Film Reviews by Steve

Attractive sixties social drama based on Mary McCarthy's popular novel about eight privileged female friends who graduate from a prestigious girls' school in 1933, and their experiences from the depression to WWII.

The narrative focuses on gender issues such as contraception, free love, childbirth and inequality in the workplace. Of course these are as pertinent to the sixties as the thirties. The group are intellectuals, but this isn't an academic film. It's a melodrama about their social experiences.

 Lumet and screenwriter Sidney Buchman do a fine job in telling a story with so many lead characters, particularly as the actors were all relatively unknown at the time.  There are a lot of debuting female actors here and they give sensitive, sincere performances.

 What seems groundbreaking about The Group, is that it was a story about a group of women which wasn't patronising or satirical. It also began a sub-genre of films about the experiences of a clique of graduate friends.  In 1933 these women left college looking for the opportunity to play a full part in society. By 1966, they were still waiting.

Faithful adaptation of Horace McCoy's bitter, despairing political allegory of American capitalism. It is set at a dance marathon in LA in 1932 during the long American depression. Poor, desperate couples dance around the clock for weeks to win a large cash prize, ignorant that the last pair will just pay for the staging of the event out of their winnings.

It is a grotesque depiction of social Darwinism. The strongest survive, but the game is crooked. As failed actor Gloria (Jane Fonda) laments, 'maybe it's just the whole damn world is like central casting: they got it all rigged before you ever show up'. The event is staged to entertain a crowd. Poor people pay to watch other poor people suffer. They talk about Hollywood movies like the medieval idea of heaven.

This was a breakthrough role for Fonda as the strong minded agitator, helplessly mangled in the gears of the free market. Like the rest of her community, she is at liberty to make a choice; take it or leave it. The film is most memorable for Gig Young as the cynical, manipulative, indifferent MC and Susannah York who is heartbreaking as a vulnerable would-be actor driven to madness.

The film is directed with flair by Sydney Pollack who ornaments the cinemascope frame with imaginative impressionist touches and haunting close-ups. The period recreation is wonderful and the soundtrack of standards adds atmosphere. The film is tragic, but real. When Gloria can't go on, she asks her partner Robert (Michael Sarrazin) to shoot her. It is a mercy killing. She is in too much pain. The last line of the film is devastating. It is the title.

Passionate and philosophical adaptation of Tennessee WIlliams' last great play, set on the coast of the remote Mexican rain forest. Various wandering strays assemble by chance at the end of the world, and at the end of themselves. John Huston finds a location where cinema rarely goes, not just on a map, but in ourselves.

The Reverend Shannon (Richard Burton) is the figure in the title, tied up and hysterical and essentially saved by nomadic artist Hannah Jelkes (Deborah Kerr) as he fails to outrun his spooks. This is like alcoholics anonymous for desperate people. Hannah has been there herself and knows what it takes to endure, to survive.

Shannon has been locked out of his church in America. Finding work as a tour operator, he leads a religious party headed by a repressed middle aged woman more interested in finding the comforts of home than the glories of Mexico. Shannon is tempted by Sue Lyon playing his ultimate bête noire, what used to be called a nymphette.

There is a wonderfully cast: Burton, Kerr and Ava Gardner  are all touchingly believable in what is a highly schematic narrative. It's funny in its early scenes with Burton particularly good, driven loco by relentless torment as the Reverend discovers that in the absence of god, we can only ever be saved by the will of others.

Intense drama about the suppressed memories of Sol Nazerman, a holocaust survivor living among the violence and squalor of Harlem, NY. The Pawnbroker was groundbreaking in its presentation of the Jewish survivors of the concentration camps in contemporary America.  

Rod Steiger's performance feels authentic as the man haunted by subliminal flashbacks to the camps. We also glimpse in these suppressed images, his present day traumas. The brutality of the streets. But his shop is a hub for laundering money. In seeking to be invisible, and rendering himself numb to cruelty, he helps to sustain it.

It is interesting how distant Sol is to his present reality. A simple remark about his religion can only be answered in terms of 7000 years of struggle. But he is blind to the historic suffering of black Americans. He is so removed from his environment he can no longer see the humanity in himself or anyone.

Most of the film is shot in the pawnshop, with Steiger trapped in the wire security cages. But when Lumet does stray outside, his camera captures Harlem most realistically. It is a powerful, very depressing film which gives an identity to a hidden, voiceless demographic through Steiger's potent, unreachable anguish.

