Film Reviews by Steve

The principal interest of Rome Express is that the story and some of the dialogue was written by Sidney Gilliat and it is obviously a run out for his co-script on the classic train thriller The Lady Vanishes. And while it isn't in the same class as the Alfred Hitchcock film, it is still an engaging watch, with a lively score.

The MacGuffin is a stolen Van Dyke which is stowed on an overnight train (with dining car) from Paris to Rome full of British character actors (and Conrad Veidt) playing a range of mysterious eccentrics and heavies. The painting is limited as a focus of suspense as most of the passengers aren't involved in its theft or discovery.

Still, the cast is colourful, though the characterisations are broad; Gordon Harker plays the most boring man in the world, and Cedric Hardwicke is among the most unpleasant. Like in The Lady Vanishes there's an eloping couple (married, but not to each other) who refuse to get involved in the mystery. But sadly- no Charters and Caldicott.

Typical of early talkies, the camera rarely moves. And like most British films of the thirties, the accents are very theatrical, which pick up well on the primitive microphones, but make the exchanges rather stiff. Maybe the working classes can't afford tickets. It's a dated film, but it has momentum and still entertains.

Leisurely, low budget thriller which was the solo directing debut of cult British director Thorold Dickinson. The lack of money on screen is obvious, but the producer did manage to send a crew out to Ghana to shoot on location which is expertly cut into the studio footage to help lift the film out of the ordinary.

Though dated, there is evidence of real craft here, with intelligent editing, occasional noirish photography, visual wit and imaginative use of sound. The art direction is good and there's decent dialogue. Performances are quite theatrical, but engaging, with a fine early role for James Mason.

And it's great to hear the evocative tones of Lucie Mannheim (the spy who died in Robert Donat's flat in The 39 Steps). Lionel Atwill is a stolid lead, an army man who has a scandal in his past which follows him to a malaria hospital in North West Africa. There is a strong impression of place, and the contrast between local traditions and those imported by the British.

Dickinson satirises the occupation, but not enough to trigger the censors. Despite the slow pacing, this is an engrossing and atmospheric mystery, set in British colonial Africa. I doubt much was riding on this production, but the talent of the director and crew made an interesting film out of familiar melodrama.

British cinema wasn't a golden age in the 1920s. And Shooting Stars isn't as lavish as the great Hollywood feature films of the silent era, but it compares extremely well on quality. AV Bramble was a journeyman of pre-sound cinema and Anthony Asquith a key director of British films, so it is tempting to regard this as Asquith's film.

This was his debut, and he co-wrote the story about a love triangle on a film shoot. Brian Aherne plays a handsome and likeable leading man who is in love with the tempestuous star of the British screen (Annette Benson)... who is his wife.  But she falls for an affable sad/funny man (Donald Calthorp) who makes slapstick in a bowler hat.

The diva plans to kill her husband by swapping a live cartridge for the dummy in the studio rifle. Then leave for Hollywood. Shooting Stars is a brilliant satire on the film business which handles the drama very well too. There is wonderful mobile, expressionist photography. The trio of leads give intelligent and absorbing performances. 

There is so much fascinating detail of British cinema and London society in the twenties, and visual insight into the characters and their motivations. Intuitive connections are made between the actors and their personas; and fiction and real life. It's an early film about film. And the final scene, with that last shot, is a triumph.

Anthony Asquith's first solo credit as director and writer reveals how, in his early films, he looked east and west for inspiration. The opening scenes set in the London Underground are obviously influenced by Soviet documentary realism. This style is then sidelined in the last 30m minutes for a chase which owes more to Hollywood melodrama.

The earlier part is more successful, shot on location with its proletariat characters at work and leisure, living ordinary lives. A London transport assistant (Brian Aherne) meets cute with shop girl (Elissi Landi) but runs into trouble with his sinister rival (Cyril McLaglen), who works at Battersea Power Station.

The film is stolen by a deeply affecting performance by Norah Baring as the dressmaker McLaglen jilts to pursue the more vivacious Landi. The plot is a rudimentary love triangle, but the whole film is made exceptional by Asquith's extraordinary gift for concise, visual story telling. Though the story is deliberately commonplace, it is absorbing, and ultimately thrilling.

