Film Reviews by Steve

 This is one of the Stan and Ollie scenarios in which they have jobs, a home and wives, which always feels a stretch because they are incapable of carrying out even the simplest of instruction. We never find out what their work is, only they want to go to their fraternity's yearly convention to make business connections!

 Which of course their wives will not allow. The duo inhabit a domestic world of bullying and fear. Ollie's wife is often wielding a big knife and Stan's invariably is holding a huge rifle for killing ducks. They go anyway and are inevitably found out. Ollie is punished ruthlessly, with crockery.  

As ever, it's the characters of Stan and Ollie and the comic performances of the great stars that are the best parts of the film; their clowning, their optimism, their aspirations and their inevitable failures justified by the pair through the distorting lens of self delusion.    

There is a good script too and Charlie Chase is memorable as the drunk, middle aged practical joker they get lumbered with at the convention. Mae Busch spars well with Ollie, and Dorothy Christy is really quite scary as Mrs. Laurel. Laurel and Hardy often suffered with inauspicious directors and meagre budgets, but this is among their very best.

Fred and Ginger arrived as a starring double act with Top Hat. It was the first musical created for them, rather than the duo being cast into an existing project. It is a continental farce set in London and an extremely artificial art deco Venice with the classic device of mistaken identity keeping the sparring Americans abroad apart until the final reel.

 Fred handles the screwball dialogue pretty well, though Ginger is given little to do outside the dance spectaculars. The support cast is very much at home among the frou-frou of the plot, particularly Eric Blore as the unctuous valet of a bemused toff  (Edward Everett Horton). They seem far more married than Horton does to his wisecracking wife (Helen Broderick) .

 When Astaire and Rogers are dancing, particularly together, the film is sublime and they have some wonderful Irving Berlin songs to perform. There's the chic swing of Top Hat, White Tie and Tails with Fred backed by a male chorus line. The star dancing in his tails with a cane implies a whole world of style.

The duo performing Cheek to Cheek, with Ginger in that fluffy feather dress, is among their greatest routines. They present pure elegant romance and insinuate an unmissable sexual rapport. Astaire and Rogers together are one of the most enduring images of Hollywood in the 1930s. They must have looked otherworldly to audiences going through the depression.

 In American films in the thirties, comedy was  a courtship dance that ended at the altar. For Berlin émigré  Ernst Lubitsch, that's where it started. Romance was a masque of deception, intrigue and impulse. His musicals in this period were set in a sort of Paris of the mind. In the context of early sound Hollywood films they were alien, exotic and a revolution...

...Until 1934 when censorship closed them down. Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald are happily married. So happy that they talk in rhyming couplets and break into song. Their relationship is so fertile with innuendo that it's their matrimony that seems salacious, and the marriage-go-round of their friends which appears the dull convention.

In the face of such conjugal joy, what can Genevieve Tobin and Roland Young do but try to break them up? Her, by seducing Maurice, Roland by exploiting this dalliance to divorce his unfaithful wife.  The suggestiveness of this film is astonishing, and hilarious.

Maurice has a unique charisma, addressing the camera directly and audaciously, singing in his boulevardier style amazing songs of sex and infidelity. Like Oh That Mitzi! and What Would You Do?   Lubitsch's films are artful, gravity free celebrations of the great game of love and they established the conventions of the sophisticated comedy.

The plot of Steamboat Bill, Jr.  is similar to Harold Lloyd's earlier The Kid Brother, but the style is different. Keaton's location shoot was more striking and his sets and stunts more ambitious. I think Lloyd's film was funnier. Both play ingenues, though in their mid thirties. Harold makes a romcom, Buster produces more of an action comedy.  

Young Buster is a softy brought up by his mother on the east coast. He leaves to work on his dad's ramshackle river boat, and falls in love with the daughter of the owner of a fleet of state of the art steamships. A situation desired by neither father. Love conquers all, but not until Buster has proven himself by saving everyone from drowning in a cyclone.  

The film is best known for its astonishing final 25 minutes when the town is ripped apart by the high wind and washed away in a great tide. Including the famous gag of the front panel of a frame house collapsing over a hapless Buster, who is saved by an open upstairs window. It was a stunt he had used before, but not on as grand a scale.    