Brilliantly cast, faithful adaptation of Edward Albee's waspish theatre hit. It's hardly opened up from the stage, mostly being set in George and Martha's rather scruffy university residence.

Albee's dialogue is intelligent and very funny as George and Martha take us on a tour of their esoteric fantasy life while they initiate two arrivals. George works in the history department; Nick is an assertive biology teacher, burdened by his frail, irksome, alcoholic wife Honey. The games the foursome play through the long, drunken night are irresistible.

 Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, have ruined the play for other actors. This is Taylor's best performance, as the aggressive, insolent daughter of the university Chancellor. Burton is adept at the coruscating verbal sparring, but there is also a vulnerability.

It's so much fun just watching the Burtons  warming up in the opening scenes. What then unfolds is astonishing. They become like two warring civilisations. George Segal and Sandy Dennis are fine as Nick and Honey but they get blown away in the storm. This is a dazzling intellectual experience made definitive by its great stars.

The film where Paul Newman emerged out of the shadow of Marlon Brando and the myth cast by James Dean's death. It's about a strong but ageing father (Melvyn Douglas) who lives by a rigid moral code and his contrasting relationships between his bad son (Newman) and a good grandson played by Brandon de Wilde. 

Hud Bannon really isn't an anti-hero at all, but an irredeemably contemptuous villain with a charming, attractive façade. In the era of the sixties counterculture Hud was taken as a role model for the way he stood up to and contested the rules his father lived by. They admired his individualism, however corrupt.

 Patricia Neal is sympathetic as the Bannon's sassy housekeeper with a past, who occasionally enters into the crosshairs of Hud's licentious gaze. There is a very elegant score from Elmer Bernstein. But the glory of the film is James Wong Howe's photography in Panavision, dominated by the epic, white, Texan skies.  

Bannon is a rapacious capitalist who intends to flatten his father's ranch and produce oil. It is a landscape where sickness is endemic, and the future uncertain. Hud is an elegiac lament to the passing of the old west, But it is political too; the old men have let us down. It's time its institutions and conventions were challenged.

Political allegory from Sam Fuller is straight melodrama but typically original and incisive. Hot shot journalist Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) goes in pursuit of the Pulitzer Prize by faking insanity, which will allow him access to a mental hospital and potentially discover who committed the murder of one of its patients.  

Only once admitted, Johnny's real mental frailties start to betray him. The film adopts the notion that madness is a reasonable response to an abnormal circumstance. This is what has driven the three witnesses to the killing to their own sickness. And Johnny begins to conform to the insanity of his environment.

He uncovers the killer, but  exposure to the hospital liberates his own schizophrenia. Fuller deploys the corridor where the residents congregate as a metaphor for America. He asserts that the country has become deranged by ignorance and prejudice and inevitably when people conform to its rules, they become irrational themselves.  

Though boldly sensationalist, Shock Corridor is a clever and convincing film produced to good effect on a single studio interior. Its budget must have been minuscule, but typically Fuller gives it plenty of visual clout, particularly in the scene when we see the corridor awash in the torrential rain that terrorises Barrett when in his psychotic state.

This film kicks off explosively and never lets up. Big city sex worker Kelly (Constance Towers) is slapping down her pimp for the £75 dollars he has held out on. Her wig falls off revealing the bald head he has inflicted on her. And as she peels only the 75 off his roll, we know this is an honest girl.

 Kelly leaves town and pitches up in small town America. Working in a children's hospital she falls in love with its benefactor, Grant (Michael Dante). This is a film about appearances and reality and the deception and hypocrisy that lie between. Griff is a paedophile who uses his largesse to snare his vulnerable victims. There are no fairy tales or happy endings.  

There is an amazing scene in The Naked Kiss when Kelly and the kids from the orthopaedics ward sing a sentimental lullaby, which is so elusively peculiar that it is actually incredibly moving (especially given the threat to these children). The film is set in a hyper-idealised fantasy of America that we would one day call Lynchian, yet steeped in a tragic sorrow.

Every dream has a mirrored heartbreak. Nothing is what it seems. This is Fuller's masterpiece. It is brilliantly written, dense with cynical wit and disingenuous hope. Towers is in every scene and her performance of exaggerated sweetness is aptly, and unforgettably strange. What a role this is for her. And what a fascinating, original film.

