Film Reviews by Steve

This initial feature length adaptation of Lew Wallace's 1880 bestseller is a cinematic landmark for its incredible action sequences and for its recreation of the ancient world. The famous 1959 remake far exceeds this in scale of production... but for my money the legendary chariot race* is more astonishing in the silent original.

And there is a more exotic, decadent dimension, most obvious in the costumes... Plus the moments in primitive Technicolor.  The massive Francis X. Bushman is one of the great screen villains as the Roman who commits Ben-Hur to a living hell on a slave galley. Ramon Novarro is impassively hunky/sexy as the obsessive hero who swears revenge.

There are problems with the pacing. The initial 15 minutes which recreate the birth of Jesus is sluggish, unnecessary and sticky with the usual Hollywood awe for religious themes. The dialogue scenes are inevitably difficult in silent films and this could have been more sharply edited. And the sentimental melodrama is off the scale!

But this matters less than it sounds because it is mostly action. There is the famous visual effect of the miracle of Ben-Hur's mother and sister's recovery from leprosy, within a single edit... but this probably has little impact unless you're looking for it. This is not so much a classic silent picture, but remains an impressive and epic action spectacular.

*Warning. Many horses had to be shot because of the barbaric attitude to animal welfare.

This is available as an extra with the 1959 version.

THE MYSTIC

This is unmistakably the work of Tod Browning, with the carnival setting and the outré storyline about the post WWI vogue for occult communications with the dead. A trio of Hungarian sideshow charlatans are tempted to New York to run fake seances to scam the rich.

 And of course their racket succeeds, then falls apart. Without the director’s usual star- Lon Chaney- there are minor actors, but still a decent ensemble cast, with Aileen Pringle charismatic as the exotic medium. And she gets to wear some eye-catching art deco costumes.

The early scenes are spooky and unsettling, and it remains interesting as the tricks of the trade are exposed. But eventually the narrative stalls before recovering for a decent climax. In the middle period there is an impression of filler to get it up to feature length. But this always is a handsome production.

The home video release has an eerie score (by Dean Hurley) with ambient audio effects, similar to the Movietone soundtracks of later silents. And this enhances the picture… This should be of interest to fans of Browning’s weird, dreamlike idiosyncrasies. And surely was an influence on Nightmare Alley?

FREAKS

This is such a groundbreaking horror picture mainly because it emerged from an existing community; the human exhibits exploited by travelling carnivals. Many of the actors actually made a living out of displaying their deformity. And also because what is on the screen is so subversive. Sometimes, it's hard to believe your eyes.

There is a love triangle between two ‘midgets’ played by Harry and Daisy Earles (actually brother and sister) and a 'big person’, a normal bodied trapeze artist (Olga Baclanova as Cleopatra). She wants his inheritance and so marries the much smaller man with the intention of ending his life.

This is an exploitation film. There’s a framing story which explains how Cleopatra  became a sideshow curiosity after the revenge of the 'freaks' which puts us in among the interested by-standers. We've bought a ticket, and we are voyeurs. And as the events are told by a carny barker, maybe the whole story is a fantasy and we are also mugs.

And perhaps the freaks aren't those with genetic mutations, but the normal woman and her accomplice, who seek to murder out of greed. The famous scene where the 'freaks' accept the bride, by chanting ‘one of us' is spellbinding. It’s an extraordinary experience, and not always easy to watch. There’s nothing else like this.

THE UNKNOWN

The wildest, craziest plot ever imagined. It is set in Madrid and claims to be a true story told by carnival workers! Lon Chaney plays a serial killer known to the police only by his unique double thumbs. So he binds up his arms and joins a travelling circus as a knife act, throwing daggers at a very young Joan Crawford with his feet. Who he loves...

Because of previous abuse, the girl can't stand to be touched. So she is neurotically repulsed by the attentions of the circus strongman (Norman Kerry). As the police close in, to hide his incriminating thumbs and to indulge her fetish, Chaney has both his arms removed by a surgeon he is blackmailing! 

Unfortunately, by the time he returns to the circus, the showgirl is over her phobia and married to the muscleman. The now insanely jealous knife thrower devises a hideous revenge! Phew! This is pretty uninhibited stuff. It was created by Tod Browning who left home as a child to join a circus. Chaney's upbringing was similarly unconventional.    

Many silent horrors have the illusory mania of a fever dream. And that is the attraction here. And it's a lot of fun watching Chaney (and his stand-in) act with his feet. There was an alchemy when Browning and Chaney worked together. It feels like absolutely anything is possible.

What looks like being Woody Allen's last American  film is a simple diversion about a pair of college kids separated in the eponymous circumstances who are snagged up in contrasting adventures. In a way, it takes us back to the director's early New York comedies...

