Film Reviews by Steve

So many Hollywood classics are connected to a scare story that George Raft was close to being cast in the lead, like it would be be the worst possible calamity. Including The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca and Double Indemnity. Well he's actually in this RKO film noir, and while he sleepwalks through the role, he's ok. Though this isn't a picture of that stature.

It's a minor murder mystery about a rich playboy musician who is gunned down in his swanky Frank Lloyd Wright show home while playing the title song on his grand piano. The idiots at LAPD say suicide, but a maverick on homicide (Raft, naturally) suspects one of the many bombshells whose pictures decorate the walls of the death room.

So the detective chases them down. There are signs that this was once a longer film with more leads followed up, and the clumsy editing shows. Sometimes the search for the murderer seems to be forgotten while the cop cracks wise with the RKO starlets. Virginia Huston stands out among the photogenic suspects.

There's some decent smartass dialogue, and attractive noir photography. And there's a nice, studio impression of LA and a few sultry torch songs performed in a glitzy hotspot. Raft eventually gets suspended for his obsessive behaviour and goes solo, but really should have been kicked off the force for taking so long to solve the case!

Fast, laconic thriller that is mostly remembered now for the original screenplay by hardboiled poet Raymond Chandler, two years after his co-write on Double Indemnity kicked off the whole film noir movement. There's a dusting of classic dialogue but this leaves the impression he was saving the best lines for his novels; and was never the best at plots.

Critics claim film noir reflects the alienation of returning WWII combat veterans who find everything has changed in their absence. In this case, it isn't subtext. Alan Ladd plays a navy pilot who comes home to find his wife (Doris Dowling) is playing around, and he can't find a room...When the flyer's fitted up for her murder, he must clear his name.

Maybe the real guilty party is his best pal (William Bendix) back from the Pacific with PTSD and a steel plate in his head. Or the ex-gangster (Howard Da Silva) who has been playing house in the dead dame's apartment. He runs The Blue Dahlia hotspot and is married to Veronica Lake, who picks up the accused on the highway, to see what he knows.

So it's a vehicle for Ladd and Lake... though Bendix steals the film. The ending was compromised when the US Navy refused to have a sailor guilty of the crime. And director George Marshall was more suited to light comedy than stylish noir. But there's a nice big band soundtrack and period LA feel. Maybe a let down for Chandler fans, but still a decent noir.

Enigmatic psychological murder mystery from Joseph Lewis, maybe the best B-picture director of the studio era. It's film noir because of Burnett Guffey artistic, shadowy photography but the story is more of a golden age whodunit. There are no mean streets. The final twist isn't original, but is executed with considerable élan.

Steven Geray plays a famous Parisian sleuth who is released to the country to recuperate- for as long as it takes. The diffident, middle aged detective falls in love with a young woman (Micheline Cheirel) already engaged. When she and the childhood sweetheart are found dead, the grieving holidaymaker investigates.

It's an intriguing puzzle, though not difficult to unravel. There is a slight impression of the story being stretched to fit feature length. The cast is little known. Geray is familiar from support roles in Columbia's major releases, and his lack of star charisma suits his role as the modest suitor who has never experienced love.

It's the director's imagination which most impresses. He exploits the evocative studio setting of a rural French village with some wonderful visual flourishes. And accumulates a powerful sense of fatalism as we drill down into the killer's fractured obsession. He creates the kind of living dreamworld which will one day be explored by David Lynch.

Eccentric, implausible mystery with that eeriness which comes from complementing a standard film noir scenario with expressionism. This really could be a lingering, unsettling dream. The premise is from a Cornell Woolrich story, which he repeated many times; the suspect has lost his memory for a period when he really needed not to.

A sailor (Bill Williams) on leave gets drunk while the floozy he picked up is murdered. He stumbles upon a taxi dancer (Susan Hayward) and a cabbie (Paul Lukas) and they all try to piece together his missing hour. It was made by veterans of the New York Group Theatre, and leaves the impression of their politics; it's about how connected we all are.

Clifford Odets' verbose script gathers an ever increasing cast of suspects who stand around delivering the B-picture poetry. There's some decent dialogue, but eventually it smothers Woolrich's concept. Much of the attraction is Nicholas Musuraca's noir photography. Williams was an ex-swimmer, but not much of an actor and can't carry the film.

