Film Reviews by Steve

Casablanca is perhaps the ultimate justification for the Hollywood studio system. It wasn't a prestige project. No one knew they were making a classic. But because Warners had great salaried talent to call on, they transformed an unproduced one act play set in Casablanca in WWII into something enduring and universal.  

It lacks realism in some respects, but it feels true. During the cathartic scene when the refugees of many countries sing La Marseillaise in Rick's cafe to drown out the Germans' anthem, the cast and extras were in tears for real. Many of them were refugees themselves. Humphrey Bogart and Dooley Wilson are the only American actors.  

What makes the film cohesive is Max Steiner's unmistakable score and Julius and Philip Epstein's legendary script. What exalts the film is the compelling romance between Rick (Bogart) and Ilsa (Ingrid Berman). She gives the film so much of its emotional intensity, he delivers the sassy humour and famous epigrams with immortal cool.

 The many famous production complications perhaps contributed to the impression of a precarious world. Casablanca could have been yet another film on the Warner's roster. But it is loved, because it captures a sensation of the uncertainty of exile at crossroads in history while touching our hearts and giving us faith in a greater good.

Tennessee Williams' American theatre classic was transferred to Hollywood by its stage producer Elia Kazan with reluctance as he felt he had achieved as much as he could with the play on Broadway. It was controversial material for New York, but in Hollywood it was scandalous. But the play survives remarkably intact.

 This was the first Hollywood film to feature a jazz soundtrack. Some of it was suppressed for being too sexy (it is pretty hot!). Language and insinuation formed battle lines. While the play is about changes in the American South and the corrupting nature of human violence, it is just as true to say the play was about Williams' own heart. He felt violated by the furore.

 Kazan took three of his main players with him to Warners: Karl Malden, Kim Hunter (superb), and Marlon Brando. Brando was a sensation. We'll never know what a shock his performance must have been. Nothing like it had been seen on the screen before. It's crazy Brando didn't win the Oscar.

The other three stars did (and Kazan) including Vivien Leigh as the ethereal, vulnerable Blanche. Leigh and Brando's scenes together are sensational. They made two of the great dramatic roles their own. Blanche's fight for survival is heartbreaking. She becomes an exotic, outré figure of southern gothic, destroyed by what the changing world has become. 

This looks back to Hawks' The Dawn Patrol (1930), a WWI film about flyers and their response to the seeming inevitability of death, living under unusual pressures that form a bond and an unshakeable code of ethics. And it looks forward to the romance of Casablanca whose narrative is very similar to Only Angels Have Wings.      

These men deliver the mail in the fog over the Andes. But they will transit anything, including nitroglycerine! The boss is Cary Grant who hires a pilot who happens to be now married to the only woman he ever cared about... And the husband is reckoned to have once bailed out of a crash which killed his co-pilot and thus breaking the code...  

This was Cary Grant's first significant dramatic role. And Rita Hayworth broke through from B films here. Both are excellent. Two out of three ain't bad; Jean Arthur was badly cast as the showgirl interloper who stumbles on this exotic other world.  

There's shadows and fog,  and life threatening heroics with plenty of action and a lot of fast, tough crosstalk. There's a gallery of mavericks who wash up on a mountain in South America determined to get the mail out, no matter what. These are the types of thread that Hawks would continually weave over his career, creating a kind of genre of his own.

The film is set in a small town in early twentieth century Alabama where little has changed since the civil war. It is a poor community, of low wage workers and apartheid, which is resistant to change. The southern aristocracy has atrophied and the new money of American capitalists is waiting to feed on the corpse of the confederacy.  

The adaptation of Lillian Hellman's play is set almost entirely in a single house. As a woman, Bette Davis' Regina has to fight for wealth through her husband (Herbert Marshall). He has grown tired of exploiting the weak and become terminally sick. Regina and her brothers need his money to secure a deal which will make them very rich.

 This is a fascinating film of the decline of a corrupt tradition about to be consumed by the wealth of the few. They are all avaricious monsters who howl and tear at each other as much as those they exploit. Davis is impassive behind her mask of white paint, which conceals her tawdry appetites and sordid ambitions.

