Film Reviews by Steve

 Frank Capra gives us an unlikely hero, a rich man who wants to give all his money away! Longfellow Deeds is an everyman from Hicktown, USA who inherits $20m and moves to the bright lights of New York. Deeds is taken for a ride, but surely he can trust fast talking newshound Babe Bennett, who he is falling in love with?

Gary Cooper gives a signature performance as the provincial, tuba playing writer of greetings cards who grows disillusioned by ambient corruption. Jean Arthur became a star as the tough cynic who repents. As ever, Robert Riskin's dialogue is full of sharp political wit, and he's brilliant at voicing Deeds' idiosyncratic wisdom.      

Some of the commentary on America in the depression feels like editorialising. Unlike other Capra/Riskin films, the message isn't spun into the thread of the narrative. They hammer away at the point that America needs to find a unified solution to the depression which includes the rich and the poor. At times the film seems as naive as its hero.

There are many incidental pleasures, like the unflattering portrayal of the Algonquin round table of New Yorker critics. Its theme is that a corrupt society will always make good people look naive, even dangerous. Which is fair enough. Deeds wins out because Capra can't send his audience home without hope. But the reality may prove to be different.

The boxing film was always an apt metaphor for the Hollywood left in the era of film noir. They expose the corruption of the system as the boxers fight each other rather than those with power. Their willing participation in their own exploitation and destruction made the sport a potent symbol for the myth of the American dream..  

The Set-Up is the best of these fight films. Stoker (Robert Ryan) is a no-hope puncher nearing the end, vaguely aware he will never be a champion. His next bout has been fixed by his manager, who doesn't even tell him because he thinks Stoker has no chance anyway.  He is literally the fall guy. He fights, but he fight isn't fair. His fate has been sold.

 The film plays out in real time over a terse 70 minutes. Ryan (a boxer in college) is magnificent as a decent man who has never been corrupted by the hell he lives in, and so must destroyed physically. The outcome is heartbreaking. Audrey Totter is also very moving as his suffering wife.

The fight game is powerfully evoked: the brutal contests; the punch drunk veterans ; the wealthy racketeers. Hard-up punters pay rich promoters to see other poor men beat the hell out of each other. The hostility of the crowd towards the losers is so powerful and shocking. Robert Wise places us in the seats, among these voyeurs, another one of the mob.  

This is a heist film which closely follows the genre rules established by John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle. The star of that film, Sterling Hayden also features in The Killing, though as the leader of the caper, rather than a heavy.  

The heist takes place on a racetrack, worked by inside men, particularly a crooked bookie played expertly by Elisha Cook jr. He's a sexual flop, pitilessly squeezed dry by his unfaithful, predatory wife. As they must, the caper falls apart disastrously on the big day.

There is a good hardboiled script, which uses the unusual device of telling the heist from the various points of view of all the gang members, with the sort of strident third person narrative familiar from documentary style noirs like The Naked City.  

This low budget film was Kubrick's first significant release. It didn't sell too many tickets, but it gave him the opportunity to make Paths of Glory the following year. It is a genre classic, and stylishly made. 

Nightfall is an adaptation of a novel by one of hardboiled fiction's most pessimistic writers, David Goodis, a poet of impoverished lives ruined by dumb bad luck. It is glamourised a little for the screen, but is still subdued, like a mournful ballad.  

Aldo Ray tells the story with a catch in his voice like a corny torch singer, a sentimental guy with no luck at all. He is being tracked by a pair of relentless killers convinced he has pocketed the loot from their bank raid. Rudy Bond and Brian Keith are a fine double act as the heavies.

There are also enjoyable support performances from Anne Bancroft as a model he picks up in a bar and James Gregory as a resourceful detective chasing up the stolen loot.  Stirling Silliphant's screenplay conveys the weariness of Goodis' writing and the threadbare lives of his characters.  

Nightfall is mostly set in Los Angeles and the oil fields of California, but it concludes in the winter snowdrifts of Wyoming. Like On Dangerous Ground the film contrasts the dirty city with white rural snowscapes. The death of a character by snowplough must be unique in cinema! This is a stylish film and one of the great LA noirs.

