Film Reviews by Steve

Faithful adaptation of Oscar Wilde's famous novel with major studio production values. Hurd Hatfield- in the title role- is gifted his most solemn desire, that he may stay young and beautiful while he enjoys a hedonistic lifestyle, and the inevitable signs of debauchery are displayed on the enchanted painting hidden in his attic.  

Hatfield is impassive- little more than mask- which is appropriate for a story about appearances. The epigrams are delivered by George Sanders who does pretty well with dialogue that is easier to read than speak. Angela Lansbury as a Cockney music hall entertainer, and Donna Reed, as an aristocratic beauty, are both archetypes, but ideal for gothic melodrama.  

There is an evocative recreation of Victorian London, particularly the expressionistic dens of vice where Dorian goes slumming. There's a scene in an opium dive/brothel towards the end of the film which is so engorged with louche decadence that it steals the film.

 It is in black and white, but there's a striking use of colour when we first see the portrait and later, when it has absorbed all of Dorian's wickedness. This is the best of Oscar Wilde on screen. While it is heavy with period atmosphere, Albert Lewin doesn't let it slow down his narrative. Despite the typically provocative Wildean irony, it is an enduring and compelling moral tale.

Influential expressionist horror about a serial killer who strangles women with physical infirmities. The murderer ritualistically pulling on his leather gloves before asphyxiating his victims is a  motif often repeated in the Italian giallos of the '70s. And Alfred Hitchcock must have been impressed by the voyeuristic theme suggested by the extreme closeups of the killer's eye observing his victims.

It is set in New England in the 1910s. The story begins in a cinema with a silent melodrama showing a heroine in peril, which anticipates the terror of a mute servant (Dorothy McGuire) in a gothic house of shadows. When she closes the heavy door of the old, dark mansion it is evident that rather than barring the killer's entry, she has locked him inside.

The maniac's obsession is that he must rid the world of people with disabilities. There is a brilliant point of view shot through his eyes of his potential victim without a mouth which exposes his insanity in an instant. Surely the intension was to critique the cult of eugenics, fashionable in the Edwardian era, which nourished Nazi ideology.

This is horror noir, rich in gothic atmosphere and suspense climaxing in a showstopping electrical storm! McGuire is the opposite of the old horror scream-queen. She tries to shout for help, but... isn't heard. It's easy to guess the murderer, and Ethel Barrymore is annoying as the irascible matriarch, but Elsa Lanchester provides comic relief as reliably as ever. And McGuire suffers in silence magnificently.

Val Lewton's final production for RKO's B horror unit is a historical film about the mentally sick inhabitants of an asylum in 18th century London. Boris Karloff is marvellous as the corrupt, devious head of the institution, who shows his charges to the public for tuppence, and is amenable to allowing the enemies of his rich friends to disappear into its dark corridors, for a consideration.

This is an extremely impressive historical drama which isn't scared to show its learning. William Hogarth is given a writing credit and the film recreates frames from A Rakes Progress! The script is witty, intelligent and rich in fascinating historical detail which never even remotely slows down the story. It's not easy to think of an A film that recreates the age nearly as interestingly.

This is a horror film because of the revulsion generated by the enemies of the enlightenment as they not only obstruct change, but imprison reformers within the walls of the living hell. There are brilliant stylistic flourishes: the bare arms snaking out of the bars of the cells in the moonlight; or the flicker of Karloff's eyes as the inmates place the last brick in his tomb.

This is a world of menace and cruelty where evil can be hidden inside a witticism. Where the decadence of the rich is not only accepted, but presumed to be fair. Where the poor suffer unbearably and the pretence of taking care of the sick is a racket. This lost money and Lewton's team was broken up. But his legacy is the best anthology of genre films in cinema.

When the RKO bosses informed Val Lewton he would make his next few films with Boris Karloff, he feared he would have to produce Universal style monster movies. But Karloff didn't change Lewton. The producer wove the lisping Englishman seamlessly into the Lewton style. In return a grateful Karloff gave the best performances of his career.  

