Film Reviews by Steve

The first (and only non-musical) version of the durable backlot classic. The story won the Oscar, even though it's a rip off of the 1932 film What Price Hollywood? They also share a sharp satirical edge aimed at Hollywood life. Esther Blodgett (Janet Gaynor) is the small town girl who makes it on the big screen as the American sweetheart, Vicki Lester.

She is given a break, then a wedding ring, by alcoholic has-been Norman Maine (Fredric March) who must then watch as her career eclipses his. Gaynor was only 31 when she made this but she's so associated with silent cinema that she feels a little old fashioned for a star of the late thirties. The Oscar she accepts in the film, is the one she won in real life a decade earlier.

Ironically, her performance is overshadowed by her co-star. March pulls of the difficult trick of being the egotistical drunkard who burns all his bridges back to the studios and also the husband that Vicki is plausibly in love with. I don't think any of the other Norman Maines quite manage that. His charm penetrates through the self-destructiveness and we feel the poignancy of the flaws of damaged people.

It's an attractive production in Technicolor with a fine, sentimental score from Max Steiner. Seen from the present day, there is the interest of a glimpse behind the scenes in golden age Hollywood. Like the skit when Gaynor does rapid fire impressions of Hepburn, Garbo and Mae West at a party. Perhaps it's a little ponderous, but it's my favourite A Star is Born.

Handsome, Hollywood adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's novel about Germany after WWI, and the pacifism which gives way to poverty and the emergence of the Nazis. Three young men return from the western front to build a new country but find themselves swept up in the rising tide of a new tyranny. Robert Taylor, Franchot Tone and Robert Young have a palpable rapport as the friends.

Taylor falls for a penniless aristocrat, played by Margaret Sullavan. Sullavan has a strong screen presence; slim, poised, husky and cool. She looks elegant in a beret. Frank Borzage turns their relationship into the ethereal hyper-romance which was his speciality. The normally lightweight Franchot Tone brings gravitas in support, in perhaps his best performance.

The novel was adapted by F. Scott Fitzgerald, his only screenwriting credit. Sullavan complained she couldn't speak his dialogue and the script was rewritten by the producer, Joe Mankiewicz. These difficulties are not apparent; the writing is poetic and has depth. There is some editorialising. The Hollywood censors wanted the riots to be led by communists rather than the fascists, but Borzage held firm!

Still the message is politically vague given it was 1938. It's a pacifist story set in a studio's idea of middle Europe. Today the film works best as a lyrical romance; a Borzage film, full of atmosphere and suffering. Sullavan's death in a sanitarium is protracted but it gives the film its mystical weight. It's certainly a weepie, but a relatively sophisticated one.

This sequel to Dirty Harry is usually considered inferior. There is a less auspicious director, with Don Siegel replaced by Ted Post who came from tv. But I prefer Magnum Force, mainly for the interesting premise; if the public is going to cheer for the pragmatic, instant justice of Harry's 44. Magnum, how far are they willing to go?

A death squad of San Francisco motorcycle cops is executing the Mafia bosses that liberal law and order is unable to touch, because of course, the law is there to protect the crooks. Harry Callahan is their hero, but for the sequel, he has changed. The bigoted Harry is buddied up with an African-American sidekick. The lone gun has a Japanese girlfriend. And the reactionary iconoclast is now defending the system.  

Magnum Force has plenty of what gave Dirty Harry its salacious clout. There's the scuzzy funk-noir of Lalo Schifrin's theme music; the squalid nocturnal, neon lit setting of urban and moral decay; and Eastwood, without ever threatening to actually put in a performance is charismatic enough; like the Man With No Name has slept through basic training and now has a license to kill.

It's a tight, exciting film in spite of the 120m+ running time. The main deficit is that in the attempt to exploit the violent, squalid realities of the naked city, it tips over into voyeuristic sadism. The shapeshifting of Harry into a babe-magnet who doesn''t have to try too hard also says more about Eastwood's box office appeal of the time. But that's the early seventies, and it's actually that period aesthetic which is a major part of Magnum Force's enduring attraction.

