Film Reviews by Steve

Classic psychological ghost story set in contemporary New England, though shot in the UK. Robert Wise was obviously referencing head of RKO horror in the 1940s, Val Lewton, who gave Wise his film debut, and who proposed that the terror conjured up in the imagination was more daunting than anything that could be shown. So the horror is kept off screen, mostly suggested by sound.

 The set design of the haunted stately home and the expressionist shot compositions are brilliantly unsettling. But we don't see any ghosts. In fact, the ambiguous script implies that the haunting may be happening inside the fractured psyche of the pale, neurotic, brittle Eleanor (Julie Harris), the unreliable narrator of the story.

 Dr. Markway (Richard Johnson) wants to prove the existence (or otherwise) of the paranormal through an academic experiment, and brings along two women who have experience of the supernatural, Eleanor, and also Theodora (Claire Bloom) a chic socialite who has the gift of ESP and consequently knows what everyone is thinking. The group is rounded out by Luke (Russ Tamblyn) who brings the scepticism, the wisecracks and the martinis.

The Haunting isn't unlike the kind of B horror William Castle was famous for in the 50-60s, but better budgeted, and more sophisticated... And scarier. The small cast is excellent, but Harris excels as the lonely, spinsterish, unstable conduit for the spirits who possess Hill House. Who want her to stay. It's her vulnerability and suffering that lingers in the memory.

Z budgeted, dreamlike and very cultish fantasy, shot along the California coast, and evocatively set in an empty amusement park. It is a film that draws strongly on a maritime atmosphere. It is very slow with a bare, prosaic script, but it has that strange, ethereal mood that amateur productions sometimes have because they are made in unconventional ways.

There's a cast of mostly tv support actors, but Dennis Hopper leads as Johnny, a sailor in the US navy who falls in love with Mona (Linda Lawson), who works posing as a mermaid in the fair. She is being investigated by the police as two of her boyfriends have been found dead.

The old sailor who runs the mermaid attraction (Gavin Muir) tells Johnny that Mona is a siren from the sea who draws men to their death... The fortune teller thinks the sailor is in deep peril. So who is crazy? Maybe it's even Johnny who keeps having nightmares about the sea.

This is an atmospheric, homemade film which demonstrates what can be done with very little money but plenty of imagination. The eerie music is effective, particularly the echoey flute themes. The lack of budget for extras makes this a deserted, lonely world, with a melancholy ambience that lingers.

The best truly independent film ever made. It cost $30000 and was made guerrilla style in the street with hand-held cameras by a five person crew. But the director creates a virtue of this circumstance. Maybe the audio and overdubs aren't professionally recorded, but their strange resonance just makes the film more detached and dreamlike. If Herk Harvey had spent his budget processing the sound to give this effect it would have been money well spent.

Some young adults drive off a bridge and emergency services can't recover the car in the muddy river. Hours later, Mary Henry (Candace Hillgoss) pulls herself from the water. She travels to a new town to work as a church organist, but her reality has distorted. Sometimes, people don't see her, or she doesn't hear them. At dusk she begins to be attracted to a desolate closed down amusement park where grotesque, ghostly apparitions congregate and freakishly waltz.

Carnival of Souls looks like the horrors of German expressionism. Its high contrast b&w photography is artistically composed in natural twilight or the dark. There are distorted close ups and long shots of eerie stillness. Figures appear and move unnaturally. One of the greatest merits is the amazingly gloomy and oppressive organ score. Hilligoss is ethereal as the living ghost who has cheated death. She is the only professional actor in the film.

The only strand of the film which doesn't really work is the uncomfortable attention of a young man towards Mary in the boarding house they share. He is rather too effectively repellant. But it is one of the great horror films. Harvey was an industrial documentary film maker. This was his only cinema release. It feels like a miracle that it came about at all, and much more that it is so great.

The image of this film seems to have been swallowed up by the saga of its two elderly stars. A legend has grown around the rivalry of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford which nourishes the film's eccentric horror, which in turn fortifies the myth of their enmity.