Credit to the scenery and props department, their work on the storm scene is phenomenal, and complements Keaton's extraordinary performance as the man fighting nature. It is a tour de force and one of the great passages in cinema. Just watching him walking into the wind is worthwhile, and no one ever fell as well as Buster.

This is a sweet boy-meets-girl romcom, until the amazing last twenty minutes of action when Harold rousts a huge redneck who has stolen public money from his dad. Lloyd is the weakling youngest son of a family of tough rustic musclemen led by his father the sheriff. And Harold admires them devotedly, and dreams of being just like them.

The innocent Jobyna Ralston comes into town with a crooked medicine show, and her associates steal the town's savings.  And Harold goes to get it back, employing the inventive intellect that no one else in the family or community shows any interest in,  they being thick in the arm, and in the head too.

Harold plays his usual archetype, a skinny, optimistic do-gooder we can root for. His alliance with Jobyna is utterly virtuous. The film is dense with charming, clever gags and the set-piece climax on a wrecked ship gives Harold plenty of opportunity to display his character's wholesome determination and his own genius for physical comedy.

 Lloyd made more at the box-office in the 1920s than any of his great contemporaries. His work was so consistent. But it's 1927 and the talkies will change everything.  Lloyd did better than some, though his clean-cut hero began to go out of style in the sophisticated era of screwball. But, for me he remains the funniest of the silent comedians.

The film begins like a typical late fifties film noir as Elmer Bernstein's big band scores a familiar montage of the neon lit streets of Manhattan. Then, with the seeming magic of originality, James Wong Howe picks up his camera and, wanders through the avenues and backstreets, clubs and theatres of Broadway. This location tracking was completely new for film noir and it looks fabulous.

Despite the corrupted humanity on show, and the noir aesthetic, there is no legal crime.  JJ Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) controls Broadway through his popular newspaper column and the secrets he holds over its players. He owns press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) because Falco needs the column. In turn the agents court Falco for his access to Hunsecker.

The screenplay was written by Clifford Odets, the liberal who named names to HUAC. The cynical showbiz food chain of Broadway represents the iniquities of capital and politics. The big cat feeds on the vulnerable minions of the neon jungle. Hunsecker has an unspoken incestuous obsession with his sister and leans Falco to break her engagement to a jazz guitarist

Manhattan is controlled by the syndicate which means Hunsecker, a populist with a god-complex who brazenly drums out his phoney patriotics and dares anyone to demur. He has a logo which gives him the eyes of Big Brother. This is the ultimate film that has no one to root for, and offers no sweeteners at the fade out. It is an intelligent, artistic work of overwhelming pessimism.

A one man show for Keaton. He had honed his blank, Great Stoneface persona in a porkpie hat over years in vaudeville and in dozens of comedy shorts dating back to 1917, and by Sherlock Jr. he was at his peak. Buster plays a projectionist who aspires to be a detective. Unfortunately he is fitted up by his rival for his girl to appear the thief of her father's pocket watch.

 Buster falls asleep showing a film about a jewel thief and dreams that he enters the screen and solves the crime. As it is a dream, the events become increasingly surreal. Other silent comics used incongruous back projection, but Keaton's (and his writers') imagination make it just that little bit more special with Buster also let loose in the film, destroying its realism.

But it is more than just a great idea. Keaton was also an extraordinary physical comedian, and the film is dense with amazing acrobatics, often of complicated, cerebral set ups. And so he stands on a huge water-pipe as it swings across the road and deposits Buster in the passenger seat of a getaway car.

 The contrast between Keaton's deadpan exterior and his bizarre experiences is the key to his comedy. It is hard to watch Keaton's extravagant, show-stopping stunts and not be overwhelmed by his ambition and his craft. For me he is the most enterprising and gifted of all the twenties comedians and Sherlock Jr. is his greatest work, one of the best silent films ever made.

