Film Reviews by Steve

Brief, fast paced B western which is full of offbeat narrative details: like the gunfighter's steel prosthetic right hand and the hero's duelling weapon of choice, the harpoon. It's a fascinating film, packed with audacious stylistic flourishes. The ultra-stark black and white photography, allied to a percussive mariachi score, gives the film a unique ambience.

Sterling Hayden plays a Swedish immigrant sailor who comes home to Texas to discover a rich landowner (Sebastian Cabot) has hired a gunman (Ned Young) to murder the farmers who have leased his territory, now he has discovered it is sitting on a sea of oil.  The killer has shot down the sailor's father. So it's a revenge western.

This was written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo under a front, and the film is ostentatiously about the failure of people to stand up to an oppressor. It is also a story about the corruption of capitalism. The terrified farmers wonder why one man should want everything. Hayden was another victim of McCarthy. He is terrific in this.

And it's an exciting work of genre fiction; the film moves like a bullet. There is phenomenal suspense for such archetypal situations. And the characters are vivid and moving. We really care about these persecuted farmers. This was Joseph H. Lewis' last film before he went onto tv, but he was still clearly at his peak. He's among the great low budget directors.

 Warlock tells a story similar to the gunfight at the OK Corral, but there are interesting differences. Everyone in the film is an ostentatiously ambiguous character: the Marshall paid by a western town to protect it from it from marauding, homicidal outlaws is a gunfighter without any legal status; the actual law is a former member of this gang of ruthless killers.

Henry Fonda is the Earp-like Marshal and Anthony Quinn is his stand-in Doc Holliday, played as a disabled, gay gunman... Richard Widmark is the former comrade of the cowboy/gunfighters who elects to clean up the territory on the side of the law. Some critics claim all this moral relativism is an expression of director Edward Dmytryk's status as the only one of the Hollywood Ten to name names to HUAC.

Which feels tenuous, but it does give an impression of how complex the characters are, even though the story is familiar. And this is a fascinating film with great performances which exploits the dramatic Utah scenery at least as well as any other western. The female characters are peripheral, though Dorothy Malone's former sex worker driven by revenge, Lily Dollar, has a great name.

It's another western about the obsolescence of the gunfighter which were abundant at the end of the fifties. As Widmark says: 'civilisation is stalking Warlock'. The interests of disparate groups will become codified under the law. Among these films, Warlock stands out for the continually shifting moral landscape of its ambiguous anti-heroes.

This was made as a riposte to High Noon which Howard Hawks and John Wayne felt was anti-American, and they mocked the film for the notion that a sheriff would expect the support of his community; he should go out and shoot the bad guys alone. Though, in Rio Bravo, when the outlaws hit town, Duke has enough deputies and allies to fill a minibus.

The western it most imitates is Gunfight at the OK Corral, particularly for the comedy of its odd couple bromance. Wayne is the steadfast, sharpshooting Sheriff. Dean Martin is the charismatic, drunken deputy. The films share many similar details, but Rio Bravo is a more comic, cartoonish film. The characters have names like Stumpy and Dude. Angie Dickinson wears feathers and so is called Feathers.

And by the finale, Walter Brennan is throwing sticks of dynamite around like it's Looney Tunes. After Hawks made The Big Sleep he decided that the audience didn't care about the narrative, just the comedy and characters. Leigh Brackett wrote both films, and Rio Bravo is a series of archetypal western situations set into a loose narrative. The plot barely matters.

It's a long, episodic film and by the time Dino and Ricky Nelson present a couple of Mariachi ballads, it begins to feel more like a revue. There are a pair of comedy Mexicans. Dickinson reprises the Lauren Bacall persona from earlier Hawks films. But, personally, if it was intended to support the human rights abuses of the McCarthy witch hunts, then that makes liking Rio Bravo a lot to ask.

Civil war western which has the usual John Ford signifiers: manly baritone singing; comical Irish soldiers in a constant search for strong liquor; a gratuitous punch up... and the competing males leads.  Here, John Wayne is a veteran cavalry Colonel leading his column south to sabotage Confederacy railway lines, and William Holden is an army medic trying to keep his men alive.

Into this contrived mano a mano is forced Constance Towers as a southern aristocrat who has listened in on the cavalry plans and so is taken along to keep her quiet and adorn the horse soldiers with some decorative glamour, rather than shooting her as a spy. She begins the film promising ruination on all Union soldiers and their kinfolk and ends it falling in love with the Colonel.

The comic tone of the early part of the film gives way to the conflict, but while the battle is photogenic, Ford doesn't reveal much of the human cost. A potentially quite poignant attack by children enlisted into the Confederate army doesn't extract any sense of absurdity or pity for the horror of war. The scene ends with one of the boy soldiers being spanked.

