Film Reviews by Steve

Weighty melodrama adapted from Clifford Odets' social realist Broadway play about an adultery. Of course, at the height of the Production Code there was only so much a Hollywood film could say and show on this subject and the ending especially is compromised. But Fritz Lang shades the film with some noir atmospherics and the interesting cast makes the film worthwhile.

A hard-luck dame (Barbara Stanwyck) returns to her home town, a fishing port on the California coast. On the rebound, she marries a dull stalwart (Paul Douglas) but then falls into a stormy affair with his boozy braggart best friend (Robert Ryan). That's already a decent cast-list, and a pre-stardom Marilyn Monroe also appears...

...as a worker in a fish processing factory! But glamorous. She's clearly a star in waiting but hasn't yet created her trademark sexpot schtick. Stanwyck delivers a handful of great lines with vinegary aplomb. The first half is slow as she is reluctantly courted by Douglas, but comes to the boil when Stanwyck and Ryan are whooping it up.    

Lang laces the melodrama with documentary footage of a working fishing port which lends some authenticity. There is a realistic impression of damaged survivors shuffling their dwindling chances of happiness. In 1950, audiences had just seen A Streetcar Named Desire which instantly dated this. But it comes alive still when Monroe is on, or Stanwyck casting her spiky epigrams.

After their success in Smash Up in 1947, Stuart Heisler and Susan Hayward re-teamed for this routine drama about the early days of the oil boom in 1920s Oklahoma. Indeed it gives the impression of being financed by big oil, emphasising how well regulated their industry is. There's even a voice over telling us how green they are!

It's a film about the transformation of farmland and territory occupied by Native Americans into oilfields. It has a startlingly liberal view of their rights and cultural traditions for 1949. Susan Hayward is Cherokee Lansing, whose ancestors occupied the land appropriated by American western migration.

Hayward is the best part of the film, playing a feisty, ambitious landowner who is changed by her good fortune from a small scale cattlewoman into a ruthless capitalist willing to destroy the territory to satisfy her relentless greed. And she will alienate Robert Preston as the studious, ecologically minded geologist who helps her locate the liquid gold in the first place.

Chill Wills provides sardonic commentary and country songs in the style of Hoagy Carmichael. There's a pretty impressive oil fire action climax in Technicolor. It's worth seeing for fans of Hayward's star vitality but otherwise, it's entertainingly bizarre to see the oil industry presented as the virtuous blood of America's future.

Five years after Laura, Gene Tierney re-teamed with Otto Preminger for another film noir. There are many echoes of the earlier hit including the sour wit of Ben Hecht's script, and the lingering shots of a large portrait over a fireplace which has no impact on the narrative but is a reminder of their previous success. Preminger gives Whirlpool a similarly attractive noir look.

Tierney is Ann Sutton, a kleptomaniac who falls into the clutches of a cultured but degenerate hypnotist (José Ferrer) who uses her to kill off an inconvenient woman who has the goods on him. It's up to Ann's husband, a brilliant psychoanalyst (Richard Conte) to clear her with a mixture of Hollywood Freud and good luck.

At a stretch it's possible to see this a forerunner of those eighties yuppie thrillers where an attractive, privileged couple are terrorised by an out of control antagonist just because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like the characters in those films, the Sutton's aren't a likeable pair.

There's nothing like an original story, but the stars make it work. Charles Bickford adds a little weight to the confection as a laconic cop. It's good to see the elegant Gene in contemporary clothing after a run of costume dramas for Fox and her fashions and the des-res sets have a period appeal. Whirlpool is a slender, dark film noir. And while familiar, it's still entertaining.

Olivia de Havilland won her second Oscar for this lavish mid-nineteenth century period drama based on a Broadway adaptation of Henry James' Washington Square. And it's a perfect vehicle for the star, one in a series of exceptional roles she created after WWII, when she escaped from her unhappy contract with Warner Brothers.  

