Film Reviews by Steve

Roger Corman's series of historical horror releases from 1960-65 is clearly influenced by the early Hammer horrors and copies their successful formula: colour, castles, cleavage and classic text. The claim these are based Edgar Allan Poe doesn't always stand up to scrutiny. This takes its title from a verse by Poe but 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.

 Price plays a necromancer in 17th 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, his heir- still played by Price- arrives to take up his inheritance. He is possessed by his ancestor and the whole process begins again... until finally Paget is being terrified by the grotesque demon her husband employs in his genetic investigations.  Warning! This a film of potent, transgressive horror.

Passionate and philosophical adaptation of Tennessee WIlliams' last great play. It is set on the photogenic coast of the remote Mexican rain forest where wandering strays assemble by chance. It's a location where cinema rarely goes; not just on a map, but in the human heart.

Richard Burton plays a disgraced priest. And he is the image in the title, tied up and hysterical and essentially saved by a nomadic artist (Deborah Kerr). This is like alcoholics anonymous, but for people who can't outrun their demons. She has been there herself and knows what it takes to survive, to endure.

The reverend has been locked out of his church in America. Working 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 secrets of Mexico. He is tempted by a sexually precocious young woman (Sue Lyon) which is what got him into trouble in the first place.

There is an amazing cast: Burton, Kerr and Ava Gardner are all believable despite all the poetic mysticism. It's funny in the early scenes with Burton particularly good, driven loco by his frailty until he discovers that in the absence of god, we can only be saved by the kindness of strangers.

Intense drama about the suppressed memories of a holocaust survivor (Rod Steiger) living among the violence and squalor of Harlem, NY. This was groundbreaking in its presentation of the Jewish survivors of the concentration camps in contemporary America.  

Steiger's performance feels authentic as the pawnbroker haunted by terrifying subliminal flashbacks. We also glimpse in these suppressed images, his present day traumas. The brutality of the streets. But his shop is a hub for laundering crooked money. In seeking to be passive, and desensitised to cruelty, he helps to sustain it.

He has become detached from society. A simple remark about his religion can only be answered in terms of 7000 years of struggle. But he is unable to relate to the historic suffering of black Americans. He is so numb he can no longer see the humanity in himself, or others.

Most of the film is shot in the pawnshop, with Steiger captive in the wire security cages. So it's a classic Sidney Lumet format set in a limited interior space. It is a powerful, very depressing film which gives an identity to a hidden, voiceless demographic through Steiger's potent, unreachable anguish.

Faithful adaptation of Edward Albee's waspish Broadway sensation. It's hardly opened up from the stage and mostly set in George and Martha's rather scruffy campus residence as they take us on a tour of their esoteric fantasy life while they initiate a couple of new arrivals.

George (Richard Burton) is in history and married to Martha (ElizabethTaylor) the daughter of the university chancellor.  They entertain an assertive biology teacher (George Segal), burdened by his frail, irksome, alcoholic wife (Sandy Dennis). The games the foursome play through the long, boozy night are irresistible.

 And Albee's dialogue is intelligent and very funny. Burton and Taylor ruined the play for any other actors. This is her best performance, as the aggressive, insolent, yet hugely vulnerable woman stuck in middle age with an unambitious husband. He is particularly adept at the coruscating verbal sparring.

It's so much fun just watching the Burtons warming up in the opening scenes. What unfolds is astonishing. They are like two warring civilisations. Segal and Dennis are actually very good but they get blown away in the storm. This is a dazzling intellectual experience made definitive by its brilliant stars.

From the period when Paul Newman emerged from the shadow of Marlon Brando and the myth cast by James Dean's death.  Melvyn Douglas plays a patriarch, an old school cattleman who lives by a rigid moral code which conflicts with his unprincipled son-Newman as Hud- who is worshipped by Douglas' naive, orphaned grandchild (Brandon de Wilde).. 

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

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

Hud 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. This 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 their institutions and conventions were challenged.

This political allegory from Sam Fuller is characteristically original and incisive and dynamic. A hot shot journalist (Peter Breck) goes in pursuit of the Pulitzer Prize by faking insanity, which allows him access to a mental hospital and potentially discover who committed the murder of one of its patients.  

Only once admitted, the writer's real mental frailties start to unravel. The film adopts the notion that insanity is a reasonable response to an abnormal circumstance. This is what caused the mental illness of the three witnesses. And the news man soon conforms to the delirium of his environment.

Fuller uses the corridor where the patients congregate as a metaphor for America. He asserts that the country has become unbalanced by ignorance and prejudice and inevitably when people conform to its rules, they become irrational themselves. Which still resonates.

Though sensationalist, this is a clever and convincing film, shot to good effect in a single studio interior. The budget must have been tiny, but Fuller gives it plenty of visual clout; particularly the surreal rainstorms which sweep the corridor and terrorise the journalist in his psychotic state.

This kicks off with a bang and never lets up. A blonde, big city sex worker (Constance Towers) is slapping down her pimp for the £75 dollars he held out on. Her wig falls off revealing the bald scalp he left her with. And as she peels only the 75 off his roll, we know this is an honest woman.

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

There is an amazing scene when the reformed hooker and the kids from orthopaedics 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. 

