Film Reviews by Steve

Exciting, twisty thriller with an exceptional cast. Robert Young is cast against type as a dishonest playboy who is financially dependent on his wife (Rita Johnson) while dallying with Jane Greer and Susan Hayward. Greer's part is insubstantial but Johnson is excellent and Hayward gives the film a huge boost with her reliable dynamism as an unrepentant gold-digger.

It's a murder mystery that relies on that traditional golden age standby, the unidentifiable corpse. In fact, there is another; the story is narrated from the witness stand by Young who may well be an unreliable narrator. His uncorroborated testimony gives an already absorbing plot another twist.

There's pleasure to be had from watching the suspect play the field before his complicated comeuppance, but the strongest emotion in play is just how trapped he is in his marriage and his job. The gilded cage from which he never escapes. This allows Young to make his ill-fated character at least a little sympathetic.

The film's grown-up cynicism and fatalism gives it a noir edge, though its look isn't dark and there are no mean streets. The big plus is Irving Pichel's swift, polished direction which speeds us through the chicanery of many intricate plot complications. There's an excellent, pessimistic script. Young felt it was his casting as a villain that led to the public staying away; they all missed a stylish, entertaining thriller.

Cult film noir set in New Mexico in the aftermath of WWII. Robert Montgomery returns from the Pacific with his pal who gets rubbed out by a mafia boss (Fred Clark) for trying to put on the bite for a crooked Government contract. The ex-GI tracks the gangster south to San Pablo during the fiesta, while being tailed himself by an FBI agent (Art Smith).

For a noir, Ride the Pink Horse doesn't have a strong expressionist look; this isn't a town of shadows. It is most like film noir for its political context. The promised postwar settlement has fallen through. Semi-legitimate gangs and crooked politicians have been getting rich while a generation of young men were fighting in Europe and the East.

The laconic, traumatised hero has lost his girl and his friend and his belief in his country. He has no faith in the law which allowed the killer to go free. Criminality has been normalised. But in San Pablo he meets honest citizens among the Mexican poor; the trusting, guileless Wanda Hendrix and an optimistic fairground worker played by Thomas Gomez (who was Oscar nominated). This challenges his racism and cynicism.

The enigmatic title hints that this stowed a socialist message inside a low budget thriller. Perhaps it was this which attracted A list writers Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer, and Montgomery, to such a minor production. It was released in '47, when the Hollywood blacklist was introduced to prevent films like this being made. It works best as a woozy, dreamlike political allegory.

This was a minor studio production but has become a B film legend. Julia (Nina Foch) takes a job as a secretary to a family of nutcases who kidnap her and lock her up on a remote estate in Cornwall (shot in California). They need a body to stand in for the woman who was murdered by her psychopathic husband, which will be made to look like a suicide.

They parade Julia as the wife for the benefit of local witnesses, claiming her protests are part of her psychosis. OK, it's a screwball story, though no more than many other golden age mysteries. It succeeds because Joseph H. Lewis stages it so well. No screen time is wasted, and there's one of the most brilliant noir house-of-shadows.

Nina Foch is believable in the difficult title role, but it is the crazy abductors who make a bigger impression. May Whitty is the eccentric but ruthlessly pragmatic mother of the simple-minded George Macready. He is splendidly menacing as the killer who relishes their plans for Julia, while also enjoying having her as his wife, for a while.

It is set in England, where in the world of Hollywood these things happen. Like Gaslight. Film fans like to flag up the doomed males of film noir, exploited by a predatory female, as a key postwar theme. But there were many women like Julia; lonely, vulnerable and manipulated, particularly by family. My Name is Julia Ross is among the most typical and successful of these.

Spy melodrama from a story by Eric Ambler, which clearly anticipates Graham Greene's The Third Man. Peter Lorre is a Dutch writer visiting Istanbul who hears of a ruthless, inscrutable agent for hire called Dimitrios, who has washed up in the Bosphorus with a fatal stab wound, and decides to research his past for a possible novel. 