 Baby Jane Hudson was a child star in the era of vaudeville, the sort of awful, sentimentalised poppet that was popular in America between the wars. Her sister Blanche was a popular actor in thirties Hollywood making the kind of women's pictures that Bette and Joan starred in back then. So the story goes, Jane paralysed Blanche with a car when she was drunk, out of jealousy. But maybe Blanche has something to hide.

Thirty years on, Jane (Davis) is going crazy. She is tormenting Blanche (Crawford) who is trapped in a wheelchair within a room of her ancient Hollywood mansion. They are the freakish old-Hollywood figures, hidden away from the California sun in their dusty mausoleum, that Gloria Swanson was in Sunset Blvd. Crawford suffers effectively, but Davis is phenomenal as a dissolute, spiteful monster, regressing back to Baby Jane, and protecting her illusions with the tools to hand.

Victor Bueno makes an impression as another grotesque, the venal, obsequious pianist Jane enlists to recreate her old musical act. To be her new daddy. Robert Aldrich creates a rich environment, of the airless, antiquated cage that the former stars inhabit, and the sunlit materialism of the unfamiliar, normal life that goes on beyond their door. But this is Bette's film. She gives an uninhibited, once in a lifetime performance, making Baby Jane Hudson one of the legends of American Gothic.

Musical version of Ferenc Molnár's Liliom which was adapted by Frank Borzage and Fritz Lang in the thirties. Billy Bigelow (Gordon MacRae) is a fairground barker of superficial charm and foul disposition who ill treats his new wife, Julie (Shirley Jones). He dies while attempting a robbery on a local big shot, leaving Julie pregnant and alone. In the afterlife, with his family in trouble, Bigelow takes the opportunity allowed to all those in the spiritual sphere and returns to Earth for a day...

There's a lot that doesn't work in Carousel. Bigelow is such an unrepentant and contemptible lowlife that it's hard to believe in, or wish for, any possible redemption. The character of Julie Jordan is too sweetly virtuous to easily accept as a working girl growing up in poverty. The beautiful locations in Maine carry no impression of a realistic fishing port where lives are traded for a few dirty coins...

They retain too much of Liliom's realism to be credible within the conventions of a fifties Hollywood musical. And its acquiescence of domestic abuse makes it too difficult to want to suspend disbelief. The story is too dark for this kind of treatment.

Within the customs of a fifties musical, there is much to enjoy. Of course the songs are excellent, and You'll Never Walk Alone is one of the great, sentimental showstoppers. It is performed twice. The cinemascope is thrilling, particularly in accommodating the dance routines. The locations are lovely and the colour is bright and deep and luxurious. But none of that is harmonious with the story that's told. 

Classic adaptation of Jack Finney's timeless science fiction concept is often assumed to be an allegory for Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist witch hunts in post-war USA. Others suggest a near opposite, that it was intended to be a warning of the spread of communism. Don Siegel testified that he intended his film to comment on the brainwashing effect of materialism in the contemporary economic boom.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a brilliant vehicle for critiquing any kind of conformity. The film features an alien invasion, not from flying saucers, but from seeds, which have blown in from space. They grow into pods which can mimic the exact appearance of the hosts, and once established take over their being and memories. Only without individuality. Then, the pod-people attack the freedom of others, claiming they will be happier without individuality or emotion.

There is no intergalactic conflict. It is the start of a wave of sci-fi films about conspiracies which tap into society's paranoia about a perceived hidden threat. At the end of the film Kevin McCarthy is running on the freeway shouting about the danger to us all: 'you're next, you're next'. But no one stops to listen. Maybe he is insane? Maybe it's true? Sadly, the studio insisted on a couple of framing scenes which removed that ambiguity.

