Film Reviews by Steve

This is my pick for the best horror film ever made. It delivers visceral shocks in a dense atmosphere of supernatural dread among the labyrinthine canals of out-of-season Venice; which lead Donald Sutherland to an unexpected and disorientating conclusion.

There is a potent sense of intractable fatalism, and powerful horror shocks too. And it is intelligent and sensual. Sutherland plays a rationalist who is unable to save his daughter from drowning. While he restores a church his wife (Julie Chritie) pursues a growing obsession with the paranormal.

 But it is the sceptic who experiences the mysterious and frightening visions. The remarkable support cast contributes to the tone of anxiety: Hilary Mason and Clelia Mantania as the seemingly ubiquitous seers, Ranato Scarpa as an inscrutable detective, and Massimo Serato as the saturnine bishop.

They all seem to know much more than they ever say. And the grey, rainy Venice and its medieval churches provide a most ambient, sinister environment. It's flawlessly realised arthouse horror by the idiosyncratic Nicolas Roeg. And one of the best films ever made in the UK.

Classic film noir about a pickpocket (Richard Widmark) who snatches microfilm of US military secrets wanted by the Soviets. He's so obnoxious that the detective on the case keeps getting busted for beating him up! The mark who had her bag picked (Jean Peters) also wants to recover the MacGuffin, but improbably falls in love with the three time loser.

This is an exciting, great looking thriller. But what it's most remembered for is a touching performance from Thelma Ritter as the neck tie selling stoolie, who just wants enough money so she doesn't get buried in a pauper's grave in Potter's Field. She gets great lines but brings enormous pathos to what could just be a Runyonesque archetype.

Sam Fuller digs into the crooked code of the black economy. The criminal secrets that the underworld pass around all have a monetary value. So while this is superficially about the red scare, it's actually more potently disillusioned with American capitalism- a risky perspective in the McCarthy era.

Fuller relocates noir from California to New York, and benefits from a great waterfront setting. Widmark's shack on stilts makes for a memorable image. There's a fine jazz score. Best of all is Fuller's pungent, realistic dialogue full of criminal jargon. Sometimes funny, but often heartbreaking.

This is usually called the first Ealing comedy. It was mostly aimed at children (I think), though it's unlikely such an audience is still viable. Now it's an eccentric and cheerful period piece about England after the war. But it isn't just social history, this is a lot of fun.

There is a satisfying and diverting story, enhanced by an ultra-anxious and indecisive Alastair Sim as a cartoonist whose work has been commandeered by the criminal element. A group of children take on a gang of crooks who use their favourite comic (Trump!) to pass on messages about gang activity.

And everything ends in a big punch up...TEB Clarke's script is droll rather than laugh out loud funny but there is the characteristic anarchy of the Ealing comedies

London is a bomb site devastated by the blitz and adopted as a playground for children. No one has anything of any value. There is no parental supervision. Boys and girls are segregated by their own choice, and play when and where they like. The past is a foreign country.

Celebrated version of Raymond Chandler's debut novel is the best of his work on screen, and Humphrey Bogart the ultimate Philip Marlowe. He's paired with Lauren Bacall and release was held up for a year while Warner Brothers spiced up their scenes after their hit with To Have and Have Not (and marriage in real life). And their dialogue is hot.

Marlowe is employed by a rich, elderly man to track down pornographic pictures of his young daughter, for which he is being blackmailed. Which of course leads into a web of secrets and lies from the family's murky past which draws him down deep into the lowest strata of LA crime.

 But, meh. It's not the knotty plot complications that attracted audiences to The Big Sleep. There is a riff of murders in the middle part of the film that are barely explained, if at all. The publicity sold Bogart and Bacall and they supplied sophisticated thrills to a hungry audience adrift in post war austerity. 

Bacall's languid elegance is a plus but arguably she is upstaged by Martha Vickers as the nymphomaniac sister and Dorothy Malone as a sexy bookshop worker. Hawks is a master at the dazzling crosstalk. and the photography is classic noir. It's not by any means profound, but it is friction free entertainment.