This proves hazardous because the trail leads to Dimitrios himself (Zachary Scott), who isn't as dead as he is supposed to be. There's an episodic plot made up of flashbacks to international scandals from which the agent provocateur vanishes without capture. For the final part of the film, Lorre allies with Sidney Greenstreet, one of Dimitrios' former gang of murderers, assassins and spies. 

Lorre and Greenstreet made eight films together in the five years after The Maltese Falcon. And they are always reliable. Zachary Scott makes his debut in the title role and he is perfect as the outwardly charming, inwardly unscrupulous conspirator, gaming the volatile capitals of the Balkans between the wars.

Production values are high for a moderately budgeted ensemble thriller with no big stars. The art direction and photography are full of shadowy atmosphere. Hollywood routinely used this kind of foreign intrigue for their many serials. The Mask of Dimitrios is a class above that, and while not a prestigious production, it is a minor classic.

The second of a pair of period films made for Twentieth Century Fox with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Arthur Conan Doyle's immortal Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. These and the further 12 updated stories at Universal have widely established the duo as the best Holmes and Watson on the big screen.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes stands out among the 14 because it is such a handsome production and a rich recreation of Doyle's world. The plot stands little scrutiny, but the film was made with a lot of love. This is an atmospheric London of foggy, gothic graveyards, beautiful Hansom cabs and gas lamps. These excellent sets are painted in deep shadows. There's a touch of the exotic too, which is typical Doyle.

The drama focuses on the psychological war between Holmes and Professor Moriarty (George Zucco) who intends to steal a priceless emerald from the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London. But more thrillingly, Moriarty means to destroy Holmes, who is the Napoleon of Crime's only realistic adversary. Obviously Scotland Yard is just a storage facility for idiots.

Bruce's bumbling doctor is a matter of taste, but he does bring some effective humour to the earlier films and he looks the part. But Rathbone is perfect casting. He appears just like Sidney Paget's original drawings for The Strand Magazine. It's an entertaining film which still works for hardcore Holmes enthusiasts. The stars and the dense ambience of Victorian London make this a strong candidate for the best feature film about the great detective.

Fascinating curiosity which pre-dates many of the techniques and motifs which will soon be applied to film noir. A reporter (John McGuire) gives circumstantial evidence which will send an innocent man (Elisha Cook Jr.) to the chair for murder. Under the strain of this responsibility, the newsman's psyche begins to unravel just as he spies a mysterious stranger (Peter Lorre) who may be the real killer.

This is a very minor, low budget release and it's isn't likely that it inspired the pioneers of noir, but some of its technical team would become key players in the genre, like cinematographer Nicolas Musuraca (Build My Gallows High) and art director Van Nest Polglase (Gilda). They are the main contributors here, giving the film an ostentatiously expressionistic look.

There are many quirky plot points that predict emerging noir themes. McGuire is eventually accused of both murders and his girlfriend (Margaret Tallichet) must investigate to clear his name, just like Phantom Lady or many other adaptations of Cornell Woolrich stories. There is a voice over narration, a dream sequence, a feeling of oppressive uncertainty with an innocent man confronted by a malign, inexorable fate.

The narrative was clearly influenced by Franz Kafka and feels like the work of the Hollywood socialists of the period. Authority figures are shadowy, menacing figures. The individual is helpless to resist. Aside from historical interest, it is an entertaining and unusual film. McGuire and Tallichet lack star wattage, but Lorre brings a surge of energy towards the climax and is appropriate casting for a production that owes a debt to German Expressionism.

Warner Brothers haulage melodrama which takes the premise of the Bette Davis vehicle Bordertown and welds it onto the chassis of AI Bezzerides' pulp novel The Long Haul. George Raft and Humphrey Bogart are wildcat truck drivers continually getting gypped by the buyers. Ann Sheridan is the sassy hash-slinger who wins Raft's attention away from Ida Lupino, the wife of a wealthy haulier who she's looking to turn into an insurance payout.