Seigel was a wonderful genre director. His only science fiction film is justly legendary, and has become part of our cultural language. It has a great film noir look and while the meagre budget may have limited funds for special effects, they are still good. McCarthy has become almost exclusively famous just for this role, and with the unusually beautiful Dana Wynter forms quite a permissive relationship for the period.

This intelligent and imaginative film broke new ground for science fiction. It was the first big studio production to take man into space and land them on an alien planet. The narrative is a rather wonderful re-telling of Shakespeare's The Tempest, with Walter Pidgeon as Dr. Morbius (Prospero) and Anne Francis as Alta (Miranda). A super-intelligent robot called Robbie stands in for Ariel and the awesome id-monster for Caliban. The brave new world is space travel.

The studio set planet is very artificial but hugely impressive, particularly its modernist-deco machinery. The bright, pastel shades of its terrain and star-scape create the dominant image of fifties sci-fi worlds. The special effects are astonishing, particularly the combat between the space crew and the invisible id-monster. The completely electronic score, was revolutionary as well as gloriously futuristic.

There is a strong comic element to the film contrasting the innocence of Alta with the healthy young astronauts who have been confined to the C-57D for over a year. There is a flirtation between the skipper of the spaceship, Commander Adams (the mischievously deadpan Leslie Nielsen) and the exaggeratedly naive and sweet and very young, Alta. Perhaps this might look potentially a bit creepy from a modern perspective, but in 1956 it was just space-screwball.

This was turned into a stage musical which was campy rock and roll nostalgia for the fifties. It feels like this has reflected negatively on the film, which is not sending itself up at all. It is one of the best and most original science fiction films of the decade. This is a clever film which stows some pretty dark themes within its state of the art visuals.

Behind this schlocky fifties exploitation title there is an intelligent sci-fi action film. Exposed to a radioactive cloud, Scott Carey (Grant Williams) begins to lose size. As he does, his relationship to his comfortable, materialistic lifestyle begins to shift.

Experimental medical treatment arrests his decline for a while. When he again begins to lose mass, he eventually falls into his cellar and is presumed dead by his despairing wife. This last third of the film below ground is about Scott's fight for survival, particularly a brilliantly staged combat with a (relatively) giant spider.

Scott finds meaning within confines of his new universe which he had lost as diminished man in the normal sized world. Eventually he loses a sense of his physicality and becomes a transcendental being, freed from the limits of his human perspective.  It's astonishing that Universal allowed the film to end like this. They really wanted Scott to be cured and to return to normality and his old life... which would have been absurd.

This was adapted from his novel by Richard Matheson- his debut film. He would go on to find a home on tv's The Twilight Zone and this is the sort of intelligent, altered reality science fiction that programme specialised in. This is easily the best film of sci-fi/horror expert Jack Arnold. The visual effects of the shrinking man's changing relationship with his environment are most impressive, but it is his interior, philosophical world that leaves the greater impression.

The film is prefaced by the journalist Alistair Cooke informing us that what we are about to see is all true. It is adapted from a case study by a team of psychiatrists on a patient with multiple personality disorder. She presented to them as three different people. The film needs this documentary style gravitas otherwise it might slip disastrously into unintentional comedy.

The story is based on the experiences of Christine Costner who actually claimed she had over twenty personalities. She challenged the veracity of the film. Of course, this is just screen melodrama. The psychiatrist Doctor Luther (Lee J. Cobb) ultimately cures Eve through some extremely unconvincing but convenient Hollywood Freud. But it is fascinating and fabulously entertaining.

The film leans heavily on the performance of Joanne Woodward who deservedly won a Best Female Actor Oscar. Without her credible portrayal it would be too difficult to suspend disbelief. She plays three working class characters from the southern states. Eve White is a repressed introvert. Eve Black is an extroverted good-time girl. Jane is a kind of balancing superego. Woodward slips with fluidity between the characterisations.  