Not just that Timothée Chalamet plays a lascivious/intellectual update of the old Woody persona, but more enjoyably, Elle Fanning clearly channels Diane Keaton in a delightful portrayal as a ditsy naif from small town, USA. She gives the screen a lot of light and energy.

And it takes us back to contemporary New York after the director's European period, to the sidewalks of the early classics. Fifty years on. If it all fades out with two lovers meeting in Central Park in the rain, it would feel appropriate. 

There's little plot, just a loose chain of events evoking the charm and romance of life (for the lucky) in the great metropolis and the sweet benevolence of chance. It doesn't feel like the work of an artist running down on inspiration and motivation. It is still fascinated by the hazards of the human heart.

One of many Alfred Hitchcock films made in a Hollywood studio but set in England with a predominantly British cast. It is a thriller from a novel by Francis Iles about a frumpy spinster (Joan Fontaine) who marries a dangerous sociopath (Cary Grant) and grows to fear for her life.

And that premise conceals a number of difficulties. In 1941, Fontaine was a very beautiful young woman and there is little about her character that is unappealing. And Grant was the great screwball star of the period, but a limited dramatic actor and his portrayal is idiotic.

But the main problem is derived from Hollywood star etiquette. The plot continually stretches plausibility until it eventually rips apart during a climax purely devised because RKO wouldn't let Cary Grant play a murderer. Still, despite these fundamental weaknesses, it's an entertaining film

This is mainly thanks to the Master's imaginative visual approach. It is shot in the emerging film noir style with its ominous house of shadows. Fontaine won the Oscar she deserved for Rebecca a year earlier, playing another vulnerable new wife. It's a flawed woman in peril thriller with a few nice moments of black comedy. 

Stunning crime melodrama, which in some ways hardly feels like an Alfred Hitchcock film at all; it's similar to the wave of b&w docu-noirs which swept US cinema in the '50s, in the wake of Italian neorealism. The premise of the innocent man accused of crime is pure Hitch, but this is much more naturalistic.

During the opening credits, a woman suddenly looks into the camera, to stress that this is intended to look like a documentary and a long, long way from the Hitchworld of spectacular set pieces and sexual innuendo with an icy blonde on a speeding train. He then throws in some jump cuts....

Henry Fonda plays a night club musician wrongly accused of robbery by a negligent and mediocre judicial system. And his life and marriage fall apart. Fonda and Vera Miles give deeper performances than we expect from Hitch. And Robert Burks photographs New York on location- in that candid Weegee style- at least as well as anyone else in the period.

Hitchcock introduces the film, to emphasise this is a true story. There are familiar themes of guilt, mental instability and the imperfection of justice, and it's as suspenseful as his thrillers. But this is different. Instead of a MacGuffin, we get social realism. This is Hitchcock goes New Wave. And he succeeds completely.

Like much of '30s screwball, this reflects on the economic realities of the depression. A Wall Street banker (Edward Arnold) is so enraged by his family's profligacy that he throws his wife's new mink coat over the balcony of his Manhattan penthouse. It lands on a working girl (Jean Arthur) on her way to the office, knocking her out of the orbit of her ordinary struggles.

She is sacked for the moral improprieties she is presumed guilty of to get the coat. But because she is thought to be the mistress of the third richest man in America, luxury traders lavish her with valuables when they draw the same conclusion. By chance (!) Arthur ends up giving a room in her penthouse suite to the slumming son (Ray Milland) of the banker..

Arthur is really very good as a bewildered working stiff carried far away by the tide of fate. Her hunger in the early scenes is palpable. She never feels fake and eclipses the faintly drawn support characters. Preston Sturges' script allows her to experience both sides of the depression.

There's a remarkable scene in an automated restaurant. The unemployed protagonist can't afford even these prices. A man washes in a glass of water. And we wonder how such extremes of wealth can co-exist. The banker treats everyone in his kingdom with contempt. The politics is woven into a charming and entertaining farce. But in Hollywood terms, this is quite subversive.

Billy Wilder revives the screwball comedy, about 20 years after its golden age. As was typical of his mentor Ernst Lubitsch, the director returns to Europe for his story, a '30s French farce called Fanfare d'Amour, and transplants it to the US, to the Chicago of the jazz age and prohibition.

Two musician pals (Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon) witness a gangland hit and go on the run in drag as part of a female swing group, fronted by Marilyn Monroe.  Screwball was usually about boy meets girl. Here, the two men drive the narrative. What we now call a bromance...