 The Little Foxes is specifically a film about the deep south, which would dominate Hollywood drama in the middle of the century. Hellman's writing is more precise than the poetics of her contemporaries. This is a frank exposure of the physical and emotional violence hidden in domesticity and a society where southern gentility is merely a strategy.

Film historians routinely tell us that during the Great Depression audiences turned to screwball comedy and musicals for diversion. Sure they did, but they also made hits out of The Grapes of Wrath and Pearl Buck's epic of Chinese feudal poverty, The Good Earth.

 It's the story of a woman sold into slavery as a child during a famine and her struggle to endure a proud husband, a hostile environment and an oppressive aristocracy. Luise Rainer gives one of the most moving of all cinema performances as O-lan, a pragmatic, brutalised, determined survivor. Paul Muni is most convincing as her vain, impulsive husband.  

The film is a huge spectacle, with vast scenes of revolution. The people are chattels, owned by the rich, and destitute women suffer most of all because they are possessed by their husbands. Wealth is hoarded by the few and the poor are blown about by the winds of history just as the locusts are by capricious thermals.  

It's a long, slow film but hypnotic. The realism is a little horrifying at times, like the period when the family survives by eating earth and Wang sifts the soil for roots. There is also a suggestion that O-lan kills one of her babies. There is a little hope at the climax, but it's the incredible hardship and hunger that linger in the mind.

This is the best of the end of the world films that emerged during the cold war. Its premise is that the accumulation of nuclear weapons will inevitably lead to their deployment which will potentially end human life. And we get the pleasure of listening to Fred Astaire explain the concept of mutually assured destruction!  

Gregory Peck is extremely good as a buttoned down submarine Commander unable to articulate the pain of losing his family. He eventually falls in love with party girl Ava Gardner who is drinking just to blind herself to the inevitable. They meet in Melbourne in the last inhabitable city on earth, waiting for the winds to bring the fatal radiation.

The film delivers its anti-nuclear message clear and stark. We are less moved by the two stars finding solace in the path of inevitable death, than the premonition of the destruction of ourselves. Kramer doesn't have much time for any of the forces that divide us, including class and religion, as well as the nationalism that provoked the war.  

On the Beach utilises its Australian locations evocatively, the black and white photography is beautiful and there is a quite superb script in which people communicate through implication and evasion, which is realistic. It is a study of how people react when there is no hope left. 

Leisurely rural drama set in the Australian bush which owes plenty to the American western but captures enough local culture and landscape to maintain a separate identity. The roving inhabitants of the outback are colourful, though perhaps the film delivers idealised portrayals of these characters and their tiny, remote settlements.

The Sundowners is still convincing. The costumes and interiors don't feel cleaned up at all.  The terrain is shot on location and the story is realistic. In fact the narrative feels like reportage: the 2-up, the bushfires, the sheep shearing contest and the horse racing.  

The performances of Robert Mitchum and, especially, Deborah Kerr feel surprisingly authentic. They are a married couple working as drovers, steering sheep between the country towns of Jindabyne and Cawndilla. She and their son want to buy a farm and settle down but he wants to carry on drifting.

There is fine ensemble support from familiar British and Australian character actors (including Chips Rafferty). But most of all we gather an impression of the vastness of the Australian interior and its scattered communities. Of rural loneliness and the vulnerability of isolation, but also of a resilient frontier spirit. 

Faithful version of Tennessee Williams' unsuccessful 1957 play Orpheus Descending, itself patterned on the classical myth. It is an ominous, atmospheric film full of raw symbolism. If you enjoy Williams' sad poetry and empathise with his world view, this is a treat. The southern hell is powerfully credible, and the dialogue very quotable.

 Marlon Brando delivers a stoned performance as Valentine Xavier who drifts into a southern town in thrall to racism and violence, and which conceals a guilty secret. The enigmatic hero becomes the lover of the suffering wife (Anna Magnani) of a violent, dying bigot.  

It is an allegory about purity and corruption. The capitalist world is intrinsically unholy, where human souls are bought and sold. Only the artist can be free of this contamination and become celestial. Like visionary painter Vee (Maureen Stapleton) or Val whose guitar is enscribed by the great singers of the blues.

 It is the allusions that matter. Val wears a snakeskin jacket which denotes he is a wild thing, and which he sheds at the end of the film to become a relic to inspire future disciples.  There is an abundance of abstract talk and little plot. It fared poorly, notably falling between the eras of the Beats and the Hippies, who might have embraced this cryptic parable.

