Film Reviews by Steve

Hard to imagine that this folksy, corny biopic could work without the everyman qualities of James Stewart. But it does work, and became a big box office hit. Seven years after Pride of the Yankees, Sam Wood returned to baseball and miraculously manages to excise nearly all the sentimentality from the life of Monty Stratton, a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox in the thirties who recovered from an above knee amputation to play again in the minor leagues.

It's the epitome of Hollywood Americana, the story of a country boy, from rural Texas who who made good in the major leagues before overcoming his hunting accident. The rags to riches narrative of the first part of the film draws on the myth of the American dream. And the star gives us a character we can unconditionally cheer for. It adds up to cheerful optimistic cinema.

It's a true story that demands the audience suspend their cynicism but it only once strays into mawkishness; after Monty has shot his leg and commands his dog go for help... There are familiar archetypes; the unconditional love of his stoical ma, the drunken hobo ex-baseball star who cleans up to mentor Monty on the finer points. Peppy June Allyson plays James Stewart's romantic interest for the first time.

There are cameos from major league baseball stars to convey a little authenticity on the field, though Stewart is clearly no demon pitcher. There's a great script which allows Monty Stratton far more wit than the usual Hollywood country boy. And there's lively camera work out on the diamond. It's easy enough to mock its good hearted ideals, but for me it's the best baseball film of the studio era.

This is the western as political history. Of course it is fictionalised to fit an acceptable narrative, but it is a biopic of Tom Jeffords (James Stewart) a US army scout who constructed a relationship with Cochise (Jeff Chandler) leader of the Apaches in 1861, which was instrumental in ending the war in Arizona. Clearly, it's Hollywood history and primarily an entertainment.

The story condemns the American western expansion for ethical reasons as well as for the entrenched racism which may also have spoken to US attitudes when the film was released in 1950. Broken Arrow recognises the Apaches' strength as warriors, which other films had done by 1950, but also stresses that they were a civilised and principled people even compared to American imperialists. It treats their culture as worthy of respect.

 This was shot on location in Arizona in technicolor. It is a vivid spectacle full of well staged action scenes. As so often, Stewart is able to mute the heroics and reveal the common man within the hero. Chandler is dignified and charismatic and plays Cochise as a philosopher-warrior. Debra Paget is appealing as Jeffords' Apache love interest and it's quite startling to realise she was only 15 when shooting started.

Broken Arrow isn't written solely from the point of view of the Apaches, it voices either side. James Stewart has to do a lot of editorialising to draw out the nuances of the relative positions. Roughnecks in both groups threaten the treaty. It humanises the Native Americans and acknowledges that greed and corruption among the settlers will overwhelm Apache traditions as well as their territory.

The one where Jane's clothes keep falling off! When not swimming naked, Jane was filmed in a two piece. In the later sequels, the censors ensured Maureen O'Sullivan wore a dress, after a fuss created by the Catholic League of Decency... She has a wonderful chemistry with her still-slim Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller) which is ostentatiously physical.  

The attraction today is for its pre-code exotica and the prestigious production values. There are acrobatics, magnificent sets, underwater scenes and a run out for MGMs zoo animals. Tarzan wrestles a mechanical crocodile. Now, he seems an ecological hero, as he seeks to defy the European ivory trade in his carbon zero, off grid wilderness...

Unfortunately this is no longer the fabulous family entertainment it once seemed: partly because of its antiquity; but mainly because of the racism. Not so much the British hunters treating Africans with such indifference, as that may be realistic. But because the native Africans are stereotyped so grotesquely, as was usual in 1930s Hollywood.  

It is the best of the Weissmuller Tarzan films, with O'Sullivan a most beautiful Jane. Tarzan is was never more monosyllabic, a kind of parody of fantasy machismo, but Johnny has a pleasant comic touch and the stars make plenty of screwball sparkle. But for all its various merits, the reflexive racism makes the film now a transgressive experience.

The best of the thirties Hollywood historical adventure stories. It's a fantasy which is clearly improbable but so extravagantly romantic that this doesn't matter. Ronald Colman plays dual roles: the king in-waiting of a small middle European state who is kidnapped on the day of his coronation; and his distant, but identical relative, Major Rudolph Rassendyll, formerly of the British army, who steps into the royal shoes on the big day.