Lang's last Hollywood film is anti-death penalty, just like his first (Fury, 1936). A novelist seeks to prove the fallibility of justice by planting clues to indicate that he is the killer of a burlesque dancer. He intends his publisher to then reveal the evidence was faked, proving circumstantial evidence is too precarious to justify the death penalty.  

No such luck. This being a Langian world, subject to the indifference of fate, the writer's accomplice is killed in a car accident the day the jury is to deliver its verdict! With Tom Garrett (Dana Andrews) on death row, his estranged fiancée (Joan Fontaine) works to clear his name.

 There is one final twist, which though unlikely is still enjoyable... The weakness of the film is its stars. Andrews gradually ossified through the fifties and Fontaine should have been playing mothers of teenagers by 1956. And the film looks awfully low budget. The bonus is its trashy burlesque setting and the sassy dialogue of its support cast of strippers.  

The police don't seem too bothered when they find out they were building a case against a writer researching a book. But though the story is improbable, it is still suspenseful and its many twists pay off.  And the film does actually make an effective case against capital punishment.

Robert Wise's anti-capital punishment polemic is based on the real life case of Barbara Graham who was executed in San Quentin in 1955 on unreliable evidence. It's a procedural film which explains how the prisoner is processed from their conviction all the way to the death penalty. The system is characterised as barbaric and legally hazardous.    

The film casts doubt over her guilt and argues that she was ill-used by a defective judicial system and the parasitic media. It was based on Graham's letters, and articles by Edward Montgomery, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who initially condemned her, but eventually tried to save her from capital punishment.

Graham was a prostitute with a history of petty crime. She lies by reflex. She is also shown as an affectionate mother who suffered at the hands of others. Susan Hayard is superb as the complex, condemned woman. For my money, Hayward was the great American female dramatic actor of the fifties. 

Wise actually puts us inside the gas chamber with Graham, trapped within the voyeuristic gaze of the press and representatives of law and order. The film makes a powerful case (though has been criticised for altering facts) but it's Hayward's intense, kinetic performance that ultimately dominates the screen.

With Dr. X (1932), one of a pair of horror films made by Warner Brothers in the early thirties, shot with mostly the same cast and crew and both in 2-strip technicolor. The greens and browns of this process give The Mystery of the Wax Museum an unusual and exotic look, allied to the striking deco sets (even the morgue!). Fay Wray gets top billing, but is in a supporting role.

The film is carried by Glenda Farrell as the sort of fast talking girl reporter that got her typecast.  Lionel Atwill plays Ivan Igor, a waxwork artist in London whose creations are destroyed when his partner burns down the gallery in an insurance scam. These statues were Igor's closest confidents, so he was bound to be upset, especially with his face and hands scorched in the blaze.

Igor reopens in New York years later and overcomes his disability by ordering corpses that look like his lost works and coating them in wax. Fay Wray looks the image of his long ago favourite, Marie Antoinette. The horror is mostly confined to the last ten minutes, particularly when Wray pulls off Igor's wax mask to reveal the hideous distorted face beneath.

This is a wonderfully entertaining film. While we're waiting for the exotic horror of the climax, the tough, fast talking house-style of Warner Brothers is a delight. Farrell is a blast and establishes a rapport with everyone she shares the screen with. The wax museum premise became a horror staple, but this is the best version and a marvellous swan song for the 2-strip colour process.

Fields used his feature films to recycle favourite sketches from his stage acts, so they are inevitably episodic. It's a Gift feels like his first masterpiece because his tragicomic persona crystallises perfectly. He is a timeless, suffering everyman whose desires must always be thwarted. He only wants to go to California to run an orange grove...  

Fields' is a middle aged man whose wife has become alien to him. He is aware that he has been left behind by a changing world. His coping strategies have made him weary, and unfulfilled. There is a residual charm which is evident to the kindhearted, but looks grotesque to most. Traumatised by domesticity, he remains more gentle than his times.

 Like all film comedians, he creates a strong visual image: his cigar, white flannel suit and boater, the ruined nose. It's a Gift has a fine script. The opening episode is the funniest with Fields' grocery store destroyed by the blind/deaf Mr. Muggles, who after wrecking the glassware, hilariously crosses the road outside untouched by the speeding traffic.