Susan Hayward became the great Hollywood female dramatic actor of the '50s. In this, she's mainly unexpectedly sexy in an otherwise uncharismatic cast. She's the main reason to watch. And the melancholy of the big city at night as the lonely, weary insomniacs pass through the picture, looking for peace, but finding only trouble.

This golden age film noir begins inauspiciously but develops into a pretty exciting thriller. The early scenes feel like they are made up of other better noirs. The pessimistic, wisecracking gumshoe with an office bottle is pure Raymond Chandler. And Clifton Webb duplicates his role from Laura (1944) to the extent of actually repeating dialogue.

Henry Hathaway starts in the documentary style he often adopted after WWII with a location shoot around New York. But later on we get some classic noir photography. The familiar Fox library music (first used in Street Scene in 1931) gives way to ambient sound. And a decent plot kicks in about the PI getting framed for murder.

Mark Stevens is too lightweight for the tough detective but Lucille Ball delivers as his girl Friday. Webb as a rich jealous, art dealer is a limited actor, though Cathy Downs is an unexpected bonus as the sexy bad girl married to his money, but playing around. William Bendix is authentically brutal as the hired muscle paid to do the dirty work.

Leo Rosten's narrative about an innocent man trying to clear his name with the assistance of a resourceful, lovestruck colleague evokes Cornell Woolrich. And like his stories, this film noir has aged well. The familiarity becomes part of the pleasure. The genre archetypes and the crimes that connect the rich with the underworld always seem to engage.

Quintessential John Ford western which climaxes with the legendary gunfight at the OK Corral. But takes a long, circuitous route getting there. Don't expect to find any genuine history because there isn't any. We get a slow shuffle of the director's usual motifs: a vocal harmony group, a lot of sentimentality and knockabout comedy, and a bashful romance.

Walter Brennan does his Walter Brennan impression as old man Clanton and there's the standard stuff about the coming of law to the west. It's set in Monument Valley... even though Tombstone isn't in Utah. Ford claimed he got the lowdown on what actually happened from Wyatt Earp! Well, maybe, but he doesn't reveal it here because the wrong people die!

Which hardly matters. It's an entertainment. Anyone who likes the director's films will love this. Best on show is Joseph MacDonald's striking high contrast b&w photography which gives it a noir feel. Henry Fonda brings his usual candid integrity to the role of Earp but fails to spark with the impassive Victor Mature as Doc Holliday.

Which is a flaw, as their bromance is usually the main driver. Other characters invented for the screen come and go without leaving much impression of why they are there, like Linda Darnell as Doc's rainy day gal. Alan Mowbray drops by to do a drunken soliloquy from Hamlet! There's everything but a punch up. It's rated a genre classic... but won't convince the uncommitted.

Credit to Sam Goldwyn Productions for making this sincere and sensitive drama about the big social issue of the period; the return of combat survivors after WWII. Fredric March plays an army sergeant demobbed to his well paid position at the bank. Dana Andrews comes home with PTSD and a decent rank from the air force, but to a dead end job.

And most memorably, representing the navy, Harold Russell, a non-professional actor who lost both hands for real. He has the most uncertain future of all. Some of the wives waited, and some didn't; life went on. There has been little preparation for the return of the veterans and business cuts the corners off any government legislation.

But this isn't a political film, it's more about the point of impact between the servicemen and their families. It tells us that without love and humanity, there is no future for anyone. The potential for sentimentality is mostly averted by skilful acting; Cathy O'Donnell does particularly well in a difficult role as Russell's girlfriend.

William Wyler gets the emotional pitch just right and his use of deep focus is masterly. Oddly, Gregg Toland's photography wasn't nominated but this won seven Oscars including best picture and director, and best actor for March. It was the biggest film of the decade at the US box office. It no longer has that sort of impact, but this is still a high quality production.

Micro-budget celebration of the work done by the scientists in WWII, particularly in the development of radar. It was released with the fighting over, which might account for the giddy holiday mood; this is more of a comedy than a drama and no one is going to learn any official secrets.