Another Orson Welles production that ran into problems because the studio didn't know what the hell he was doing. It's hard to understand their concerns. He transforms unremarkable pulp fiction with his wit and sensational visual imagination. And he contributes as the loquacious fall guy, calamitously beguiled by Rita Hayworth's luminous femme fatale.

The only real lull is the period when the film runs through the twisty plot of the source novel. Hayworth had her trademark red hair cut and bleached,  also to the studio's dismay. She is breathtaking in close up, particularly singing Please Don't Kiss Me, and is subdued and enigmatic to great effect.

The dizzy, disorientating expressionist finale in an amusement park, including the shoot out in the Hall of Mirrors is cinema legend, peaking with its brilliant, sardonic last line: 'Killing you is like killing myself. It's the same thing. But, you know, I'm pretty tired of both of us'. 

The script is darkly poetic, full of contrary philosophy, and often very funny. The curiously grotesque support performances are fascinating. Its location shoot in Acapulco, New York and San Francisco brings local colour. Welles and Hayworth had just divorced, but share a powerful on screen chemistry. The critics didn't think much of it, but now this looks like classic noir.

Krzysztof Kieslowski again casts Irene Jacob- after Double Life of Veronique- for the last of his trilogy on the themes of liberty, equality and fraternity. And she is most sympathetic- and beautiful- as a compassionate student/model who stumbles upon the life of an embittered elderly intellectual.

It's mostly a two hander with Jean-Louis Trintignant as the retired judge with a streak of megalomania, who listens in to the telephone conversations (this is pre-internet...) of his neighbours, whose miseries and tawdry misdemeanours serve to disillusion his last few years.

It's about the interconnectedness of people which allows Kieslowski (and co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz) to poetically impress on us various abstract themes, through music, montage, the repetition of imagery, colour... The director's art. It is exquisite and cathartic

It feels like the last great film. Of course, that's subjective but- for me- it has that kind of power. If cinema really is in terminal decline, then this may serve as a late example of how transformative its power once was. Kieslowski communicates ideas that can't be said, and conveys them with purity and simplicity.

This was a critical hit and is a strong candidate for Woody Allen's best straight drama- though he does save a few good comic lines for himself. It follows the conflicts and heartaches of three sisters and the men who orbit their lives over two years, bookended by a pair of Thanksgiving parties.

Woody plays the former husband of Hannah (Mia Farrow), who marries her sister (Diane Wiest) having faced a crisis when he becomes convinced he has a terminal illness. Michael Caine is Hannah's present husband who has an affair with the middle sister (Barbara Hershey). 

The brilliant script deservedly won the Oscar and the cast makes the most of it. Caine is sympathetic as a philanderer stricken by a bad conscience. And it's a treat to see Max von Sydow as a dogmatic intellectual pessimist. From the golden age, Hannah's parents are played by Lloyd Nolan and Mia's real mother, Maureen O'Sullivan ('such a boozy flirt').

Best of all is Diane Wiest who brings so much energy and whose captivating appeal gives the great ending ('I'm pregnant!') such a kick. Wiest and Caine won Oscars. Having faced death and finding no solace in religion, Woody finds epiphany through the Marx Brothers. Such a classic Allen resolution.

Fritz Lang's career was in freefall when he made this psychological thriller for low budget studio Republic. Surely his lowest point in Hollywood. It did no better than its predecessors, and was forgotten until the last copy was saved and restored in the '70s. And then positively reappraised.

Unlike most film noir,  this is isn't contemporary. It is set in Victorian New England, and conveys the minor chords of gothic horror . Louis Hayward plays a struggling middle aged novelist who kills his attractive housekeeper and convinces his brother to help him sink her body in the river that runs past the back of his house.

When the body is found, the murderer makes sure the police suspect the innocent brother. The author is convinced his stories should draw from life, and so starts to spin his escalating paranoia into his next novel. He feels like the kind of monomaniac found in Edgar Allen Poe.