The actors do well under the circumstances, particularly the elegant, urbane Holden who is surprisingly at home in Ford's old west. It's quite entertaining. Ford frames his cavalry soldiers attractively, but it has very little sense of authenticity. There is no impression of poverty or famine, or that the black people the Union soldiers encounter are actually slaves. A lesser John Ford, I suppose, but not untypical.

Low budget psychological western raised way above the ordinary by a wonderful double act between a nervy Anthony Perkins and a very cool Henry Fonda. There's a standard western plot. A bounty hunter and former lawman (Fonda) passes through town to claim on the body of killer.  He stays around to help the inexperienced sheriff (Perkins) learn the facts of life.

The stranger lost his wife and child long ago, and the youngster has no family either. They form a temporary father-son relationship as the veteran teaches his protégé how to face down a contemptuous gunman splendidly played by the ever loathsome bad guy specialist Neville Brand.

It's a liberal Hollywood film and Brand channels the racism of fifties America which the sheriff must overcome, as well as impose law and order. It's a great looking film in fabulous b&w, widescreen Vistavision. There's a plausible impression of period and a lovely romantic score from Elmer Bernstein.    

This is Anthony Mann at about his peak, making fine entertainment out of genre conventions. But it's the simpatico pairing of Fonda and Perkins and the relationship of their characters that makes the film so enjoyable. Though admittedly Perkins looks more like he belongs in High School Confidential than the old west. 

Western melodrama leading up to the famous shootout in Tombstone in 1881 works best as a buddy movie between Burt Lancaster (Wyatt Earp) and Kirk Douglas (Doc Holliday). Earp saves Doc's life so Holliday trails the lawman across the famous towns of the old west to pay off his debt. Earp's pragmatic but law-abiding Marshal riffs off the gambling gunman's mercurial charisma.

The film is a study of the gunfighters of the old west, so a few famous gunmen turn up who weren't really present. The film concludes with Wyatt delivering a lengthy homily about the perils of the gunfighting life to one of the Clantons (Dennis Hopper). Who is shot anyway. The concluding face-off is excellent, but there's quite a lot of discursive chat in getting there.

It looks more like a western of the sixties. Its palette of matt creams, browns and greens is muted compared with the more fluorescent Technicolor of the fifties. And Burt needs a shave at times and the impressive set of Tombstone feels relatively realistic. It's mostly an urban western, but when the stars do leave town the big blue widescreen skies are magnificent.

Aside from the action, there is plenty of romance and a few comical touches. Most of its huge box office punch is down to its rangy leads. Burt and Kirk are great together. It feels quite procedural even though the history it presents is pure fantasy. Still, there is an exciting gunfight and it leaves us with a visual mythology and an impression of the kind of man who lived by the gun.

This intelligent western is one of the great thrillers of the 1950s. It is a head to head between Glenn Ford as the insidious killer held at gunpoint in a rural town by a stubborn, determined farmer (Van Heflin). While the captive waits for his ruthless gang to spring him before the train arrives to take him to the prison at Yuma, he whittles away at his emergency warder's insecurities...

One of the attractions of 3:10 to Yuma is the dramatic, imposing film noir lighting, but Delmer Daves takes more from noir than its look. This is a psychological film about doubt and anxiety. It also has a remarkable atmosphere for a western, a poetic sense of loneliness most poignantly expressed when the wanted man dallies to seduce a forlorn bar worker, which allows him to be caught.

This melancholy is enhanced by the lovely acoustic guitar score. Of the supporting cast, Felicia Farr is heartbreaking as the unloved girl willingly seduced by the outlaw's welcome lies. Their sexual liaison is quite candid for 1957. The visual imagery is haunting, with a very desolate, austere funeral particularly evocative. The script from Elmore Leonard's story is wise, and elegant.  

The brilliant performances of Ford and Heflin dominate the film. Daves frames them so starkly in b&w against the parched wilderness of the land. The drought that is killing the farmer's herd. Daves directs with great finesse. He seems to be gazing into the desolate heart of every scene. This is an exciting thriller, but it is the undertow of sadness that gives the film its power.

Tough psychological western set around the time when the civilising of the west was threatening to end of the age of the outlaw. After many years of peaceful living, a former gunfighter (Gary Cooper) by chance runs into his ruthless former gang. He gets sucked back into a bank job, while he tries to devise a plan to to extricate himself and co-travelling chanteuse (Julie London).

When the bandits stage the heist they discover the bank is now a ghost town. They leave a few of their own bodies behind. It is an apt location for their self destructive shoot out. These brutal men are the phantoms of the old west, the anachronistic spirits of men who have outlived their ascendency with the arrival of law and order.

