Film Reviews by Steve

A prisoner of war comedy which was made before there was a tradition of POW films in Hollywood. Consequently there's a voice over at the start, explaining what a Stalag was and how the camps were run. It was written by a pair of former POWs. The plot now is familiar; one of the American captives is a spy giving information to the Germans.

Billy Wilder was a great blender of genres and as well as a comedy and a war film this works as a thriller. Who is the stoolie? Most of the captured flyers think it's the aloof JJ Sefton (William Holden) who trades goods with the enemy and finagles a few luxuries for himself. To protect himself from brutal reprisal, he must find the mole.

It's a very black comedy. Some of the men die because of the leak. Wilder implies these Americans are no better than any other men would be in these circumstances, and may have something to hide. There is humour but also a degree of realism; the camp is dirty, the prisoners are half crazy.

Holden is perfect as the supercilious Sefton. Though his Oscar was a bit of a push in an ensemble part. Sefton is an antihero and nearly all the characters are morally ambiguous. The most memorable performance is by Robert Strauss as 'Animal' who gives the film comic energy. WWII was still a recent trauma, but the public bought Wilder's comic cynicism.

A sex comedy about infidelity was always likely to be a heroic failure in the era of Hollywood censorship, and so it proved. Now, the only aspect likely to offend is the sexism. When the wives and kids leave Manhattan every summer, the eyes of the men turn to available women. Nervy publisher Tom Ewell is distracted by the kooky blonde who takes the upstairs apartment.

Marilyn Monroe is ideal casting. She perfected the personality of the sexy, obliging innocent. In a film that survives mainly as a period piece, she is still as fresh as iced cucumber. There is that iconic moment when her dress flies up as the subway train passes beneath an air vent... and Ewell is excellent too!

Plenty of humour survives. Billy Wilder follows the method of his mentor Ernst Lubitsch in crediting the audience with the wit to complete the cryptic innuendo. In 1955, this film was audacious, and it was modern. And that zeitgeist has modified into a fifties time capsule of New York City with the brownstone flats and executive tower blocks.

This is not Wilder's best work, and he dismissed it, thinking the censorship restrictions were insurmountable. But it is a glossy, superficial, entertaining film, with one of Monroe's definitive performances. Tom Ewell's fantasy soliloquies were innovative and surely influenced Woody Allen. And there is still residual excitement in its once forbidden themes.

Frenzied political satire with social themes unusual for Hollywood during WWII. The film questions the uninhibited patriotism which engulfed America, and it empathised with the guilt of those who were unable to serve. And rather provocatively hinted that returning soldiers would expect a new politics.

Preston Sturges combined the cynicism of Billy Wilder with the sentimentality of Frank Capra, his great comedy contemporaries. But his humour is  less subtle. This is his darkest film. A patriotic kid (Eddie Bracken) is refused entry into the Marines with hayfever and feels too ashamed to go home. He is taken in by a group of genuine Marines on leave who march him home to mom.

But once back in small town America, the people adopt him as a much needed hero. Soon he is running for mayor. Ironically, many of the male Hollywood stars were away in action, so this film is led by the rather lightweight Bracken when really it needed James Stewart. Ella Raines is attractive and sympathetic but not as formidable in farce as film noir.

As is typical with Sturges, the cast is led by its eccentric support ensemble. William Demarest has a larger role than usual as a tough but interfering Sergeant. The film has real momentum considering it reflects on the state of the nation in such depth. But for all the wisecracks and insane plot twists, it's a bit short on laughs.

WC Fields' last classic is a return to the format of his best comedies of the early thirties; a series of sketches loosely tied to a single theme. Here Fields is Egbert Sousé (pronounced Sous-ay) a docile underdog who is an outcast in his own family. He keeps getting offered jobs, initially as the director of a film, and then as a bank detective.

Naturally Fields plays his famous persona, an old fashioned man traumatised by domesticity and the cynicism of contemporary life. He wrote the script which is fertile with his wild, Fieldsian flights of language: 'Don't be a luddy-duddy! Don't be a mooncalf! Don't be a jabbernowl!'

It's among the eight comedies which Fields made as a writer-actor which are the core of his appeal as an auteur. This isn't quite the equal of the great man's early talkies. And there is a brief, insulting role for a black actor. Arguably everyone is a distorted caricature in this world, but, it's still deplorable.

There are plenty of decent gags and an enjoyable silent film style car chase. Fields was getting old and heavier. This doesn't enhance the poignancy of the role like it does with many of the great comedians. Fields' character always was tragicomic; a little man in a small town who suffers a life of injustice and humiliation on behalf of us all.