Such are the frustrating laws of the Fieldsian universe.   He can see every disaster as it approaches, but is powerless to resist. All he can do is palliate with whisky and cigars. It is a standard strategy in comedy to place your protagonist in the last place he wants to be, which is exactly where the immortal Fields' character lives his life. 

When comic acts from the stage got to make Hollywood films they were usually stiffed with B directors and budgets. The Marx Brothers fared better than most and here rated multiple Oscar winner Leo McCarey. Harpo, Groucho and Chico (and Zeppo in his last film) worked their act for years, and finessed their strong visual image and contrasting comic styles.

There's Groucho's fast talking wordplay, Chico's garbled malapropisms, and Harpo's destructive, primal mime. Groucho takes over the corrupt oligarchy of Freedonia which is slipping into war with neighbours Sylvania for whom Harpo and Chico are operating as spies. With populist governments emerging in 1930s Europe probably this was intended as satire.

But it's mainly an opportunity for the trio to unleash their trademark anti-establishment anarchy. There's a great visual joke with Groucho playing both sides of a mirror. Margaret Dupont again scores as their uncomprehending straight woman.  I like Marx Brothers films when Groucho is reeling off sardonic, convoluted, rapid-fire gags and not so much for the musical interludes of the other two.

Which makes Duck Soup their best film, dense with immaculate Grouchoisms.  It's the pick of their early Paramount films and it bombed, badly. The remaining three brothers left Paramount for MGM thinking that they were finished. But over the years Duck Soup has become an influential comedy (there's plenty of Monty Python here) and rated their masterpiece. 

With 42nd Street a hit, Warners made Gold Diggers in its image. Busby Berkley arranges the dance numbers and the brilliant songs are again by Dubin and Warren. There are familiar faces on screen with Dick Powell as a blue-blood composer romancing Broadway showgirl Ruby Keeler, to the outrage of his stuffy Boston family.        

If the comedy, script and situations of Gold Diggers aren't quite to the standard of 42nd Street, Berkley's musical numbers are still sensational and the best feature of the film. The film opens with Ginger Rogers singing We're in the Money as the rented scenery and costumes are reclaimed. Broadway is feeling the impact of the depression.  

There's Shadow Dance and the amazing Pettin' In the Park. This time it's Powell who has to go on at the last minute after the juvenile wrecks his back, and Dick ends the routine trying to get Keeler out of her steel corset with a tin opener. There's some fizzy precode dialogue from Joan Blondell and Aline MacMahan. It's still a year before the production code.

 Remember My Forgotten Man is the showstopper with a phenomenal vocal from Etta Moten,  mimed by Blondell. Berkley cuts from the stage to scenes of men queuing at a soup kitchens. Warner Brothers supported the New Deal and Roosevelt. Berkley's numbers were usually beautiful confections, but here he showed you could dance the blues.

The Baron (Herbert Marshall) and the Countess (Miriam Hopkins), have arranged a romantic supper in his swanky hotel in Venice. But soon they rumble each other as fellow con artists. After they have returned the trinkets they have lifted from each others, they move onto Paris as a team and steal a diamond covered handbag from a rich perfumer (Kay Francis).

Marshall finagles a job as the tycoon's secretary and develops romantic feelings for her while embezzling a fortune from the company. But Hopkins wants him for herself. It's a love triangle, except two of the lovers are kleptomaniacs trying to gyp the third and each other.

Marshall is very much at home in Lubitsch's Paris.  But it's Hopkins film in a performance that goes a long way to establishing a female archetype of the screwball comedy with her mix of the ditzy, impulsive and volatile.  

The dialogue is charming and witty and the farce is adorable.   But it's a comedy of manners which also refers to Trotsky and the wages of the poor. Unexpected and imaginative at every twist it is the last word on the sophisticated comedy which was Lubitsch's milieu: set in the romantic destinations of Europe, a place of irony, charade and repartee. And scandal. 

Musical version of Anita Loos' durable 1925 novel, via the Broadway stage, and updated from the jazz age to the 1950s. Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell are two showgals from Little Rock, Arkansas. Monroe plays a gold-digger, Russell a sort of she-wolf, who sail by liner to Paris with the red blooded boys from the US olympics team, and an elderly gent (Charles Coburn) who owns a goldmine.