As so often in this period, Gary Cooper is twenty years too old for his role, even for a reformed gunfighter. Consequently Lee J.Cobb is buried under a heap of cosmetics in order to play his uncle. Julie London is for long stretches mostly employed as decoration. But they still deliver memorable performances.

Man of the West is a brooding, bleak western. The family of outlaws are all vicious grotesques. There's some humour early on, but this becomes a bitter, violent film, with an authentic look. Perhaps it was the film's intense brutality which meant it didn't find an audience at the time, but it has subsequently become a critics' favourite.

Attack is a cynical, tough war film which deals with a complex dynamic between the soldiers fighting within a defective hierarchy. The Lieutenant (Jack Palance) is a classic square jawed GI, but his bravery is undermined at every crisis by his incompetent, cowardly Captain (Eddie Albert).

The Captain is kept in position by the Lieutenant-Colonel (Lee Marvin) who seeks to gain politically from his stooge's family connections after the war. But how many men will he allow to die before he intervenes? This is a dystopian vision of the US infantry in the Battle of the Bulge which portrays the officers as a privileged elite, benefitting from the same preferment they expected back home.

The weakness of the film is that Palance is too much of a hero and Albert too much of a gutless zero, which makes the film schematic and less realistic. The sets are basic, though Robert Aldrich finds striking imagery among the ruins. It's a talky film with good action scenes. The usual running commentary of pessimistic infantry wit is punchy and funny. Lee Marvin always looks convincing in an army uniform (all the leads fought in WWII).

Its great strength is the nerve-shredding suspense. When Palance leads a dozen lightly armed soldiers into a heavily fortified village held by hundreds of Germans, with tanks, his superior doesn't even man the radio.  The Lieutenant's isolation and abandonment is excruciating. Attack was ahead of its time. Its motifs of disillusionment and mercenary individualism would become more typical in the war films of the sixties.

Febrile southern melodrama (from William Faulkner) about the barnstormers of the thirties who toured their shabby exhibition of hazardous flying stunts around the impoverished towns of the depression. They are led by a former WWI pilot (Robert Stack), a broken down war hero who can only sustain himself through the habit of danger, while destroying the life of his sexually frustrated wife (Dorothy Malone).

Into their orbit comes a poetic, drunken reporter (Rock Hudson) who is similarly damaged and empathises with the reckless flyer while regretfully falling in love with his wife. Hudson gives a subdued, melancholy performance. Malone is blindingly, maturely sexy. Stack is in a support role but steals the film. All of these characters are human wreckage, but Stack conveys his reckless pessimism wordlessly, with a haunted, infinite stare.

The flying scenes in b&w Cinemascope are exciting, but Douglas Sirk is far more interested in the psychology of his characters, the living debris of war and economic futility. The grinding, tawdry poverty of the travelling carnival and its exotic, fatalistic performers is palpable and pitiful and seductive.

It's the kind of breathy melodrama that Sirk could make better than anyone, full of sex and pessimism and extreme emotions. And disillusion with American capitalism. Hudson's scene when he drunkenly explains an airman's death to his editor is a classic. Hudson and Malone prowl around each other like jumpy cats. There's a lot of lyrical, gloomy innuendo. It ends a little cheerfully, but that's Hollywood.

Heartbreaking polemic about pitiless military justice on the western front in WWI and the corrupting insanity of war. This is one of the great anti-war films, but it isn't talky, or worthy. It is a fascinating, brilliantly acted film that burns on the energy of our anger.

It's a drama based on a real life incident. A senior French officer is offered promotion if he will order his men across no man's land to take and hold a heavily defended German stronghold.  The men fail against impossible odds, so three low ranking soldiers are tried and shot for cowardice, to encourage the others.

Many Kubrick classics have an epic quality, but this is the opposite. It dissects a single episode from conception to conclusion in forensic detail and indicts institutionalised cruelty and injustice. We are shown that the trenches were an extension of civilian life gamed to protect those with privilege and to facilitate their advancement.

The genius of Paths of Glory is that it works as an allegory for any hierarchy. It is brilliantly shot by Kubrick, particularly the long crane shots of the futile assault on the enemy positions. Kirk Douglas is incredibly intense as the lawyer defending his men. It is a classic of political cinema and Kubrick's best film. Prepare to be horrified.

Trapeze adapts the conventions of the sport film to a circus. Burt Lancaster plays an embittered, alcoholic former trapeze flyer who was grounded after an accident attempting the ultimate, the triple somersault. Tony Curtis is the young gun who arrives in Paris to learn the triple off the master, and to perhaps save him from self destruction.