Their relationship is complicated by the predicament that they are disguised as two female jazz musicians and travelling with a party-hard girl band. Like most screwball comedy, it is a masquerade; characters pretend to be something they are not. The exception is Monroe, who doesn't know that Curtis is a man, so exposes her heart.

Marilyn was famously impossible on set, but delivers a performance (and a couple of good vocals), not just dumb blonde schtick. Lemmon and Curtis are inspired. On the threshold of the '60s, Lemmon succeeds Cary Grant as the great comedy star of his era. This is a fabulous spectacle of comic imagination. 

The second of six films directed by Marcel Carné between 1938-46, which are the foundation of French poetic realism. Though without his usual screenwriter  Jacques Prévert, there is more realism, and less poetry. It's an ensemble melodrama set among the residents of the title address.

What makes this most like other Carné films is the romantic pessimism of the central story about a juvenile couple who can't make a living in the depression, so check in to execute a double suicide. Annabella and Jean-Pierre Aumont are extremely beautiful and affecting in the roles.

There's a wonderful support cast of French character actors, but the emphasis of their stories is unbalanced by the charisma of Arletty and Louis Jouvet as a sex worker and her pimp. Watching them bicker while shacked up in bed spotlights how much more adult late '30s French cinema was than Hollywood.

There is an awful lot of infidelity going on! The huge set of the Canal St. Martin and Maurice Jaubert's romantic score bring atmosphere. It's arguably the least of Carné's releases around the war years, but the image of the young lovers wrestling malign fate in the dark of their temporary room is among his most potent.

After the success of Dracula, Universal studios rushed Frankenstein into cinemas later the same year. And it is an improvement in every respect. The direction of James Whale co-ordinates the production with greater imagination. And there is obviously more money for costumes, effects and set design. And crucially, for Jack Pierce's monster makeup.

He transforms Boris Karloff as the reanimated cadaver into a screen legend. Though I'd prefer him mute rather than that weedy growl. The performances are fine, with Colin Clive expressive as the monomaniacal Doctor Frankenstein. Dwight Frye stands out as the hunchback. There's some witless comic relief and a weak romantic subplot, but still clocks in at a taut 70m.

This is a blockbuster and Whale doesn't labour the subtext of Mary Shelley's classic novel. We get another story about mankind overreaching itself and being punished. But there is an engaging impression that the monster is looking for a father. And so being brought to life by lightning, Karloff quite poignantly reaches to the stormy sky, like a forlorn child.

It's more transgressive than Dracula and still delivers a few shocks; like the monster's killing of the hunchback. It's a proto-mad scientist film which borrows heavily from German expressionism but has artistic merit of its own. The editing is excellent. And Karloff as the agonised victim of Frankenstein's hubris, is an icon of the decade and the emerging horror genre.

The Baron (Herbert Marshall) and the Countess (Miriam Hopkins), share a romantic supper in his swanky hotel in Venice. But soon they tumble each other as fellow con artists. After they have returned their stolen trinkets, they move to Paris together and steal a diamond covered handbag from a rich perfumer (Kay Francis).

Marshall finagles a job as the tycoon's secretary and develops romantic feelings for her while embezzling a fortune from the company. But Hopkins wants him for herself. It's a love triangle, except two of the lovers are kleptomaniacs trying to gyp the third, and each other.

Marshall is very much at home in Ernst Lubitsch's Paris.  But it's Hopkins film, in a performance that goes a long way to establishing a female archetype of the screwball comedy, with her blend of the ditzy, impulsive and volatile.  

The dialogue is witty and the farce is adorable. But it's also a comedy of manners which refers to Trotsky and the wages of the poor. Surprising and imaginative at every twist this is the last word on the sophisticated comedy which was Lubitsch's gift, set in the romantic destinations of Europe, places of irony, charade and repartee. And scandal. 

This violent gangster-noir is dominated by Broderick Crawford as a tough cop who goes undercover among New York longshoremen to investigate criminal activity- including murder- by the union. This is three years before On the Waterfront. So HUAC would appreciate its politics, even if it does feature a corrupt policeman.

The plot is driven by the search to expose the gang boss. Which will come as a surprise, and the jeopardy of the special agent makes this a potent thriller. The clunky wisecracks which Crawford has to constantly spit out are a weakness, but his aggressive, kinetic performance supplies the film's energy.

He created variations on this character for the rest of the decade. There are familiar faces in minor roles. Charles Bronson is an uncredited dockworker and Ernest Borgnine a supercilious heavy. Best of all, Neville Brand re-runs his schtick as the sneering, sadistic goon. Somehow he gets better dialogue than anyone else.

