Film Reviews by Steve

Minor film noir which extracts plenty of interest from its lowlife location shoot in Santa Monica, on the Californian coast. Which is a squalid hell! It’s a pessimistic crime-does-not-pay parable with an anti-capitalist subtext; where business and finance chews up the luckless workers... Director Irving Pichel was soon blacklisted by HUAC.

It’s one of a pair of crime films in which Mickey Rooney plays a small town mechanic drawn in by the lure of exotic sex and easy money (see also Drive a Crooked Road, 1954). There’s the usual noir scenario of an ordinary guy who makes one wrong turn…. He takes 20 dollars from the garage cash register, and his whole world caves in.

Pretty soon he’s strangling his corrupt boss with a telephone wire and fleeing down to Mexico in a stolen car. He is drawn into this shabby inferno by a cheap blonde (Jeanne Cagney) who sets up the grease monkey to loot a rundown penny arcade owned by her scuzzy ex-boss, played by a splendidly repellent Peter Lorre.

Does the reckless stooge not have eyes? He is pursued by his girl-next-door ex (Barbara Bates), who is not only not a chiseller, but ten times the babe that the femme fatale is… Still, Mickey is back from the war and wild for kicks. There are echoes of zero budget cult noir, Detour (1945). It isn’t as good but still sleazy fun for genre fans. 

Charming gaslight melodrama based on a 19th century urban myth. Jean Simmons stars as a young, romantic English rose at the 1889 Paris Exposition with her brother (David Tomlinson) who suddenly and mysteriously disappears. As does his room, and any memory of his existence among the hotel staff.

Of course, it is a familiar story often told but this conveys an eerie sense of muted hysteria beneath the late Victorian gentility. It’s a fine vehicle for Simmons which won her a Hollywood contract. Eventually Dirk Bogarde comes to her aid as an aristocratic Brit studying art…

They produce zero sparks as a romantic couple, but are both uncommonly beautiful. It’s a handsome costume drama which might better have been filmed in Technicolor. Still, it benefits from an extensive location shoot in the French capital. And a glorious support cast.

The motifs which made the legend a proto-urban myth, still resonate. Particularly of the innocent alone in a foreign country, unfamiliar with the customs or language and unable to trust anyone. This is genteel melodrama; there are no jump scares. But has value as an eternal folk tale, and full of period atmosphere.

Intelligent, loquacious western noir which illustrates the psychology of the frontier outlaw rather than presenting much as realism. It feels like a tv play, but with major studio resources; principally Gregory Peck as a former desperado who has lived long enough to be haunted by his reputation as the fastest gun around.

His character is loosely based on real life killer Johnny Ringo. Everywhere he goes, some young punk wants to beat him to the draw. Everyone with a grievance believes he is to blame. It’s a study of small town mob mentality, as well as an interesting- if schematic- attempt to get inside the head of the gunfighter.

This was released near the trigger of the western golden age, and influenced many pictures which present the gunman as a lonely wayfarer, pursued by his own legend. Who has to kill, or be killed. Like Shane (1953). Peck’s lowkey performance isn’t as mythic as Alan Ladd. This is stripped down. Plus there is some effective humour.

There’s a textbook demonstration of Hitchcockian suspense as the gunfighter delays his departure to see an estranged wife (Helen Westcott), while his nemesis closes in. The ’50s western is typically in Technicolor, but this has a high contrast b&w look which suits the noir-ish scenario. It may even appeal to those not usually attracted to the genre.

After a sequence of independent film noir hits in 1947-48 (including T-Men and Raw Deal), MGM signed Anthony Mann for this dark, violent exposé on the criminal smuggling of manual labour along the US-Mexican border. Though made for a studio more famous for glossy musicals, it’s still dirty, punchy and credible.

It’s a contemporary western as well as a crime picture. Most of all, this is inspired by Italian Neorealism, like many Hollywood docu-noirs at the turn of the ‘50s. There’s a strident newsreel style voiceover and an un-starry cast of men without women, as the gangs muscle in on the trafficking of workers.

Ricardo Montalban and George Murphy are Mexican/US immigration agents who go undercover. And there’s a familiar support cast of un-photogenic blokes to play the ruthless crooks led by Howard Da Silva, with Charles McGraw, Jack Lambert… The sort of western actors who would stay with Mann into the ‘50s.

