Film Reviews by Steve

Deep and dark, dreamlike Freudian noir from Fritz Lang which incorporates elements of Hitchcock's Rebecca and Suspicion but is more surreal. It is a thriller that operates on the subconscious level of its disturbed hero, full of visual symbolism.

Michael Redgrave is an architect who collects historical murder rooms, believing that the ambience of the surroundings induced the deaths that occurred within. When he impulsively marries Joan Bennett, she comes to suspect that she may have impetuously fallen in love with a psychotic murderer.

It's far fetched, but fascinating. Lang was disappointed with legendary cinematographer Stanley Cortez  because he worked too slowly. But it's the photography that makes this film so rich, the corridors that Bennett and Redgrave wander in search of the origins of a mental trauma which may be hidden behind one of the many doors.

Redgrave does well in a difficult, melodramatic role.  Bennett  gives a sympathetic and sincere performance. There's a superb gothic score by Miklós Rózsa. The fragmentary narrative gives way to the artistic impact of its gallery of beautiful, haunting noir imagery.

Pessimistic social realism about a bigoted soldier who kills a Jewish civilian. A detective (Robert Young) investigates a group of demobbed soldiers, including an intimidating loudmouth redneck Sergeant (Robert Ryan), and the more reflective, gentle Sergeant (Robert Mitchum).  

Edward Dmytryk films the long drunken night expressionistically with out of focus,  tilted frames and camera shake. He evokes a powerful impression of alcohol induced hysteria and disorientation. Most of the film is set in interiors and the director's constantly searching camera induces a feeling of restlessness.

 If the trauma of the war is a recurring theme of film noir, it is usually approached subtly and obliquely. Here the issue is confronted directly, particularly in a long, sympathetic speech by the civilian who will be murdered. The soldiers are home, but they are still fighting, looking for a new enemy to hate.

The Sergeant warns us: 'The snakes are loose. Anybody can get them. I get 'em myself, but they're friends of mine.'  Taylor delivers a long, persuasive monologue about intolerance. In its initial years, film noir was usually about the unravelling of a tragic flaw. Now some directors were starting to look up, and out towards the world. 

Brilliant prison drama which retains the liberal sentiments of the great Warner Brothers penitentiary films of the thirties. But America had since been through the war and the dynamic between guard and prisoner has now changed. The prisoners are humanised by flashbacks to domestic life. When the inevitable knock on the door comes, it now evokes images of the gestapo.  

Many of the men fought in the war, and draw on combat experience to plan their escape. Cast against type, Hume Cronyn is the sadistic guard, his torso oiled, polishing his rifle while listening to Wagner, intent on beating a confession out of a prisoner with a lead pipe. No debate about whose side we are on here, though true to the laws of noir, Burt Lancaster and his cellmates are ill-fated.  

Jules Dassin was associated with the Hollywood ten and this is the work of a dissident. Cronyn, as Captain Mumsey is a political figure, his power justified by his uniform (this seems to anticipate the Stanford Prison experiment). He is a fascist, who turns his guns on the inmates, or cajoles them into self destruction. Often his sadism is sensual ('I get quite a kick from censoring the mail').

Lancaster is the nominal star, but it's Cronyn that dominates the film. There is a chilling moment at the end when Mumsey is announced as the new Governor, surely a warning from Dassin of the danger of state fascism: 'Kindness is a weakness' he says as he lies to a prisoner that his wife has divorced him, leading to the inmate's suicide, 'the weak must die so the strong can live'.

The greatest ever poverty row feature. It is claimed it was made for $10000 in a week. It sets a standard for what can be done with almost nothing.  Al (Tom Neal) is a jazz pianist hitching from New York to LA. He thumbs a ride from a loudmouth with a bad heart and when he dies, Al (this is film noir) steals the dead man's identity and car and gets himself into real trouble.

Al picks up Vera (Ann Savage), who had also been picked up by the dead driver and assumes Al has bumped him off and lifted his wallet.  She's not above turning these assumptions into hard cash. Detour made B actor Savage a legend. She doesn't turn up until the last twenty minutes, but she really rips it up. She's not beautiful, but she's so artlessly trashy, she's irresistible. 

These two characters are as morally and financially bankrupt a pair of sleazeballs as is imaginable and it's not obvious what they wouldn't do for a few bucks. As Vera says, 'We're both alike, both born in the same gutter'. Neal is great, but Savage is jawdropping as a cheap chiseller without brains or scruples.    