Director Johnson doesn't make much of the cinemascope and it's not a visually impressive film. He was a screenwriter, and he does tell the story very well. There is some comedy when the husband explores the possibilities of being married to multiple personalities. But if the film threatens to become frivolous, there is a solemn narration to redress the balance. It does touch on the personal cost to the family of mental disability but this is chiefly an addictive, outré melodrama.

Invaders from Mars was made for a family or younger audience, and while it's unlikely any kids now will sit still for this typically paranoiac 1950s science fiction drama with home made effects, there is plenty to interest genre fans.

It was the first sci-fi film released in colour, rushed through to pip The War of the Worlds. Director Menzies was best known for his art direction. And this is the main attraction of the film. It's a low budget production but the expressionist set design makes it feel detached and dreamlike, and looks great..

The story is indeed a dream. David McLean (Jimmy Hunt) is a science and sci-fi fanatic who sits up at night watching the stars. In one of these sessions he sees a flying saucer land and burrow its way into the sand at the back of his house near the local rocket research facility... When the martians take over the bodies of his parents and other locals, including the police, David has to find support among the unpossessed to rally opposition until the army arrives.

Being the boy's nightmare, the surreal look is just right. As is the crazy jargon of the dialogue which sounds like it has come out of the comics David reads. It is an eerie film, and while the monsters look very crude, their leader, a head suspended in a glass dome, has a haunting, organic quality. It became a motif of science fiction that a small town would have to make it through the night against an alien foe to reach the safely of the morning, and that started with this imaginative, lurid melodrama.

George Pal's legendary production steered clear of the more reflective implications of HG Wells' classic novel and offered pure, magnificent spectacle. This was a leap forward for the visual reach of science fiction just as King Kong was for horror in 1933. The sets, effects (sound and visual), models and costumes are phenomenal.

The theme that would most inspire future film makers was a depiction of the breakdown in society. Law and order vanishes in an instant. The mobs actually smash the instruments that were going to be used by scientists to combat the invasion. There is looting. The ordinary people behave uselessly, resorting to panic, prayer and brutality. The blitzkrieg of the militarily superior invaders is brief. Soon, all the cities are abandoned, the left behind vaporised under the close scrutiny of the space ships.

Wells' estate was so impressed that they offered Pal access to any other of the writer's works. But while the film is a visual wonder, including the gorgeous technicolor, there are weaknesses in the script, particularly the lacklustre dialogue. The characters are archetypes and the unheralded cast does little with them. The pious religious sentiments are badly misjudged.

But this is a film of action, the one sided conflict between the civilisations pumped by Leith Stevens hyper-dramatic score. The War of the Worlds invented many of the future rules of cinema science fiction and it still works as a screen filling blockbuster and a landmark disaster film. And yes, the invaders' biological flaw which dooms their conquest is now more pertinent than ever.

The title tells all in this ultra low budget sci-fi film which boasts flying saucers created by visual effects legend Ray Harryhausen. It aims for a documentary style realism, with voice over narration and lots of pseudo-science, adapted from a non fiction book by Major Donald Keyhoe, formerly of the US marines who headed up a national committee on UFOs! 

But of course it's just an entertaining B film. It may be poorly budgeted, but it had some advantages in being made for Columbia pictures who had Harryhausen under contract. He creates a good space ship though his models of the collapsing landmarks of Washington DC are no better than ok.

The story mimics the cold war in that it depicts a rapid escalation of military capability, though there is no nuclear. The humanoid invaders (their planetary home is left vague) have an effective ultra-sonic weapon and the Americans invent an electro-magnetic ray gun which interferes with their engines. Although at times a six shooter has to do.

Hugh Marlowe is pedestrian and careworn enough to play a research scientist, but perhaps not sufficiently charismatic for the action hero he becomes. But he does have an exceptionally sexy assistant/wife in Joan Taylor. This is a pioneering film. Anyone today showing a sky full of UFOs over the monuments of a world famous city is doing nothing that Fred Sears and Harryhausen didn't do first. It's a must-see for fans of fifties sci-fi.

