Film Reviews by Steve

Film noir moves to the sunny suburbs of Los Angeles. Joan Bennett plays a harassed mother of two feisty kids who covers up the accidental death of her teenage daughter's older, mercenary lover and is blackmailed. When the extortionist (James Mason) falls in love with his mark, he must protect her from his brutal, less principled accomplice.

That's a crazy story, but we are expected to accept its emotional truth even though the narrative realism is stretched. For anyone able to make that allowance, this is a thrilling and compelling melodrama. The relationship between the two leads is extraordinarily moving, especially as production code convention means their feelings remain unspoken. 

The chiaroscuro photography of the house of shadows is exceptionally beautiful. The dark interiors contrast satisfyingly with the sunlit, prestigious, lakeside locations. Max Ophüls directs with impressive panache. And the stars are heartbreaking; both lonely in very different ways. For me, it's Mason's greatest performance.

His mute emotional pain is overwhelming. In the noir tradition, he suffers for a woman who may well be manipulating him for selfish reasons. At the end, she's free to just walk away... but surely devastated by his sacrifice? Or is Ophüls saying the poor must suffer and be morally compromised so the rich can live in righteous comfort? Don't miss this one.

The same year as Robert Wise's The Set-Up, his old associate at RKO, Mark Robson, also made a boxing picture which operates as a scathing critique of American individualism. This is about how much humanity a poor man must divest in order to succeed; the sociopathic exploitation of others it takes for him to achieve personal wealth and status.

It is a dystopic analysis of the mythology of the American dream. In the role that made him a star , Kirk Douglas plays a penniless nobody who lives with the indignity of poverty. When at absolute rock bottom, he is taken on by Paul Stewart's cynical boxing manager. In his quest to become champion, the contender betrays everyone he encounters.

The excellent support cast is led by Arthur Kennedy as the boxer's brother who has a manifest physical injury where the fighter has a hidden moral affliction. Kennedy loses out painfully to Douglas' unrestrained egotism. He is extremely affecting in the noirish shadows of this moral tale.

The boxing scenes are superb. It won an Oscar for the ringside editing and Franz Planer's photography is as gorgeous as ever. But it mainly scores as a vehicle for Douglas who is exceptional in a physical role unusual for melodrama in that period. His implicit and explicit aura of violent threat is very potent.

Classic farce with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy as employed men of reasonable means, with wives who are not as aggressive as usual. In fact, Ollie calls his wife Mama, and Stan's wife calls her husband lover! What next, kids? This is the least idiotic Stan and Ollie ever got, and are almost functional, even if a trial for their spouses. Things have never been better.

The pals discover they each have a twin who... are also eternally bound together. Bert and Alf are sailors who have docked in Stan and Ollie's hometown. And they are as clueless as our heroes usually are. Which leads to inevitable complications of mistaken identity related to Stan and Ollie's wives and a couple of good-time popsies with their hooks in Bert and Alf.

 This is a wonderfully entertaining film, dense with gags. OK, some of them aren't all that original, like the three men trapped in a phone box, and the cake fight. But in the hands of the masters, they are funny all over again. All it takes is a long suffering sideways glance into the camera from Ollie.

Great to see James Finlayson, and there's quality in the support cast. Daphne Pollard and Betty Brown are fun as the wives. It's a slick comedy, which ends memorably with Stan and Ollie teetering on the side of the dock with their feet stuck in cement. Laurel and Hardy were lasting the '30s better their vaudeville contemporaries.

It's not obvious why anyone would trust Laurel and Hardy with delivering the valuable deed to one of the world's most profitable goldmines, and true to form they mistakenly leave it in the hands of a crooked saloon keeper (James Finlayson) and his mercenary moll rather than the exploited sweetheart (Rosina Lawrence) it was intended for.

Soon Stan and Ollie are breaking into the premises, trying to get it back. With only our heroes to protect the rights of the bullied youngster against the finagling Finlayson makes the audience really root for them. Which is awful, given how hopeless they are.

 The standout scene is the duo forcing entry into the upper room of the saloon using a pulley, with a donkey at one end and Mr. Hardy at the other. The donkey ends up on the balcony. There's some fine comedy arising from Stan trying to get a locket over Ollie's head without opening the clasp.