Raft has the lead role, with Bogart subdued in support. Sheridan has little to do, but she's skilled with the sexy, snappy backchat that's compulsory for a waitress in a diner in a Hollywood film. The last third of the film is stolen wholesale by Lupino as the deadly femme fatale. On being snubbed by Raft after killing her vulgar, but loaded, other half, she is willing to destroy herself to take Raft down with her.

Her disintegration in the witness box is a stunning tour de force. Alan Hale is excellent as her unlucky husband. Jules Dassin's noir classic Thieves Highway (1949) was made from an almost identical story by Bezzerides. That was a socialist film and there's a little of that social protest also stowed away in They Live By Night. The haulier business is unsafe, corrupt and unjust and in need of regulation.

But of course the studio was not making a political picture. It's road film, loaded with atmosphere and interesting social history. Raoul Walsh keeps the story rolling forwards. The laconic dialogue is excellent and the hybrid narrative is interesting. There's a weary, gloomy pessimism on board which gives the film the haunting despair of film noir, though still a few years short of the noir big bang.

Rural Warner Brothers gangster film which broke Humphrey Bogart as a Hollywood star. He is Roy 'Mad Dog' Earle, a stick-up man who is sprung from prison by a crime syndicate to pull off a heist in an exclusive mountain resort. Roy is an outlaw of the old school who knocked around with John Dillinger in the midwest of the depression. But now the wild country has been tamed and turned into health spas and hotels. Just another racket.

Earle is the most interesting gangster of the American pre-war era. He is a violent, menacing and unpredictable man but sentimental, and often kind. When his resentful and righteous anger boils over, he doesn't recognise this brute as himself and soon forgets. He is a man running out of time. Doc says it best: 'Remember what Johnny Dillinger said about guys like you and him. Said you were rushin' toward death'.

Roy is an anti-hero. He is a gunman, but almost everyone else in the film is a monster in some way! The sympathetic characters are the old timers. After Roy arranges for a surgeon to fix the foot of a girl he meets on the road, without her disability she becomes spoiled and cruel. Roy has a woman, a no-luck dame, a taxi dancer from LA. She's played for maximum heartbreak by Ida Lupino and she and Roy go straight to the heart.

High Sierra is an intelligent story, a road film heavy with pessimistic, noir atmosphere set in vivid rural locations. The climactic shootout is a blast. There's a poetic, slangy script from John Huston and WR Burnett (from Burnett's novel). It's another tough, fast-paced triumph for Raoul Walsh who made so many classic action melodramas in the golden age.

One of the great Hollywood films. Credit goes to Dashiell Hammett's wonderful novel, faithfully adapted by debut director John Huston. The dialogue and narrative is all Hammett. He was a former Pinkerton Agent who knew what he was writing about. In Sam Spade, he gave us cinema's first authentic PI. And Humphrey Bogart's first signature role.

The rest of the story is actually quite theatrical, with the elaborate McGuffin of the Knight Templars' falcon, and the band of colourful crooks in pursuit. That the three male conspirers are obviously gay, seems a remarkable detail, given the censorship of the period. It's a caper film but with the darker shading of the emerging film noir style.

The stars are phenomenal, especially Bogart as the morally ambiguous antihero, the fast talking Spade. Mary Astor is the deliciously duplicitous femme fatale, a noir legend. Elisha Cook and Peter Lorre are the henchmen. Best of all is Sidney Greenstreet as the huge, loquacious, dangerous boss. Bogart's chemistry with all the support cast is sensational.

The Maltese Falcon is a fascinating thriller, with its cast of totally unreliable criminals, and a hero you are never sure of. The photography is artistic. The script is full of memorable, quotable dialogue, particularly in the long, thrilling final scene. It was a huge leap forward for the Hollywood crime film, and it seems to keep getting better.

