Film Reviews by Steve

An archetypal portrait of life in the English home counties in the first years of WWII, and a sanitised vision of the shock and havoc unleashed by the Luftwaffe. The Minivers are an upper middle class family in a rural village hardly changed since the Domesday Book, where everyone knows their place. Much of the narrative centres on the competition for the best rose at the village fête...  

Mrs. Miniver (Greer Garson) is a frivolous but kind and resourceful woman of the type that would become the unsung heroes of the home front. She captures a grounded Nazi pilot at gunpoint! Her husband (Walter Pidgeon) sails with the light rivercraft over the Channel to Dunkirk. Her charming son joins the RAF, and marries the daughter of the local aristocracy.

They adapt through courage and sacrifice. It's typical for UK viewers to be sniffy about Mrs. Miniver because it creates an Americanised impression of little England, with its arcane customs and preoccupation with class. But this was the actual model for many British homefront films made in the war years. And William Wyler's images would be copied many times before VE Day.

Mrs. Miniver was a gift from Hollywood, from MGM, to the British war effort. Production was started before Pearl Harbour, before the US officially entered the war. It helped reverse American isolationism. It's a sentimental film, but brilliant propaganda. Greer Garson won the Oscar and she's perfect casting. Of course her character is an ideal, but she became a symbol of the war effort.

This is the classic Hollywood adaptation of Jane Eyre, but in editing Charlotte Brontë's lengthy novel down to 97 minutes, it isn't all that faithful. Still, there's a brief outline of the story and it is a rich gothic melodrama with some evocative visual expressionism. And there is a stark representation of the hardships of Victorian life for the poor and powerless.

The plot is so episodic that it feel like watching a video game as Jane passes through the levels of hardship and shame necessary to become the wife of Mr. Rochester: her uncaring family; the brutal school; the scorn of the spoiled gentry; Rochester's insane wife. There's little idea of the ruthless determination Jane needs to survive, or of her own egotism.

A jowly Orson Welles draws Rochester in dark, deep lines. There is a genuine spark with Joan Fontaine's pale, vulnerable Jane. It's yet another Fontaine vehicle where we are advised by the script that she is a plain looking woman. Which she isn't. She does dress down though. Eventually her silent anguish stalls the film but it's a definitive performance.

When Jane is sent to a dismal, isolated institution as a child she is well played by Peggy Ann Garner. It's startling to see an eleven year old Elizabeth Taylor as her sickly friend. It's a shame that the studio exteriors of the moors are so poor, but the menacing, shadowy interiors are excellent. It's an entertaining historical romance, with the profound horror of the novel replaced with noir atmospherics.

Delirious southern soaper set in New Orleans in 1852. Bette Davis is a headstrong, vain aristocrat of the slave owning class who loses her industrious, progressive fiancé (Henry Fonda) when she wears a scarlet dress to a ball when the convention was for maidens to wear white. After her capriciousness leads to the death of Fonda's brother in a duel, she seeks redemption during an epidemic of yellow fever.

The deep south setting allows an exotic, febrile melodrama even before the disease arrives. It's all top hats, billowing petticoats, neoclassical architecture and southern hospitality. Davis' blue blooded belle isn't likeable, but she gives star performance, creating a profound personality. The male characters are just context, even Fonda. She deservedly won the Oscar.

The portrayal of the slaves is uncomfortably careless. The North leaning Fonda is obviously a more liberal thinker, but the scene when the black characters express their excitement to be back on the plantation is hard to forgive. There is some mitigation. William Wyler portrays the haughty, rich southerners as misguided, even stupid, and about to be swallowed up by history.

The end when Davis accompanies the dying Fonda to the plague island is plainly preposterous but it gets by because of the exalted climax to Max Steiner's score. There's a handsome production generally. The ballroom scene is classic Hollywood. Jezebel is the work of a talented director at a great studio but the iniquities of slavery are less a concern to Warner Brothers than Bette's costumes.

Still the biggest box office hit ever, adjusted for inflation, David Selznick's lavish blockbuster is the ultimate Hollywood production of the studio era. It's a faithful adaptation of Margaret Mitchell's bestseller of the American Civil War and the epic romance between tempestuous southern belle Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) and rakish soldier of fortune Rhett Butler (Clark Gable).

It's a spectacular landmark, but flawed and the cracks now dominate the picture. Scarlett survives the burning of Atlanta, but the film doesn't, and the second half is episodic and repetitive. There's a birth or serious accident or death along every five minutes like a speeded up soap opera. Characters change and then forget they've changed. The portrayal of the slaves is heartbreaking and unforgivably cruel.

There is a sumptuous, colourful production. Max Steiner's score carries the second half of the film. Otherwise it's the performances that keep the film alive. Scarlett is an absurd archetype, but Vivien Leigh just about makes her credible over four hours through sheer star willpower. Gable has little to do other than twinkle roguishly but Hattie McDaniel and Olivia de Havilland at least make you care.

The troubled pre-production shows. There were many writers and three directors. The film has fallen apart. Politically it is hard to stomach. Late in the film it is strongly implied that Butler and a few male cohorts have joined the Ku Klux Klan! Now the film has become sucked into controversy it is promoted as an opportunity to reflect on the values of a vanished civilisation. But that's too much to ask.

Six years after Of Human Bondage, Bette Davis starred in another Somerset Maugham adaptation. But this time, with the Production Code at full tide, greater compromises had to be made. Davis empties her revolver into the body of her lover because he has has married a Chinese woman in colonial Singapore, but she cannot go unpunished as she does in the source play.

Bette gives one of her best and most interesting performances. Her character is lying for most of the film and she performs behind an inscrutable visage which doesn't signify a stiff upper lip, but her intent to not betray her guilt. And the suppressed Malayan locals are similarly impassive, unable to express themselves honestly before these corrupt, entitled occupiers.

The scene between Gale Sondergaard as the grieving wife and her husband's murderer is a meeting of masks. The unctuous facade of Victor Sen Yung as a Singaporean lawyer acting as a go-between for the two women is another deception. James Stephenson is excellent as Bette's biddable British lawyer who hides behind a mirage of ethical purity. The message is plainly anti-empire.    

The studio recreation of the east is exotic but plausible. Davis' costumes by Orry-Kelly are elegant. The camerawork is mobile and eloquent and very artistic, with the expressionist photography painting the fluttering, white-laced and guilty heroine within its shadowy net. Though censorship was an impediment, this is one of William Wyler's greatest films.

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.