This is also one of William Wyler's many great films. Olivia plays Catherine Sloper, a rich but gauche spinster from an upper middle class family who is suffocated by the authority of her dominant father (Ralph Richardson) who resents his daughter for not being as beautiful and sophisticated as his deceased wife.

When she is courted by an attractive, charming idler (Montgomery Clift), Mr Sloper seeks to sabotage the proposal by convincing her that no man could want to marry her because she is too plain and dull! We know that the gentleman caller is after her money, so the business of the film is to judge whether it is preferable for this lonely woman to be exploited, if it would save her from a life of emotional emptiness.

Olivia creates a powerful impression of an abused woman consumed by loneliness. She is a study of disappointment and repression. Catherine has no artfulness but she learns how to deceive by finally closing down her heart to love. De Havilland's performance is sometimes raw, but she is also haunting, and tragic. 

This has a huge cult following; directed by critics' favourite Nic Ray, and with a once in a lifetime pairing of film noir superstars Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame. And it starts promisingly with Bogart under suspicion for the murder of a cocktail bar hatcheck girl, and Gloria the witness who could clear him.

But like many Ray films, after the set up, it unexpectedly becomes something else. Once Dix and Laurel fall in love, she becomes menaced by his violent jealousy. In the source novel, Dix is a serial killer and Laurel playing with fire. Maybe because of star protocol, in the film he is just responsible for an incandescent temper, probably due to PTSD after fighting in WWII.  

Dix's agent tells Laurel that if she loves Dix, she has to love all of him, including his volatility... Which is bad advice! Grahame is sensational, and Bogart is impressively menacing. But he's too convincing to be forgiven when he turns out to be innocent. The only plausible conclusion was in Dorothy Hughes' book. 

It's set in Hollywood. Dixon is a screenwriter and Laurel a minor actor in B films. And there is some interesting behind the scenes chat about the industry. It looks great. But it's a disappointment. Dixon is such a dreadful, overbearing nutcase that no one would go near him. It's two different films implausibly welded together. Plus points though for the great noir title.

Patrick Hamilton's gothic play gave the English language a new verb, which makes it particularly relevant for our times. It's a film about domestic abuse,  shaped into historical drama and noirish thriller. A manipulative and ominous Victorian gentleman (Charles Boyer) means to use his psychological dominance over his timid new wife (Ingrid Bergman) to drive her insane.

Boyer wants the jewels he knows are hidden in her house and Bergman's mental frailty will allow him to deliver her to an asylum and keep the loot. He uses the building itself as an instrument of duress. Some of the audience might be wondering if it's him who is crazy, so extraordinarily beautiful is the female star.

Ingrid got an Oscar for her suffering. It's a vivid and expressive performance. But there's something amiss in the chemistry between her and Boyer and the film only comes to life when Joseph Cotten appears as the conscientious detective who works to save her. Maybe it's too difficult to watch a vulnerable woman be tormented at such length. And Boyer is so patronising.

George Cukor was a great director, but not of suspense films. The 1940 UK adaptation has a meagre budget but is more exciting. Still, Gaslight is a handsome production with beautiful set décor and an unforgettable film debut for the 17 year old Angela Lansbury as a rather mercenary maid. Plus the luminous star power of the exquisite Ingrid Bergman.

It's not obvious which is more gorgeous, the sumptuous Technicolor location photography or Gene Tierney in her only Oscar nominated performance. No need for a line of dialogue explaining that Ellen is hot trouble. Her beauty has bite too, feeding the narcissism which makes her a danger to anyone who threatens to come between her and her husband (Cornel Wilde).

Tierney creates a brilliant and chilling portrait of a psychopath. The scene when she watches Wilde's disabled brother drown as she looks on from behind her shades is haunting, and it's astonishing that the Production Code allowed it to stand. Similarly when she ends her pregnancy by throwing herself down the stairs. She kills herself while framing her step sister (Jeanne Crain) who she suspects loves her man!

It has the dark pessimism of film noir, but in colour; the interiors are full of shadows and Ellen is a very malevolent femme fatale. However, much of the atmosphere of the film comes from its sunny rural exteriors, which ultimately rules it out of the noir genre. This is psychological melodrama.

