Film Reviews by Steve

Sophisticated Euro-caper in the Hitchcock style, of the sort that became popular post Topkapi. Great stars make this fun, if unexceptional.

Sort of a British response to The Blackboard Jungle, set in the high rise slums of fifties Liverpool. David McCallum is a juvenile delinquent, and his gang of psycho-toughs features Freddie Starr and Melvyn Hayes (Gloria from It Ain't Half Hot Mum!). I mainly watched it for Stanley Baker's cop in pursuit of an arsonist. It is a solid film until the last twenty minutes, a shoot out in a school, which is excruciating rather than prophetic.

A singer-songwriter's music career in America ends in failure and he goes on to live a humble, but still unusual life on the mean streets of Chicago... Half a world away in South Africa, his songs live a life of their own, touching many people, and become tangled up in the protest against apartheid.

That set up is pure Frank Capra! This is a wonderful, inspiring and moving documentary, which delivers a pay off of quite delicious sentimentality. A remarkable story.

Sort of a Hammer art film, but Belgian. Slow, but engrossing. Trashy, but stylish. And sexy too. Namechecks the Elizabeth Bathory legend used in Countess Dracula.

The naked female vampire has bikini marks. But it's nice to know.

An endearing and dated look at hippy sensibility v establishment, and sixties sexual issues set on the beautiful Californian Big Sur. Burton and Taylor too old, but still very good.

Critics recently voted Hitch's Vertigo the best ever film. Maybe Hitch would be in with a shout for the worst as well, with this tortuous early sound film about an Irish family which spends an inheritance they mistakenly think is coming their way.

I watched this film merely to tick off the final Hitch.

Having done so, I want to warn others in my position, don't do it. Juno and the Paycock is a waste of your time, do something else. Paint the fence. Just don't watch this one. Even to complete the set.

The acting, the camera work, the patronising, tedious and contrived story...there are no positives.

Richard Lester directed some good films. But I think this isn't one of them. I like gloomy depressing films more than most. But not necessarily ones that feature Pete & Dud, Spike Milligan, Roy Kinnear, Arthur Lowe, Harry Secombe and Jimmy Edwards. It doesn't sap away any hope and optimism left in your tired soul because it's a black comedy about a post nuclear future. It kills your spirit because it is so badly written, unfunny and pointless.

Raquel Welch plays a post op sex change, who goes to Hollywood for extended picaresque encounters with trippy seventies weirdos with stupid names.

The only plus point of this sad film is the central appearance of seventies uber-sexbomb, Raquel Welch. But even that pleasure is destroyed by the pitiful appearance of a 75 year old Mae West, as a kind of living waxwork version of her former persona, delivering depressing double entendres to, among others, a pre 'tache Tom Selleck.

A beautiful woman has caused the downfall of many virtuous men. And while I wouldn't say Jennifer Jones exactly led me to the land of the rising sun, her magnificence did entice me to watch this awful soap noir that really should have been better.

Made by great Hollywood director King Vidor, with a brilliant cast, this tedious and absurd backwoods melodrama fails where so many others have: in trying for the exotic Southern poetry of Tennessee Williams, it only managed to be long winded, shrill and fatuous.

Probably a spoof of private eye films, involving the theft of a paralysing gas...

Or whatever. So many people asked to have their names taken off this, there weren't many credits left. Originally written by Cleese/Chapman, John Sessions was left bearing the responsibility. Involves many greats of British tv comedy, including the respected Spike Milligan. Their best work lies elsewhere.

About as far from Ernst Lubitsch that it is possible to get while still breathing air.

A film of such soporific aimlessness and self indulgence that it could only have been made by a stoned six former. A small cast of poshos in boating shoes, cream slacks and pretty frocks wander around a nice old house, occasionally visited by visions of a Victorian doll.

I would say it shows no signs of talent at any level, if only because it doesn't. (The director did make the distinctly ok, I Monster.) Though someone clearly has an interesting dressing up box. A cult classic for some. For others, a bewildering waste of time.

Three Edwardian men (odd trio Jimmy Edwards, David Tomlinson and Laurence Harvey) seek to escape their domestic woes, by whiling away some hours on a boat...

Many fine films have hung on flimsier hooks than this. It is the idiotic slapstick, the relentless jolliness, the faux hyper-poshness, the bonnets and all the cringeworthy cherchez-la-femming that make this such an ordeal.

A prostitute is killed in Nazi occupied Warsaw. One of three high ranking Generals is responsible...

A dud, all the more disappointing in that it was directed by the respected Anatole Litvak. An international cast competes to deliver the most misjudged performance; Tom Courtney wins for his cowardly, diffident womaniser.

With particularly poor script and editing, this unfocused film is way too long, and not quite weird enough to be fun.

This isn't a great film , but is easily the best of the old black and white Saint films, with Hayward a charismatic and ambiguous hero. Much better than George Sanders. Paul Guilfoyle and a startlingly young Jack Carson are great as a pair of idiot hoods.

At one time, Hitchcock was down to make this his first American film.

So-so period piece stolen by a cameo by John McGiver as a banking dullard with a fascination for ornithology; particularly in a scene where he teaches James Stewart how to walk... Otherwise, few laughs, but blandly inoffensive typical late Stewart harassed-dad farce.