At first glance this is another noir that follows the extraordinary ill fortune of a doomed, corruptible male. But eventually, the penny drops; the whole narrative is a lie. Neal is a tawdry killer who is rehearsing the story he will tell the cops when they inevitably catch up with him. Hell, we've only got his word that he was even in a band. And I don't trust him for a second. 

James M. Cain's depression era novel is made into film noir with the addition of a murder. This prompts a long flashback about a waitress who builds a chain of restaurants, but loses everything else. Mildred was the role of Joan Crawford's life. She surely identified with a woman born into poverty who works to gain wealth but alienates her children through dogmatic parenting.

It's a powerful film with strong studio virtues. Much of the dramatic thrust is provided by Max Steiner's orchestral score. The gorgeous high contrast black and white photography gleams like wet tarmac.  The sassy screenplay is joy.

Mildred Pierce isn't as much of an urban film as other forties noirs. It is mostly set in the suburbs of LA, but it still makes good atmospheric use of its environment, the beach towns and highways of Southern California, and features a typically noirish, lavish Malibu beach house where the murder takes place.  

Its greatest strength is the depiction of psychological frailty. It is an opera of passive-aggression, an epic of bartered love, of desire and greed rendered so frighteningly sordid that they both mean the same thing. The casting is glorious, particularly Crawford and Ann Blyth who was seventeen when she made this but is scarily believable as Mildred's spoiled, sociopathic daughter.

Lang never became the director of prestige that Hitchcock was in Hollywood and only ever attracted low to medium budgets. But film noir never much thrived in lavish productions. Better to get a poetic script and some tough/sexy actors, and just hide the set in the shadows.

Edward G. Robinson is a comfortable Professor of Psychology who finds himself at the whim of a young, desirable artist's model (Joan Bennett). After she kills her possessive sugar daddy, she is blackmailed by Dan Duryea's swaggering heavy. The Professor disposes of the body but he begins to feel the breath of the law on the back of his neck. It's quite a cute story.

 Joan Bennett was typecast in this period as the femme fatale, the sexy agent of entrapment. She's very still, languid, the voice low and seductive (in contrast to the fast talking dames of the thirties). She wouldn't be released from these roles until the fifties when she began to be cast as suburban housewives. For me she is one of the first ladies of noir.      

The leads are all great. Duryea is the kind of dangerous, greedy lout that often turns up in film noir, ending any hope of the hero steering back onto the highway. It has the gloomy, fretful atmosphere of the period. It isn't Lang's very best work, but it is very entertaining and a big enough hit for the three stars and the director to re-assemble the following year for Scarlet Street.

If any noir director was justified in picking up the tools of German expressionism for American film noir it was Lang who was a key exponent of the style In Berlin. And if there was a lot of Hitchcock in Ministry of Fear, then that was mainly because the influence was so strong the other way. The set up is pure MacGuffin.

Stephen Neale (Ray Milland) is released from a psychiatric hospital where he had been imprisoned after the mercy killing of his wife, and wins a cake at a country fair. The prize was supposed to have been given to a member of a group of fifth columnists because it contains microfilm of secret military designs...

 Sadly, the film doesn't make the most of Graham Greene's novel. The plot survives, but its moral complexities are discarded leaving a chain of suspenseful set pieces. The script is ordinary. It is interesting that Lang was seriously investigated for killing his wife back in Germany in the early twenties, which must have made this project unusually close to home.

Ministry of Fear is one of very few forties noirs with a WWII setting, rather than depicting the men returning from the war who don't find the promised post war settlement. But the visual and thematic approach of the director is very noir, with the everyman trapped under the wheel of an intractable fate, pinned in the path of the tracking shots in a mesh of shadows. 

Woody is back in London and again pondering the affairs of an extended upper middle class family in a lively comedy drama. Though not among his best, it's still fine entertainment with sharp dialogue and it doesn't drag for a second. 

Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) feels the breath of mortality on the back of his neck and abandons his wife Helena (Gemma Jones) for a pneumatic sex worker/actor. Meanwhile their daughter toils in a gallery and is attracted to her handsome boss  while drifting apart from novelist husband who is falling in love with their beautiful neighbour. So it's farce.  

