Film Reviews by Steve

Beautiful looking late period film noir with the familiar premise of a vulnerable woman terrorised by a menacing, unknown male assassin. Lee Remick works in a bank and lives with her school age sister (Stefanie Powers). An assailant who can only be identified by his asthmatic breathing says they will be brutally murdered unless Remick robs her employer of $100,000. And don't tell the cops.

The panicked clerk immediately calls the FBI and Glenn Ford throws a huge team behind her protection, which climaxes with the wheezy psycho gunned down on the outfield of the LA Dodgers.

The first casualty of the investigation is logic. It's incredible that the FBI would commit such extensive, round the clock resources to the protection of a single tax payer for a crime that hasn't yet happened. And it's implausible that the maniac who threatens to kill her if she tells a single person, and has her entire life staked out, doesn't notice there are a dozen G Men watching her every move 

Unfortunately this also undermines the suspense as it makes the stalker a bit of an idiot. However, the film is an eyeful with imaginative camera set ups and impressive locations (including the set piece at Candlestick Park) and the b&w photography is sensational. It never gets as tense as is promised in the early scenes but this is still an entertaining thriller with attractive stars.

Sam Fuller took the American gangster film to Tokyo and turned its classic b&w expressionism into brilliant Technicolor. It is a remake of the 1948 film noir, The Street With No Name. Robert Stack goes undercover in occupied Japan to infiltrate a gang of former US soldiers who have established a syndicate.

While the film is set against a backdrop of national regeneration, it isn't political. It's a straight thriller. It captures Japan in the spasm of great change, but its vision is more touristic. There's a fabulous lingering shot of Mount Fuji. There's the Imperial Hotel, and an exciting (Hitchcock influenced) finale on the rooftop of the Tokyo Amusement Park.

The racketeers are led by Robert Ryan, who has the hoodlum's customary vanity; his gunmen wear some amazing suits and look as stylish as any screen gang, ever. There is an unmissable homosexual relationship between Ryan and his number one boy, which makes a stronger impact than the tepid inter-racial romance between Stack and Shirley Yamaguchi. Both were contrary to the production code in 1955.

House of Bamboo isn't immersed in the sleazy lowlife typical of Fuller's work, or have his usual energy. It wasn't a project he initiated or his screenplay. But there are some stunning camera setups, a fair amount of suspense and great locations. It wasn't the first colour crime film of the fifties, but the striking use of CinemaScope makes it groundbreaking and Fuller adapts the technology with flair.

This is probably the best film adaptation of an Agatha Christie story. Her characteristic plot twists may stretch credibility, but Billy Wilder's laying on of cute but acerbic comedy makes the film a delight. Tyrone Power gets top billing as the shifty, shiftless wide-boy who murders for money, but the film is dominated by Charles Laughton as his irascible barrister. Wilder thankfully gets him to speed up his usual ponderous harrumphing.

 It is tempting to read this as a screwball romance between Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, his carping, exasperated nurse. They certainly walk off arm in arm at the end. The title character is Marlene Dietrich She's twenty years too old, but she does allow a nice flashback to cabaret in the ruins of black market Berlin. It's her acting sleight of hand that gives the mystery its final reveal.

The film is based in London, but was all shot in the MGM studios. The sets are fine and feel realistic, particularly the recreation of the Old Bailey. There's a fabulous cast of British expats in support, with Una O'Connor scoring in her final screen appearance as the victim's cranky housekeeper. A sickly Tyrone Power makes his last complete film performance. His flashy but squalid gigolo isn't his normal screen territory, but he excels.

This hasn't the psychological complexity of fifties film noir. It's a puzzle. Like most golden age murder stories it makes demands on the goodwill of the viewer. But, it delivers some effective and delightful surprises. It's peak Wilder,  a Hollywood comedy-thriller of compelling entertainment.

It's a Sam Fuller film, so it kicks off with a bang. Gunfire is heard in the dressing room of a burlesque theatre. A stripper runs down main street in her heels and scanties to be shot dead in a line of traffic. Sugar Torch's murder is tangled up in the LA Japanese community. A contrasting pair of detectives who served together in Korea are on the case: the easy going WASP/jock (Glenn Corbett) and a sensitive, cultured Japanese American (James Shigeta).

The core of the film is its inter-racial triangle between the two veterans and the arts student (Victoria Shaw) who is helping them with their enquiries. Censorship made this still problematic in 1959. Through a late period film noir, Fuller challenged the traditional Hollywood taboo on race. This was around the time of the start of the civil rights movement.

With its big band soundtrack (solo clarinet for the romantic scenes), chases and punch ups, and seedy, lowlife locations and characters, this is a model for the emerging tv crime series. An oddball stool pigeon is especially familiar. There are no big stars. But Fuller's camera setups are far more interesting than on telly, and there is more background detail. There's an extensive tour of LA's Japanese district.