This comedy drama was an adaptation of Philip Barry's Broadway hit which also starred Katherine Hepburn. She plays Tracy Lord, the entitled, shrewish daughter of a wealthy New England family, who has divorced CK Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) so she can marry an entrepreneur.  Instead, she learns important life lessons... and re-hitches to CK Dexter Haven.

The film was a star vehicle for Hepburn. The story covers the events of a society wedding, so it's an opportunity for audiences to glimpse the lavish lifestyle of the super-rich. But Barry does effectively examine the condition of inherited wealth, principally through the observations of a pair of sardonic news reporters (James Stewart and Ruth Hussey).

Stewart got the Oscar for Best Actor. And as usual he brings authenticity and heart. He and Hussey are a likeable team. Cary Grant is wasted in a support role. Hepburn is very convincing as the indulged heir to old money but lacks the charisma or sex appeal to suggest why such a cold, moralistic woman is so irresistible. And she is less persuasive as the humbled, more sympathetic Tracy.

It's a conservative social comedy about the class system, which is a home draw for director George Cukor. There are bountiful MGM production values. Some aspects don't play so well today, especially the easy ride given to Tracy's toxic dad. It offers insight into the psychology of privilege, but as a comedy it lacks wit and for a romance it wants for charm.

This is a shaggy dog story about the rise of a dishonest lunk who becomes State Governor solely because his shameless lawbreaking is a perfect match for American politics. This façade is managed by wealthy syndicates who run candidates on either side so they always win. The film is a comedy, perhaps because it was the only way of getting this cynicism past the censors.

By being receptive to corruption, McGinty (Brian Donlevy) goes from panhandling for dimes in the street to signing off public money to graft, getting rich in the process. Even his marriage to his secretary (Muriel Angelus) is a sham. Only once does McGinty behave with integrity, and it finishes him completely.

Which is a nice ironic sleight of hand from Preston Sturges on his debut as writer-director. It's a pretty dark comedy. With the expressionist shadows it even looks like a gangster film. The leads are acceptable, but as often with Sturges, the memorable performances come further down the cast list; among the gallery of Runyonesque reprobates, Akim Tamiroff excels as head of operations.

So, politics is a front for powerful interest groups, usually illegal. Sadly, it is all too believable. The film is fast moving and sharp with plenty of arresting dialogue. Full of irony but rarely actually funny. The slapstick is perfunctory. It's more of an interestingly satire about the US political system than a lot of laughs. But it is a clever, entertaining and even subversive film.

Breathless farce which is completely unlike any other Frank Capra comedy. There is no inspiring underdog here, it's pure comic mayhem. Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant) gets married. So it was a bad day to discover his two dotty aunts are serial killers who bury their victims in the cellar of their spacious New York guest house.

There are slamming doors, hidden bodies, unexpected guests and a vicar. So it's a proper farce. The best moments are a bit more subtle and reference Brewster's job as a famous theatre critic. The key gag is that Brewster's entire family suffers from hereditary insanity, implying drama critics are also nuts.

It all gets exponentially more frantic until in the last act...  when Cary Grant, the greatest ever comedy actor, is reduced one basic function; the double take. It's overkill. Grant performs with complete abandon. He deserves credit for being a sport, but he's too classy for this. The support comes off better, especially Josephine Hull and Jean Adair as the batty spinsters.

On Broadway, Boris Karloff played Brewster's sinister brother who has cosmetic surgery which leaves him looking like... Boris Karloff. Sadly he wasn't cast and Raymond Massey stood in. The film is fun and there are a lot of uncomplicated laughs. It's rated a classic Hollywood comedy but rarely gets mentioned among Capra's best films. Which is fair enough.

The universality suggested by the title is misleading. These are fashionable trophy wives of the Park Avenue wealthy elite who spend their lives shopping and being pampered and gossiping about each others' infidelities. And living in unspoken fear that as they sink into their thirties they will be replaced by a younger model.

While the film dallies with the trivial competitiveness of these mannequins in their natural habitat of fashion shows, lunch dates and beauty parlours, it's hilarious. When the film gets darker it loses its lustre. There are some long, tearful scenes between the divorcing Norma Shearer and her daughter which are hard, unpleasant work.