Idiosyncratic update of Raymond Chandler's best novel met with critical contempt for apparently mocking his legendary PI Philip Marlowe. Robert Altman called him Rip Van Marlowe because he imagined him going to sleep in the 1950s, and waking up in a seventies LA of hippies, goofball gangsters and Ronald Reagan as the governor of California. His identity as a knight in dirty armour is more out of place than ever.

Chandler's satirical trick was to portray his hero as a man of integrity who gets into so much trouble because his environment is so corrupt. In Altman's contemporary parlance, that makes Marlowe a 'loser'. He has no wife, and he has a crappy car/apartment. He is adopted by a cat which the PI goes to extraordinary lengths to satisfy, much like his relationship with his clients.

Altman doesn't even attempt to be faithful Chandler's complicated narrative; the first 12 minutes of the film are about Marlowe buying his cat its favourite food. In the book, Marlowe doesn't have a cat! And yet, there is still a lot of Chandler in the film and any lover of the great crime writer should find this adaptation at least interesting because Altman has obviously thought about him very deeply, even if unconventionally. And about film noir too.

Elliott Gould's Marlowe is likely to remain unique as he is so much of its time. I think this is the best screen portrayal because it has a depth. Humphrey Bogart and and Dick Powell were wisecracking cyphers, however enjoyable. There's a rich nocturnal atmosphere, with a late night lounge jazz soundtrack. There's even a first person narrative typical of classic noir as Gould constantly mumbles to himself! It's eccentric, but the best neo-noir of the decade.

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.

The arrival of sound was a revolution and like many early talkies, Morocco imparts a sensation of a medium in shock. The performers are speaking slowly, and leave pauses between lines. There is no music. Other than the lighting and smoking of cigarettes the impassive actors do nothing while they talk. The imperative is to speak clearly so the microphone picks up their dialogue.

Without music on the soundtrack, this feels slow and soporific. It creates an aesthetic through necessity, but in films about exotic escapism, it actually works. The studio built Morocco of von Sternberg's film allied to the strange pacing, elaborate shadows and fanciful, expensive decorations creates an opiated trance to which the languorous, woozy characters plausibly belong.

Gary Cooper is too literal an American to assimilate into this curious dreamworld. But Marlene Dietrich in her American debut is perfect. Partly this is because she is young and so alluringly beautiful. And there's her accent, and her background in cabaret. She actually plays a showgirl, and sings. Famously she performs in male drag and kisses a girl in the audience, a legendary moment of screen sexual ambiguity.

The film conveys the fascination of pre-censorship values in a medium which hasn't quite worked out what it is going to be. The ending when Marlene follows Cooper into the desert, while she's still in her heels, is really eccentric. The film is flawed; the plot is perfunctory and the broad comedy is jarring. Dietrich hasn't quite arrived as the ultimate glamour star of early sound but it is mainly she who makes Morocco a place still worth visiting.

Critics knock this for its deviation from historical events, but it triumphs as an example of late sixties social realism. This is a fascinating and intelligent film. For the first hour, the Boston police search for the psychopathic killer of women who live alone . Detectives instigate and respond to a backlash of prejudice and ignorance. They also expose a pandemic of neglected mental illness.

Tony Curtis doesn't make his appearance as Albert DeSalvo until the second hour and while it's obvious that liberties have been taken with real psychiatry, the scenes between Curtis and Henry Fonda, as the cop leading the investigation, are compelling. Curtis is convincingly banal as the blue collar family man who lives in unconscious fear of his other, suppressed personality.

Richard Fleischer uses split screen, which offers alternate ways of observing the killer's personality. Maybe this was cutting edge. It feels a bit gimmicky now, but it doesn't detract from the impact. Otherwise, the hand held cameras produce that jerky documentary look which eventually became standard in docu-drama. And it works. There's intimacy, as well as a sleazy portrayal of the naked city.