The three leads would go on to have careers almost exclusively on the small screen. They lack star charisma, but the two cops' friendship is engaging with its odd couple chemistry; Corbett is laid back and self possessed, Shibeta is intense and volatile. We'd see that dynamic again! The murder case is perfunctory and the racism no longer challenging. But Fuller shoots with ingenuity and cuts with energy, which keeps the film alive.

Lengthy courtroom drama based on a real life criminal trial which scrutinises the condition of the US legal system. And if that sounds like homework, it really isn't. This is an absorbing film made with a light touch by Otto Preminger with a fine jazz score by Duke Ellington. It was adapted from a novel by a defence attorney based on one of his cases.

The film is shot around coastal Michigan where the actual events took place. An unambitious small town lawyer (James Stewart), defends an army lieutenant (Ben Gazzara) who shot the man who raped his flirtatious wife (Lee Remick). The soldier is charged with murder and claims temporary insanity. The film is fascinatingly ambiguous and it is impossible to be sure, even by the end, what really happened. The same is true for the jury who must reach a verdict.

Of course, the audience wants the lawyer to win the case as we see the case through his eyes, and we like his sassy secretary (Eve Arden) and the alcoholic gumshoe seeking redemption (Arthur O'Connell). So we are partial. The point of the film is that everyone involved in the case is influenced by expectation, personal interest and past experience. Justice is at the whim of the dark arts of the lawyers.

It's a 160m film full of exposition voiced by static actors mostly framed within a single interior, the courthouse. It leans on its cast. And they are superb, particularly Stewart who is on the screen for almost every second. There is some awkwardness around issues which challenged fifties censorship, but that's a quibble. This is a masterpiece, and Preminger's best film by a long way.

This incredibly gloomy road noir is the best of the low budget crime pictures Anthony Mann made after the war. It's a love triangle. Joe (Dennis O'Keefe) escapes from prison and flees with a reluctant member of his legal team (the excellent Marsha Hunt), and his jealous moll (Claire Trevor) who loves him submissively and unconditionally.

The narrative is related by Trevor like a sombre dream, accompanied by the joyless drone of a theremin. Her introspective reverie is ethereal, like she is already dead. The real star of the film is the cinematographer (John Alton) who fills the screen with looming squares of inky darkness which have the oppressive expressionist dread of a Mark Rothko painting.  

The fugitive searches for the gangsters who sent him down with the promise of a financial sweetener. Only they have decided not to pay up. Raymond Burr and John Ireland are hugely intimidating as the hit men who try to rub out their former partner while the police chase him down to Mexico.

Luckless Joe is another poor sucker lost on the dark roads of film noir. It is a powerful, melancholy film, with its compromised, cursed figures always moving in and out of the enfolding shadows. The familiar story is slim but its heavy, clinging fatalism has a way of staying in the memory.

Ultra-low budget action thriller which spent most of the bottom line on its stars, including film noir legends Lizabeth Scott and Dan Duryea. There's a familiar set up; a comfortable married couple (Scott and Arthur Kennedy) are out driving when a man in a passing car throws a blackmail payoff into their back seat. The sleazy extortionist, (Duryea, of course) comes after them for his mislaid $60,000.

The swaggering Duryea is a man you love to hate, but he is outclassed. Scott plays one of the most relentlessly vicious femme fatales in noir. She will hold onto that windfall at any price. When her honest husband acts to hand it in to the cops, she shoots him and sinks his body in a lake. It's possible even to feel sympathy for the blackmailer when he is ruthlessly poisoned to settle who should keep the loot.

Scott plays a materialistic, suburban American housewife. Surely the extreme lengths that she goes to satisfy her greed is meant to be satirical. She has never been poor, she wants money to give her status in the middle class. So she is not outgunned by the other wives. There is even a hint that she may have helped along the suicide of her first husband when he proved to be an insufficient provider.

The sets and back-projection are pitifully cheap but the film's strengths dwarf its limitations. Scott is wonderfully degenerate in another of her noir bad girl roles. Sex is merely a negotiating stategy. There is something dreamy about her hushed, slurred delivery. She is aroused by wealth. Plausibility isn't always a priority, but this is a compelling morality tale, with a tasty script.

Short but thrilling film noir set in a news office. It was adapted from a Sam Fuller novel and it punches like his films, with an extrovert swagger and dialogue that sounds like headlines. The star editor (Broderick Crawford) kills the wife he left twenty years earlier when she threatens to expose his past to the rival tabloids, which are as rapaciously unprincipled as his own.

The newsman is conflicted. He wants to hide his crime and his sleazy background, but he can't deny the populist urge to sell papers. So he puts his top reporter (John Derek) on the story of the dead woman and blows it up big. A lavish bonus has been promised to the editor. Sales go through the ceiling but the trail leads right to his desk.