The film that spawned a decade of horrors about the birth of an antichrist. It draws on the classic premise of psychological terror, that you can never be sure whether the horrific events are actually happening or if they are the dubious fantasies of a vulnerable, disintegrating mind.

Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and her husband Guy (John Cassavetes) move into an apartment intending to start a family. Guy begins to spend time with some elderly kooks living next door (Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer) just as his struggling career as an actor starts to turn around. When Rosemary conceives, she begins to suspect/fantasise that the neighbours are satanists and her husband has sold them her reproductive capacity.

The film benefits from having a great director, with Roman Polanski making his American debut. His script is faithful to Ira Levin's novel (1967) which presents a problem as the first half of scene setting and exposition is very slow. But once the baby is on board, the film becomes suspenseful and psychologically twisted. There is a support cast of old Hollywood faces as the coven. You know Rosemary is in big trouble when even Ralph Bellamy is in league with the devil!

Cassavetes is terrifically oppressive as her ambitious, extraordinarily mercenary husband. Mia Farrow is well cast as the fragile, neurotic mum-to-be. In the end, we are probably persuaded to believe that this is happening and Rosemary has been raped by the anti-christ. Which makes it very dark indeed, particularly when she eventually shows interest in nurturing the demon baby.

Charly  was adapted from a tv play (1961) starring Cliff Robertson. The film release would win him an academy award for best actor. Charlie Gordon has learning disabilities and is selected for an experimental operation which will make him more intelligent. More than that, he becomes a genius polymath. When it is discovered that the change is temporary, he must use his intellect to arrest his tragic decline.

For the first hour, Charly is a rewarding crowd pleaser,  following a sort of Rocky story arc. It has a documentary feel, with hand held cameras and a muted colour palette. But as the dream starts to shatter, the film becomes fragmented, telling much of the story through hallucinogenic split screen montages, scored by Ravi Shankar. It all gets very summer-of-love. This method tells the story quickly, but avoids following up any thematic proposals.

The film relates a uniquely human experience. We are educated until we understand the fact of our mortality, and nothing we can learn afterwards can deny this truth. But the film doesn't really dissect the interesting issues it raises. What would it mean if everyone had such an operation? Surely it is more likely that this surgery would be offered to the rich rather than those it would most benefit? What are the ethics of using Charlie as an experiment?

Robertson's performance is a little raw. It helped establish the theory that Oscars go to actors playing disabilities. Charlie is an outsider, someone who sees the world having first experienced its cruelty. There's a very strong scene where he word associates with scientists at a press conference and we glimpse his psychological trauma. It feels credible that one day, something like this could be attempted, and that's what good sci-fi does; it syphons into the almost believable.

There is an epic quality to The Exorcist, particularly in its early scenes of the exhumation of the satanic statue in Iraq. This is horror as major studio blockbuster. The director was hot property at the time and the visual effects are state of the art. The sound effects are extraordinary. There is money being spent on this and it went on to make a bomb for Warner Brothers at the box office. 

Divorced from the hype, the film no longer feels quite as shocking. We are now an audience that has absorbed its decades of influence on other horror films. But the profanities are still startling. Just the normal ritualistic traditions of Catholicism, its medieval imagery and Latin ceremonies are unsettling enough, and the film draws on primal images of the devil which are part of our communal childhood fears. How could it miss.

It is interesting how much time the film spends on creating an impression of America in crisis. The poor man begging in a subway station, the student protests. The US is socially and politically divided. The family is falling apart and there is a crisis of faith. And now the youth is going to hell... There is an impression that for America, this is the right time for the anti-christ to re-enter the stage.

In an excellent cast, Max von Sydow is exceptional. It is one of the great joys of the film that we see him in the title role, going head to head with his satanic majesty. The 14 year old Linda Blair is also astonishing as the possessed child, augmented by the hideous sound mix. It feels like the demon has a character. It's a key film of the 1970s and it was new kind of horror. We had been introduced to the devil before, but never as viscerally or explicitly. Nowhere near.

The final part of Frankenheimer's paranoia trilogy. Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) is a middle aged banker who feels life has passed him by. He pays a shady organisation a huge sum for a second chance. He gets extensive cosmetic surgery, a phoney back story and the company provides a corpse to allow the Arthur to shed his old life. He becomes Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson!).

