy. Maybe better if they had been as the rather smug Milland can be hard to like. The film is also weakened by Charles Laughton's ludicrous yet soporific portrayal of the odious Mr. Big.

Still, Elsa Lanchester is funny and adorable as the kooky artist who comes to the framed reporter's aid. The screwball makes it uncertain how seriously all this should be taken, but it just about works as suspense. The set design of the media empire, and the b&w photography make an attractive noir look. There are interesting historical themes but they don't burden the film's charming escapism.

Exciting, twisty thriller with an exceptional cast. Robert Young is cast against type as a dishonest playboy who is financially dependent on his wife (Rita Johnson) while dallying with Jane Greer and Susan Hayward. Greer's part is insubstantial but Johnson is excellent and Hayward gives the film a huge boost with her reliable dynamism as an unrepentant gold-digger.

It's a murder mystery that relies on that traditional golden age standby, the unidentifiable corpse. In fact, there is another; the story is narrated from the witness stand by Young who may well be an unreliable narrator. His uncorroborated testimony gives an already absorbing plot another twist.

There's pleasure to be had from watching the suspect play the field before his complicated comeuppance, but the strongest emotion in play is just how trapped he is in his marriage and his job. The gilded cage from which he never escapes. This allows Young to make his ill-fated character at least a little sympathetic.

The film's grown-up cynicism and fatalism gives it a noir edge, though its look isn't dark and there are no mean streets. The big plus is Irving Pichel's swift, polished direction which speeds us through the chicanery of many intricate plot complications. There's an excellent, pessimistic script. Young felt it was his casting as a villain that led to the public staying away; they all missed a stylish, entertaining thriller.

Cult film noir set in New Mexico in the aftermath of WWII. Robert Montgomery returns from the Pacific with his pal who gets rubbed out by a mafia boss (Fred Clark) for trying to put on the bite for a crooked Government contract. The ex-GI tracks the gangster south to San Pablo during the fiesta, while being tailed himself by an FBI agent (Art Smith).

For a noir, Ride the Pink Horse doesn't have a strong expressionist look; this isn't a town of shadows. It is most like film noir for its political context. The promised postwar settlement has fallen through. Semi-legitimate gangs and crooked politicians have been getting rich while a generation of young men were fighting in Europe and the East.

The laconic, traumatised hero has lost his girl and his friend and his belief in his country. He has no faith in the law which allowed the killer to go free. Criminality has been normalised. But in San Pablo he meets honest citizens among the Mexican poor; the trusting, guileless Wanda Hendrix and an optimistic fairground worker played by Thomas Gomez (who was Oscar nominated). This challenges his racism and cynicism.

The enigmatic title hints that this stowed a socialist message inside a low budget thriller. Perhaps it was this which attracted A list writers Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer, and Montgomery, to such a minor production. It was released in '47, when the Hollywood blacklist was introduced to prevent films like this being made. It works best as a woozy, dreamlike political allegory.

Speedy, cheerful locked room murder mystery from the Philo Vance series. William Powell returns as the gentleman sleuth and the role is a perfect fit for his sophistication and comic élan. There's a standard golden age premise; a wealthy but hated man is found dead in his bolted bedroom with a gun in his hand. Everyone has a motive. The idiotic police are happy for the amateur to take charge.

The film has the weaknesses typical of this kind of story: the solution is preposterous; anyone could have done it; and the cast of suspects are archetypes. There is no impression of the misery caused by the act of murder. But given the limits of the genre, this is one of the best ever entries in a detective series.

Michael Curtiz keeps the the action moving. There isn't much of a budget, but Warner Brothers draw on a fine support cast of familiar contract players, including Mary Astor, Eugene Pallette and sexy Helen Vinson, so at least we know who these people are. The precode humour sparkles, and crucially, Curtiz tells the complicated story with lucidity, which rarely happens in low budget crime films.

It's a genre quickie with sterile sets and a static camera and the usual impediments of early talkies. But it is also a lot of fun and the editing is so slick it whizzes by. We get the cosmopolitan setting and the stereotypes and clichés we go to classic detective story for. Powell really makes it fizz. This was his last go at Vance, but he would play similar roles throughout the thirties, with charm and a lightness of touch.