His use of the director's tools is so impressive, including the editing, but particularly the photography of industrial London, which is is an artistic gallery of impressionist images. But this is also an entertaining romcom; Brian and Elissi make a most attractive couple. The humour sparkles on the screen. Another silent gem from Asquith.

Anthony Asquith's final silent film was partly shot on location in Cornwall. As it's a melodrama which climaxes with an attempted murder, it's tempting to imagine the influence of contemporary Alfred Hitchcock, though more realistic to suppose they were both inspired by German cinema. But the director does have a cameo. Like Hitch.

It opens at an isolated cottage as a young mother (Norah Baring) is terrorised by an escaped convict, and then flashes back to a barber shop in London where she was a manicurist who provoked the violent jealousy of a colleague (Uno Henning) by flirting with a customer, her future husband. The fleeing prisoner is that barber, back for revenge.

Asquith was an adventurous and versatile film maker but some of the cinematic tricks he attempts here now seem a bit gimmicky. Most startling are the brief flashes of red that are edited into the barber's assault on his rival with a razor. But it's not all visual technique; Baring gives a soulful, yet vivacious performance in the central role.

In his early films, Asquith was a stylist, as well as a brilliant visual storyteller. The rural locations limited the movement of the camera, but the photography of the windswept moors is evocative. The London scenes are exceptional, particularly a sequence in a cinema which focuses on the audience watching a talkie. Shame he didn't direct more silents. 

Charming, optimistic musical comedy from the popular novel by JB Priestley which made a star of the adorably peppy Jessie Matthews. Several enterprising regional caricatures are blown together by fate and assemble in a concert party, putting on shows around the seaside towns of England.

There was some allegorical intent from Priestley which the scriptwriters retain. We are introduced to three of the characters in their prior lives in the English regions, trapped by convention in a country where everyone knows their place. They find freedom on the road with the theatre company, which operates as a co-operative, unencumbered by class.

But the politics is lightly sketched. The Good Companions are an oasis of make believe, a sanctuary from the realities of the depression. There are ensemble roles: John Gielgud is disappointingly inert as a frustrated schoolteacher who turns to songwriting; Edmond Gwenn is likeable but quite broad as a middle aged factory worker seeking a second act.

Matthews gradually commands the spotlight, more for her comic appeal than the modest song and dance numbers. This is an idealistic, uplifting film in which fortune favours the eccentric misfits and good-hearted strivers roaming the hotels, theatres and inns of England; the eternal haunts of the footloose traveller.

The first sound version of the classic adventure story is peerless. The production values rival those of the historical films of 1930s Hollywood, with big sets, handsome interiors, rich and detailed costuming and swarms of extras, all tucked away into a tidy and exciting 90 minutes.

Leslie Howard is superb as both the popinjay Sir Percy Blakeney and his dashing masquerade, The Scarlet Pimpernel, sought by the French revolutionaries for saving aristocrats from the guillotine. Raymond Massey is a natural as his saturnine adversary. Merle Oberon is beautiful, but a little too impassive as Lady Blakeney.

The elusive Pimpernel is a prototype superhero, a figure of destiny who hides behind a passive alter-ego. So this story has been (sort of) ripped off endlessly. But in this case, thanks to the star, it is the domestic facade, the effete, idle toff who is far more entertaining. The script is certainly mannered, but that suits the splendid theatricality of the film.

This is far from realism, and part of suspending disbelief means imagining ourselves on the side of the French aristocracy. And the film is relentlessly patriotic towards the English nobility. But, propaganda aside, it is among the best action adventures of the '30s. Leslie Howard reprised his role in 1941 as Pimpernel Smith, this time fighting the Nazis.

Brief shaggy dog story about a haunted Scottish castle which is bought by a brash American and transported to Florida, forcing its weary ghost to cross the Atlantic too. Having grown tired of a spectral existence it must adapt to the New World, as a tourist attraction promoting a supermarket chain.

Robert Donat plays the apparition, and also its living descendent who falls in love with the daughter (Jean Parker) of the tycoon (Eugene Pallette) who bought the ancestral home. Donat is always worth watching, though he is more convincing as the disillusioned phantom (in traditional Scottish dress) than the romantic suitor.