Perhaps the director’s wisest decision was to retain his cinematographer, John Alton. These are mostly location exteriors, but with a dark, expressionistic look. This may be as pulpy as MGM ever got, including an astonishing murder by plough. Sometimes it loses impetus, but it’s a convincing early look at an issue which still persists.  

The second of his cavalry trilogy is either customary or classic John Ford, depending on your position on his reputation. It’s the usual bundle. John Wayne stars as the doughty captain on a final tour of the former ‘Indian’ territorial heartlands before retirement… as frontier war threatens.

And there are all the other Ford signifiers: the spunky dowager and the capricious maiden; Victor McLaglen drilling the recruits while finagling his next glug of whiskey; the singalong male baritone choir and the witless punch up; the boggy sentimentality. Plus scant regard for the dignity or rights of Native Americans....

Ford claimed this is the picture that convinced him Wayne could act... Though it's just a typical Duke performance. There’s a salty caricature from Mildred Natwick, but the support cast is otherwise forgettable. Joanne Dru and John Agar are inert romantic leads.

There are also the usual positives, with the photogenic locations in Monument Valley, Utah- in buzzy Technicolor! And a decent, if brief, action sequence towards the end. Yet the bad squeezes out the good. The director’s many enthusiasts will love it, but maybe not one to win over any western agnostics.

Sumptuous MGM musical romance with wonderful stars and memorable songs by Irving Berlin. Plus the period fashions in gorgeous, vibrant Technicolor. This is among the very best of many nostalgic eulogies to the golden age of vaudeville made after WWII.

Fred Astaire plays a minor celebrity on the musical revue circuit. When his dance/romance partner (Ann Miller) quits both roles to appear on Broadway, the ballroom hoofer decides to pull a chorus girl (Judy Garland) out of a low-class night club act and make her a star.

Though this eventually leads to his routine evolving into a new style to accommodate her special singing talent. Of course she falls in love with him… and it’s a slim story, often told. But the narrative is only there to support some magical musical numbers, including the legendary A Couple of Swells…

Fred performs the phenomenal jazz age celebration, Steppin’ Out With My Baby and combines with Miller for a knockout ballroom duet, It Only Happens When I Dance With You. Plus the instant hit of the title song. And many more. None of this is profound, but all of superior quality. A smile is guaranteed.

THE WHISTLER

This is the start of an offbeat series by Columbia based on a popular radio suspense programme. There are eight Whistler films, the first seven star William Dix in a variety of roles. Here he is a depressed businessman who arranges a hit on himself, but when his fortunes suddenly improve, has trouble cancelling the contract.

The story actually seems to come from the radio series, though obviously it’s been remade and ripped off endlessly since. And it’s a good plot, with many wild twists. William Castle in his breakthrough as director, makes this into a really eccentric and stylish film noir.

The Whistler is the storyteller, briefly glimpsed in the shadows. He is partly the all-knowing narrator, and also a figure of implacable destiny. So it feels like an eerie parable on fate. This is not realistic, but dense with expressionistic dread.

It takes place in a US where everyone struggles. There’s a really gloomy scene in a flophouse. Dix is a limited actor, but has a touch of impassive moral ambiguity. J. Carrol Naish is sinister as the assassin. It’s a 60 minute programmer of the sort that would made for tv a decade later. And the best radio spin off of the period..

THE MARK OF THE WHISTLER

The Whistler series has an impressive strike rate for unearthing classic, repeatable film noir scenarios. Which also means they are now quite familiar. This is from one of many Cornell Woolrich stories in which a drifter of uncertain virtue assumes another identity, but soon realises they are now in even deeper trouble…

So, Richard Dix plays an imposter who claims a large inheritance. Only there is a mob contract out on the real heir. This is ideal for the series, as The Whistler- the omniscient narrator and voice of destiny- mocks the feeble attempts of the shiftless bum to deny the fate he has assumed.

Dix may play a different character in each entry, but he gives the same performance; hunted, haunted, and concealing a deep secret. Usually he is pulled down among the lower depths of society; the human deadbeats… So this series can be quite sombre.

Here at least Janis Carter- Columbia’s second string Rita Hayworth- generates a glimmer in the moral darkness as a pushy newshound. There is a B-budget, but William Castle brings polish to the noir atmospherics. Though it’s the choice of twisty moral parables that really sets this series apart.