Laura is a stylish whodunit from the year zero of film noir. The photography won the Oscar and it's fantastic; the web of shadows gives the film a classic noir look. It differs from most other early greats of the genre in being a golden age murder mystery set among the cultural elite rather than tough, dirty pulp fiction. There is a deep and dreamy aura of romantic fantasy.

When Laura's body is found in her swanky apartment she leaves behind a number of rich, unlikeable and droll suspects, mostly men who are in love with her. The detective investigating the murder (Dana Andrews) falls under the spell too, particularly of her woozy, mysterious portrait. And then Laura walks back into her room leaving the NYPD to wonder who the corpse really belongs to.

The famous romantic score perfectly elevates this mood of narcotic glamour. As Laura, Gene Tierney's unconventional beauty is a huge bonus. But far too much doesn't work. Not so much the crazy, overelaborate murder plot, which is standard for the whodunit but because Preminger just can't seem to stop the suspense from sliding out of the frame.

Clifton Webb, as the excellently named Waldo Lydecker, has to utter weary epigrams which are just too banal for the supposed doyen of fashionable New York, and is too creepy for it to be obvious why Laura would choose to spend time with him. The co-suspects played by Vincent Price and Judith Anderson are transparent. It was a huge hit. There's an interesting premise and plenty of talent, but Preminger fluffs it. 

The last of the '30s Warner Brothers gangster films looks back on prohibition and organised crime with nostalgia. There's a declamatory newsreel style narration which takes us from the armistice to the repeal of prohibition. James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart play doughboys who turn to bootlegging to get rich during the depression. Priscilla Lane sings hits from the period.

Because this era is being filed away into history rather than the present threat it was in the early thirties, Raoul Walsh is allowed to be relatively frank about how the gangs made their money and spent it. We see the speakeasies, the fashions, the machine guns and sedans. Real people from the period are featured, and infamous news stories are re-enacted.

Walsh keeps the story moving and the stars are excellent. Cagney and Bogart repeat their good gangster/bad gangster dynamic from Angels With Dirty Faces. It feels like Bogart has now arrived as an actor and is just waiting for a better role than Warners' were willing to give. But he still dies a quivering coward at the end of Cagney's shooter.

The usual bases of Warners' social realist mob pictures are covered. There is a progressive ethic. The film condemns prohibition and supports Roosevelt's new deal. Though it's a tough, terse, entertaining film, the action feels like pastiche and the nostalgia is sentimental. WWII ended the first classic era of the gangster film, and it's great to see Cagney still at his peak as the genre that he dominated fades to black.

With prohibition ending in '33 and censorship arriving in '34, the mob film began to slide from view by the mid-thirties. When it returned in this Cagney vehicle, it was with nostalgia. It's set in New York in the twenties. The crooks run the city and have the politicians and the police in their wallets. Crime often seems the only hope for the poor of the depression and the gangsters are revered by the kids.

Rocky (James Cagney) is released from stir and plans to rejoin his former partner, a slick mafia lawyer (Humphrey Bogart), who holds the proceeds from the job that Rocky took the rap for. Only Bogart would rather rub out Cagney than share his good fortune. The busted con forms a loose alliance with his childhood pal, Father Jerry (Pat O'Brien), a two fisted, crime busting priest trying to break the hold of the gangs on his parish.

This is more sophisticated than the early gangster pictures. There is a vast city set. Michael Curtiz's roving camera opens up the frame and there is a stirring score from Max Steiner. A key similarity with the pre-code gangster films is the inevitable demise of the criminal. What makes Angels With Dirty Faces special is how Rocky dies in the chair. It is one of the most stunning film climaxes, and absolutely chilling.