Predictable chaos ensues. Neither Monroe nor Russell were dancers and they kind of wiggle and sway through the film in synchronicity, singing half a dozen pretty good musical numbers, including the legendary showstopper, Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend.

There's a very funny script by Charles Lederer, heavy with innuendo, and Howard Hawks is a legendary comedy director.  But the film shines because of the performances of the two stars. They make dazzling, glittering magic, particularly Monroe, playing a sort of distorted femininity.  Its look probably influenced the future of drag more than mainstream chic. 

 It's completely weightless, and its values are materialistic, mercenary and soulless. But it is hilarious, irreverent and unique. It's the film that made Monroe a major star and the original good time blonde that would be copied across the world. What she does here, I'm not sure it's acting at all, or even sexy. But as far as the Hollywood comedy is concerned, she heralded the hedonistic, consumerist fifties.

This civil war comedy-drama is now considered Buster's classic but it wasn't well received at the time.  He plays a rebel engine driver who isn't allowed to enlist and so is shunned by his fiancée. When his train, with his girl on board, is stolen by Northern spies, Buster must retrieve the locomotive, rescue the girl and secure a strategic advantage for the South.  

The General is an ambitious film, with armies of extras staging huge battle scenes, with spectacular stunts, shot in remote locations in a period setting. Keaton was thinking bigger than his comic contemporaries. Sadly, its failure meant his independence was compromised and he would soon sign a disastrous deal with MGM which sent his career into a spiral.  

But Keaton was still at his peak. His gymnastics around the engine are graceful and breathtaking, with many truly hair-raising stunts. He still performs his familiar persona, the Great Stoneface, but also inhabits a believable character. Marion Mack gives an appealingly ditsy comedy performance as his capricious sweetheart.  

While the film is spectacular, it isn't among Buster's funniest films. It doesn't help that many people are dying on screen. It's an action film. The period detail is persuasive and the star gives a brilliant demonstration of his prodigious talent as a physical actor and comedian.

When the Marx Brothers signed with Irving Thalberg, he asked them if they would take a pay cut as Zeppo had quit. Groucho replied that without him they were worth twice as much. It's a shame that no one could bring similar insight to the musical numbers that stretch their MGM debut over 90 minutes and introduce longueurs to their maniacal, fast talking comedy.  

The act was revised, toning down the anarchy, and making the trio more likeable by having them roast the bad guys, rather than just anyone. The difference is obvious, but there are still some long stretches of fabulous wordplay from Kaufman and Riskind, including the legendary Sanity Claus sketch.

 There is also the famous crowded stateroom scene. Margaret Dumont adds a little continuity by leaving Paramount with the remaining trio to play Mrs Claypole.  The vocals of Kitty Carlisle and Allan Jones are, I guess, a matter of personal taste.

It's tempting to lean on the FF during the musical numbers. Harpo and Chico's recitals are actually harder to tolerate than the opera. They all slow the film down. Hard to be too critical as this was the biggest box office hit of their careers, but my personal preference is for the earlier, crazier Paramount films.

This is a vehicle for Charles Laughton's ripe, mature comic talents.  He is Ruggles, a valet won in a game of poker by a tycoon from the US west, (Charles Ruggles, channeling Walter Brennan) from an English aristocrat (Roland Young).  It's a fish-out-of-water comedy, but there is also a little light propaganda, as the inhibited servant finds freedom and equality in the new world.

 There is plenty of Lubitsch in the set up (Young and Ruggles are among his regulars) but Leo McCarey paints with a broader brush and a heavier touch. He even has Laughton quite solemnly reciting the Gettysburg Address!

 The film is funniest in the earlier scenes, as the wife of Laughton's new employer (Mary Boland) tries to get Ruggles to gentrify her reluctant spouse, mocking the (supposed) vulgar pretensions of Americans abroad. Eventually, Ruggles finds dignity in the American west and escapes the control of those in who would exploit his compliance.  

Laughton and Young give most unusual performances, almost catatonic, so inhibited are they in their seemingly feudal relationship. The implication seems to be that they are both damaged by their dependence on each other and their fatalistic belief that this is inevitable. Laughton is a matter of personal taste, I think, but this is his best comedy.