Foreign intrigue from Universal which principally looks good today for Ava Gardner’s studio era glamour just before she became a major star. This sort of exotic melodrama was better made in the 1930s, but at least we get a classic period film noir look.

And there are the usual generic signifiers of the far east with the white colonial suits, the rickshaws and the gin slings. And the vagabond rogues, far from home. Fred MacMurray is a smuggler of pearls about to marry Ava, who he assumes is dead after a Japanese air raid.

Only, when he returns from wartime heroics to pick up a stash of contraband, he discovers his lost love is alive and married to Roland Culver. But has scriptwriter’s amnesia. The plot is quite engaging, though John Brahms doesn’t generate enough suspense.

There are constant evocations of Casablanca (1942), which is fine. Naturally, the stars don’t create as much chemistry. Fred just isn’t a convincing romantic hero. There’s a decent support cast playing colourful scoundrels… It’s just a minor programmer, but with plenty of the old studio gloss.

The early 1970s saw a glut of erotic euro-horror, usually arthouse vampire films which sound like guilty pleasures but are almost always tedious, badly acted, poorly plotted and lean on a kind of gauzy/dreamy ambience for any possible interest. This is the lesbian vampire picture that is actually worth seeing.

It makes the similar Hammer films of the period seem quite anaemic. Arthouse luminary Delphine Seyrig stars as Elizabeth Báthory, medieval murderer of virginal girls, who even in 1971, bathes in the blood of innocents; so still looks like a hot aristocratic matriarch.

She wafts into wintery Ostend in her classic motor car in search of new blood, and seduces the wife of a photogenic married couple (Danielle Ouimet, John Karlen). The Countess is accompanied by Andrea Rau as the sexy, undead arm candy who should be destroyed by sunlight, but has bikini marks… We get to see plenty of her.

The out-of-season seaside resort is a place of seedy, decadent decay, shot through with psychedelic flourishes and a prog score. This is all trashy, salacious and sadistic, with softcore nudity. And Harry Kümel achieves what few other directors of erotic horror ever do; he tells a compelling story with clarity. 

William Castle’s final entry in Columbia’s Whistler series of low budget suspense pictures suggests he has been taking notes from the emerging film noir movement. The shadows are deeper and darker, and many scenes are plainly stolen from year-zero noir Murder, My Sweet (1944).

Even more, the script rips off The Maltese Falcon (1941) at every turn. Except this time the rumpus is all about is a couple of valuable musical recordings. Series regular Richard Dix stars, and his morally ambiguous gumshoe might as well be called Sam Spade.

Barton MacLane even turns up as the antagonistic cop. The private dick is hired to find the real owner of the MacGuffin while a dangerous criminal gang muscles in. It doesn’t so much duplicate the usual Whistler blueprint. This is less about the fate of an ordinary man blighted by a single wrong move…

And the Whistler is just a narrator, rather than the mocking, cautionary voice of destiny. The support cast isn't as familiar as usual, but Mike Mazurki has a cameo as a killer heavy. It’s an hour long, cheap, dirty B noir but way above standard for an instalment in a ’40s mystery series.

The plot of Wim Wenders critically adored arthouse road movie is now completely bewildering. The idea that a mother would leave her nine year old daughter with a male stranger to travel from New York to Amsterdam… and much more... You can do that in a western, but in a modern setting, it’s as realistic as science fiction.

However, it’s redeemed by the profound red-eye atmosphere: the ultra-grainy b&w photography, particularly in the rain; the plangent, improvised electric guitar; and the mood of rootlessness and futility. The impression of the US and Europe sharing a soulless, homogenous monoculture.

So it feels like photo-journalism, and maybe neorealism. There is some diary level philosophy about the alienation of the travel writer (Rüdiger Vogler) as he tries to find a relative to take care of the abandoned girl (Yella Rottländer)… And there is some rapport between the two actors.

Plus there is the director’s usual preoccupation with the primacy of US culture. The narrative meanders to evoke the journalist’s disengaged, vagabond mentality, which means there are longueurs. But it has a way of lingering in the memory. This is the first (and best) of Wender’s road trilogy with Wrong Move (1975) and Kings of the Road (1976). 