This is famous for Humphrey Bogart’s breakthrough performance as Duke Mantee, a killer modelled on depression era gangster, John Dillinger. But the best part of the film is the opening half an hour of romantic dalliance between Leslie Howard and Bette Davis. She plays a young dreamer trapped in the Arizona desert, aching for escape. He is a rootless poet running low on hope. Their ethereal chemistry is very poignant.

They meet in The Petrified Forest, a desert made of fossils, a wilderness where obsolescent creatures come to die; like Mantee, the last of the western outlaws, or the poet who is a disillusioned, exhausted idealist. A few other archetypes gather in the lonely diner where Bette marks time as a waitress: there’s a patriot, an athlete, a wealthy couple…

After the exceptional opening, the dialogue becomes aimless and overwrought. But the film maintains its grip. This is too early for film noir, but it has that feel. Partly because of the slowly darkening restaurant as the night falls, but mainly because of its sadness, its atmosphere of pessimism and malign destiny.

As for Bogart, he has a strong, malevolent presence, and he dominates the later scenes, but he is awkward and not yet a star. Archie Mayo’s staging of Robert Sherwood’s poetic realist play is rich and full of mythology and wistful symbolism. But it's the melancholy rapport between Howard and Davis that cuts deepest, both searching for meaning in the haunted desert as world sinks into the depression and fascism.

Modern revisionist, western that reflected contemporary American civil rights as much as the historic persecution of Native Americans. Paul Newman plays a white settler who was adopted by Apaches as a young man. Finding himself a second class citizen on a hazardous stagecoach journey, he reluctantly employs his combat skills to save the lives of his fellow passengers when they are held up by bandits.

So it's a liberal reshuffle of the old western classic Stagecoach. Though John Ford is unlikely to have featured the avaricious Fredric March who starves Native Americans on a reservation and pockets the profit. Newman plays that archetype of American cinema, the isolationist who is eventually persuaded to act for the greater good.

It is a terse morality tale with few diversions. In the ensemble cast, Newman is effortlessly cool. Diane Cilento is moving as a sassy, wise but lonely woman facing up to middle age. As ever, Richard Boone makes a convincingly brutal outlaw.

There is an epic score and fine cinematography. The film deals with the oppressive, psychological violence of prejudice, and the personal injury of living in its grip. It's a philosophically interesting film, with plenty of suspense and strong characters, and a key star vehicle for peak period Paul Newman.

Handsome, decently acted but feebleminded Civil War western. The film is unmistakably indebted to John Ford, with its knockabout comedy, broad support characterisations and lengthy punch-up which all eventually gives way to some sentimental drama.

James Stewart is a Virginian farmer with so many boys it is only possible to count them when they are sitting down to dinner together, saying grace. He refuses to send his men to fight, arguing that they are needed on the farm and it isn't his problem anyway. Of course he eventually discovers if they don't go to war, the war will come to them, and he has to get involved.

While there is impressive technical work, the film gets tied up in thematic contortions and idiotic plot lurches. Stewart was a pro-Vietnam voice, and would have seen a parallel with his family of refuseniks being forced to go and fight in an unpopular war. But in taking the side of the pro-slavers he actually makes his intervention hard to admire. So it doesn't work as propaganda.

It's not just that the story is relentlessly absurd, it is also badly constructed. Scenes are so disconnected, they grind against each other. New episodes start that have forgotten how the last one finished. The finale when the youngest son, lost in the war, turns up at Sunday mass propped up on a crutch is the last straw. Too many plainly ridiculous things have happened.

Sam Fuller's platoon film set in the Burma operation of WWII looks at the conflict from the perspective of the ordinary soldier. A group of special operations GIs, who have been together since Bataan, find they are no longer running missions, but fighting one seemingly endless battle. As malaria and typhus become endemic, they are physically and mentally spent.

This is a psychological war film. We definitely get the message because the army doctor (Andrew Duggan) runs a commentary on the men's state of exhaustion. This isn't really about the combat with the Japanese, but the human cost of being out in the field for so long. Fuller's very good at presenting the group as an experienced, well drilled team, but also of the damaging pathology of stress.