There is expressionism and the action is melodramatic, but it's the look of grainy realism which impresses. This is a dirty waterfront of desperate men. The female roles are peripheral. Once the postwar vogue for classic noir began to fade, the gangster picture returned. Though this isn't well known, it's among the more successful.

There was a revival of prison films after WWII when the punishment of crime became a hot topic in US news. Maybe because many returning combat veterans had experienced POW camps. This isn't among the best of these. It's mainly of interest as a remake of one of the classics of the first wave of big house melodramas, Howard Hawks' The Criminal Code.

It worked better in 1931, in the wild, permissive precode days when it felt raw and strange. The realism no longer stacks up in more regulated times. And it makes exactly the same case for reform as it did in the age of prohibition. Broderick Crawford plays the liberal lawyer who becomes governor and attempts to introduce more humane strategies.

But why is his daughter (Dorothy Malone) involved in rehabilitating prisoners, as a sort of hobby? She develops an unlikely romance with Glenn Ford, incarcerated for punching a rich blowhard in a bar... who fell awkwardly and died. Eventually, it gets tangled up in clichés and too many improbable things happen to enable an acceptable outcome.

Henry Levin was a director who could make a small budget go a long way, but the elementary lighting betrays a rushed production and exposes studio sets which look phoney in an age of location shoots. It's never dull or sanctimonious, and the performances are sincere, but Brute Force (1947) had already broken new ground for the prison film.

Cult heist-noir which re-entered public consciousness 40 years later when mentioned as an influence on Reservoir Dogs. The title suggests the kind of docu-noir which was going out of vogue by '52, but actually it's a tough, twisty crime thriller which reflects the postwar relaxation of censorship; the suggestion of police brutality is unexpectedly candid.

The usual first two acts of the heist film- the plan and the operation- are over in 15 minutes. This is all about the disintegration. A discredited former police chief (Preston Foster) brings together a gang of degenerate hoodlums to hold up an armoured car. Under masks- so they cannot identify each other- they agree to divide the swag when the heat is off.

Most of the action takes place in a Mexican tourist resort for the big payoff. John Payne plays an innocent party snagged up in the enterprise... and gradually the story gets less interesting, especially his romance with Coleen Gray. He hasn't the star quality to spice up the longueurs. But there's an incredible support cast as the crooks: Jack Elam, Lee Van Cleef and Neville Brand!

The script says Payne wins the confrontation, but they dominate the screen. The primary noir theme of greed is dominant, and Payne- the ex-marine who loses out in the postwar settlement- is a genre archetype, yet this doesn't have the pessimism of the '40s classics. It's a cute caper with an effective climax, but the slender intrigue is overextended.

Hugely commercial comedy-western loosely inspired by a pair of real old time outlaws. Paul Newman (Cassidy) and Robert Redford discovered the formula for thousands of future buddy pictures with the none too smart leader matched with a constantly bellyaching sidekick.

And it’s their chemistry which is the best part of the film. There isn’t any period realism or interesting thematic dimension, it’s just a fun action-adventure. It hardly feels like a western at all with Burt Bacharach's pop soundtrack- including the incongruous hit Raindrops Keep Falling On my Head.

George Roy Hill had surely been studying the Nouvelle vague- this takes plenty from Jules et Jim (1962) in particular. Maybe the bicycle was intended as disclosure! But, despite its New Hollywood credentials, this is really a throwback to the knockabout western spoofs of Howard Hawks.

It is episodic and the lack of a compelling narrative makes for occasional drag, though the sketches usually work. It won a deserved Oscar for cinematography, among seven nominations. There was nothing for the stars, but it’s the combo of Newman and Redford at their peak which is the main reason to watch. 

First runout for Clint Eastwood as the iconoclastic Harry Callaghan, the impassive detective who keeps San Francisco safe for effete liberals while impeded by their rulebook. With his .44 Magnum he’s like a lawman from a western. And for a while, there was public controversy over his right wing fundamentalism.

Which now feels exaggerated. Though Harry is likely to tickle the prejudices of those who don’t like how the world changes. And this is an incredibly sleazy America. Like Pottersville actually happened. Harry is from the generation who missed out, while the kids turned on and tuned in.

So he works, while they play. And now he’s chasing a serial killer while the law protects the criminal. Andrew Robinson is memorable as Scorpio, the whiny psychopath who knows his rights. And it’s suspenseful and expertly directed by Don Siegel. Though it all gets a little absurd towards the climax.

It’s astonishing how far the crime film evolved in the decade since Siegel’s earliest noirs. This city of freaks, dropouts and junkies is unrecognisable. With the urban decay, Lalo Schifrin’s sensational jazz-funk score and the laconic star, this landed at just the right time and became a phenomenon.