This isn't exactly Lewton's usual psychological horror. It is as pessimistic as the earlier films but more conventional. Greece is weary with war. Some travellers are quarantined on a tiny island where plague is killing local residents. The visitors, led by a general (Karloff) are trapped there until the wind changes and the hot Sirocco comes to burn away the disease...

Like all Lewton horrors to this point, this is about rationality against the occult. The officer is a scientist. But as the people die, he puts his faith in the ancient customs of his childhood, and the old remedies. He believes in the Vorvoloka, a malevolent spirit that inhabits and controls the body while it sleeps. Maybe this is causing the deaths, not the plague.

The story lacks originality; the horror set piece is the live burial of a catatonic, which is as old as Poe. With WWII at an end, audiences stayed away from its exhausted fatalism. But it is a haunting experience that leaves behind an uneasy impression of the uncanny, and the appeal of superstition to explain what we cannot understand.

The final two productions from Val Lewton's B horror unit at RKO -with Bedlam in 1946- are not the psychological horrors of the earlier films which are usually located in contemporary America. They are historical dramas set in Britain. They are only in the horror genre at all because of the grotesque themes. Though this may not be quintessential Lewton it is still a magnificent and exciting film.

It is loosely based on a Robert Louis Stevenson story about a grave robber in Edinburgh after Burke and Hare. Boris Karloff plays a cab driver who supplies bodies to a teaching hospital. When supply doesn't meet demand he isn't above creating a few corpses of his own. The hubristic head of the medical school (Henry Daniell), is in too deep with the sinister murderer. 

There are interesting and profound themes not normally found in horror. The script is superb, full of colourful, archaic language, rich period detail, and it looks amazing, borrowing the set of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The noirish pools of darkness are gorgeously sad.

The chilling, supernatural climax is a heart-stopper. The nucleus of the film is the deeply pleasurable head to head between Karloff and Daniell. This is the performance of Karloff's life, as the insidious, leering, morally forsaken killer. And there's a legendary moment for horror fans when Karloff 'burkes' Bela Lugosi in their last appearance together.

This is a remake of a silent film about men who returned from the great war with horrific injuries. RKO updated it to WWII, just as that conflict was ending. Robert Young plays a flyer who suffers facial scarring and paralysis. He finds companionship with the shy, unattractive spinster (Dorothy McGuire) who cares for him as he comes to terms with his injuries.

And they fall in love under the influence of the enchanted cottage, which makes them perceive each other as attractive. He glimpses her inner beauty and she sees the man she distantly loved before the war. Others don't share their illusion, but the lovers are protected by the cottage's mystical, lonely housekeeper (Mildred Natwick) and a blind neighbour (Herbert Marshall).

Clearly, the studio pulled a lot of punches on the couple's appearance. She is so unattractive, soldiers at a wartime dance draw back in horror. But she's just Dorothy McGuire without makeup. He has a scar, but the twisted lip comes and goes. This isn't horror. It's a lush wartime romance which offers comfort to the home-front waiting for its heroes to return. Who may have changed.

It is a lush Hollywood fantasy, conventionally scored by Roy Webb's nostalgic, wistful orchestration, with tasteful photography and visual effects. It's the most sentimental film imaginable, but it conveys a strange ethereal magic, and has developed a small but devoted cult.

This is the last of Jacques Tourneur's trilogy of B horrors made with Val Lewton at RKO. A travelling showgirl (Jean Brooks) in New Mexico uses a leopard in her act on the insistence of her publicity manager (Dennis O'Keefe). When it goes missing, the small community fears that the cat is responsible for a series of grisly deaths. O'Keefe has other suspicions.

There are so many memorable scenes. When a girl goes to shop on the other side of town, she is swallowed up in the darkness of the underpass, which feels like the locus of her emerging adolescent fears. When she returns to her mother's locked house she is savaged by, something... As the parent frantically unbolts the door to her child, blood copiously tracks along the cracks in the floor.