The theme of the film concerns faith and whether its lack of intellectual validity matters if it lets its disciples survive the trials of life and find peace and meaning. Jones is wonderfully frustrating as an elderly woman who chooses clairvoyance and spiritualism above her family.

Hopkins also scores as the retired man whose awareness of the void opening up ahead makes him throw everything away for another go around. His frozen expression of bewildered fear is quite something.  There's a great subplot too about a struggling writer stealing the brilliant first novel of a friend in a coma, naturally conflicted about his survival!

Broad, slight comedy of manners with Woody (for a change) casting himself as a working class cultural wipeout. He and Tracey Ullman are a great team as a lowbrow, penniless couple who make a fortune and try to assimilate into aloof Manhattan society.

 The film begins with an idea that's been pitched before. A gang of hapless bank robbers led by the deadbeat, small time crook, Ray (Woody Allen) lease retail space in order to dig into a bank up the street. To create a front, his wife Frenchy (Tracey Ullman) opens a bakery in the store and, of course, her biscuits are a sensation.

 They make so much money that they abandon the raid and become a filthy rich, if eccentrically managed corporation. The latter part of the film relates to Ullman's compulsion to social climb, bringing her into contact with Hugh Grant, excellent as an oleaginous art dealer. He is richer, but no less a crook than Woody and his crew.

 It's an insubstantial confection, with most of the comedy pitched awkward as the new money clashes against the wealth of the elite. The laughs are at Ray and Frenchy's expense, because their taste is so vulgar. The film gets a huge lift from Elaine May as Frenchy's even dumber relative, whose dialogue is so idiotic that it appears to have a strange incidental wisdom.  

Woody's rewrite of La Dolce Vita landed with a loud critical thud,  and Kenneth Branagh's Woody Allen impression in the lead met with a stunned response. It would have worked better if Ken had the charm to account for the stars receiving him so readily into their entourages, and Melanie Griffiths relaxing him so libidinously, but it's time for a rethink. Celebrity was ahead of its time.

 Branagh is a travel writer who splits with his wife Judy Davis and decides to be a screenwriter. He funds himself by freelancing for celebrity mags, which brings him into contact with A-listers, like fashion model Charlize Theron and hell raising actor Leonardo DiCaprio and their periphery of sycophants, publicists, and gofers.

Davis quits being a teacher of medieval fiction to present daytime tv, interviewing B list makeweights like gossip columnists and politicians.  While not a profound piece of work, Celebrity does generate enough zeitgeist to work as a final cry for help from a society obsessed with the trivial.

These characters are no more degenerate than the intellectuals of Woody's early period, but they don't aspire to anything more cultural than a rung on the celebrity ladder.  They assume fame frees them from personal responsibility.  The script is sharp, the many celebrity cameos give the film an attractive gloss and the ending is a doozy.

After 1990 Woody began to be more interested in genre cinema. He made an expressionist horror film in Shadows and Fog and would go on to pastiche film noir with The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. So, this musical comedy about the romantic diversions of an extended family of rich New Yorkers perhaps shouldn't have arrived as such a shock.

It isn't an homage to any of the great Hollywood musicals. The actors perform their standards without talent or elan. The choreography is clumsy. It's a Woody Allen film with brief moments of singing and dancing. Another romantic triangle.  Aside from a ballroom dance by the Seine with a wired-up Goldie Hawn, the musical numbers aren't that enjoyable.

It's pretty thin stuff and there's is no really stand out comedy. It's difficult to care that much about the affairs of such slight characters, so other irritants are exposed. Like (a 61 year old) Woody Allen and Julia Roberts being swept away in sexual passion, and in such a contrived circumstances. Why is Edward Norton actually doing a Woody Allen impression?  

The characters so ridiculously privileged it's difficult to relate to them. Overlook all that then there is a gentle, undemanding comedy in there somewhere. The photography by Carlo di Palma is sumptuous. The New York, Venice and Paris locations are stunning. Drew Barrymore has never looked more beautiful. But... this is my candidate as Woody's worst film. 

 My favourite of Woody's London trilogy. It is a supernatural comedy thriller with Scarlett Johansson as a journalist who is vanished by Woody Allen (as Splendini) at a magic show.  During the trick, she encounters the ghost of a dead newshound who tips her off about an aristocrat (Hugh Jackman) who may be the Tarot Card Killer, the serial murderer of sex workers in London.