A major weakness is Vincent Price's clodhopping performance as the idiotic lawyer who seeks to prove Ellen was killed by her sister. Wilde and Crain are fine, but the film is dominated by Gene Tierney's stunning performance. Leave Her to Heaven was Fox's biggest box office hit of the whole decade. While it's a little slow in places, it's a compelling, unsettling film.

Gothic romancer with supernatural themes which was a big factor in Gene Tierney's post WWII rise to stardom. She's Miranda, a farm girl from New England before the Civil War, who is invited to take a job as a governess in the stately home of an aristocratic relation. Vincent Price is the megalomaniac landowner who kills his wife in order to marry his beautiful country cousin.

Dragonwyck is the sort of old manor which has a haunted harpsichord. The servants mutter about strange goings-on. There's a lot of Poe in the story and that's a home draw for Price. His delusional philosophy conveys unmissable echoes of fascism. His performance is excessive, but it's not easy to imagine anyone else getting away with it.

There were many films in the forties about an inexperienced girl moving into a grand residence occupied by intimidating gentry and hostile staff. But Miranda isn't as fainthearted as most. Tierney plays her as a naïf, but she has ambition and stubborn values derived from her faith. Walter Huston is excellent as her unbending but protective father.

This was Joe Mankiewicz's directorial debut and he wrote the adapted screenplay. It creates is an impression of a believable, detailed historic society. It's a key American gothic film, and while the narrative is a little slim, there's a rich, eerie ambience thanks to Alfred Newman's score, the wonderful interiors, and the arcane language.

This is the kind of romantic supernatural fantasy which was popular just after WWII. It's set at the start of the twentieth century in England, Hollywood. Gene Tierney is a recent widow, and moves to a picturesque seaside town in order to find herself and escape her oppressive in-laws. There, Mrs. Muir meets the ghost of a sea captain (Rex Harrison) who narrates to her a best selling tale of the oceans.

Maybe in the years after the war, it was likely there would be an audience for a story about a bereaved woman who falls in love with a man who (probably) only exists in her thoughts. And about a widow who must find the strength to go on alone. There are many interesting themes on the subjects of loss, and also the creative process.

But mostly the film is a charming comedy-romance. Rex Harrison is engaging as the salty, barnacled sea-dog. The beautiful Tierney is extremely sympathetic as a woman searching for a second chance in life, which is sadly unfulfilled. When she seeks to re-engage with the world through George Sanders' decadent rake, she is badly let down.

Joe Mankiewicz creates a rich period atmosphere from his studio sets and the shadowy, expressionist photography. And there's a superb score from Bernard Herrmann. Sure, it's a sentimental tearjerker, but there is intelligence and craft too. The stars are wonderful together; they elevate the whole film and make you care, which makes the magical ending a real heartbreaker.

The first of Susan Hayward's trademark powerhouse performances which would make her the premier American female dramatic actor of the fifties. Smash Up gave her a debut Oscar nomination. Angie is a nightclub singer who parks her career to bring up baby and support her crooner husband (Lee Bowman). Her social anxiety leads to her becoming a drunk.

The Production Code didn't like this story at all, and many compromises were made. While the film is surprisingly realistic in its depiction of alcoholism, Hayward's descent into booze hell is much less ugly than in I'll Cry Tomorrow in 1955. Everything works out by the fadeout. But it's a typically emotional and volatile characterisation from the star.

There's a hot blooded face off between Hayward and Marsha Hunt as Bowman's lonely personal assistant who is in love with the boss. It's a great touch when Angie's swanky apartment fills up with gifts that her rival bought on his behalf. The feud finally erupts into a punch up in the girls-room, with a pie-eyed Angie going in fists first.

Eddie Albert plays his usual best friend role with his usual warmth, and Marsha Hunt is excellent. Bowman is an insipid male lead. It's a pulpy melodrama with quite an expressionistic look as Angie loses her struggle with the bottle. The main pull is Hayward's star-making performance and she's on the screen all the way. She even has a soliloquy!

