Film Reviews by Steve

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.

Sam Fuller took the American gangster film to Tokyo and turned its classic b&w expressionism into brilliant Technicolor. It is a remake of the 1948 film noir, The Street With No Name. Robert Stack goes undercover in occupied Japan to infiltrate a gang of former US soldiers who have established a syndicate.

While the film is set against a backdrop of national regeneration, it isn't political. It's a straight thriller. It captures Japan in the spasm of great change, but its vision is more touristic. There's a fabulous lingering shot of Mount Fuji. There's the Imperial Hotel, and an exciting (Hitchcock influenced) finale on the rooftop of the Tokyo Amusement Park.

The racketeers are led by Robert Ryan, who has the hoodlum's customary vanity; his gunmen wear some amazing suits and look as stylish as any screen gang, ever. There is an unmissable homosexual relationship between Ryan and his number one boy, which makes a stronger impact than the tepid inter-racial romance between Stack and Shirley Yamaguchi. Both were contrary to the production code in 1955.

House of Bamboo isn't immersed in the sleazy lowlife typical of Fuller's work, or have his usual energy. It wasn't a project he initiated or his screenplay. But there are some stunning camera setups, a fair amount of suspense and great locations. It wasn't the first colour crime film of the fifties, but the striking use of CinemaScope makes it groundbreaking and Fuller adapts the technology with flair.

This incredibly gloomy road noir is the best of the low budget crime pictures Anthony Mann made after the war. It's a love triangle. Joe (Dennis O'Keefe) escapes from prison and flees with a reluctant member of his legal team (the excellent Marsha Hunt), and his jealous moll (Claire Trevor) who loves him submissively and unconditionally.

The narrative is related by Trevor like a sombre dream, accompanied by the joyless drone of a theremin. Her introspective reverie is ethereal, like she is already dead. The real star of the film is the cinematographer (John Alton) who fills the screen with looming squares of inky darkness which have the oppressive expressionist dread of a Mark Rothko painting.  

The fugitive searches for the gangsters who sent him down with the promise of a financial sweetener. Only they have decided not to pay up. Raymond Burr and John Ireland are hugely intimidating as the hit men who try to rub out their former partner while the police chase him down to Mexico.

Luckless Joe is another poor sucker lost on the dark roads of film noir. It is a powerful, melancholy film, with its compromised, cursed figures always moving in and out of the enfolding shadows. The familiar story is slim but its heavy, clinging fatalism has a way of staying in the memory.

Ultra-low budget action thriller which spent most of the bottom line on its stars, including film noir legends Lizabeth Scott and Dan Duryea. There's a familiar set up; a comfortable married couple (Scott and Arthur Kennedy) are out driving when a man in a passing car throws a blackmail payoff into their back seat. The sleazy extortionist, (Duryea, of course) comes after them for his mislaid $60,000.

The swaggering Duryea is a man you love to hate, but he is outclassed. Scott plays one of the most relentlessly vicious femme fatales in noir. She will hold onto that windfall at any price. When her honest husband acts to hand it in to the cops, she shoots him and sinks his body in a lake. It's possible even to feel sympathy for the blackmailer when he is ruthlessly poisoned to settle who should keep the loot.

Scott plays a materialistic, suburban American housewife. Surely the extreme lengths that she goes to satisfy her greed is meant to be satirical. She has never been poor, she wants money to give her status in the middle class. So she is not outgunned by the other wives. There is even a hint that she may have helped along the suicide of her first husband when he proved to be an insufficient provider.

The sets and back-projection are pitifully cheap but the film's strengths dwarf its limitations. Scott is wonderfully degenerate in another of her noir bad girl roles. Sex is merely a negotiating stategy. There is something dreamy about her hushed, slurred delivery. She is aroused by wealth. Plausibility isn't always a priority, but this is a compelling morality tale, with a tasty script.

Short but thrilling film noir set in a news office. It was adapted from a Sam Fuller novel and it punches like his films, with an extrovert swagger and dialogue that sounds like headlines. The star editor (Broderick Crawford) kills the wife he left twenty years earlier when she threatens to expose his past to the rival tabloids, which are as rapaciously unprincipled as his own.

The newsman is conflicted. He wants to hide his crime and his sleazy background, but he can't deny the populist urge to sell papers. So he puts his top reporter (John Derek) on the story of the dead woman and blows it up big. A lavish bonus has been promised to the editor. Sales go through the ceiling but the trail leads right to his desk.

This is a fabulously entertaining film, driven by a lively, hardboiled script and unpretentious direction. It pulses with energy, especially in the fast talking newsroom scenes. The cast lacks a little sparkle in places, with Donna Reed insufficiently sassy, but Derek is effectively sordid and Henry Barnes is memorable as a former Pulitzer prize winner who has drunk his way down to skid row.

The locations are anchored in the New York lowlife, among the drunks and bums, hock-shops, scummy hotels and, well, tabloid newspapers. It's a light satire on the press. Derek finds redemption when he rejects their corrupt methods. Crawford's constant justification for dealing in murder and vice is 'it will sell papers'. In the end, he flogs his own dirty washing and makes his biggest sale. He can't deny his nature.

Unusual, code-busting melodrama which can be read as a parable on American capitalism. Tyrone Power plays a charismatic narcissist who works up from a fairground conman to the lucrative spiritualism racket. He exploits everyone in his path until he is destroyed by a similarly fake psychotherapist (Helen Walker) who sends The Great Stanton into a spiral that ends at absolute zero; a geek in a sideshow.

This is the performance of Power's career as the unscrupulous, ambitious clairvoyant who seems to see into people's souls, and can turn it into cash. He is matched by a sensational portrayal from Helen Walker as the well bred shrink to the rich Chicago elite. When one of them must be sacrificed, Stanton's lack of class ensures it is him.

All the cast are exceptional. Ian Keith is devastating as the alcoholic deadbeat whose demise Stanton's story arc will imitate. His pitiful death is appalling. Joan Blondell is Oscar-worthy. This should have been a big award winner, but was just too unorthodox. It was an ambitious production though; Fox built a large fairground and filled it with real carnival acts. The noir photography is another big plus.

Nightmare Alley is pessimistic and disturbing and psychologically complex. It is surprising it was passed by the censors, especially as it equates religion with spiritualism... and Power and Blondell's relationship is unusually sexually frank for the time. Director Edmund Goulding usually made romances but this allegorical noir is one of the great films of the fifties.

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.