 As often with Lang, there is some Hollywood Freud. The depths of the river represent the subconscious of the killer, which occasionally releases troublesome detritus to the surface. It's another typically strange, dreamlike noir from the director, hardly impaired by his reduced circumstances.

Jack Lee was one of the directors who came through the documentary movement at the GPO before making feature films. While this is beautifully photographed, it has the realism which is quite common to British war film of the '50s and '60s, with its understated acting and location filming in Malaysia and Australia.

The novel by Nevil Shute was inspired by the experiences of Dutch women in Indonesia. Here they are British women and children in Malaya, swept out of their colonial offices and homes by the rapid invasion of the Japanese army, and forced to march across country in the company of a monolingual guard, until they begin to die from malaria and malnutrition.

The women are trenchantly portrayed by a wonderful cast of character actors. It really feels like we get to know them. It leaves the impression of an epic, despite its average running time. It is a tremendously moving film about the suffering of the displaced prisoners. Though please note some racist language is used.  

The diverse, stoical ensemble is superbly led by a pragmatic Virginia McKenna, adapting to circumstances grotesquely alien from civilian life. Her alliance with Peter Finch is captivating and inspiring. And it is good to see that the adversity borne by the local people is featured far more than is usual in British war films.

The first, best and quintessential screwball comedy. It defines the genre, from the opening scene in which an heiress (Claudette Colbert) jumps over the side of a yacht into the sea at Miami, to the conclusion as she flees from her society wedding to a playboy waster into the waiting car of the working stiff newspaperman she really loves (Clark Gable).

It's also a story about the depression. Cut loose from her privileges, the runaway must learn to live on a budget. The reporter loses his job and has to experience the indignity of not being able to provide for the woman he grows to love. They witness the nation's poverty in their journey across country on a bus. 

Over the next decade Frank Capra's vision of America would darken. But despite an undertow of real sadness,  this is an uplifting experience, and one of the funniest films ever made. Alan Hale as a singing motorist is memorably uproarious among the fine support. And Colbert and Gable share an enchanting chemistry. The beautiful photography bestows on them a kind of magic.

Strange that they wrapped thinking it was a disaster. An opinion they revised when it won them both Oscars- as well as for best film, director, and Robert Riskin for his once in a lifetime screenplay. This is a classic story of romance, which has been endlessly copied, that will speak to people for as long as they go on falling in love. 

Of course there is no objective answer to the question of who gives the best performance in films, never mind in any particular year at the Oscars. But when the conversation takes place, it has to include David Thewlis' literate, traumatised anti-hero in this brilliant stream of consciousness about urban alienation.

It is a state of the nation address by Mike Leigh about the collapse of society, provoked by the Thatcher revolution. It is absolutely the London I remember from the period- of rootless, insecure outsiders. It feels like the end of the world.

Down from Manchester, Thewlis' roams the capital by night, spitting out a bitter apocalyptic commentary on a country and a world he sees as irrevocably damaged, and sliding into the end of days. The centrepiece is a meeting with a nightwatchman who  guards empty office space, which is stunningly scripted and performed.

And it's unsettling. There is humour, but it is desolate. There is something of Catcher in the Rye, but more pessimistic. Mike Leigh again captures the time and the place forensically and prophetically, though like all his films, they get a hugely polarised response.

Probably the best film adaptation of an Agatha Christie story. Her characteristic plot twists are implausible, but Billy Wilder's cute and acerbic comedy makes the film a delight. Tyrone Power gets top billing as the shifty, shiftless wide-boy who murders for money, but the film is dominated by Charles Laughton as his irascible barrister. 

There's a sort of screwball romance between Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, his carping, exasperated nurse. They certainly walk off arm in arm at the end. Marlene Dietrich gets the title role. She's 20 years too old, but she does allow a nice flashback to cabaret in the ruins of black market Berlin. It's her acting sleight of hand that gives the mystery its final reveal.

It's set in London, but was shot in the MGM studios. The sets feel realistic, particularly of the Old Bailey. There's a fabulous cast of British expats in support, with Una O'Connor scoring in her final screen appearance as the victim's cranky housekeeper. A sickly looking Tyrone Power is also in his last role. His flashy but squalid gigolo isn't his normal territory, but he excels.