Hamilton was one of the generation born into the depression, sent to fight in WWII and who returned to the sexually and socially inhibited America of the fifties. In the sixties, young people reject those values, get the contraceptive pill and discover free love. Who wouldn't want another go around?

Only Arthur doesn't change. Tony is just a frightening, unknowable mask. In his new identity, he begins to question who he used to be.  A lot of this feeling of paranoia is created visually with the distorting lenses, and by the gloomy progressive score.    

It is a chilling story of a rapacious organisation whose mission, to provide a service to the rich, has been swallowed by its corporate objective, the obligation to create wealth. Anything can be justified in the pursuit of profit. Arthur's self doubt is exploited and he becomes paralysed in a terrifying web of ruthless, inexorable business ethics.

It is a sign of the increased prestige attached to science fiction in the late sixties that Planet of the Apes was assigned an A list director to what looked like a B film premise. An astronaut (able to traverse time as well as space) lands on a planet with a habitable atmosphere in the distant future, where the great apes are the dominant species (who speak English!) and the humans are mute, unreasoning animals.

Taylor (Charlton Heston) discovers an earth-like environment, but because his instruments are telling him that he is way over the other side of space, he doesn't draw the obvious conclusion... at least until the justly famous ending.

Schaffer brought the advantages of an A budget with him into the project. There is a major star. The visuals are fabulous, particularly in the early location shots in the Utah desert. There is a sophisticated score. While the beautiful colour of the film is bright and without expressionist shadows, the irregular, jagged constructions of the ape city give the film an unsettling, distorted look. Best of all are the superb ape costumes and make-up effects.

For what is essentially an action film there is quite a lot of thematic content in Planet of the Apes. Religious leaders must have blinked at the evidence proving evolution was in progress well before the provenance of the ape scriptures. The schism between the gorillas and chimpanzees allowed for reflection on contemporary American racial conflict. It is a film about social and political realities in 1968, with prejudice, belligerence and superstition ascendent over reason.

Title tells all in this thoughtful and faithful adaptation of Daniel Defoe's novel... except it's on Mars. It was a clever idea to adapt a classic story about colonialism to the final frontier, though The Forbidden Planet (1956) got there first.

Commander Draper (Paul Mantee) crashes onto the surface of the red planet. He adapts to his new home (Mars has an atmosphere in this film) and changes his environment to support himself. The film establishes a hierarchy of needs, of the space-wrecked Commander's physical, psychological and then social being.  

Draper happens upon Friday (Victor Lundin), who is being viciously exploited by inter-planetary slave traders. The Commander seeks to impose his own acquired values on his new companion; a class hierarchy. A relationship of master and servant. Only under duress can he accept an equality based on mutual respect and common needs.

The film benefits from its location shoot in the otherworldly terrain of Death Valley, California. The matte effects of the red sky, and the ruined remains of a Martian civilisation are both clearly limited by the budget but are still acceptable. The most poignant theme of the film (inspired by Defoe) is of the spaceman, exposed to the vastness of the universe, disconnected from the safety of his capsule, and alone in space. It is a potent image which is often revisited.

Roger Corman's series of historical horror releases from 1960-65 was clearly influenced by the early Hammer horrors and copied their successful formula: colour, castles, cleavage and classic text. These films' claims to be based Edgar Allan Poe don't always stand up to scrutiny. The Haunted Palace takes its title from a verse by Poe but it is an adaptation of a story by HP Lovecraft.

 It's my pick of the best of the 'Poe' series shot in America. It has a more interesting and detailed story, as well as sumptuous colour and beautiful, spacious sets. Vincent Price, rich of oratorical voice, is on board of course, and Debra Paget supplies classier female support than is customary. And it has dark, genuinely perverse themes.

 Joseph Curwen (Price) is a necromancer in seventeenth century New England, experimenting on the reanimation of corpses and some malevolent breeding projects which aren't fully explained because we 'wouldn't understand'. He is set alight by the local menfolk and dies while cursing their descendants. His sorcery leaves behind a community of 'mutants' born from his hideous satanism.

A hundred years later, Curwen's heir, Charles Dexter Ward (Price), arrives to take up his inheritance. He is possessed by Curwen and the whole process begins again... Corman's historical horrors usually end with a grand set piece as the thunder cracks over the castle. The Haunted Palace climaxes with Mrs. Ward (Paget) being terrified by the grotesque demon her husband employs in his genetic investigations,  a potent scene of transgressive and shocking terror.