They are joined by another archetype. Gina Lollobrigida (Lola!) is the hot tempered Italian acrobat who wants to break into their team. She gets between the two men and threatens the purity their act with her drop-dead glamour. They become a threesome in the air and on the ground. While the film soft-pedals this implication of homosexuality between the men, it doesn't quite avoid it.

It's the best circus film there is. While it is full of genre clichés (though we don't get a sad clown) these are made fun by great star performances, and spectacular action photography, in Technicolor. Carol Reed captures the flaking exoticism of the ring and the seediness of the threesome's assignations in trashy Parisian hotels. It's a sexy melodrama.

There's plenty of flesh on show from all the leads. Gina is fabulous in her sequinned leotards. The sassy dialogue uses the ecstasy of the high wire act as ominous innuendo for sex, which makes the film feel quite noirish. Maybe not one of (former real life trapeze artist) Burt Lancaster's more prestigious roles, but it's entertaining and a reminder of Lancaster's imposing physicality, and his athleticism, and grace.

Strange, eerie low budget western shot entirely in the studio. Its unrealistic approach gives the film a unique atmosphere. The painted western exteriors look like landscapes by Salvador Dali. A melodramatic country ballad provides the narration. And Lang's direction is way classier and more visually striking than is usual for a B film.

Though a western, and in colour, it feels like film noir. It looks so dark. The blackness of the shadows seeps into the dark, nocturnal colours. Like noir it is full of flashbacks, mainly into the backstory of its femme fatale, played impassively by Marlene Dietrich as Altar Kane, who runs a refuge for outlaws.

Arthur Kennedy is the relentless, borderline crazy cowboy searching among these fugitives for the killer of his girl. His consuming revenge begins to make Kennedy a lot like the men who hide from the law at the Spanish colonial ranch, particularly the saturnine Mel Ferrer, a kind of alter-ego and Altar's top gun.

 The action scenes are well staged, particularly a convincing punch up in a saloon and a climactic shootout. The performances are all enjoyably intense, especially Kennedy in a rare starring role. There's some good terse, bleak dialogue and Marlene has a song. But it's the pessimistic noirish theme of obsessive revenge that drives the film, and pulls it out of the ordinary.

Melodrama set around the rodeo circuit of the new west in the 1950s. Jeff McCloud (Robert Mitchum) is a busted up  ex-bullriding champion who coaches Wes Merritt (Arthur Kennedy) to riches and celebrity and sees him make the same mistakes as he did... while Jeff falls for Wes' combustable wife (Susan Hayward).

The Lusty Men depicts the west as a place where working traditions have been transformed into leisure and entertainment. It's a bit trashy, like an airport novel. There are a few bum notes; Susan Hayward is a great actor and she brings a lot of energy, but she is too polished for a shack reared rodeo wife travelling the trailer parks of the famous towns of the old west.

But it's a fun, volatile performance, and Robert Mitchum is easily a match as the brooding, bruised former champion. He was always a convincing cowboy. There's some fine low-rent poetic dialogue. Roy Webb's orchestral score evokes the big skies of the western without resorting to cliché, and gives the film an epic quality.

 It succeeds because it presents a vivid impression of the wild west carnival, populated by drunk stars and their suffering wives and transient groupies. The riders compete for finite prize money, which they spend on the road until they drop out with broken bones, or punch drunk, or worse, and empty pockets. The action in the ring is convincing, thanks to the stunt riders. There's a poor ending, but it creates a credible and unfamiliar world.

Ensemble western set after the Civil War. The naked spur refers to our motivations: bounty hunter James Stewart is driven by revenge; wandering prospector Millard Mitchell by gold; and disgraced cavalryman Ralph Meeker by sexual depravity. All are distorted by greed and compete to take in a fugitive killer (Robert Ryan), for a cut of the $5000 reward.  

And the murderer will seek to divide his captors and escape with his girl (Janet Leigh) as they travel through the Rockies back to Abilene. Most of the entertainment is watching the crazy, glittery eyed gunman use the men's weaknesses against themselves, like Iago in a cowboy hat.

Robert Ryan gives the dominant performance. He keeps his wild strategies secret, but he plainly enjoys the barbed malice he scatters in the path of his adversaries. No one could sneer quite as repellently as Ralph Meeker and he feels dangerous and completely mercenary as an ex-army rapist without any conscience at all. He's even more loathsome than the killer.

 James Stewart gives a complex portrayal as a peaceful man who has survived the Civil War with (what we'd call now) PTSD.  It's an actor's film, but visually striking with magnificent colour photography of the grandiose Rockies. It's all filmed on location and there's an exciting action finale shot in the rapids of the rugged, picturesque Colorado River.