Laurel and Hardy are at the peak of their craft. Every visual gag and character reveal is perfectly honed. There's some singing and dancing but this adds a little warmth rather than unwelcome diversion. There's a meagre budget and a minor director, but as always, the stars transcend the production.

This is Cary Grant's breakout role in Hollywood. And co-star Irene Dunne establishes herself as a screwball star too. Together they are dynamite as a married couple who divorce and seek new partners but never re-find that elusive chemistry. They drift back together, at first over the custody of the dog, but really for the elegance and wit, and then, for the sex.

Director Leo McCarey gets this superficial set-up to sparkle. Some of the situations and plot complications are inspired. Apparently he wrote most of the final script and gets wonderful performances too, largely through improvisation. And the innuendo is pretty risqué. It is amazing it got past the Hays Office... Maybe because it is so good!

Grant and Dunne are one of the great screwball partnerships. And Ralph Bellamy as Irene's rich, unsophisticated suitor, is outstanding too. The sparring cosmopolitans are so aloof they look down on anyone who isn't a New York sophisticate. But the film gets away with it because of the charm of the stars.

 Grant rousting the blundering Bellamy to the mortification his ex-wife is hilarious, which Dunne matches in a scene where she pretends to be Cary's dipso sister to discredit him before his wealthy would-be in-laws. It never falters. Thanks to the all time great triangle of leads, this remains a consistent and compelling joy.

This second match-up of Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda- after The Mad Miss Manton in '38- is usually included among the great screwball comedies. Towards the end of the classic cycle, Preston Sturges began to write and direct just at the moment the comedy climate darkened around him. America was drifting into war...

His best films feel like pastiches. This owes much to Bringing Up Baby (1938) and Libelled Lady (1936). But Sturges steps up the slapstick. Fonda takes as many pratfalls in this as anyone in a Blake Edwards film. There isn't much verbal wit. This is more of a sitcom.

Fonda is a dull rich klutz ('snakes are my life') who is the mark for a con-girl (Stanwyck). She starts out to fleece him at cards but falls in love. After he catches on, the wealthy clot cuts her off. So she re-appears as an English aristocrat, and seduces him all over again...  just so she can jilt him.

Fonda handles the physical comedy surprisingly well. Stanwyck is appealing in a dual role and supplies the sassy romance the cute plot demands. Eric Blore stands out in the strong support cast as a con man posing as an an English Lord. It's a slight film, but entertaining with lots of star power.

It is 1937, and the Great War has been over for nearly 20 years. But Stan Laurel is still in his trench, unaware that everyone else has gone home. Away from his great pal for all that time, Oliver Hardy has made a reasonable life for himself. He has a wife. Admittedly Ollie is under her thumb, but they are very loving and they have a swell apartment in a nice area.

 Mr. Hardy enjoys a well ordered existence... until Mr. Laurel returns from the front. And then inside two hours, Ollie has been in a fight with James Finlayson, has his big game hunter neighbour's blonde wife locked in a trunk, while his own has turned into a dragon, and the kitchen is in flames. The duo are chased out of the building on the end of an elephant gun.

The big joke of the film is, would they really have been better off apart!? Are they fated to be destroyed by their association with each other? Well, for over a decade in their films, our heroes have always been just about to get everything right, when everything goes disastrously wrong. It just took a lot longer this time.

When they meet at the soldier's refuge, Ollie thinks Stan lost a leg in the war. Ollie is so tenderly solicitous that he carries Stan in his arms. When he finds out that Stan is intact he drops him in a heap. Which is their dynamic in one sketch. Maybe not their funniest but it's made special by the stars and their immortal alter egos.

Considering the amount of material Woody Allen has mined from his single term at NYU, it is perhaps surprising that this campus film is his first. It is set at a small university on Rhode Island, where the arrival of notorious philosophy academic (Joaquin Phoenix) unleashes debate about his teaching methods.

His reckless depression and affairs with a chemistry professor (Parker Posey) and student (Emma Stone) make him a volatile presence. The characters are archetypes, though Phoenix's charisma makes much of his role. Stone and- especially- Posey are appealing support.