Peter Ustinov makes his debut as director and he opens up with a couple of ostentatious tracking shots to announce his arthouse credentials. But it mostly reflects postwar austerity with documentary lighting and a lot of talk. Ralph Richardson leads a group of superbrains to a coastal guesthouse for the duration to do some blue sky thinking.

And mostly explore their comic eccentricity. These boffins can think outside the box but can't boil an egg. Richardson is a genial presence. Maybe there is a suggestion of autism in Raymond Huntley's lack of empathy. Today, their input into the firebombing of Dresden and Hamburg doesn't seem so whimsical.

This was initiated as a training film for scientists enrolled in the cause, and later extended into a feature film. It seems war films were box office poison after '45, and maybe this suggests why. It's drab and unambitious, though amusing. And it at least offers an opportunity to remember the inventors, who also served.

Interesting but minor Fritz Lang espionage drama which is ultimately sabotaged by the long romantic subplot. It's one of a group of post WWII films which looked at the secrets of the war years; the spycraft, the gadgetry and the underground. It is based on a non-fiction book about the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA.

But it is unlikely that much of this was a revelation, even then. What we mainly get is an action adventure about a US nuclear scientist (Gary Cooper!) who goes undercover in Europe to see how far the Nazis have got with the bomb. As we soon learned the Germans didn't get very close, the plot is just McGuffin.

Lang and the screenwriters planned an anti-nuclear theme, but the studio wanted something less political. Instead there's an insipid love story between the two fisted boffin and a partisan in the Italian Resistance (Lilli Palmer). She is introduced knifing a Nazi goon in the back, but any hope she'll emerge a female action hero is short-lived.

Soon the American hero- an academic- is running the show. The dust up between Cooper and a fascist heavy (Marc Lawrence) must be the best fight scene of the studio era. Aside from the romantic padding, there's a decent spy story and moments of suspense. It's a case of what might have been, but a trace of the anti-nuke message remains.

Two years before his cinematic landmark with Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio De Sica broke though to an international audience with this neorealist critique of juvenile prisons in impoverished postwar Rome, which won a special Oscar for best foreign language film. It's a polemical exposé of unusual candour and insight.

Civic society has broken down. Rather than go to school, poor kids make money for their families. There is no social net for the orphans of war so they work to survive. A pair of close friends (Franco Interlenghi, Rinaldo Smordoni) are shoeshine boys duped into working on the black market and betrayed and jailed.

The bulk of the story is set in a destitute youth detention centre alive with fleas, bugs and lice, which is vindictive and without purpose. The boys are separated and gradually brutalised into tough kids who hide their vulnerability. It's some achievement by De Sica to draw such nuanced performances from this large cast of children.

There are the usual motifs of neorealism including a reformist, socialist agenda as well as the documentary approach and amateur cast. But there is more craft than the raw, earlier films, with faster editing and some visual style. But primarily, it is a cry for help. The two boys are not even guilty, but no one should go through this.

While not the first of the Italian Neorealism movement, this is the one that introduced it to the world when it became an unexpected success after WWII. This was made on the run; the vérité style is dictated by necessity. Roberto Rossellini doesn't always convey the narrative with clarity. But that's hardly the point.

It's a record of the struggle by the Italian Resistance against the German occupation. The underground was run by the Communists, for whom this was a long campaign. It was shot on the streets of Rome with minimal crew and equipment on remainder film stock begged from the news crews of the liberating Alliies.

And it looks absolutely authentic, like a newsreel or home video. It is mostly improvised by a non-professional support cast on the actual locations where similar events took place under the command of the Gestapo only weeks earlier. Nazis are played by German prisoners of war.

This feels closer to actual events than any other WWII film. Not so much propaganda as evidence. The torture of a Resistance leader (Marcello Pagliero); the gunning down of a pregnant witness (Anna Magnani); the execution of a partisan priest (Aldo Fabrizi)... it's so incredibly real. There is nothing else like this.

Production began in occupied France and continued through liberation to be released into a national celebration. Behind the scenes legends compete with the drama on screen. This isn't merely a film, it's part of the story of France in WWII. Who better to tell it than Marcel Carné whose prewar Poetic Realism reflected a nation on the precipice of defeat?