This is a fabulously entertaining film, driven by a lively, hardboiled script and unpretentious direction. It pulses with energy, especially in the fast talking newsroom scenes. The cast lacks a little sparkle in places, with Donna Reed insufficiently sassy, but Derek is effectively sordid and Henry Barnes is memorable as a former Pulitzer prize winner who has drunk his way down to skid row.

The locations are anchored in the New York lowlife, among the drunks and bums, hock-shops, scummy hotels and, well, tabloid newspapers. It's a light satire on the press. Derek finds redemption when he rejects their corrupt methods. Crawford's constant justification for dealing in murder and vice is 'it will sell papers'. In the end, he flogs his own dirty washing and makes his biggest sale. He can't deny his nature.

Neorealist prison drama shot at Fulsom State Penitentiary, California, which used inmates as extras. And one of the leads, Leo Gordon, had served five years in San Quentin for armed robbery! The title covers the plot pretty well but the action is a vehicle for social protest. The film makes a case for prison reform. While there is balance, it's a liberal film which argues for the kind of progressive changes usually resisted by the tax payer.

Producer Walter Wanger had just served time for shooting his wife's lover and wanted to make an exposé of his experiences. We witness the systemic thuggery which leads to the (costly) violence and vandalism that a more enlightened approach might avoid. The mentally ill, the sex offenders, the first timers and the lifers are all kettled under the cudgel of the demoralised staff.

There was a glut of films in the decade after WWII in response to frequent news reports about unrest in prisons across the country. There is a lot of editorialising, but this is easily the most visually realistic. Its cast looks authentic even if at times the cons are too articulate.

Neville Brand and Gordon are convincing as the two leaders of the riot with conflicting methods. Gordon is a psycho who just wants to waste the screws from the start. Brand, usually cast as the thug, actually has a strategy! This was Don Siegel's breakthrough as a director. It is a work of procedural social realism, modelled on a real prison riot, and it is relevant still.

Unusual, code-busting melodrama which can be read as a parable on American capitalism. Tyrone Power plays a charismatic narcissist who works up from a fairground conman to the lucrative spiritualism racket. He exploits everyone in his path until he is destroyed by a similarly fake psychotherapist (Helen Walker) who sends The Great Stanton into a spiral that ends at absolute zero; a geek in a sideshow.

This is the performance of Power's career as the unscrupulous, ambitious clairvoyant who seems to see into people's souls, and can turn it into cash. He is matched by a sensational portrayal from Helen Walker as the well bred shrink to the rich Chicago elite. When one of them must be sacrificed, Stanton's lack of class ensures it is him.

All the cast are exceptional. Ian Keith is devastating as the alcoholic deadbeat whose demise Stanton's story arc will imitate. His pitiful death is appalling. Joan Blondell is Oscar-worthy. This should have been a big award winner, but was just too unorthodox. It was an ambitious production though; Fox built a large fairground and filled it with real carnival acts. The noir photography is another big plus.

Nightmare Alley is pessimistic and disturbing and psychologically complex. It is surprising it was passed by the censors, especially as it equates religion with spiritualism... and Power and Blondell's relationship is unusually sexually frank for the time. Director Edmund Goulding usually made romances but this allegorical noir is one of the great films of the fifties.

Comedy-thriller which smuggles in a few political themes under its sparkling surface. There is an ingenious premise: a big shot media mogul (Charles Laughton) murders his rainy day lover, and gets his fixer (George Macready) to plant evidence suggesting the killer was the newsroom's ace reporter (Ray Milland). The journalist investigates the crime and finds the trail leads to himself...

The film drops a few hints that the boss' unfettered corporate power implies the fascism that has just been fought in Europe. The ubiquitous big clock symbolises the extent of his malign control. This is the era of HUAC. The Hollywood Ten were charged a year earlier. When Laughton threatens to have Milland blacklisted it must have shot a bolt down the spines of American audiences.

There's plenty of comic fizz. When Milland and the soon-to-be murder victim (Rita Johnson) go on a crawl of cocktail lounges they might as well be William Powell and Myrna Loy. Maybe better if they had been as the rather smug Milland can be hard to like. The film is also weakened by Charles Laughton's ludicrous yet soporific portrayal of the odious Mr. Big.

Still, Elsa Lanchester is funny and adorable as the kooky artist who comes to the framed reporter's aid. The screwball makes it uncertain how seriously all this should be taken, but it just about works as suspense. The set design of the media empire, and the b&w photography make an attractive noir look. There are interesting historical themes but they don't burden the film's charming escapism.