 While the rules of film noir had shifted in the fifties from its forties prototypes, Human Desire reverted to the characteristics of the earlier classics. It has a femme fatale in Vicki Buckley (Gloria Grahame). Jeff Warren (Glenn Ford) is the ill-fated male dupe back from the war. Only now it's Korea rather than WWII. Jeff returns to resume his job on the railways.

Vicki is a traditional enough archetype, a provocative, sexually distorted looker motivated by greed. She seduces Jeff to persuade him to murder her violent, abusive husband (Broderick Crawford). For most of the film she seems a victim, as she is physically and mentally tormented by her jealous partner and was sexually assaulted when sixteen by her guardian.  

Eventually we realise that much of the web she spun to entrap Jeff has been lies. Vicky is damaged by exploitative men, but our sympathy is shaken finally when we see the moral vacuum that she has learned to hide. She's quite a horrifying figure, though if ultimately unredeemable, we see that as a woman at that time, her choices are limited.    

No one played hot sleazy trouble like Gloria Grahame and she Ford are incandescent together, as they were a year earlier in The Big Heat. It's Gloria who gives its charge of implied eroticism.  The noir plot is interesting, and the railway setting exploited for suspense, symbolism and expressionist visual art. Not as great as The Big Heat, but still quality film noir.

 The best of half a dozen excellent independently produced dramas from the London born director Ida Lupino in the 1950s before she moved on to television. She co-wrote the tense, terse original screenplay based on recent real life events.

Two old army buddies on a fishing trip pick up a hitcher who turns out to be the serial killer who has been murdering drivers all along a rural highway in Southern California. He forces the friends to drive 500 miles to a small harbour town where he plans to escape to Mexico.

He tells them he will kill them on arrival for certain, but sooner if they don't play ball. It's a race against time for the police closing in as the men drive south through the desert. The film is mostly a three hander.  Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy are perennial support actors who seize a rare chance to lead. William Talman is unforgettable as the manipulative psychopath.

This is a phenomenally suspenseful film which makes a virtue of the empty desert locations. Most of the action is spent observing the shifting balance of power between the three men. Every stranger they meet triggers a crisis. The two friends are tough, resourceful fellas, but it is Talman as the incredibly menacing killer with a fascistic worldview who dominates the film.

Low budget film noir about an unfaithful wife (Helen Walker) who schemes have her rich husband (Brian Donlevy) murdered during a car journey. When her lover/accomplice fails to complete the kill and is consumed in the flames of a crash with a petrol truck, everyone assumes it is Donlevy's burned corpse at the scene of the accident.

While the concussed, amnesiac husband stumbles into a small town in Idaho to work as a mechanic for the tomboyish Ella Raines, Walker is busted by a smart Irish cop (Charles Coburn) and goes on trial for a murder that never happened.

 Impact shows how robust the conventions of film noir are. The film is a reshuffling of noir archetypes, made by an unremarkable director and crew with a B standard cast. But it's still a very entertaining film, with a strong atmosphere.

Donlevy is fine as a schmuck that gets played for a sap, and Raines lifts the second half as the down to earth good girl who contrasts with Walker's glamorous femme fatale. Arthur Lubin was a lifelong low budget director but he could turn out a pacy thriller and he handles the narrative well.  American film noir rarely lets you down.

Bogart visits the family of the dead soldier he fought beside in Italy: his father (Lionel Barrymore) and widow (Lauren Bacall). Bad timing. The hotel they run on the Florida Keys is taken over by gangsters led by Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) while the building is battered by a mighty hurricane, making escape impossible.  

The set up is almost exactly the same as The Petrified Forest (1936) in which Bogart played the outlaw Duke Mantee as the last gasp of the wild west, an individualist. But Rocco is far more insidious. He buys the political process and operates in plain sight, subverting justice, raking profit out of the system.

This time Bogart is on the right side of the law.  He plays his signature role, the loner who won't stick out his neck for anyone (but then does). But his status as an outsider is no longer a symbol of American isolationism in early WWII. It is because having survived war, he is disillusioned by the grip men like Rocco have on America.

Crime has become organised and is corrupting legitimate business. This would become a key theme of fifties mafia films. The politician on the make, the nickel and dime business' cutting corners and protected gangster bosses would become familiar film noir personnel. This is Bogart and Bacall's last film together and it's a classic.