Every dream has a mirrored heartbreak. Nothing is what it seems. This is Sam Fuller's masterpiece. It is brilliantly written, dense with dark wit and disingenuous hope. Towers is in every scene and her performance of exaggerated sweetness is aptly, unforgettably strange. It's a fascinating, sorrowful experience.

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 actor husband (John Cassavetes) move into an apartment intending to start a family. He falls in with the elderly kooks next door (Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer) just as his career starts to turn around. When Rosemary conceives, she suspects that the neighbours are satanists and her husband has sold them her reproductive capacity.

This was Roman Polanski's American debut. He is faithful to Ira Levin's novel which is a problem as the set up is slow and there is a lot of exposition. But once baby is on board, is suspenseful and psychologically twisted. The coven is a support cast of old Hollywood faces. You know Rosemary is in trouble when even Ralph Bellamy is in league with the devil!

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

The return of Inspector Clouseau from The Pink Panther isn't as much a sequel as a fresh start. And all the changes are improvements. Most obviously, this is now unambiguously a Peter Sellers' film. There is less plot and much more physical comedy from the star. Clouseau's comical French accent is even more exaggerated.

The new characters are also bonuses. Herbert Lom makes a classic partner for Sellers as his traumatised boss, Commissioner Dreyfus. The introduction of Burt Kwouk as Cato is a big plus, but there's something inspired in Graham Stark's strange role as Clouseau's taciturn sidekick. Like he's completely emotionally shut down.

Henry Mancini wrote a lush new score, including a glorious pastiche of the easy listening theme songs of the period. The script is a lot of fun and it's with this that The Pink Panther series begins to be quotable. Including Dreyfus' killer line: 'Give me ten men like Clouseau, and I could destroy the world!'

It's a harsh criticism, but Elke Sommer doesn't make much of the thankless role of the love interest/stooge. Maybe eventually the accident prone Clouseau's pratfalls get predictable. But mostly they are hilarious. This is a film that passes or fails on its laughs, and there are many famous gags to be enjoyed.

Attractive sixties proto-feminist 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 up until WWII.

The focus is 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 women are intellectuals, but this isn't an academic film. It's a melodrama about their social experiences.

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

What seems groundbreaking, is that it was a story about 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 '33 the group left college in search of an opportunity to play a full part in society. By '66, they were still waiting.

Faithful adaptation of Horace McCoy's inconsolable political allegory of American capitalism. It is set at a dance marathon in LA during the long American depression. Destitute couples dance around the clock for weeks to win a large cash prize, without knowing that the last pair will pay for the event out of their winnings.

It is a grotesque depiction of social Darwinism. The strongest survive, but the game is crooked. The poor pay to watch other poor people suffer. Jane Fonda plays a struggling actor who laments, 'maybe it's just the whole damn world is like central casting: they got it all rigged before you ever show up'.  

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 wannabe actor driven to madness.

Sydney Pollack ornaments the Cinemascope with imaginative impressionist touches and haunting close-ups. The period recreation is wonderful and the soundtrack of standards adds atmosphere. It is a tragedy. When Jane can't go on, she asks her partner (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.

This adaptation by William Gibson of his own stage play retains its two wonderful Broadway 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 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 astonishing enterprise is an act of audacious bravery, even though achieved in a domestic context.  

There is an expressionistic look, with noirish lighting and distortion. 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 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. There are long scenes of little or no dialogue or cutting, and without music. It looks artistic, but feels real. Most of all, it's Bancroft and Duke that endure, locked in the confrontation of their anguished, intimate darkness. They both won very well deserved Oscars.

Meticulous and and detailed version of Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize winning classic. The casting is inspired, from Gregory Peck as the wise lawyer Atticus Finch, all the way down 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 is a character study as the children learn about life from their small southern town. The relationship between Atticus, a widower, and his daughter Scout, is sensitively sketched. The latter part relates to the lawyer's defence of a black farm labourer (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 even poorer black people, which they guard ruthlessly. The accused 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 farmers' conviction of primacy.    

The rural south of the '30s is superbly realised. This is a memory film 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 tutor 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. The prosecutor claims that religion is a comfort for communities made wretched by poverty. Even though he is is a politician, he offers no insight into how suffering might be relieved by other means. Besides, 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 observations 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 is the film seeks to find a balance between Christianity and science, which isn't possible. 

There is a caustic, witty conclusion to the long scenes of dialogue, which really sums up its themes in an instant: when the frenzied prosecutor collapses in court,  a voice passionately shouts out "Pray for a miracle and save our holy prophet" while another yells "Get a doctor"!

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

Robert Armstrong plays a megalomaniacal film producer who takes a crew into uncharted waters to research and exploit a legend about a land of giant creatures. He keeps his real mission a secret, especially from the starving ingenue (Fay Wray) 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 effects, but also the sheer amount of death. Its body count is off the chart. And because of the crazily entitled behaviour of the movie mogul who takes Kong back to wreck New York.

The use of sound is a landmark. Fay Wray's screaming is legendary. The cries of the beasts are fearsome. And Max Steiner's thrilling, groundbreaking score is all over the climax. King Kong is a triumph of technical achievement, but it is also a wonderful tale of exotic exploration, anthropological hokum, crazy entrepreneurship, two fisted action and, Fay Wray in her underwear.