Warners was the studio with a social conscience. The title refers to the Dead End Kids, the slum delinquents who idolise Rocky, but the film asserts that they are redeemable. It is the deprivation of the big city, the impediments to turning an honest buck that make the poor turn to crime. The character of the priest is fanciful, but Cagney is a bundle of star energy. And that sensational ending places the film among the gangster greats.

One of the great films of the '30s; a classic of social protest which played a role in ending the use of chain gangs in the US. Robert Burns (Paul Muni) is wrongly sentenced to hard labour by a corrupt and sadistic penal system. The film doesn't merely assert that this is an unjust destiny for an innocent man, but for anyone. 

Burns returns from WWI to penury; one of the forgotten men. A bystander in a petty crime he is sentenced to ten years on a Georgia chain gang. He escapes to become a successful engineer, but having been tracked down to Chicago he agrees to return to jail on the understanding that he will be pardoned after 90 days.

The state, offended by Burns' public criticism, sends Burns to the foulest chain gang in the south and withdraws its promise. I can see Muni's face now, his pardon denied, sucked back into hell. Muni is magnificent. The support acting is variable, but mostly convincing and often very moving.

I Am a Fugitive... delivers a subtle appraisal of the purposes of the prison system. It's a gripping polemic about human dignity and the kindness of strangers delivered in the punchy, concise style of Warner Brothers in the thirties. The famous ending is a heartbreaker. 

Speedy, cheerful locked room murder mystery from the Philo Vance series. William Powell returns as the gentleman sleuth and the role is a perfect fit for his sophistication and comic élan. There's a standard golden age premise; a wealthy but hated man is found dead in his bolted bedroom with a gun in his hand. Everyone has a motive. The idiotic police are happy for the amateur to take charge.

The film has the weaknesses typical of this kind of story: the solution is preposterous; anyone could have done it; and the cast of suspects are archetypes. There is no impression of the misery caused by the act of murder. But given the limits of the genre, this is one of the best ever entries in a detective series.

Michael Curtiz keeps the the action moving. There isn't much of a budget, but Warner Brothers draw on a fine support cast of familiar contract players, including Mary Astor, Eugene Pallette and sexy Helen Vinson, so at least we know who these people are. The precode humour sparkles, and crucially, Curtiz tells the complicated story with lucidity, which rarely happens in low budget crime films.

It's a genre quickie with sterile sets and a static camera and the usual impediments of early talkies. But it is also a lot of fun and the editing is so slick it whizzes by. We get the cosmopolitan setting and the stereotypes and clichés we go to classic detective story for. Powell really makes it fizz. This was his last go at Vance, but he would play similar roles throughout the thirties, with charm and a lightness of touch.

This is famous for Humphrey Bogart’s breakthrough performance as Duke Mantee, a killer modelled on depression era gangster, John Dillinger. But the best part of the film is the opening half an hour of romantic dalliance between Leslie Howard and Bette Davis. She plays a young dreamer trapped in the Arizona desert, aching for escape. He is a rootless poet running low on hope. Their ethereal chemistry is very poignant.

They meet in The Petrified Forest, a desert made of fossils, a wilderness where obsolescent creatures come to die; like Mantee, the last of the western outlaws, or the poet who is a disillusioned, exhausted idealist. A few other archetypes gather in the lonely diner where Bette marks time as a waitress: there’s a patriot, an athlete, a wealthy couple…

After the exceptional opening, the dialogue becomes aimless and overwrought. But the film maintains its grip. This is too early for film noir, but it has that feel. Partly because of the slowly darkening restaurant as the night falls, but mainly because of its sadness, its atmosphere of pessimism and malign destiny.

As for Bogart, he has a strong, malevolent presence, and he dominates the later scenes, but he is awkward and not yet a star. Archie Mayo’s staging of Robert Sherwood’s poetic realist play is rich and full of mythology and wistful symbolism. But it's the melancholy rapport between Howard and Davis that cuts deepest, both searching for meaning in the haunted desert as world sinks into the depression and fascism.