Jeff Chandler is extraordinarily convincing as Frank Merrill, the leader who has to live with the guilt of pushing his men ceaselessly against their limitations. Even the mule gives up... but still the men march on through the jungle! The film benefits from being shot in the Philippine jungle, which gives a realistic impression of the arduous terrain.

 The CinemaScope is utilised exceptionally well, especially for a B picture. This is a Hollywood Burmese War film that acknowledges the presence of the British and Commonwealth soldiers and the terrible suffering of the local population. It's a very moving experience and if it presents these soldiers as being exceptional and heroic, then, probably they were.

Surprisingly faithful adaptation of Jules Verne's 1864 sci-fi novel. Four scientists/adventurers make a subterranean exploration via a cave in a volcano in Iceland, and discover a fabulous landscape of quartz and phosphorescent lakes, and eventually the remains of an ancient civilisation inhabited by prehistoric animals. It's like a prototype for a video game with different levels of jeopardy.

The group is led by James Mason, as the kind of cranky professor who has a tantrum when he has to take a woman along but it barely registers when the group acquires a pet duck. He and Arlene Dahl squabble like an old married couple. Singing student Pat Boone and strapping local rustic Peter Ronson fill the group out into a makeshift family.

This is a fun, child friendly adventure typical of the big budget studio blockbusters of the fifties. Mason is wonderful. The top billed Pat Boone is little more than cheerful (and wears a kilt), but Gertrude the Duck provides plenty of comic diversion. And there's a particularly good villain (Thayer David), who, astonishingly, actually eats the duck!

The sombre, proto-prog soundtrack is an unusual touch. Period costumes and set design are great. The vast, underground terrain is lavishly realised. There's even a message to take away, celebrating the fearlessness of human enterprise and lamenting man's capacity to make war absolutely anywhere. The best of the Jules Verne films of the period.

Brief, fast paced B western which is full of offbeat narrative details: like the gunfighter's steel prosthetic right hand and the hero's duelling weapon of choice, the harpoon. It's a fascinating film, packed with audacious stylistic flourishes. The ultra-stark black and white photography, allied to a percussive mariachi score, gives the film a unique ambience.

Sterling Hayden plays a Swedish immigrant sailor who comes home to Texas to discover a rich landowner (Sebastian Cabot) has hired a gunman (Ned Young) to murder the farmers who have leased his territory, now he has discovered it is sitting on a sea of oil.  The killer has shot down the sailor's father. So it's a revenge western.

This was written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo under a front, and the film is ostentatiously about the failure of people to stand up to an oppressor. It is also a story about the corruption of capitalism. The terrified farmers wonder why one man should want everything. Hayden was another victim of McCarthy. He is terrific in this.

And it's an exciting work of genre fiction; the film moves like a bullet. There is phenomenal suspense for such archetypal situations. And the characters are vivid and moving. We really care about these persecuted farmers. This was Joseph H. Lewis' last film before he went onto tv, but he was still clearly at his peak. He's among the great low budget directors.

Low budget psychological western raised way above the ordinary by a wonderful double act between a nervy Anthony Perkins and a very cool Henry Fonda. There's a standard western plot. A bounty hunter and former lawman (Fonda) passes through town to claim on the body of killer.  He stays around to help the inexperienced sheriff (Perkins) learn the facts of life.

The stranger lost his wife and child long ago, and the youngster has no family either. They form a temporary father-son relationship as the veteran teaches his protégé how to face down a contemptuous gunman splendidly played by the ever loathsome bad guy specialist Neville Brand.

It's a liberal Hollywood film and Brand channels the racism of fifties America which the sheriff must overcome, as well as impose law and order. It's a great looking film in fabulous b&w, widescreen Vistavision. There's a plausible impression of period and a lovely romantic score from Elmer Bernstein.    

This is Anthony Mann at about his peak, making fine entertainment out of genre conventions. But it's the simpatico pairing of Fonda and Perkins and the relationship of their characters that makes the film so enjoyable. Though admittedly Perkins looks more like he belongs in High School Confidential than the old west. 

Ensemble western set after the Civil War. The naked spur refers to our motivations: bounty hunter James Stewart is driven by revenge; wandering prospector Millard Mitchell by gold; and disgraced cavalryman Ralph Meeker by sexual depravity. All are distorted by greed and compete to take in a fugitive killer (Robert Ryan), for a cut of the $5000 reward.  