Aroused, she sets off in pursuit of/falls in love with the titled maniac, with a reluctant Woody in tow posing as her father. Scoop wasn't allowed a cinema release and later debuted on tv. The critics laid waste and announced that Woody was finished, though it's the film after one of his biggest hits, Match Point.

The script is only so-so, but where it scores is with the chemistry between Johansson and Allen which is infectious. She is sensational as a screwball girl reporter. Their comic rapport recalls Woody's partnership with Diane Keaton, many years ago.

The director said he was going for a feel like the Thin Man films of the thirties with Nick and Nora. Well, he doesn't really get that because this is across the generations, and Splendini is a coward. It's more like a good Bob Hope film. There is a lot of genuine suspense for a comedy thriller. Scoop is a lot of fun, and it looks a knockout too.

Since critics at Sight and Sound voted this the best ever film, Vertigo now gets labelled the ultimate Hitchcock. It certainly deserves that status in recognition of a coming together of key collaborators: costumes by Edith Head; orchestral score by Bernard Herrmann; Robert Burks' innovative camera effects; script by George Tomasino; and Saul Bass' title design and effects.  

They say Vertigo was personal to the director, as it imitates a film making process; of turning an actor into a character. Scottie (James Stewart) tries to transform Kim Novak into the image of a woman out of his troubled past. Though, while it does mimic that exercise, it doesn't really draw any profound conclusions. This is primarily a thriller with a twisting, disorientating plot.

 Hitch uses motifs of spirals and falling which make us vicariously experience Scottie's psychological trauma. Stewart was far too old for the part, though he is effective.  Kim Novak is excellent,  giving contrasting performances in her two roles. The San Francisco locations and local myth making add a lot of atmosphere.

Hitchcock and his team were creating their own genre in this period. One that many others would copy. It is difficult to compare his films to the work of others except to the degree they imitate. This is quintessential Hitchcock and a summation of his art at the time of his Hollywood peak. 

Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor meet cute and then fall in love against a background of an avian apocalypse. The people of Bodega Bay, lost in trivial diversions, are blind to an inconvenient truth. From being initially oblivious to the gathering danger they are finally overwhelmed by the sudden, inexplicable onset of war by all birds on humans.  

The Birds is full of great horror moments.  Including the flock of crows gathering at Tippi's back as she smokes a cigarette outside a school while schoolchildren innocently sing a nursery rhyme, which has some of the gothic frisson of Poe.

 Hitchcock's only science fiction film was a big box office hit and the spectacle of the attack of the birds is a triumph of set design and camera illusion. The soundtrack of bird sound processed through a synthesiser was innovative and powerful. Inevitably, the actors take a back seat to the effects but it's that kind of film.

The story lacks an ending and it would be nice if Hitch had done a little more with the theme of man at war with nature, but it is a one of the best of the end of the world films of the period. Each scene is imaginatively designed and assembled to set an eerie note of fear against an ominous symphony of catastrophe.

The greatest ever backstage musical offers a vicarious glimpse of life on Broadway in the thirties while also reflecting the hardship of the depression. It is one of the the great films about the depression because it approaches it obliquely and through the genre conventions of the musical, avoiding the sanctimony that is sometimes the Hollywood way with serious social issues.  

It's quite a realistic chorus line story with characters who would become archetypes: the lecherous financier (Guy Kibbee); the hardboiled, stage director (Warner Baxter), under pressure and giving the company hell; the sassy, wisecracking, starving dancers led by Ginger Rogers and Una Merkel. Bebe Daniels is the hot tempered diva; Dick Powell the pretty, romantic juvenile.

And of course, as the ingenue who gets her chance when the star goes down lame, Ruby Keeler. In the immortal words of Warner Baxter: 'Sawyer, you're going out a youngster but you've got to come back a star!'. The punchy, sassy dialogue is a treat. OK, Keeler dances like a horse, she's overweight and her acting is little more than enthusiastic, but, who cares. So much else is wonderful.

This is Warners so we get unpretentious proletariat scenarios. But the last three numbers, are gloriously staged by legendary dance director Busby Berkley in his expressionist style.  Shuffle Off to Buffalo, Young and Healthy, and the showstopping 42nd Street. The title song is immortal, and Berkley's living tableau of the Great White Way channels a metropolitan mythology which remains rich and joyous.