The film pleads for more proactive treatment of the mentally sick. The pinched public purse of the Boston police department shown here implies there isn't much hope for progressive public health initiatives. But still, the film makes wider political points with some subtlety, even if inevitably the frank depiction of some of the city's subcultures looks a little dated.

Low budget true crime story about two teenagers who killed 11 people without apparent motive in 1950s South Dakota. The ages of the characters were raised to accommodate the lead actors, Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, who are sensational. Terrence Malick's script isn't all that faithful to the exact events; it's a modernist film which creates an ambient impression of their altered reality.

The names of Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate are changed to Kit and Holly. For a while they live in a treehouse and then they kill a lot of people. Holly's detached narrative voice suggests she has no understanding of the world, and feels zero responsibility for their actions. They are like unsupervised children, making up the rules of their games as they go.

Much of the film is about their accumulating celebrity as they drive through the American heartland and murder mercilessly and impassively. Even the police, who had two men shot down in their pursuit, bask in the reflected notoriety of Kit's fame. The midwest is presented as a wretched wasteland; arid, barren and ugly. The rural poor are depicted as an ignorant people with a moribund culture.

Badlands is one of the key pictures of its decade and has become a model for a crime subgenre; the romance of two inexperienced lovers living on the road, triggering a wave of terror. It's all atmosphere, mostly shot at night with a score of twangy old time rock and roll and Nat King Cole. Everything happens slowly and without apparent purpose. Many films are ripping this off now.

Colourful, irreverent update of the pulp crime stories of the '30s. It's from a novel by Ross Macdonald, but it's essentially the Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler. Paul Newman's insubordinate PI Lew Harper is an approximation of Chandler's hero Philip Marlowe. The film even starts like The Big Sleep with Harper calling on the mansion of a man worth a hundred million dollars. 

The wealthy industrialist has gone missing. His wife (Lauren Bacall) wants him back. Harper thinks he has been kidnapped and picks up the trail leading from grifter to kook to goofball. From cameo to character actor to special guest star. This has a fabulous cast with Shelley Winters standing out as a gluttonous ex-film star and Pamela Tiffin memorable as the missing man's sexy daughter.

Harper discovers that everyone has a hand in the till, or worse. In true Chandler style, only the detective is spotless and even he has to enter the sewer to solve the crime. Newman gives a cartoonish performance as the freewheeling hero, continually adopting alter-egos with improvised accents. There's a lot of comedy.

Jack Smight was an inexperienced tv director and this is a mixed bag. The photography is attractive, but the film lacks suspense and is a touch long. The lively cast gives it energy, especially the star. This was William Goldman's debut Hollywood screenplay and he rewards film fans with many references to classic detective films, while leaving us with a souvenir of the far out nonconformism of the mid-sixties.

Landmark dramatisation of Truman Capote's non fiction novel which reports on the capture and execution of the murderers of a family in Kansas. Two ex-cons on probation (played by Robert Blake and Scott Wilson), brutally slaughter four people during an attempted robbery. The film recreates the events using actual locations and artefacts. Blake and Wilson are disturbingly credible.

While the film argues the futility of capital punishment, there isn't much editorialising. The Capote figure in the story, played by Paul Stewart, talks to the murderers but draws few conclusions. In profiling the killers, the police explain the types who commit motiveless crime, usually young men from a background of domestic trauma.

The men are ostentatiously mentally sick. One of them hallucinates. The other is is a sociopath who feels detached from the consequences of any of his actions. The men are released from jail, but have never been psychologically assessed. There's a liberal perspective, but the film doesn't underplay how horrific the crime is. The grey photography makes everything look disturbingly squalid.

This kind of True Crime documentary realism is everywhere now. There had been neo-realism in Hollywood going back to WWII. In Cold Blood is groundbreaking in American cinema because of the how far it takes it. Its vérité makes few concessions to entertainment. The title is ironic; the film itself is unemotional, objective, cold.

