Film Reviews by Steve

Class paranoia  as Dirk Bogarde's obsequious, cockney valet turns the table on James Fox's effete toff in a schematic confrontation which concludes with Bogarde ruling the house and Fox wearing the pinny. This is probably Bogarde's greatest performance, a brilliant vehicle for Harold Pinter's sardonic, oblique dialogue. He is dangerous, hypnotic, watchful, and exactly as exploitative, degenerate and entitled as the aristocrat he seeks to dominate. And Bogarde is well on top of the sexual ambiguities. The film is an intellectual game played out by Losey within a single location or combat zone, the aristocrat's house (which the Servant proceeds to decorate to his own taste in darker colours). It is strikingly photographed within that space by Douglas Slocombe, with musical shading added by Johnny Dankworth and Cleo Laine. One of the key UK film of the sixties.

I think A Taste of Honey is easily Tony Richardson's best film. It was shot around Salford, and the location work feels authentic, and Rita Tushingham scores with an artless portrayal of a sixteen year old girl unexpectedly faced with pregnancy and motherhood. But I don't think of this film as part of the working class cycle that characterised the British new wave. Those characters are usually taking advantage of a trickle down of opportunity and prosperity, and imparting a new, unfamiliar vernacular. A Taste of Honey is about people that economic upturns never reach, the poor and the uneducated, rather than being a new idea about the proletariat. It has more in common with the films of the depression, like Love on the Dole (1941) though with a lighter touch, greater humour and free from ideology. What I most like about the film, is the poetry in Shelagh Delaney's lines that describe her protagonist's confusion and fear: it's not the darkness outside that scares me... It is a remarkable script from Delaney, written when she was only nineteen and it is her work that makes the film so special.

When this film was released, and when the book by Ludovic Kennedy this was based on was published, it was received as a condemnation of the death penalty inspired by Timothy Evans (superbly played by John Hurt) being wrongly hanged for the murder of his wife. That was my initial response to the film. Many years later I found the foul depravity, the dismal viciousness of John Christie, as portrayed in Richard Attenborough's astonishing performance had swallowed the film whole. His oppressive hypnotic psychosis was nearly all I could see. Fleischer created an awful world for Christie to operate in, a phlegmy, yellowy world in which this spider caught, murdered and raped his ignorant, innocent victims. Fleischer seems to indict the poverty and lack of education that allowed Christie to thrive in the darkness. A stunning, repulsive performance by Attenborough, and a film that seems to have gained in status as the years have passed.

Hard to believe a film critiquing the racism in 1950s London could hit so relatively few bum notes when viewed from 2020. Dearden and scriptwriter Janet Green teamed up for a pair of films about prejudice and social injustice in this period (Victim, 1961). Sapphire is a black woman who has been 'passing for white' in a London where being black imposes so many impediments, which this film goes on to expose. When she is found dead on Hampstead Heath, a traditional police procedural drama is set in motion, with racial hatred the likely motive for the killing. The cast is superb, especially Nigel Patrick as the liberal police inspector, Earl Cameron as a GP and the victim's more obviously black brother, and the always excellent Yvonne Mitchell as a lonely mother consumed by anger and resentment. The camera work is fluid and dynamic and for a message film, it is hugely entertaining. Anyone determined to look for dated attitudes to race will inevitably find them. But the heart of this film is huge compassion for the bigotry and poverty suffered by so many of the Windrush generation on arriving in the UK.

Clarke earned a reputation for making violent and uncompromising dramas for the BBC, and when his Play for Today version of this story was shelved by the broadcaster, he and writer Roy Minton made an even more brutal cinema version. Scum is the best prison drama the UK (probably any country) has ever made, and that includes the many POW films. It is a sensational exposure of the British borstals of that period, soon to be abolished. The story centres around two offenders' fight for the supremacy of their part of the system, to be the 'daddy'. A battle ultimately won by Ray Winstone's Carlin. These prisons socialise the inmates to conform with the prevailing culture, but the values they learn to adhere to, are utterly insane. No one survives. The institution and the sentences are incidental to the real savagery of the experience; these boys brutalise each other. The rape and subsequent suicide of one of the characters is particularly harrowing. This is a film where the lack of budget actually enhances the look of the drama. All is grim, and hostile, and malign. 

A tour de force from Tom Hardy, as he is filmed in monologue on a car journey in real time; we hear his side of a series of conversations on his car phone. It is a testament to Hardy's great performance that such an impediment is overcome with ease, and the film is so compelling and emotionally rewarding. Similar credit should go to the writer/director Steven Knight, who creates a world of loneliness, and alienation and a sense of a country which has lost its way. Hardy finds himself divided between his work as a construction manager, and his responsibility to a woman he had an affair with, who is going into labour. Really, it is a character on a journey to find integrity and honour, and overcome the obstacles of his own family and environment. It is about learning how to be a man.  

This was a great leap forward for Dirk Bogarde who was never quite so convincing before Hunted. He portrays a murderer who travels across country with a small boy (John Whiteley) who has witnessed his crime. The boy is abused by his guardians and is starved of love and hungry with the need to give affection. They flee north pursued by the police and of course, their relationship deepens and they effectively save each other. It is an episodic road film in which the pair cannot trust anyone but each other. I think this is the best of Charles Crichton's many fine films for Ealing, it is understated for such a melodramatic narrative, the evocation of industrial Britain is satisfying and we really care about these two. There were quite a few films made after the war about a child's unconventional relationship with a surrogate parent (these two made another, The Spanish Gardener), and this is one of the best examples.