Rassendyll is soon up to his neck in courtly intrigue, and romancing the king's beautiful betrothed, princess Flavia (Madeleine Carroll). The supporting cast is superb, particularly Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as a sort of wicked mirror image of Rassendyll. Alfred Newman's score is alternatively rousing and tender. The solo violin motif that accompanies the imposter's courting of his would-be queen is a fabulous tearjerker.

The film is so vivaciously entertaining mainly because of Ronald Colman. He is phenomenal; so gallant and polished. Naturally... as an English gentleman, he possesses an instinctive regard for virtue, which he defends with an insouciant knack for adventure. Colman tosses off his self deprecating daring with just an arch of the brow.  It's an endearing performance of limitless charm which has been imitated many times.

In the end, everyone left alive does their duty. The elegant princess gives up her love for Rassendyll. Maybe this was meant to invoke the recent British abdication crisis... If there is a message to take away, it is that a monarchy is a crazy system of government! The best possible candidate is the ineligible Rassendyll! Sure, this film is superficial and sentimental, but it is a fantasy of huge appeal, with a definitive action hero performance from Colman.

Wilder coldly picks away at the soul of Hollywood in this dark meditation on the film business: half horror, half thriller. It is a typically cynical Wilder vision, famously narrated by a dead man; Joe Gillis (William Holden ) a failing screenwriter floating in the pool of forgotten silent film star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) face down with a bullet in his back.

The mansion Norma shares with her former director/husband, now servant, Max (Erich von Stroheim) is a fascinating location; part Gillis' morbid dream, part mausoleum. It is a kind of Hollywood purgatory, a development hell. Gillis tries to finagle a deal with death, but he is doomed. He is a ghost writer.

There are many gorgeous gothic touches from Wilder and co-author Charles Brackett, like the funeral of Norma's dead chimp, or the wind that blows low eerie echoes through an old cinema organ. The film is full of delicious insights into cinema and its history.

Holden is good as the hubristic, cursed writer, but Gloria Swanson is something more; she is truly strange. Norma entraps Joe in his journey through moral emptiness and the desire to succeed at any cost.  It has the expressionist look of film noir, but it's Wilder's pessimism about human nature that most makes Sunset Boulevard a legend of the genre.

This ambitious MGM historical drama is one of the grandest productions of the 1930s. It recreates the brutal conditions on a British merchant ship in 1787, the year of the famous mutiny against William Bligh (Charles Laughton) led by Fletcher Christian (Clark Gable). Laughton overacts to huge effect, making Bligh one of the great screen villains, but also a caricature.

Ships' companies were sometimes press-ganged, or co-opted convicts who had their sentences transmuted. This Bounty is crewed by a gang of expat British character actors who have to combine providing the comic relief, singing nautical ballads and dancing the hornpipe with contributing a growing background noise of justified resentment.

 It's an epic adventure yarn that tells the broad outline of history faithfully. It only really slows during the sojourn to the paradise island of Tahiti, but we do get to see the surprising homoerotic cavorting of the bare chested Gable and Franchot Tone. It is the unbuckling of traditional order during this stopover that makes Bligh's resumed malevolence finally unbearable.

The film tries to find a balance between its two protagonists. It must ultimately side with Christian but it doesn't overlook the harmful consequences of mutiny. The film tidies up its themes at the end too conveniently to be credible. But as a spectacle, Mutiny on the Bounty is magnificent. It puts an entire historic world and seagoing way of life on screen with a lively vigour. It remains one of the great Hollywood naval films and the best version of this story.

This atypical Capra film starts in the Chinese Civil War but soon becomes an exotic, unrequited love story between an American missionary, Megan Davis (Barbara Stanwyck), and a Chinese feudal warlord (Nils Asther). This is an unusually lavish and beautiful production, epic in the early scenes of conflict, and then opulent at the General's palace.

 Davis is an American missionary in Shanghai, saved from the chaos of the war by the powerful Yen. It's a vicarious adventure, as the horrified outsider becomes seduced by the brutal but sensual oriental. As she falls under his influence, she sees him less as an archetype and becomes absorbed by his eroticism.

 Megan fits a common pattern for Americans abroad in cinema: evangelist, naive, hubristic and out of her depth. In trying to save Yen's soul she destroys him utterly even while she falls in love with the man and his aristocratic luxury. He takes poison while she returns home merely chastened by her experience, a more sophisticated woman.  