Poverty row cult film based on the Bonnie and Clyde legend and made by brilliant B director Joseph H. Lewis who shot many low budget films in the noir style. John Dall and Peggy Cummins are dynamite together as two outlaws compelled in different ways by their fatal obsession with guns.

Anne Laurie Starr is a poor, sexy circus shooter who acts by reflex, triggered either by violent crime or lust. Bart Tate is a working class kid who finds status through his talent with a gun. Driven by his desire for her, he is drawn into crime, holding up stores, and then banks, leading to murder.  

Dall and Cummins are sensational. Hot trash. They seem made for each other, except, he can't kill, and she has to kill! Cummins is a revelation. Starr is so happy when she is stealing, so fulfilled when she is killing, it's a bit infectious. It's a miracle that she got this part, unlike anything else she ever did.

There's a sassy script from the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo and the direction is ostentatiously stylish. The film is set in a timeless rural west it has the feel of a depression era gangster film, all getaway cars and shoot outs. The wild, desolate location shooting in poor rural towns conveys a powerful ambience of encroaching despair.

 The Big Combo is a face off between detective Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde) and sociopathic mob boss 'Mr Brown' (Richard Conte).  Brown defines high achievers as those most able to hate, as they will destroy others to reach their goals.  Which also applies to Diamond, who will use any means to destroy his bête noire .  

He will even sacrifice Brown's traumatised moll (Jean Wallace) who Diamond has fallen in love with. She is a cultivated, educated woman in an environment where those accomplishments have no value. The detective badly uses his murdered, stripper girlfriend too: 'I treated her like a pair of gloves. If I was cold, I called her up'.

Brown's deputy (Brian Donlevy) is a traumatised punch bag who can't take it anymore. Or dish it out. Empathy is his tragic flaw. His demise, shot in silence when Conte removes Donlevy's hearing aid is classic noir: 'I'm gonna give you a break. I'm gonna fix it, so you don't hear the bullets'.  

The Big Combo is expressionist art, photographed by noir legend John Alton. There is a tough, ominous screenplay from Philip Yordan which sometimes tender but usually brutal. In 1955, censorship was being eased. The murders are violent and onscreen, and there's a pair of obviously gay hitmen. It's one of the great gangster noirs.

This violent true story may be the nearest Hollywood got to the style and daring of Italian neorealism. It was made while the real world events were still taking place. This is documentary style vérité. There is no incidental music, just ambient sound. It was shot on location at the actual places where the events happened.  

The film begins with interviews with local people who attest to the authenticity of the film. Karlson even got actors to wear the clothes of the people they portrayed! The cast was resolutely unstarry. Kathryn Grant would become well known but this was her debut.

The incidents of the film are hard to believe. A city in Alabama was controlled by a criminal gang who used violence and murder during elections to control the public, and ran their police to ignore vice and to suppress reform. There was no law and order. The film was made while the court cases trying the killers were still in progress.  

This is an inspiring story of bravery and determination.  It's a rare example of a film about organised crime being defeated through democratic processes, rather than a single heroic vigilante. It is a classic work of cinema vérité made at almost no cost. 

After WWII, Hollywood noir began to accommodate the documentary style naturalism seen in Italian neorealism. The most influential film in that style was The Naked City, but I prefer Call Northside 777 which has a more moving and suspenseful story and a knockout ending.  

It was based on actual events and sourced from newspaper articles. James Stewart plays a Chicago reporter who is alerted by a mother's offer of a reward saved up through 11 years working as a cleaner to investigate a miscarriage of justice which resulted in her innocent son and another being sent to prison for 99 years.  

Hathaway made a few of these docu-noirs, with the standard big city locations, and a powerful, declamatory narration. Stewart is nuanced as a cynical newsman who slowly becomes obsessed with the faulty verdict from so long ago that many of the protagonists are dead.

 Compared with Italian neorealism this is processed, mainstream stuff, but it was still groundbreaking in American cinema and unashamed to show realistic poverty, particularly among immigrants. The story of the innocent victims of institutional corruption is pure noir, though the upbeat outcome is less typical.