Gréville had a career in France before moving to the UK in the thirties and was something of a stylist. He transformed unremarkable scripts into imaginative visual works not usual for such budgets. Noose is British film noir, a story of a pair of sparring reporters (Carole Landis in her last role before killing herself, and an anodyne Derek Farr) up against the mafia. And while that doesn't sound likely, particularly as Landis works in the fashion department, it is merely the setting for Gréville's directorial elan, and a few startling performances. Joseph Calleia is memorably menacing as the mob boss, his principle tools being intimidation, torture and a lack of brains. Landis brings some attractive screwball glamour. But, not so much stealing the film, as heisting the whole venture intact, is Nigel Patrick as a motormouth go-to front office mafia fixer. One of the great performances in British films, massively enjoyable, and credit Gréville for allowing Patrick to dominate to such great effect. The film pitches awkwardly between violence and comedy, and the ending is a disaster, but this is a classic because of the directors visual style and Patrick's superb characterisation.

It's often said that great books make bad films but that is clearly untrue and here is a prime example. This is a wonderful adaptation of L.P. Hartley's classic memory novel, scripted by Losey's frequent collaborator, Harold Pinter. The story is set in 1900, so it is late Victoria but visually it creates what is now my image of Edwardian rural England, across the class divides. A boy spends the summer at a country estate passing illicit messages between Julie Christie's aristocratic beauty, and Alan Bates' earthy farmer. The boy, Leo is unable to understand the repercussions of the relationship he helps to prosper. It is a slow, languid film set in the long summer of our distant pasts against the grey, drizzly world of the grown up Leo's present reality. From where he understands the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Losey is another American who made his way to the UK to escape the scrutiny of HUAC and his filmography is like a red album of consistent hits (with Modesty Blaise his Yellow Submarine).

Performance has gained a reputation as a classic British gangster film but really it is a modernist work about identity. The performers, particularly James Fox (Chas) and Mick Jagger (Turner) change under each other's influence, and their sexuality blurs. Performance owes much more to Ingmar Bergman's Persona than it does to the Krays, violent though it is. Donald Cammell wrote the quotable script under the influence of Joe Orton, full of cheeky, threatening non-sequiturs. Nicolas Roeg was responsible for the head-movie visuals which I think are the main attraction, the film increasing representing an acid trip, including the scenes played backwards and the strong colour themes. Warner Brothers apparently thought they were getting The Rolling Stones' version of a Hard Day's Night and were shocked by the sexual content and how grimy it all looked and shelved it for two years. It has become a cult favourite, better known as years go by.

Olivier cut the great play down (it's still 150 minutes!), particularly the (edgy, paranoid) comedy and left us with a film about identity as we journey deeper into the prince's state of anxiety and insecurity. It is in deep focus black and white and set in an Elsinore of yawning shadows and expressionist perspectives. It's basically Shakespeare-noir. The film is all about Olivier, and though there is a fine cast, his performance mostly eclipses them. And though Larry was too old (at 41, his mother was played by Eileen Herlie who was 30) it's still a brilliant portrayal and the film is my choice for the best of the Bard on screen. And it won the best film Oscar, which I think still makes it the only wholly British produced film to do so.

Mike Leigh had seemed to have lost his alchemic ability to distil contemporary life in the mid noughties, and how timely he should return to form in 2008. The year the banker's crash triggered austerity. The period when social media began to amplify the splintering of England. It is from the frontiers of this divided nation that Leigh and his cast are reporting. The brilliant Sally Hawkins lives the personality of the title; but she is tough and combative as she needs to be given that experience will burn away your optimism like a match. The core of the film is the exposure of her dayglo, might-never-happen but sincere and conscientious primary school teacher to a trigger-unhappy, randomly prejudiced conspiracy-theorist driving instructor created by Leigh regular Eddie Marsen. Happy-Go-Lucky emotionally channels the anger, the passive aggressive anxiety which is the hum in the wires of the circuits of contemporary British life. Typically the film has divided its audience hugely! Here we are, twelve years on and it seems all the more prescient that Leigh made this when he did. 

So wretched were Roger Corman's early films (Viking Women, The Wasp Woman) that it's tempting to look at his this later horror classic and wonder if there is some other hand at play. Maybe Twilight Zone veteran Charles Beaumont who wrote the literate and philosophical script. Or Nicolas Roeg who filmed the rich colour palette of the six illustrative rooms. True, Corman's work had improved in the sixties, and his other Poe derived films were fine, but this is on another level. It is a medieval allegory (influenced by Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal according to Corman) about how unchecked power will have a tendency to end in atrocity, Vincent Price is perfect as Prospero, the aristocratic Satanist who machinates as the plague closes in on the domicile of his empire. Corman criticised his British crew for working too slowly. This was made in five weeks rather than his usual four! But they produced the the best film of his long career.

Arthouse parable on the interface between colonialism and indigenous culture. This is a brilliant blend of atmospheric strains, including the ambient silences, John Barry's spiritual orchestral score, the otherness of the South Australian outback locations and Roeg's own woozy, narcotic images. The whole film is carried by a seventeen year old Jenny Agutter, Aboriginal debutant David Gulpilil and the director's eight year old son, Luc Roeg and hardly anyone else is on screen. Roeg's work was philosophical and idiosyncratic and usually incorporated improvisation, broken time structures and unusual casting. They make for a strong deep vibration of eeriness. The whole is then balanced by two contrasting conclusions, both disquieting in their different ways.

Sumptuous art film, dense with wit and visual imagination. I'm not a big Fellini enthusiast, who this film repeatedly references, but that was no impediment to liking this film, one of my favourite of the century. An Italian state-of-the-nation film whose bitter world view works for anywhere in the west. Be sure to watch the beautiful, poignant closing credits.