After editing Red River for Howard Hawks, Nyby got the job of directing this proto-alien invasion classic. But  Hawks produced, and this is a Hawksian film. The first fifty minutes of The Thing... are given over to the exposition of a Hawksian world. Scientists and military personnel are camped out in the Arctic Circle. They are a group of professionals who express themselves in tough, fast crosstalk. There's even a fast talking dame, Margaret Sheridan, doing a fabulous impression of Lauren Bacall.

This long introduction is fairly entertaining, but the film only really comes to life when the alien (played by the imposing James Arness) defrosts and reanimates. The last half an hour is thrilling and glorious. The alien is nominally humanoid, but analysis proves that it is actually intelligent vegetation who feeds on the blood of mammals. It is more intelligent than us and reproduces with frightening rapidity...

It is tremendous to watch the laws of fifties sci-fi being invented before our eyes. The alien that is brought back to life through human error. The attempt to confront the invasion with science. The megalomaniac boffin who foolishly aids the creature because of its value to science. Arness has a fine presence as the first alien monster of the fifties, with its strange luminous aura and thorny skin.

There's an excellent, witty script from screwball specialist Charles Lederer, and an all time great action score from Dimitri Tiomkin. The fifties science fiction wave starts here at the North Pole. At the end of the film, the dome headed newspaper reporter Scotty (Douglas Spencer) shouts his article down the phone line to his editor: 'Watch the skies, everywhere! Keep looking. Keep watching the skies!'.

Timeless sci-fi classic that established the approach of grounding its fantastical premise in an ultra-realistic environment which gives the story credibility. The alien encounter is observed against the familiar monuments of Washington DC, as well as ordinary suburban streets.

Michael Rennie is Klaatu, a mysterious, humanoid space-traveller (in a silver suit) who parks his flying saucer outside the White House and informs humanity that in an age of potential nuclear conflict that it presents a threat to the rest of the universe and must pull back from the precipice. Or else. It's a film with a message. The tall, angular Rennie is wonderful casting as the Christ-like visitor, an alien who presents an intellectual otherness that didn't need hours in makeup..

Bernard Herrmann's futuristic score, featuring theremin, is atmospheric and eerie, and would prove to be influential. The visual effects are superb. Robert Wise presents the leaders of the world as suspicious, territorial, insecure and narrow-minded. When Klaatu goes among the ordinary people, he finds they are the same!

Rennie as Klaatu has become a fabled figure in science fiction and his instructions to Patricia Neal, Klaatu barada nikto, have lived on in other books and films. Curiously the solution of the other civilisations of the universe to the threat of nuclear war is basically Mutually Assured Destruction, which is where mankind was heading anyway!

A whimsical ghost story produced by David Selznick to star his soon-to-be wife Jennifer Jones. It's a hyper-romance about how some people are meant to be together, no matter what, even if it breaks the laws that bind the universe.

Eben Adams (Joseph Cotten) is a struggling artist who meets Jennie as a child in Central Park, New York and sketches her. This provides him with a rare sale and enough money to eat and pay the rent. He begins a portrait... Adams occasionally meets her again but makes the unsettling discovery that she seems to come back to him from the past, and always a few years older. Eben and Jennie fall in love even though it appears she died in an accident at sea many years ago.

Portrait of Jennie is sweet, crazy hokum with the kind of lush orchestral score (Dimitri Tiomkin) typical of Hollywood romantic fantasies. We even hear a choir of angels. It is all atmospherics. Jennie's theme (composed by Bernard Herrmann) is haunting. Cotten and Jones are glamorous as the lovers who find each other across time. 

 It is also pretty spooky. The b&w photography is lovely, particularly the location work in Central Park. Dieterle sometimes places gauze over his lens which makes the shot itself look like a canvas. The film concludes with a tsunami off the coast of Massachusetts which is extremely powerfully done, and finally a shot of the sad/beautiful Jennie in colour hung on the wall of a gallery, a mysterious painting which enchants those who stand before it.