This hugely impressive debut from Roman Polanski is his only film made in his native Poland until The Pianist, 40 years later. It announced his exceptional gift for visual narrative and won him an instant Oscar nomination for best foreign language film. Though the dialogue is sparse.

There is an early example of a key Polanski theme; the shifting of power within a small group. This is a three-hander with a young, rootless hitch-hiker joining a married couple on a sailing trip, scored by an improvised saxophone. Which gives the picture a blue note of melancholy.

And gradually an ominous strain of menace is introduced into the dynamic, especially as the wife is an attractive younger woman suffocating in a loveless marriage. Much of the action gravitates around the outsider’s threatening blade. Which is presumably phallic. And a theatrical example of Chekhov’s gun…

This all threatens to become a suspense thriller, but doesn’t quite happen. It’s a very cinematic examination of a disintegrating marriage and a reflection on the alienation of a younger generation. The performances are fair and the b&w photography is expressive. But mainly this is a showreel for its talented director. 

The second- and best- of half a dozen Universal psychological mysteries, linked to the popular radio series The Inner Sanctum. This is as close to horror as any of them got and is the original film version of Fritz Leiber’s famous supernatural novel The Conjure Wife. Though this favours a realistic explanation. Which is actually a debit.

All six star Lon Chaney Jr, which is their main weakness. He’s a limited actor with little charisma and certainly not the dreamboat the script promises. He plays a sociology professor at a small college who researches a book about witchcraft in the Caribbean and then marries a local woman who secretly practices voodoo.

So it's about rationality versus superstition. There is a satirical element, with the hothouse of US academia portrayed as an arena of malign competition where only the weird woman's magic can keep her husband safe. When the man of science sets fire to her runes, all hell breaks loose…

There’s a fine support cast of '40s B-picture stalwarts. Plus a really unusual organ score. But Reginald Le Borg cannot raise this above the limits of his budget and it lacks atmosphere and suspense. Still, at 60 minutes, the story is robust enough to survive. Though the 1962 remake, The Night of the Eagle, is far superior. 

Italian western which claims to explore the immorality of bounty hunters in the old west, but is more of an astonishingly stylish bloodbath, which subverts normal genre expectations. It’s among the most cruel and pessimistic films ever made. And its appalling climax is legendary.

In a territory preyed on by vicious, sociopathic killers it’s the mad-eyed Klaus Kinski who earns the nickname ‘Loco’. Only, when he murders a wanted man for the reward, the wife (Vonetta McGee) doesn’t just lay down and take it, but hires the wonderfully named ’Silence’ to avenge her.

Jean-Louis Trintignant as the mute gunman arguably steals the picture in a silent performance. His disability is explained by one of those classic western childhood back stories. Apart from all the pitiless cynicism, this is remembered for the unique, frozen locale of a mountain settlement in the brutal snow of winter.

And its moral froideur is deepened by Ennio Morricone’s melancholy score. Sergio Corbucci’s ostentatious pop-art direction- dig all the reflections and sunflare- is extraordinary. Of course, it has become a massive cult item, and is surely the greatest spaghetti western not made by Sergio Leone.

This is a marker in the evolution of the crime picture from the realistic docu-noirs of the late ’40s to the action cop films of the 70’s. Don Siegel directed across the whole of that period. His cinematographer Russell Metty was one of the great film noir photographers. And Richard Widmark one of its key stars.

He’s in the title role as a dedicated, overworked New York detective who doesn’t play by the rules. He and his partner (Harry Guardino) are tough anti-heroes on the trail of the psycho-killer who gunned down a traffic cop with the duo's own guns. Obviously Madigan’s relationship with his neglected wife (Inger Stevens) is in disarray.

This made a huge impact on the crime genre, including television. The stuff it influenced was eventually spoofed in The Naked Gun (1988), so this no longer seems as original as it once did. But there is a deep feeling of post-Eisenhower urban decline. Plus the helicopter shots, funky soundtrack and widescreen Technicolor.

Now, even the good guys are… ethically flexible. And procedurally pragmatic… 1968 was also the year of Bullit, The Boston Strangler and Coogan’s Bluff (also Siegel). The motifs of the cop film were in flux in a time of political turmoil. Madigan is ultimately a hero, but hell, even Henry Fonda ( as the inscrutable Commissioner) is burying corruption.