This hasn't the psychological complexity of fifties film noir. It's a puzzle. Realism isn't a factor. Like most golden age murder mysteries, its credibility relies on the goodwill of the viewer. But, it delivers some delightful surprises. It's peak Wilder,  a Hollywood comedy-thriller of suspense and compelling entertainment.

This was made as a riposte to High Noon which Howard Hawks and John Wayne felt was anti-American, and they mocked the film for the notion that a sheriff would expect the support of his community; he should go out and shoot the bad guys alone. Though, in Rio Bravo, when the outlaws hit town, Duke has enough deputies and allies to fill a minibus.

It imitates the odd couple bromance of Gunfight at the OK Corral. Wayne is the steadfast, sharpshooting Sheriff. Dean Martin is the charismatic, drunken deputy. The films share many similar details, but Rio Bravo is more comic and cartoonish. Minor characters have names like Stumpy and Dude. Angie Dickinson wears feathers and so is called Feathers.

And by the finale, Walter Brennan is throwing sticks of dynamite around like it's Looney Tunes. After Hawks made The Big Sleep he decided that audiences don't care about  thestory, just the comedy and characters. Leigh Brackett wrote both films, and Rio Bravo is a series of archetypal western situations set into a loose narrative. The plot barely matters.

It's a long, episodic film and by the time Dino and Ricky Nelson present a couple of Mariachi ballads, it begins to feel more like a revue. We get a pair of comedy Mexicans and Dickinson reprises the Lauren Bacall persona of earlier Hawks films. But, the director and his star made this to support the human rights abuses of the McCarthy witch hunts. And that really sours the experience.

Crowd-pleasing, sentimental western which draws on the range wars between settlers and cowboys in 1890s Wyoming. This one takes the side of the farmers who are stampeded and burned out of their homes by the cattle barons whose demand that the plains remain open is backed up by intimidation, guns and a lot of muscle.

Van Heflin plays the most resolute of the farmers, a family man who can't operate a firearm but won't back down. He is supported by Shane (Alan Ladd), a mysterious, impassive drifter who might be a gunman seeking to bury his bloody past. When the cattle boss drafts in a cold eyed assassin- Jack Palance as a kind of proto-Terminator- maybe Shane will strap on his pistols one last time...

The main weakness is an astonishingly irritating performance by Brandon De Wilde as Heflin's impressionable 12 year old who hero-worships Shane. But, without him, this would be just another range war western. It's the way the stranger ingratiates his way into the the family, including the wife (a rather elderly Jean Arthur) that sets the film apart.

Maybe Ladd lacks stature, but his role remains one of the most potent in fifties cinema. It's Heflin who physically dominates the frame. But Shane is the quintessence of the western's most enduring archetype; the wandering gunfighter who can never escape his past, so must go on searching the valleys of the old west for an elusive peace. 

Intelligent western which relocates Joe Mankiewicz's 1949 noir House of Strangers to the old west, and improves it. Spencer Tracy plays an ageing pioneer who built up a cattle empire which will soon pass onto his four sons. The most loyal of these- Robert Wagner- is the child of his marriage to a Native American.

The other three belonged to his first (Irish) wife who died during the settlement. They are led by the more procedural Richard Widmark who wants to sell the land for oil. But they are motivated by prejudice too. The film alludes to the racism of the 'Indian' wars which is hardening into a legal apartheid.

It's a story of the coming of law to the frontier. There's an audacious scene in a courtroom when Tracy goes on trial for dispensing instant justice. A grandstanding east coast lawyer puts on the squeeze, not so much for pulling down the copper mine which is poisoning his rivers, but for all the improvised law of the old, wild west.

This is one of the great westerns, a fascinating film with a brilliant script which presents realistic characters and complex ideas. Spencer Tracy is absolutely credible as the bullheaded, imperious patriarch who is an anachronism in his own lifetime. It's been called King Lear reimagined as a western! Which is tenuous, but gives an impression of its ambition.