Powerful heartbreaker from Lillian Hellman's 1934 play about two female teachers who are destroyed when a young student falsely accuses them of being lovers. It is an ominous film with a taste of horror. The girl who makes up the lie out of spite (Karen Balkin) is a pretty convincing villain and the rich, small town bigots who victimise the pair make up a sinister and vengeful mob.

Audrey Hepburn is well cast as Karen, the slandered teacher who must give up her planned marriage. But the heart of the film is the response of Shirley MacLaine as Martha to the realisation that she actually is a lesbian. Her denial. The girl's lie is a scandal, but Martha's ignorance of her sexualty is a tragedy.

Shirley MacLaine is magnificent. Her performance burns you and not just because of her anguish in having to confront reality, but because she sees her true identity as degenerate and unendurable. Her pain is so powerful, and pitiful. By killing herself, Martha sets Karen free, which I suppose is the ultimate expression of love, and makes the end even more  devastating.

This was still a controversial story in 1961 but time hasn't dulled its impact. Homosexuality is no longer scandalous, but the emotions are still relevant. The capacity for onlookers to cheapen, malign and offend is greater than ever. It is an extremely moving work, including one of the great film performances and a fine example of Wyler's cinematic artistry.

The Hustler captures an aura of nocturnal transience. Passing strangers cross paths in bus stations, hotels, waiting rooms and pool halls. It traps these nightflies in the frame of its b&w photography, in its noirish lighting, its urban set design and authentic pool hall locations. It is realistic, yet as poignantly mythic as an Edward Hopper painting.

Most of all it catches the essence of this world in its ill-fated anti-hero, the pool shark Fast Eddie Felson who must overcome personal tragedy to beat Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason) in an epic contest at the Ames Pool Hall. Eddie is brilliantly inhabited by Paul Newman with huge intensity and charisma and sadness.

 Newman and Piper Laurie as Sarah, his lonely, aimless, alcoholic lover are extremely affecting together, framed in the narrow deep spaces of her apartment. George C. Scott is tough and intimidating as Eddie's manager who shows the hustler how much of himself he has to sell in order to succeed.

The film is all atmosphere. It develops scenes leisurely, assembling the strangers in a sort of ceremony in the pool rooms as the night settles in and the hustles begin. The pessimistic script sounds like beat poetry, with its slang and pool jargon. Much of the dialogue is just astonishing. So lovely, so full of sorrow. 

Adaptation by William Gibson of his own stage play which retained its two wonderful leads: Anne Bancroft as Annie Sullivan, the educator of the deaf-blind and near mute seven year old Helen Keller played by Patty Duke. Sullivan teaches the wild, unreachable child to communicate with the world through applying pressure to her teacher's fingers.

 Sullivan went to live with Keller's family in Alabama, 1887, with the South still destitute from the Civil War. Arthur Penn frames the story and its characters in the terms of the kind of heroism normally seen in war films or epics. And that feels appropriate. Sullivan's brave and astonishing enterprise is an act of phenomenal audacity, even though achieved in a domestic context.  

The film has an expressionistic look, with noirish lighting and distorted visuals. Sullivan with her pale, traumatised face, her own near blindness hidden behind black glasses looks like a visitation from a horror film. She is haunted by her own agonising past in a Victorian asylum, tortured with guilt for the handicapped brother she left behind.  

This is southern gothic. It is full of atmosphere, but is Bancroft and Duke that most endure, locked in the confrontation of their anguished, intimate world. There are long scenes of little or no dialogue, with no scoring and little editing. The Miracle Worker looks artistic, but feels real. The film is an extremely humbling experience.

Comedy-drama based on William Faulkner's novel set in the American south of the distant memory. A car is delivered to a rich family in a small rural town in Mississippi. The stable boys Boon and Ned (Steve McQueen and Rupert Crosse) 'borrow' the car and drive the family's 11 year old boy Lucius (Mitch Vogel) to Memphis where bawdy adventures take place and life-lessons are learned.  