This is one of the best American dramas of the forties. It bears the signature of its German director Max Ophüls, who mostly made films in France. And it feels like the poetic realism that was popular there either side of WWII. It is set in turn of the century Vienna. Of course it's filmed in a Hollywood studio, but it does leave a persuasive impression of place.

Lisa (Joan Fontaine) is an unremarkable, lower middle class child who falls in love with the handsome, talented concert pianist who lives in an adjacent building. Unknown to him. The man (Louis Jourdan) isn't a rogue but he is frivolous. Lisa lives her life as a kind of religious homage to the musician but only meets him once aged about 20. He leaves the girl with a child, and soon forgets about her.

The film isn't concerned with narrative realism; Lisa stands outside his house for years waiting for an occasion when they may meet. When they do, they share a perfect day together, which for her is a kind of communion, but meaningless to him. It's a psychologically fascinating story framed in the masochism of Lisa's obsession. She's the narrator, and it's not certain how much truth she tells.

The film confirms Joan Fontaine's status among the great Hollywood film actors. Jourdan is exceptional too. Their initial meeting is a moment of cinema magic. It's such a beautiful looking film. Ophüls tells his story with a personal style and finesse; it feels more like a classic of world cinema than a Hollywood drama.

Bette Davis was famous for playing bad girls, but here she is poorly cast. She lack the looks her character is assumed to possess, and is about ten years too old. In fact she has on so much makeup it's not easy to recognise her. Stanley (Davis) is a sociopathic monster who ruins her forgiving sister (Olivia de Havilland as Roy) by stealing her husband. When Stanley has driven him to suicide, she comes back for Roy's new fiancé...

The source novel won the Pulitzer Prize so perhaps it was more highbrow than this entertaining soap. This adaptation feels like the Hollywood southern melodramas of the fifties. There's a jazz soundtrack. The dichotomy between the good/bad sister is classic fifties. There is a corrupt, dying patriarch (Charles Coburn) who has a transgressive longing for his childlike niece. It's full of sexual innuendo.  

This was John Huston's second film and it's not typical of his work. Though maybe his liberal politics allowed for the more enlightened attitude to race, for the time. After the drunken Stanley has killed a mother and child in a hit and run, she casually accuses an African American (Ernest Anderson) of taking the car. The film is explicit that her testament will be assumed true. Not his.

Amazingly the film wasn't allowed an overseas certificate because it represented USA as being racially biased! Possibly there is a much more intelligent film dormant within this production. What we get is a Bette Davis vehicle, and while she's grotesquely fascinating, this is not always for the intended reasons. It's a fun, implausible curiosity.

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.

This film is so tightly knotted to its theme of vanity that it eventually becomes a moral fable. Bette Davis is Fanny, a legendary, high society coquette who marries a modest but rich businessman (Claude Rains) to keep her crooked brother out of jail. Her marriage isn't an impediment to having a good time in the company of fast men. So Mr. Skeffington toils without love, filling her life with riches.

Fanny loses her looks after a bout of diphtheria, and learns valuable life lessons. By 1944, in a lifetime of heavy smoking, Bette was starting to look middle aged and she is hardly convincing as a famous beauty. In fact there is a premonition of Baby Jane Hudson in her heavy makeup, even before the illness. But credit to Davis for allowing her grotesque appearance after discharge from hospital.

Bette dominates the film, and haunts your nightmares. Claude Rains gives a more subtle and touching performance as her rejected husband, a Jewish man who takes his daughter to Germany as the Nazis come to power. The film starts just before WWI and concludes with the world about to be again consumed by war. Bette gets to wear a compilation of classic frocks from the first half of the century.

There's quite a lot of humour (from Julius & Philip Epstein). The witty script keeps the drama fairly superficial. Almost nothing is done with the theme of anti-semitism. This is an epochal film in the history of classic cinema, because it was the final release of Bette's hated contract with Warner Brothers. And while not her best, it's a significant entry in that body of work.