This is a classic of the pre-code era. After 1934, even implying an affair between people of different races would be forbidden, as would the suicide. It's an imaginative and complex film. There is undeniably plenty of racial stereotyping, but actually by the fade it is Megan's intrusive Christianity which appears the more inexplicable, eccentric philosophy.

A faithful adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque pacifist novel which was a landmark Hollywood war film and helped establish the conventions by which we imagine WWI on screen. Exhorted by a patriotic teacher, a group of naive German children enlist, and over years of combat they are transformed by their experiences, until mutilated, insane or dead.

There is no sense of strategy in the film. The boys and their fatalistic mentors contest the same plot of French farmland in an absurdist exercise in futility. The soldiers create a society out of their irrational circumstances, and a normality out of their fear. They come to view life away from the front as alien, even menacing.

Lewis Milestone fought with the US army in France and he does sensational work. He turns his cast into a believable band of misfits; brutalised, but processing their trauma through trench wit. The visual scope of the film is epic, the camera is mobile and the editing lively. He portrays his huge battle set pieces with coherence, which few directors ever do.  

This ranks high among anti-war films and visions of WWI. There is a lot of vérité; the film shows us the logistics of mechanical war. We see a man blown away by an explosive leaving just his hands on the barbed wire. There is no music to evoke glory or sentimentality, there is just the habit forming terror of trench warfare and the betrayal of a generation.

Hollywood avoided WWI after the armistice, but the success of The Big Parade launched a wave of productions about the war over the next ten years. It was made only eight years after America joined the conflict, so there must have been real life experience on either side of the camera. Though there isn't an overwhelming impression of authenticity.  

King Vidor's epic invented a lot of the rules for platoon films, partly because it follows a predictable path: the initial patriotism on the home front; the drilling of a group of civilians into a fighting unit; the boredom of waiting and the virile furlough pursuits. Then the young soldiers confront the German army, and are stopped dead on the western front.

The film is dominated by a romance between its charismatic star John Gilbert as a rich doughboy, and the French Renée Adorée as an exuberant farmer's daughter. The cute comedy of their mutual incomprehension is utterly charming.

The Big Parade gave audiences a vision of war: the fighter planes, the army camps, the anti-aircraft artillery and chemical weapons. A veteran might have felt too many punches were pulled in the interests of tasteful entertainment. It's a long film, but doesn't drag. It was groundbreaking , but better, more incendiary war films were coming.

The plot of this adaptation of Raymond Chandler's classic crime novel was hugely simplified for the screen, though is still complicated by normal standards. But a surprising amount of Chandler survives, including a fair approximation of Chandler's tough, sardonic hero Philip Marlowe.

 Dick Powell handles the comedy particularly well and tones down the toothsome vitality of his crooning days. In his screen debut, giant ex-wrestler Mike Mazurki is Moose Malloy who strong-arms Marlowe into looking for his former sweetheart, a vanished showgirl called Velma. As cute as lace pants.

 It's disappointing that so little of Chandler's poetic vision of Los Angeles makes the cut (the studio didn't go near a subplot involving the trading of drugs to Hollywood stars). But many other strengths remain. Powell's voice-over exploits plenty of the writer's immortal narrative style and trademark wisecracks.  

A huge bonus is the noir photography, especially Marlowe's expressionistic descent into his drug hell. Thanks to censorship, the streets aren't all that mean, but the film does reflect the class structure of the great sprawling west coast metropolis and the crazies and charlatans that feed on it. A noir great.

Fritz Lang's penultimate Hollywood film is a pulpy satire of American news services. Walter Kyne (Vincent Price) sets up a contest among his management team to compete for a new role in overall charge of his media empire, leaving him free to play carpet golf and spy on his unfaithful, pneumatic wife (a blonde Rhonda Fleming).  

The Lipstick Killer is a psychopath murdering young women living alone in New York. Whoever impresses Kyne with the most sensationalist coverage will get the job. They are eclipsed at every turn by Dana Andrews' Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and broadcaster.

 This is a lively, cynical, sexy film noir which is pessimistic about human nature and the media.  Everyone in the film is grifting everyone else. They would sell out anybody for story recognition or a step up. It's about the perennial themes of film noir; greed and sex.  

Andrews is a little stiff in the lead. Perhaps appropriately as his character is drunk throughout. Ida Lupino shines as a sexy older woman hired for the 'female angle' but who mostly angles after Dana. It's a suspenseful thriller which climaxes with an exciting chase through the New York subway. Not Lang's best work but still a lot of fun.