The pessimism of those films is gone, replaced by a wistful regret. In this context, it matters less that Arletty isn't really unspoiled and beautiful enough to be the romantic muse of four men, than she has survived from Hôtel du Nord and Le Jour se Lève. She plays a courtesan in 1830s Paris, pursued by an actor, an aristocrat, a mime and a gangster.

The period recreation of the Parisian theatre district is evocative and magnificent. Jacques Prévert long, poetic script is wise and often very funny. The main characters are historical figures, and Jean-Louis Barrault haunts the film as Baptiste Debureau, the mime artist unable to render his spiritual love into human desire.

But most of all, salutations to Carné who takes these diverse, epic dimensions and makes them accessible. And that's setting aside the production difficulties. This artistic miracle isn't so much about Paris in the Restoration, but an entry into Shakespeare's insubstantial pageant. The cloud-capped towers. The stuff of dreams.

Billy Wilder said this is a response to his collaboration with alcoholic writer Raymond Chandler on Double Indemnity. So it was fortunate that Charles Jackson had a current bestseller about an alcoholic writer for Wilder to adapt. There are no narrative twists, this is just a story about the degradation of an intelligent but flawed drunk.

It's a fictional case study for which most of the interest is in the public exposure of a condition then not much talked about. Without that novelty, some weaknesses become apparent. Mostly that the storyline contains no surprises. Still, it is well executed, with a virtuoso Oscar winning performance from Ray Milland.

John Seitz's photography was only nominated, but now this looks like the main asset. Wilder must have been influenced by neo-realism, and the b&w documentary style footage of New York is extremely evocative. And the use of expressionism for the withdrawal scenes is effective too, combined with the woozy sound of the theremin.

Milland's fragile, egotistical addict is a loquacious bore, which feels truthful, but not always easy to endure. It's not obvious why his girlfriend (Jane Wyman) takes it for so long. And the happy Hollywood ending is disaster. Wilder won Oscars for best film and direction, but this isn't his best work and it no longer has the power to shock.

This is chiefly of interest because it begins a short cycle of films about combat veterans who return to Europe to chase up loose ends related to their WWII experiences. They are primarily Americans, but in this case Dick Powell plays a Canadian pilot who revisits to the ruins of France to investigate the death of his wife in the Resistance.

And then onto Buenos Aires to chase up the remnants of a fascist group planning a second act for the fatherland. A year earlier, Edward Dmytryk directed the superior Murder, My Sweet which was a success and this is made in its image with most of the same personnel. Powell basically repeats his performance as Philip Marlowe.

John Paxton returns to script the nervy one-liners and Harry Wild to duplicate the film noir photography. Adrian Scott again produces. While the intrigue looks like a lot of McGuffin, most of the crew and some of the cast were soon in front of HUAC accused of 'premature anti-fascism, so the content actually meant something to them.

There's a big speech towards the end about the threat from Nazi survivors in South America, but Hollywood wasn't concerned. This sort of espionage was rewritten for Communists and Dmytryk and Scott ended up in jail. The labyrinthine plot never really engages, but we get an insight into the psychology of WWII survivors, and the Hollywood left. 

Undemanding entry in the Universal Sherlock Holmes cycle which is fun but betrays evidence that the series is starting to run out of inspiration. In a castle on the remote and rugged Scottish coastline a fellowship of elderly bachelors are being murdered one by one, and their demise foretold by the delivery at dinner of orange pips.

While it's only an hour, the scenario feels stretched. Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson eases into his end of series imbecility and when he's running amok in a thunderstorm, this might as well be Abbott and Costello Meet Sherlock Holmes. Except Bruce is much funnier. Then Inspector Lestrade (Dennis Hoey) arrives to double up the comic relief.

There is absolutely nothing left of Arthur Conan Doyle's story, The Five Orange Pips. This is more like Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. Still, no matter, there's all the atmosphere typical of the Universal series with the gothic old dark house and the craggy clifftops and the superstitious locals.

The series survives as it always does: because Basil Rathbone is perfect as Holmes and makes an endearing double act with his old pal; Roy William Neill is an expert B-picture director and continually drives the narrative forward, however illogical; and because Doyle's legendary heroes are immortal.