And the murderer will seek to divide his captors and escape with his girl (Janet Leigh) as they travel through the Rockies back to Abilene. Most of the entertainment is watching the crazy, glittery eyed gunman use the men's weaknesses against themselves, like Iago in a cowboy hat.

Robert Ryan gives the dominant performance. He keeps his wild strategies secret, but he plainly enjoys the barbed malice he scatters in the path of his adversaries. No one could sneer quite as repellently as Ralph Meeker and he feels dangerous and completely mercenary as an ex-army rapist without any conscience at all. He's even more loathsome than the killer.

 James Stewart gives a complex portrayal as a peaceful man who has survived the Civil War with (what we'd call now) PTSD.  It's an actor's film, but visually striking with magnificent colour photography of the grandiose Rockies. It's all filmed on location and there's an exciting action finale shot in the rapids of the rugged, picturesque Colorado River.

A faithful adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque pacifist novel which was a landmark Hollywood war film and helped establish the conventions by which we imagine WWI on screen. Exhorted by a patriotic teacher, a group of naive German children enlist, and over years of combat they are transformed by their experiences, until mutilated, insane or dead.

There is no sense of strategy in the film. The boys and their fatalistic mentors contest the same plot of French farmland in an absurdist exercise in futility. The soldiers create a society out of their irrational circumstances, and a normality out of their fear. They come to view life away from the front as alien, even menacing.

Lewis Milestone fought with the US army in France and he does sensational work. He turns his cast into a believable band of misfits; brutalised, but processing their trauma through trench wit. The visual scope of the film is epic, the camera is mobile and the editing lively. He portrays his huge battle set pieces with coherence, which few directors ever do.  

This ranks high among anti-war films and visions of WWI. There is a lot of vérité; the film shows us the logistics of mechanical war. We see a man blown away by an explosive leaving just his hands on the barbed wire. There is no music to evoke glory or sentimentality, there is just the habit forming terror of trench warfare and the betrayal of a generation.

Hollywood avoided WWI after the armistice, but the success of The Big Parade launched a wave of productions about the war over the next ten years. It was made only eight years after America joined the conflict, so there must have been real life experience on either side of the camera. Though there isn't an overwhelming impression of authenticity.  

King Vidor's epic invented a lot of the rules for platoon films, partly because it follows a predictable path: the initial patriotism on the home front; the drilling of a group of civilians into a fighting unit; the boredom of waiting and the virile furlough pursuits. Then the young soldiers confront the German army, and are stopped dead on the western front.

The film is dominated by a romance between its charismatic star John Gilbert as a rich doughboy, and the French Renée Adorée as an exuberant farmer's daughter. The cute comedy of their mutual incomprehension is utterly charming.

The Big Parade gave audiences a vision of war: the fighter planes, the army camps, the anti-aircraft artillery and chemical weapons. A veteran might have felt too many punches were pulled in the interests of tasteful entertainment. It's a long film, but doesn't drag. It was groundbreaking , but better, more incendiary war films were coming.

The plot of this adaptation of Raymond Chandler's classic crime novel was hugely simplified for the screen, though is still complicated by normal standards. But a surprising amount of Chandler survives, including a fair approximation of Chandler's tough, sardonic hero Philip Marlowe.

 Dick Powell handles the comedy particularly well and tones down the toothsome vitality of his crooning days. In his screen debut, giant ex-wrestler Mike Mazurki is Moose Malloy who strong-arms Marlowe into looking for his former sweetheart, a vanished showgirl called Velma. As cute as lace pants.

 It's disappointing that so little of Chandler's poetic vision of Los Angeles makes the cut (the studio didn't go near a subplot involving the trading of drugs to Hollywood stars). But many other strengths remain. Powell's voice-over exploits plenty of the writer's immortal narrative style and trademark wisecracks.  

A huge bonus is the noir photography, especially Marlowe's expressionistic descent into his drug hell. Thanks to censorship, the streets aren't all that mean, but the film does reflect the class structure of the great sprawling west coast metropolis and the crazies and charlatans that feed on it. A noir great.