Jean Parker, more usually cast in westerns, is appealingly perky in romantic support. The film contrasts old world traditions with the aggressive commerciality of twentieth century America, but not really with much depth. It's a light screwball fantasy. Whatever complexity the film conveys derives from Donat's innate gravity.

René Clair is remembered for his films of dreamy make believe. This is less substantial than most and there is far more whimsy than laughs. But there is an atmospheric production, decent effects and Clair conjures a little magic among the longueurs. And Donat brings dignity to the frivolity, despite having to say 'och-aye'!

Cultish black comedy set in an archetypal Dullsville, USA about a young man (Anthony Perkins) prematurely released from a mental hospital where he was held for manslaughter, who has an affair with a High School cheerleader (Tuesday Weld). She proves even more criminally insane than he is.

Perkins takes a job in a chemical plant which is poisoning the rivers of this industrial backwater and enlists an attractive blonde (Weld) to investigate the ecological breech, and to visit lovers lane with him in her convertible. At first it seems that this fantasy inquiry is a product of how exceptionally boring is the New England town they live in.

But the boy starts a fire in the girl that is soon out of control. Initially there is interest in watching Perkins revisit a Norman Bates type character (this was his next Hollywood role) but the film really lifts off when Tuesday Weld takes charge. While he is a fantasist, she is a dangerous psychopath. It's just that she's pretty.

The film is also an odd couple romance and the two stars have unmissable chemistry. Both performances are vivid but it's Weld's film and she is very memorable. The photography is excellent and there's a strong impression of a dead end town. Pretty Poison was barely released but it was a hit with some critics and found an audience on television.

This is a comedy thriller about a serial killer, so it's a very black comedy. Rod Steiger is a failed actor under the influence of his dead mother, once a darling of the Broadway stage. He ritually kills older women while in character roles- an Irish priest, a gay hairdresser, a tough cop - while he plays mind games with the investigator on the case (George Segal).

Lee Remick is a witness who has an affair with the detective. The romance is enjoyable, and it works as a thriller too. The comedy mostly centres around Steiger playing various archetypes. As the Irish clergyman, he mimics Barry Fitzgerald. As a French gourmet, he's Maurice Chevalier. When he's the policemen he impersonates George Segal...

There's not much for the other actors to do other than let him get on with it. Segal is sympathetic as the hangdog investigator who keeps getting taken off the case. Eileen Heckart makes a comic impression as the most stereotypical Jewish mother ever. Remick's role is mostly decorative, though she is a fine comedy actor.

There's a strong visual impression of Manhattan with well chosen locations. The film has the potential to be upsetting, because the murders are quite graphic for the time, especially when set against Steiger's scenery shredding. The ending is a little predictable. But it's an engaging, imaginative police drama. 

Genuinely funny, laugh-out-loud comedy which fruitfully recast Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau (after The Fortune Cookie). Felix (Lemmon) is a fastidious, passive-aggressive neurotic who moves into the New York apartment of his poker-buddy Oscar (Matthau), a legendary womanising slob. It's principally a comedy about divorce.

Both have broken up with their wives and this gives the film some emotional weight, without ever threatening to be sentimental. They are going through a re-evaluation, in their different ways. And of course they drive each other crazy, which is most of the comedy. One is needy and traumatised. The other is belligerent and confrontational.

All this is given a huge boost by extraordinary cameos from Carole Shelley and Monica Evans as dizzy, divorced English sisters. They are hilarious, and surely the most flirtatious women in all fiction. Oscar is so certain that he is onto a sure thing that when he returns with the drinks and the girls are crying over photos of Felix's kids, he throws his lodger into the street.

The film is hardly opened out from the play, so it mostly takes place in one room. There's a lot of dialogue, which is a matter of preference. Gene Saks directs his actors expertly. Neil Simon's script captures the nuances of male relationships pretty well. Great score too. But we remember the film for Lemmon and Matthau who turned their archetypes into the eternal blokes.

This is a tribute to that classic screwball set-up; the fast talking dame who creates chaos in order to get to know an attractive but naive stranger. So most obviously it borrows from Bringing Up Baby (1938). Only, in What's Up, Doc? Barbra Streisand has a supernatural capacity for causing accidents. Cars crash while she merely passes by.