Nicholas Ray's stylish debut set in Texas in the 1920s. It's a road noir which starts out like it's going to be about rootless, rural outlaws but detours into a study of adolescent love, superbly played by Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell. The film looks realistic with the support cast are all convincing as the poor of the depression 

Three criminals escape from jail and go on the run holding up small banks in hick towns. Granger is a naive kid who has been inside since he was sixteen. His associates are tough, dumb career crooks. They get shot up in a raid and hole up at a safe house where the boy falls in love with O'Donnell, a lonely rural teenager.  

They live outside the law, like Bonnie and Clyde. There are longueurs and the narrative swerves all over the road but this is an elegant, innovative film, from the famous opening helicopter shot to the slow, sad final fade out on O'Donnell's face. Ray always finds interesting and artistic perspectives for his camera. 

They Live By Night recalls the social protest gangster films of the thirties. The youngsters have no alternative but to break the law. Crime is the class they are born into. It has its own etiquette. Ray makes his stars immortal as the gentle, doomed lovers who are forced to survive, while they can, in the only way they know.

Entertaining comedy thriller set in what seems to be 1940s England, but is more identifiable as a fantasy Hollywood London of cobbled streets and gaslight. A wisecracking American taxi dancer (Lucille Ball) gets entangled in a Scotland Yard investigation into a serial killer who contacts his victims through personal columns while taunting the Inspector (Charles Coburn) with provocative verses.

So Lucy is recruited by the investigation into the Poet Killer to meet oddball lonely hearts. Ball may be a bit lacking in the glamour her character is assumed to possess, but she's fine at this broad comedy. As she closes in on her dangerous quarry, the film actually becomes effectively suspenseful. Douglas Sirk makes an exciting whodunit aided by beautiful expressionist lighting, even if the plot gets a little crazy.

There's a wonderful cast of British expats in support, with George Zucco enjoyable in a rare comedy role. Poor old Boris Karloff plays a whispering nutcase who meets Lucille in order to feature her in a fantasy fashion show located in his deranged imagination. George Sanders contributes his droll, cynical libertine to good effect.

When Sanders gets banged up by mistake, it's possible to wonder if Lured is making a modest point about the unreliability of circumstantial evidence. But it never gets that serious. This isn't a major Sirk film, but it is the sort of hugely enjoyable froth that the major studios of the golden age produced so reliably.

Adaptation of David Goodis' pulp classic. Delmer Daves sticks faithfully to its plot and themes: Humphrey Bogart has been banged up for the murder of his wife. But he wasn't guilty. When he busts out he gets his face fixed and ends up looking like Bogart. Working to clear his name he relies on the kindness of strangers, especially the do-gooder socialite played by Lauren Bacall.

Goodis was a fatalistic poet of the unlucky schmuck. That doesn't sound like a Bogart and Bacall vehicle but Daves works hard to keep the story realistic. Bogart is hapless and scared and not a hero. We don't actually see his face for the first hour; the action is shot from his point of view. After Bogart removes the bandages, his vanity-free performance is excellent.

Bacall dresses down but is far too galmorous. There are moments when the love story might have been dialled back. But Daves does well to maintain a feeling of despair. This is Goodis' nocturnal city, inhabited by the lonely taxi driver, the unemployed musician, the discredited but altruistic doctor. And the perjured busybody and the cold blooded, menacing blackmailer. The convict's fate is in their hands.

During the hour of the film shot through Bogart's eyes, the other characters stare into the camera's gaze. Of course, this had been done before but Dark Passage does it better; it magnifies the criminal's fear of scrutiny. It has an expressionistic quality. The studio was furious that audiences only saw their big star for the last 40 minutes! But they did get an unusual, intelligent film noir.

The opening credits roll over a still of long legs in heels, promising salacious glamour. But nothing in all of film noir prepares us for how sleazy this film is. Maybe the censors were asleep; the narrative is occasionally sluggish. But Born to Kill lands a low punch of astonishing brutality. Even the good guy, the droll investigator (Walter Slezak) will let the murderer walk for a price.

It's a hard boiled noir about two insatiable sociopaths: Lawrence Tierney (Sam) is a violent, egotistical killer; Claire Trevor (Helen) is a poor relation who wants some of the family fortune and doesn't mind how she gets it. Together they free each other from guilt or ethics. He kills a woman, and she covers up. Sam marries Helen's wealthy step-sister (Audrey Long) but prefers sex with Helen, who is engaged to someone normal.

Everyone is compromised in some way. Sam has a (plainly) homosexual relationship with his submissive, scuzzy sidekick, brilliantly played by Elisha Cook, who will kill to clear any obstacles to Sam's desires. The spoiled step-sister will protect her psychopathic husband from the police to satisfy her sexual obsession.

The dialogue is startlingly frank. When Helen tells an old woman how it will feel when Sam kills her, she seems to experience physical pleasure. The lovers take a sensual thrill from how corrupt they are. This is a morally and visually dark film, with a rich film noir look. Tierney and Trevor are phenomenally trashy as well as degenerate. This one has to be seen to be believed.