The story proceeds like an illustrated philosophy essay (with lectures) as existentialism is played off against Kant. Phoenix chooses the former when he takes direct action to poison a corrupt judge. Stone adopts the latter when she threatens to turn her teacher in. And Allen builds up the suspense better than he ever has.

The intellectual theories aren't much of a stretch. But there's an interesting political twist. The philosopher concludes his life only has meaning if he intervenes to ensure right is done. With democracy in crisis across the world, the alternative of direct action has come into focus. Which gives the film some contemporary political relevance.  

Charming Woody Allen screwball comedy set in the '20s on the Côte d'Azur, which has the sophisticated frisson of a Noël Coward play. Colin Firth plays a famous stage magician, a renowned misanthrope and sceptic, who is engaged to expose a popular and successful medium (Emma Stone) who is all the way from Kalamazoo, Michigan.

But he is convinced she is genuine... which upends his faith in science and nature... before finally tumbling her. Of course, having been made emotionally volatile by her credibility as a mystic, in the time it takes to rehabilitate his reason, he has been humbled enough to finally believe in the real magic, of romantic love.

This is fabulous entertainment, with a clever script, some nuanced subtext orbiting around the themes of faith and rationalism, and a fine plot. Firth is enjoyable as the pompous agnostic whose logical intelligence renders him cynical rather than wise. It is a joy to see him dally with the the delightful and beautiful Emma Stone.

The negative is that it isn't all that funny. I think that's because the stars just aren't comic actors. What might Cary Grant and Claudette Colbert have made of these roles! Firth retains too much dignity to be hilarious, and Stone is too passive. But that's a quibble. This is ridiculously fun. And the widescreen photography of the French riviera, is so lovely.

Typically affectionate nostalgia from Woody Allen for '30s Manhattan and golden age Hollywood. Jesse Eisenberg plays a naive major studio gofer promoted by his big shot uncle (Steve Carell).  The youngster falls in love with a secretary (Kristen Stewart) who he discovers is Carrell's other woman.

Heartbroken, the kid relocates to New York and opens a nightclub, ignorant that the enterprise is facilitated by the muscle of his older brother, a gangster. It's a bittersweet comedy which evokes a sense of how we may live contentedly in the present, but our lives are haunted by the the ghosts of past affairs, and once possible loves that never were.

This is the director's first film shot on digital cameras, which proves no detriment. The photography (by Vittorio Storaro) is  exceptionally beautiful, like all Allen's later films. Woody narrates, and he sounds frail, which suggests maybe we won't see him in front of the camera again.

The period recreation of east and west coasts between the wars is splendid, and it's a joy to imagine ourselves eavesdropping on conversations about Paul Muni and Hedy Lamarr. Or standing outside Spencer Tracy's mansion. It's a superficial film and not all jokes land successfully, but there are still moments of magic.

Following his London trilogy, Woody Allen alighted on Barcelona for another beautiful, touristic setting for his late career comedy-dramas. Around this time, about every third release was critically heralded as a return to form halting a declining trend. This was one of those. It was a box office hit and the Oscars came calling again.

 The story is a series of loose, transient triangles which form between Vicky (Rebecca Hall), a pragmatist looking for emotional certainty; Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), an impulsive romantic seeking intensity and novelty; and a pair of volatile Spanish artists played by Javier Bardem (unorthodox and passionate) and Penélope Cruz (crazy and passionate).

It's a reflection, or even an illustrated essay, on the nature of sexual/romantic desire. Not everything works. Sometimes it strays into the platitudinous and the Spanish stars veer close to caricature. But it is a vigorous, erotic and emotional experience. It searches for truth in how we are attracted to each other in a depth that is remarkable for 73 year old film maker.

It is a quest which looks for a way to be free of the social and psychological traumas that have haunted the romances of his characters for decades. The leads are beautiful and the locations and photography are gorgeous. And there is a love of life that is missing from many of Woody's noughties films.

Curiously patchy Woody Allen comedy in which Larry David addresses the camera in the familiar style of the director, while delivering bitter, pessimistic soliloquies on modern life. He plays an intellectual misanthrope with zero coping mechanisms who, against his better judgement gives refuge to a young southern runaway (Evan Rachel Wood).