Kathleen Howard reprises her role from It's a Gift as WC Fields' shrewish wife, but the great comic star has a more loving daughter (Mary Brian) this time around to sweeten the dish. It's a Gift was hilarious, but awfully cold. Again there is a collection of sketches built around a loose narrative. Ambrose Wolfinger just wants to go to the wrestling...  

The best episode is the opener when Fields is forced down into the cellar by his wife to confront two burglars who are getting mellowly drunk on Wolfinger's applejack. Fields, the intruders and a cop end up harmonising sentimental Irish ballads together. For all of them, this is brief moment of respite seized from the hell of domesticity.

 It's such a funny film because Fields' comic persona is so identifiable. His suffering is revealed so pitifully, with a sudden nervous reflex or a mumbled aside. He has grown to accept his malign fate. There's nothing he can do about it.  

Fields is always doing what he is asked, however absurd. Then is admonished when the outcome proves to be unsatisfactory. He acts without complaint or hope, and then gets nailed for it. And who doesn't know how that feels?! This is my pick as his best film. 

This is the best MGM comedy of the thirties. It's a newspaper film. Spencer Tracy is the editor of a tabloid that accuses rich girl Myrna Loy of infidelity. She and her father Walter Connelly are going to sue. Because it's not true. Tracy calls in his libel specialist William Powell to marry Tracy's girlfriend Jean Harlow, and then be gotcha'd with Myrna...  

So it's a farce! And that's a brilliant screwball set up. Of course, Harlow falls for Powell and Powell falls for Loy. There's a superb script full of fast talking wisecracks set around the newspaper offices.  Probably this was influenced by The Front Page, but I think Libelled Lady is the better film..  

There's a fabulous cast but it's Powell's film. He shares a chemistry with all the other stars. No surprises that he is so good with Myrna, given they starred in 13 films together. The angling scene where he tries to blag trout fishing with Loy and Connelly  is a standout.  

 It's about the privileges of the super-rich, their cocktails hours and cruises and expensive hobbies and publicity headaches. It isn't too bothered about the depression. The only working class character is played by Jean Harlow, who is treated shamefully. It's a classic, funny social comedy, but it doesn't have the depth of Frank Capra's contemporary work.

 For my money, Claudette Colbert is the greatest female comedy actor in films. Midnight is mainly a vehicle for her comic élan, and flair for suggesting a little more than she says. She's an American showgirl in who arrives in Paris in the rain wearing just a fabulous gold evening dress but with no luggage or money.

She is picked up by Don Ameche, a taxi driver of limited means,  but soon enough is pretending to be the wife of a Hungarian aristocrat... for complicated reasons....  It's the Cinderella story. The charade will end at midnight. Will she be uncovered as penniless gold-digger by a high society superbitch played by Mary Astor?    

The film is a glorious dream of screwball fantasy. There is superb script by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett full of wit and innuendo. The director Mitchell Leisen proves a reliable substitute for Ernst Lubitsch. But everything is elevated by this cast, with John Barrymore very much at home in this kind of continental farce.

There are depths. Colbert starts off as a mercenary, but inevitably she must settle for something other than wealth and title. The charade must end.  She must settle for love, but the film is very clear that for the poor, love is usually not enough. One of the best comedies of the decade.

 Astaire & Rogers represent so much of the classic glamour of 1930s cinema. Swing Time is their usual screwball frou-frou with Fred as a shiftless gambler looking to blag a fortune to marry a rich looker (Betty Furness) but falling in love with working girl Ginger.

A few of the support cast from Top Hat return, including the super-unctuous Eric Blore and comedian Helen Broderick, again playing Ginger's older pal. Swing Time's weakness is that it lacks the wit of Top Hat, and Fred's character really isn't all that easy to like. But...  

...it boasts some astonishing musical standards from Dorothy Fields and Jerome Kern, and dance numbers that can be included among  Fred & Ginger's greatest hits. Fred sings the sensational romantic ballad, The Way You Look Tonight. His Bojangles tribute to Bill Robinson  is the showstopper. The legendary duo make magic together on Never Gonna Dance.

 And there's Pick Yourself Up, A Fine Romance and the title waltz! The art deco sets are wonderful too. Neither Astaire nor Rogers was a great actor or singer, in my view.. But ninety minutes spent in their company is a time machine back to a world of romance, grace and sophistication.  

*warning, film includes a blackface number.