The narrator (Burgess Meredith) declares that the citizens of Mississippi in his youth were a 'pleasant courteous people'. This was a time of apartheid, religious fundamentalism and great inequality. There is racism in the film (and free use of racist expletives) but it is stripped of menace. There are rednecks, a stupid fat sheriff, ribald sex workers... all the archetypes of southern comedy.

Perhaps this defanged idealisation of the past is more credible because it is a memory film. The suffering has been forgotten. If that hurdle can be overcome, and McQueen's rather grotesque, broad caricature, then there is a warm coming of age story set in the endless summers of all our pasts.

The film is quite beautifully photographed. There is a folksy score by John Williams, all banjos and fiddles, and well as a sentimental orchestral theme for moments of nostalgia. There is a sense of the past being a place of safety and childhood being a time of adventure, which may be a little guileless, but allowing for its faults this is a gentle, tranquil period film.

Meticulous and and detailed version of Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize winning classic. Best of all is the inspired casting, from Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch all the way to Robert Duvall's debut as inarticulate recluse, Boo Radley. There are lovely child performances too, particularly from Mary Badham as Scout.

The first half of the film is a character study as the children learn about life from their small southern town. The relationship between the lawyer Atticus, a widower, and his daughter Scout is sensitively sketched. The latter part relates to Finch's defence of a black farm labourer Tom Robinson (Brock Peters) who has been set up by a mob of bigoted smallholders.  

The white agricultural workers of depression-era Monroeville, Alabama are destitute. They have nothing but their perceived superiority to black people, which they guard ruthlessly. Robinson is found guilty of raping a white woman, not because he has a case to answer, but because he pitied her. Which strikes too deeply into the poor farmers' conviction of primacy.    

The rural south of the 1930s is brilliantly realised. This is a memory story and there is an impression of time and events being distorted by the act of recollection. It's a remarkably subtle and intelligent film which made an issue of southern apartheid as the civil rights movement in America was coming into being.

Period recreation of the 1925 Scopes monkey trial (with the names changed) which prosecuted a teacher for explaining Darwinism in a Christian fundamentalist school in Tennessee. Spencer Tracy defends the jailed teacher against an unrecognisable Fredric March as a prosecuting lawyer who believes in a literal interpretation of the Old Testament.

But there is a deeper issue on trial. Matthew Brady (March) claims that religion is a comfort for communities made wretched by poverty. But Brady is a politician. He offers no insight into how suffering might be relieved by other means. And solace isn't the role of the faith we see in Hillsboro, Tennessee. Christianity is a means of suppression and of spreading ignorance, bigotry and hate.  

Some of the ideas pass by a little too quickly. But for a film which is about a contest for the supremacy of ideas, it is extremely entertaining and the performances are a lot of fun, including Gene Kelly as an acerbic, loquacious news journalist. The real flaw in the film is it seeks to find a balance between Christianity and science, which isn't possible. 

There is a caustic, witty conclusion to the film, which really sums up its themes in an instant: when the frenzied Matthew Brady collapses in court,  a voice shouts out "Pray for a miracle and save our holy prophet" and another yells "Get a Doctor"!

Merian C. Cooper started from an image of a giant ape on top of the Empire State Building, with fighter planes swirling over its head. Edgar Wallace wrote most of the rest of the plot, though it clearly leans on Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. Willis O'Brien worked on the landmark modelling for that film's adaptation in 1925 and returned to lead the incredible monster animations of Kong on Skull Island.

Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) is a megalomaniacal film producer who takes a crew off the known map to research and exploit a legend about a land of giant creatures. He keeps his real mission a secret, especially from Ann Darrow (Fay Wray), a starving ingenue he finds fainting in a queue for a soup kitchen in New York who he proposes should star in his film.  

King Kong feels like an extreme experience  not just because of O'Brien's inspirational all time great effects, but also the sheer amount of death. Its body count is off the chart. And because of the crazily entitled behaviour of Denham, who takes Kong back to wreck New York.

This is a prime example of how much sound was now able to contribute to thirties horror. Fay Wray's screaming is legendary. The cries of the beasts are fearsome. And Max Steiner's thrilling score is all over the climax of the film in a way not yet typical. King Kong is a triumph of technical achievement, but it is also a tale of exotic exploration, anthropological hokum, crazy entrepreneurship, two fisted action and Fay Wray in her underwear.