When the girls are pulling each other apart, it's thrilling. The film has no male actors. Every part (130+) is a woman on an MGM contract. My favourite is Rosalind Russell as the ultimate queen bitch who finds sport in wrecking Norma's marriage. Though there is a letdown when the promised superbabe who has her talons in the husband turns out to be a frumpy Joan Crawford...

George Cukor directs the abundance of dialogue with a light touch and a lot of style. There are fabulous, grandiose sets. It's great to see this amazing cast working together, with astute performances all the way down the credits. The Women satirises some pretty shallow people. With the world marching to war, Hollywood would change. These stories never stopped getting made; but not with all this glamour

This is a screwball murder-mystery like the earlier Thin Man series, but funnier. Miss Manton (Barbara Stanwyck) is a dizzy Park Avenue heiress who finds a body while walking her pedigree dogs. The police don't believe her because she's always pulling some madcap publicity scam which has the Lieutenant (Sam Levene) pulling his hair out.

So she investigates the crime herself with her gang of scatterbrained high society it-girls and a cynical crime editor played by a very well groomed Henry Fonda in a top hat. Manton's girlfriends roam the set like a herd of cats. Watching these forgotten Hollywood starlets bouncing around the faux-naif dialogue is a joy.

And Hattie McDaniel is typically polished as (yes) the sassy maid. The first half is pure comic whirlwind. The latter part focuses more on the mystery, which is less fun. Director Leigh Jason has no reputation, but it's a fast moving story and looks great, with an atmospheric, pre-noir look (Nicholas Musuraca).

Stanwyck and Fonda would go on to star together more famously in The Lady Eve. And they share some chemistry here too. There's a hilarious, frothy script (Philip Epstein) and the stars don't waste a line, including many sardonic remarks about class differences. It's an archetypal thirties mystery-comedy with plenty of Manhattan glamour and just a glimpse of the New York underworld.

The title of this oddity from Universal Studios  gave a name to a sub-genre of the horror film. It's a reflection on the state of England after the great war, crossed with a monster film.  On a stormy night, five contrasting characters stumble on a remote residence occupied by inbred grotesques. 

Which has a lot in common with Deliverance and many other fish-out-of-water horror-thrillers. The visitors must survive these human monsters, and their own, personal demons. They have to make it through the night, much as England had to survive its own existential darkness after WWI.

It's is a faithful adaptation of JB Priestley's novel, which is set in Wales, but here recreated on a Hollywood soundstage. James Whale directs with a really eccentric sense of the absurd, casting a mixture of oddball English expats like Boris Karloff and Ernest Thesiger, who are transformed by the legendary Universal effects team.  

Sadly, the film runs out of credibility on the hour and often soft pedals on its social themes. What remains is ultimately a fright film. Whale's peculiar sensibilities won't appeal to everyone. But there's pleasure to be had from watching this cast work together. Apart from the crazies, Charles Laughton brings the energy, Lilian Bond provides the heart and Gloria Stuart, the sex appeal.

In the same year as 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, Warner Brothers followed up with another musical comedy with many of the same cast, notably Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler. Busby Berkeley again arranged three extraordinary set pieces at the climax of the film to the songs of Dubin and Warren. Many critics consider this the best of the three.

Instead of Broadway, this one is set in a small film studio which makes live action 'prologues' for cinemas. James Cagney is the director/producer who is struggling because his shareholders are pocketing the profits and some heel is leaking ideas to a rival. Jimmy puts on his dancing shoes for the climactic Shanghai Lil. 

The story is familiar, but still functions. There's a brilliant gag when the censor gets caught in a clinch with a girl and exclaims: 'I was just showing her what you're not allowed to show in Kalamazoo!' Maybe there's an impression that Harry Warren is having to recycle tunes and the dialogue isn't as sharp as before. We miss Ginger Rogers and the sassy chorus line gals.

But Footlight Parade still triumphs, mainly because of Berkeley's amazing final trilogy: Honeymoon Hotel, By a Waterfall and Shanghai Lil . He's operating at the top of his range. The aquatic ballet, By a Waterfall, is one of the outstanding musical numbers in thirties cinema. Which means, in film history.

This was Astaire and Rogers' first co-starring musical, adapted from a show that Fred Astaire had played on Broadway. The Gay Divorce established the archetypes of their early films. There's the splendidly unctuous Eric Blore, the idiotic toff played by Edward Everett Horton and the excellent Erik Rhodes as a very flawed Italian lothario. Alice Faye plays Ginger Rogers' customary comic sidekick.