In Bringing Up Baby, Cary Grant is a palaeoanthropologist with a dinosaur bone, and in this homage, Ryan O'Neal is a musicologist with suitcase of igneous rock... Various other desperate men pursue identical luggage... The film might not have amounted to more than well budgeted fan fiction, except it is full of clever and funny ideas and an obvious deep affection for the genre.

For instance, Streisand knows about a wide range of arcane subjects in great detail (including igneous rock) because we discover she has completed the first term at so many Universities before getting thrown out for causing pandemonium. The stars aren't the equal of the best screwball actors of the thirties, but they are still pretty good.

In the last third, the film steers closer to Looney Tunes than Bringing Up Baby with an extended car chase (including a huge pane of glass carried across a busy road). This isn't as enjoyable as the cute romcom of the earlier scenes. But there is a genuine frisson to be had from the nostalgia for the Hollywood golden age. And the love of the greatest comedies ever made.

My pick for the funniest film ever made, adapted from Woody Allen's Broadway hit. Woody goes through a crisis after his wife leaves him. He gets trapped in a fantasy world where he is given life/love lessons by an apparition of Humphrey Bogart (Jerry Lacy), while he suffers a series of excruciating dates with kooks, neurotics and oddballs...

Until he falls in love with Diane Keaton, the wife of his best friend (Tony Roberts). The scenario is huge fun for film fans as Bogart gives macho advice in his screen image. And Woody plays his own stand up persona of the luckless neurotic. He and Keaton are fantastic together, as they always are.

Woody Allen's screenplay is among the greats. There's a stunning line every minute and the quotable dialogue is as beautifully written as it is hilarious. Like when Woody tries to pick up a suicidal woman in a gallery. Or when he strikes out with a nymphomaniac...

The physical humour is just as funny. This is different from Woody's other early films. It has a story arc rather than being a collection of sketches strung together. It's set in 'Frisco. The characters are more developed. There are so many great gags, but the film is quietly moving too, with engaging themes.

One of many seventies films about urban despair and the difficulties of city life. Jack Lemmon is a middle aged/class married man who has grown bitter with crime and metropolitan decay. And the neighbours. And his advancing years. When he loses his job and with it, his status, he becomes irrational and paranoid.

But even his psychiatrist is useless. It's a black comedy, really a cry of anguish that presumes others will identify with its suffering antihero. There are funny moments, and some real clunkers. The best is when he chases a supposed mugger (Sylvester Stallone!) across Central Park only to find his own wallet at home and in fact he has just robbed a pedestrian.

Anne Bancroft plays his wife who at first picks up the slack, but then is also destroyed by the rat race. We get great stars. But, for a comedy, there are few laughs, and for a drama the themes are random and unconcerned with solutions. Obviously, as an angry, untethered maniac, Lemmon's underdog is part of the problem. And he becomes too unsympathetic to identify with.

Neil Simon's script divisively sets the middle class against the poor without ever asking why it must be like this for anyone. In our era of social media it's interesting that this victim eventually turns to conspiracies as an explanation for his misfortunes. Which is part of his insanity. But everything improbably resolves by the fade out. New York is still hell, but this one man has survived.

Reminiscent of Jules Dassin's classic caper Rififi (1955). But this is a more lavish, colourful and spectacular production. Shot in Paris, Greece and Turkey, its ensemble cast and and exotic locations would be hugely influential on the heist film. A band of crooks come together to steal an emerald encrusted dagger from the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul.

There are the usual stages of the three act heist film. The stars (Melina Mercouri and Maximilian Schell) assemble an eccentric team of character actors, and devise a plan. Next, they stage the caper in an extended set piece of sustained suspense. But the normal final twist is subverted. Rather than the theft being foiled by the gang's own weaknesses, the enterprise is a redemption.

They fail because of dumb bad luck. But the emotional nucleus of the film is Peter Ustinov as a shabby petty crook who finds self-esteem through overcoming his fears. Ustinov is excellent, and won an Oscar. But, beware casting Akim Tamiroff, because yet again he steals every scene, this time as the grubby, alcoholic cook who caters for the gang.

The humour is engaging rather than hilarious. There's superb location photography of Istanbul, with an evocative score of Balkan folk music. The best of the film is the actual robbery, with Gilles Ségal, the human fly, hanging upside down from the ceiling, slowly lowered onto the treasure. So many borrowed this scenario, and from the film in general.