This is remembered more as a civil rights film than a police drama, but it excels either way. Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier),  is a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time; he gets hauled in front of the local police chief (Rod Steiger) as a convenient suspect when a body turns up on Main St., Sparta, Mississippi. After Detective Tibbs produces his detective badge, he stays to supervise the investigation himself.

 Sparta might as well have a Welcome to Hell sign posted on the edge of town. Law and order are enforced on a whim. The duo establish a volatile hatred at the start of the film, but the redneck sheriff turns out be be the least reactionary man in a territory where poor black people still pick cotton under the hostile, unbending feudalism of the southern aristocracy.

Maybe there is too much balance in the film, as so often in the civil rights films of the sixties. Is Tibbs' hatred of this apartheid really similar to the oppression he suffers himself? He becomes pre-determined to prove that the bigoted white landowner (Larry Gates) is guilty. The white citizens are presented as victims themselves, of poverty and ignorance. I guess a white audience wouldn't sit still for a polemic.

If it pulled its punches, then it worked because the film sold tickets in the south and won the Oscar. Norman Jewison thankfully pulls up short of the two cops becoming odd couple buddies, but there is still a rapport between Poitier and Steiger. The politics dominate, but this is also a thrilling police drama. Great jazz score (Quincy Jones) and neo-noir photography too.

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.

Micro-budgeted, late period film noir that owes a stylistic debt to the Warner Brothers gangster films of the '30s. It's a revenge story about a boy who witnesses his adored but no-good dad gunned down by the mob and swears to get even. When he grows up to be played by Cliff Robertson, he joins the gang to get close the killers, giving the audience a window into how they operate.

The rackets still control gambling and protection and break unions, but have insidiously spread into juvenile crime, like teenage prostitution and selling narcotics at the schoolgate. As was typical in postwar gangster films, the mafia are a semi-legitimate business which operates in plain sight but keeps some business off the books.

Sam Fuller characteristically punches low. It's set among the lowlifes, the criminals and the jailbirds who prey on the vulnerable. It is compelling because we want to see these sordid pimps and pushers and strongarm killers get summarily sawn off... But the revenger isn't a hero. He's a psychopath driven by his personal demons rather than the greater good. The father he avenges was also no good.

This is a low budget film big on ostentatious style. When the dying Robertson staggers down main street with a bullet in his back and crashes into a bin marked 'Keep Your City Clean' we could be back in the symbolist, b&w world of Little Caesar. Previously, Fuller made his noirs on location, but this is shot in the studio on threadbare sets. Robertson is too old and there is an obscure support cast. But Fuller makes plenty out of very little.

Violent action thriller set on the bayou of the American south. It is a confrontation between a progressive lawyer (Gregory Peck), and his worst possible nightmare, the vicious Max Cady (Robert Mitchum), who strolls into town straight from prison to destroy the family of the man whose evidence sent him down. Obviously, the lawman prevails but Mitchum walks away with the battle of the stars.

The noirs of the 40s/50s had been liberal films, but Cape Fear is an update of a conservative frontier western. The police won't help. The law is in the pocket of the criminal. The women can't protect themselves. Cady can't be reasoned with. He isn't a psycho because of the failure of urban planning projects. He's just a human devil and a man must defend his family with the means available, which is ultimately a handgun.

This wouldn't be the legendary thriller it is without the domineering, repulsive portrayal by Robert Mitchum, which is almost as career defining as in Night of the Hunter. Mitchum spends the last part of the film bare chested. We believe in his brawny depravity. The men hired to beat him up scatter in horror. But though his menace is muscular, it is also malevolently psychological.

Thompson wanted to make a film of Hitchcockian suspense. He doesn't quite succeed. Its threat leans too heavily on Mitchum's malign charisma, rather than technique. But he does have a score by Bernard Herrmann! In the sixties the dogs of censorship were called off. Threats of rape and paedophilia are fairly explicit. Now, thrillers about a father protecting the domestic bubble from omnipotent malice are everywhere.