After much misogynistic kvetching, they marry... which draws in her conservative mother (Patricia Clarkson) who arrives at his flat like Blanche Dubois, but stays to transform herself into a free thinking/loving Manhattan artist. Then a similar thing happens to the girl's father (Ed Begley jr). So New York serves as a magical medium of transformation.

If it works at all it is by making us accept that David's brutal loathing of himself and the world is a kind of existential pain, which may arouse pity for his emotional need of his vulnerable but generous teenage wife. But Allen then shells that tenuous position by disastrously introducing Henry Cavill as a creepy, oleaginous (younger) rival.

Its conclusions are valid but it feels insubstantial, unfinished and commonplace. The theme of the irrationality of love is voiced much more succinctly and amusingly by Allen elsewhere. It's a career low point for the director. Rather than being titled Whatever Works, it might have been more appropriately named Will This Do? 

This is a screwball pastiche of film noir, set in the '40s. Woody Allen stars as an insurance claims detective who works by intuition, like Edward G. Robinson in Double Indemnity. He constantly clashes with the company's efficiency expert (Helen Hunt), newly appointed to bring the company in line with modern practices.

The bickering colleagues are programmed to steal jewels using their inside information at the suggestion of a hypnotist. And just for fun the crooked magician gets them to fall in love with each other on hearing the trigger word. Woody tried to get Jack Nicholson or Tom Hanks to star. It's hardly surprising they turned it down, so verminously is the lead character described.

Given that the period setting made this the most expensive of Allen's films, Woody elected to play the part himself. And he is great at the back-and-forth duel of smart-ass repartee. But he's clearly too old to be dallying with Helen Hunt, never mind Charlize Theron as the fast talking dames.

Even so, Woody and Theron's scenes are a blast, and clearly reference Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep. She is made-over magnificently into a forties femme fatale. The Chandler-esque dialogue rarely flags. It looks amazing and the period details are superb. Once again, the critics piled on and it flopped. But it deserves so much better.

Woody Allen plays a temperamental film maker fallen on hard times... As a favour,  his successful ex-wife ( Téa Leoni), throws a project his way. But just at that moment, the stressed director goes psychosomatically blind. Apparently this was inspired by Allen's collaboration with cinematographer Sven Nykvist, whose eyesight was failing.

Woody's agent (Mark Rydell) convinces him to make the film anyway as he's on an absolute last chance, so the blind director takes into his confidence a Chinese interpreter hired because the camera operator speaks no English... And there is a strong impression that this is all drawn from a lifetime making pictures.

There are problems consistent with Allen's other releases at the turn of the century. Some of the dialogue is familiar (Allen says he never rewatches his films, so maybe that's why) and as a screen couple, Woody and Leoni can't overcome not even being from adjoining generations.

But this is still funny, with inspired farce and a good story. There's even some slapstick. Not everything pays off. It's a touch long and the best lines are all in the first half. But the cast is well chosen as usual, and Leoni makes an appealing and skilled comic partner. And there's plenty of insider insight to enjoy. 

The final part of Woody Allen's London trilogy, and the third murder story. Working class brothers (Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell) are so desperately in need of money they agree to do a job for their rich uncle (Tom Wilkinson) and murder an associate (Phil Davis) who threatens to expose malpractice.

MacGregor wants cash to speculate on property development and facilitate his relationship with a needy, mercenary actor (Hayley Atwell). Farrell gambles on poker and horses and is in hock to loan sharks. It's a curious film which pretty much abandons all of the director's signature style.

 The dialogue carries no trace of its author's voice, being mostly set among the English working class. There's an original soundtrack- composed by Philip Glass in the manner of Bernard Herrmann-  which is Allen's first for over 30 years. So, no golden age jazz classics. There is nothing to link it to the director other than a preoccupation with the theme of crime and punishment.

This barely scratched the box office. It's a well made thriller and the excellent ensemble cast does good work. The story is diverting and it's interesting to see Woody stretch himself. But it's ultimately thwarted by a lack of suspense, which makes the story feel stretched. It's gloomy fatalism may appeal to fans of film noir.