A Mexican dancer Clo-Clo (played by 'Margo') seems to be cursed. As she walks through the town, the people she interacts with will perish; seemingly killed the escaped cat. The construction of the film is unusual; the narrative continually diverts to whoever intersects with Clo-Clo, which will end in death. There is a powerful impression of an inexorable, malign fate.

When the real serial killer is revealed, that illusion of destiny disappears. The deaths have no motive. And we have little knowledge of the mysterious forces that control our lives. This is a pessimistic, shadow world where people enter into the darkness from which they may be released. Or may not. 

There had been Hollywood films about satanism going back to the silents, but this was new in depicting a devil cult in contemporary New York among ordinary people doing unremarkable jobs. Cuts imposed by RKO left problems with plot continuity, but it hardly matters. This is mainly a work of atmosphere and psychological anxiety.

It shows the apprehensive journey of a young woman (Kim Hunter) into sexual maturity. The film subtly suggests that what lies in the darkness and behind doors is her unease over her erotic awakening. Her quest is to find her sister (Jean Brooks) who joined the satanists, but broke their code of silence. And so must die, like six others before.

 There are some brilliantly innovative moments of suspense, most potently a scene on the subway where the girl witnesses a man she has just seen murdered held up between two heavies, as if they were all drunk. There is also a very interesting shower scene which may have influenced Psycho.

This is a film of dense emotional dread, of despair. The lost sister is portrayed as a figure of extreme moral emptiness, without will. Her last scene with a dying neighbour (Elizabeth Russell) is astonishing. It is an intensely pessimistic film which offers little hope. It is unique in '40s Hollywood, and an intelligent, audacious horror landmark.

When RKO asked Val Lewton to take charge of their new B horror unit, they expected monster movies similar to those made at Universal but on a lower budget. Instead, they got a new genre- psychological horror- set in realistic, modern city locations. Its fears were drawn from the darkness and superstition and the unknown. Secret personal anxieties.

The studio just gave Lewton the title. Simone Simon plays a commercial artist in Manhattan, who believes she has inherited a curse. If she is sexually aroused she will turn into a predator. Desire will make her bestial. Her rejected husband (Kent Smith), encourages her to try psychoanalysis, but rationality proves to be inadequate.

This is horror noir. It was shot and lit by RKO's great noir photographer Nicholas Musuraca. There's an extremely imaginative script which invents a rich folklore for the woman's psycho-sexual anxiety to inhabit. Simon is poignant as this outsider, tortured by her need for love but fearful of its consequences

This is one of the best and most influential horror films ever made. It was a revolution, a Freudian allegory heavy with shadows and symbolism. It is one of Jacques Tourneur's greatest noirs. It was a huge hit and allowed Val Lewton to make another eight high quality B horrors for RKO. 

During the opening scenes it feels like this may be a gritty exposé of the incapacity of US healthcare; a sort of Hollywood neorealism. But then it wanders off into melodrama, and its portrayal of a psychiatric hospital failing due to lack of funds and facilities becomes secondary to the lead character's psychosis.

Still, as melodrama, it is very effective. Olivia de Havilland is a married, middle class schizophrenic who gets snagged in the net of American public health, which is portrayed as extraordinarily incompetent. Her only hope of getting better rests with a handsome pipe smoking psychiatrist, played by Leo Genn.

Early on, there is plenty of soap box editorialising, but the story eventually becomes so conventional that by the end, all the residents are singing Goin' Home together led by a Broadway standard vocal from one of the patients. Olivia is deglamourised,  but it is still quite a photogenic breakdown.  

It's a sensitive and well-meaning film, which uses expressionism to suggest the woman's hallucinatory state. De Havilland gives one of her great performances of the postwar era when she was among the best dramatic actors in Hollywood. There is an attempt to be naturalistic and unromantic but this was made in the studio system and it proved impossible at this time. 