There is the usual glamour, the exotic studio locations of Paris, London and... Brighton. Big deco sets, fabulous clothes, sophisticated romance and some of the greatest ballroom scenes every captured on film. The dialogue is just fair but the mistaken identity plot is excellent. Ginger intends to force a divorce by being compromised in her room by a stand-in lover.

Only for Fred to turn up instead. And much farce ensues. But fans mainly bought a ticket for the musical numbers and they are brilliant. And not just the stars... An irresistibly peppy Betty Grable does a featured ragtime solo Let's K-nock K-nees which is a riot. Fred is so suave performing Needle in a Haystack as he prepares to hit London in his bowler hat.

Fred and Ginger are stunning in the eighteen minute epic The Continental, which won the Oscar for best song. But for the sheer joy of just seeing them together, the best part of the film is the duo presenting Cole Porter's Night and Day. It's a seduction. They go into the dance as prickly strangers and emerge as lovers. After Top Hat, this is the next best of Astaire and Rogers.

The title promises the jazz age hedonism of F. Scott Fitzgerald but this is actually quite a conventional romantic comedy which matches virginal smalltown girl Irene Dunne with metropolitan wolf, Melvyn Douglas. She has anonymously written a racy best seller as escape from her boring life in a rural southern backwater.

Douglas designs her book cover and then has designs on her virtue as he follows her back to Connecticut. He encourages her to shrug off the constraints of convention, and once liberated, she helps him escape from the influence of his wealthy, corrupt family. It's pertinent social history as censorship brought Hollywood under the control of conservative puritanism through the Production Code.

The main interest in the film now is that, at 38, it launched the comedy career of Irene Dunne, who was nominated for an Oscar. Next year she became a comic legend in The Awful Truth. Theodora Goes Wild isn't in that class. The script lacks wit, the direction is flat, and Melvyn Douglas plainly isn't Cary Grant. But there are flashes of her potential.

The support cast is capable rather than inspired. It has merit as a morality tale about the interface between responsibility and freedom. But crucially for a comedy, there are very few laughs. It creates a plausible, even poignant, impression of small town hypocrisy, suppressed emotions and wasted lives, but it is probably mainly of interest to students of screwball comedy.

Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper had starred together in Morocco (1930), her Hollywood debut. And it's a pleasure to see them reprise their partnership in Desire because they are both so suggestive of thirties A-list glamour. She is exotic in her shimmering white costumes, he is saturnine in a dinner jacket as the bewildered American adrift in European romance and adventure.

Frank Borzage was a great director but Desire is much more representative of its producer, Ernst Lubitsch. The story commences in his Paris of the imagination, among jewel thieves posing as aristocrats, before taking the screwball road to Spain. The audience is vicariously placed in Cooper's brogues as the naive tourist gets a fast education.

It's similar territory to Lubitsch's peerless Trouble in Paradise (1932), except by the mid thirties, censorship had put mitts on the famous Lubitsch touch. There is no real sexual risk taking here which makes the film much less exciting. The incidentals of the genre are still in place; the sophisticated stars, the amazing clothes, the swanky hotel suits. But there is no je ne sais quoi. And even less frou-frou.

By 1936, the screwball comedy had taken to the highways of America. Lubitsch's scenarios of elegant crooks posing as phoney toffs was old hat. Desire is fun but a little tired. There's some decent sitcom. And Marlene sings. But this kind of film was done better in the pre-code era when the Countess' gown could be a little more risky, and her innuendo too.

Screwball comedy about the diaspora of the Russian revolution... A married pair of destitute Russian aristocrats exiled in Paris take on a job as servants to the frantic family of a banker, and find living in the home of a capitalist to their liking. But when a prominent Bolshevik comes to dinner, old resentments are revived.

The problem with Tovarich is that the play by Jacques Deval is so wholeheartedly sympathetic to the aristocracy. Which probably suited Hollywood's anti-Red agenda going into WWII. The story completely whitewashes them and demonises the Communist. The film partly overcomes this impediment thanks to sensational performances and an unusually witty script.

Claudette Colbert and (a slimmed down) Charles Boyer are the émigrés forced into service. She is in a class of her own with comic dialogue of this calibre. The support cast is excellent, featuring an ominous performance from Basil Rathbone as the Soviet consul. There are evocative studio sets of the Paris ghettos which contrast with the wealth of the bankers.

The film ultimately gets bunged up with dubious politics. The best and funniest parts of the film are when the refugees ingratiate themselves into the rich French household, far more luxurious than they knew back home. Anatole Litvak's direction is mechanical, but the film remains viable thanks to the brilliant screwball stars.