This broke new ground for big screen science fiction. It was the first major studio production to take humans into space and land them on another planet. It's a re-telling of Shakespeare's The Tempest, with Walter Pidgeon as its Prospero and Anne Francis as its Miranda. A super-intelligent robot- Robbie- stands in for Ariel and the awesome id-monster for Caliban. The brave new world is space travel.

The studio set planet looks artificial but is 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 which contrasts the innocence of 'Miranda' with the red blooded astronauts confined to the C-57D. There is a flirtation between the skipper of the spaceship (a deadpan Leslie Nielsen) and the exaggeratedly naive girl. This might look a bit creepy from a modern perspective, but in 1956 it was just space-screwball.

Much later this was turned into a stage musical which was campy rock and roll nostalgia for the '50s. 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 sci-fi releases of the decade. This is clever and imaginative and stows some pretty dark themes within its state of the art visuals.

Behind the schlocky fifties exploitation title, this is an intelligent science fiction action film. Grant Williams plays a middle class everyman who is accidentally exposed to radiation and begins to lose size. As he does, his relationship to his comfortable, materialistic lifestyle begins to shift.

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

He finds meaning within confines of his new universe which he had lost as diminished man in the normal sized world. Eventually he loses 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 actually wanted him to be cured and to return to normality! Which would have been absurd.

This is easily the best film by sci-fi/horror expert Jack Arnold. It was Twilight Zone regular Richard Matheson's debut screenplay, adapted from his novel. The visual effects of the shrinking man's changing relationship with his environment are impressive, but it is his interior, philosophical world that leaves the deeper impression.

There is a preface by journalist Alistair Cooke which informs us that what we are about to see is all true! It is adapted from a case study by psychiatrists of a woman with multiple personality disorder. This documentary style approach helps prevent the film from occasionally falling into unintentional comedy.

The real patient actually claimed over twenty personalities. The film gives her three. She challenged this version of events. Of course, this is just screen melodrama. The psychiatrist (Lee J. Cobb) ultimately cures Eve (Joanne Woodward) through some extremely unconvincing Hollywood Freud. But it is fascinating and fabulously entertaining.

The film leans heavily on Woodward's performance. She deservedly won an Oscar. Without her credibility 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 each.  

It's not a visually impressive film. The director- Nunnally Johnson- was usually a screenwriter, and he tells the story well. There's some comedy when Eve's husband explores the possibilities of being married to three contrasting wives! But any frivolity is balanced by the impassive narration. It does touch on the consequences of mental disability, but this is chiefly offbeat escapism.

This was made for a family audience, or children, and while it's unlikely any kids now will sit still for this typically paranoiac '50s science fiction 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 William Cameron Menzies was best known for art direction. And this is the main attraction. It's a low budget production but the expressionist set design makes it feel surreal and illusory. And it looks great.

This story is a child's dream. A science and sci-fi fanatic (Jimmy Hunt) is up all hours watching the stars. Late one night he sees a flying saucer land at the back of his house, near the rocket research facility... When martians take over the bodies of his parents and his community, the boy has to find support among the unpossessed to rally opposition until the army arrives.

It is an eerie film, and while the monsters look crude, their leader, a head suspended in a glass dome, has an unsettling, freakish 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 nightmare.

George Pal's legendary production steered clear of the philosophical themes of HG Wells' classic novel and offered pure, magnificent spectacle. This was a leap forward for the visual reach of '50s science fiction, just as King Kong was for horror in the '30s. The sets, sound effects, models and costumes are phenomenal.

Wells' dystopia of social breakdown proved influential in the sci-fi of the nuclear age. The citizens behave uselessly, resorting to panic and prayer. The mob actually smashes the instruments that might be used by scientists to combat the invasion. The blitzkrieg of the militarily superior invaders is brief and brutal. Cities are abandoned and the left behind are vaporised. 

Wells' estate was so impressed 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, pumped by Leith Stevens hyper-dramatic score. It invented many of the future rules of sci-fi cinema 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 again pertinent in the new age of pandemic.