Film Reviews by Steve

This is the role  Bette Davis went to war with Warner Brothers to get, and which made her a star. She is a Cockney waitress who cruelly breaks the inoffensive student (Leslie Howard) who is in love with her. She doesn't care, but humiliates him because she has the power and it is in her nature

And he would rather have her spite than nothing. It's a psychosexual power game. The adaptation was compromised by censorship. So, Mildred dies of poverty and TB- in the book she is a sex worker who contracts syphilis. The difficulty of condensing an epic meditative novel into an 82m melodrama would have meant trade-offs anyway. It's still transgressive.

Howard is studying anatomy. His own physical injury (he has a deformed foot) has marked him as a victim and is a symbol of his emotional inferiority. She is inarticulate and ordinary but has a sexual charisma that prevails. There is nothing else quite as extreme as this in thirties Hollywood, even precode. Her death scene is phenomenal.

Davis is astonishing. Her accent is a disaster. She is raw and wild, but this is one of her stand out performances. Howard is fine, though too old. But Bette is dominant, as she should be. It's like watching a sadistic, predatory creature torment its victim. It's not a realistic portrayal, it's far more than that: it's horrifying and among the greatest performances of the decade.

Sentimental tearjerker set in Philadelphia during the Civil War. Bette Davis has a brief affair with a Union soldier (George Brent) who is killed in action. Their illegitimate daughter is raised as part of the family of a manipulative cousin (Miriam Hopkins). And Bette becomes the austere aunt of the girl who loves instead her assumed mother.

Bette grows old and shrewish, almost a monster. Davis was always better matched by another female star. No one cast Brent opposite her for sexual chemistry. Hopkins is a fine adversary, as she pecks away at her poor cousin's soul. This is something of a horror film, where the terror is for a woman is to grow old without a child or a husband.

And that brings a lot of suspense. Of course the main attraction is Bette's extraordinary star performance as she (tastefully) ages from a girl with dreams into an elderly woman driven by bitterness. She has a powerful, intimidating presence. There's a touch of the gothic in her, many years before Baby Jane.

It's a Civil War film about the home front made right at the start of WWII. So there's a premonition of new sacrifices to come.  Bette's usual costumer Orry-Kelly creates a riot of crinoline and lace. Corsets are tight and Max Steiner contributes a tender score. It's a handsome Warner Brother's production which is utterly conventional, but still a heartbreaker.

Quintessential Warner Brothers soap which is a vehicle for Bette Davis' star performance. She is one of the Trehernes of Rhode Island, a woman of inherited wealth and no responsibilities beyond a whirl of social events and the pursuit of pleasure. Only those headaches, and that blurred vision, are the early symptoms of an inoperable brain cancer.

Bette gets to explore the many sides of her star persona: a socialite who believes in the superiority of her breeding; the chastened bride-to-be who faces life saving surgery; a reckless thrill seeker intent on blocking out the reality of her relapse; finally, the selfless wife in snowy Vermont who accepts her death, compensated by a brief experience of love.

To allow Bette to shine more brightly, she was paired with her frequent leading man, George Brent as the brilliant brain surgeon who can't save her, but does at least marry her. The film is a tribute to the medical profession, but this is Hollywood pathology. Davis' symptoms are crafted to fit the requirements of the plot.

It's pure escapism. We get a tour of the privileges of the upper class. There are oddities. Humphrey Bogart plays an Irish stablehand and Ronald Reagan a drunken playboy, which suggests it was someone's first day in casting. But Max Steiner's score is typically superb. The choral swell when Bette bids farewell to her dogs is a sentimental heartbreaker. As is the film.

This confirmed Fred and Ginger as a starring double act. It was the first musical created for them, rather than being cast into an existing project. It is a continental farce set in London and an extremely artificial art deco Venice with the classic device of mistaken identity keeping the sparring Americans abroad apart until the final reel.

 Fred handles the screwball dialogue pretty well, though Ginger is given little to do outside the dance spectaculars. The support cast is very much at home among the frou-frou of the plot, particularly Eric Blore as the unctuous valet of a bemused toff  (Edward Everett Horton). They seem far more married than Horton does to his wisecracking wife (Helen Broderick) .

Of course, when the stars are dancing, particularly together, the film is a beautiful dream and they have some wonderful Irving Berlin songs to perform. There's the chic swing of Top Hat, White Tie and Tails with Fred backed by a male chorus line. The star dancing in his tails with a cane implies a sublime world of sophisticated style.

The routine for Cheek to Cheek, with Ginger in that fluffy feather dress, is legendary. They present pure elegant romance and insinuate an unmissable sexual rapport. Astaire and Rogers together are among the most enduring images of Hollywood in the 1930s. They are the eternal essence of golden age Hollywood glamour.

In American films of the '30s, comedy is a courtship that ends at the altar. For Berlin émigré Ernst Lubitsch, that's when the fun starts! Romance is a masque of deception, intrigue and impulse. His musicals in this period were set in a sort of Paris of the mind. In the context of early sound Hollywood films they were alien, exotic and a revolution...

...Until 1934 when censorship closed them down... Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald are happily married. So happy that they talk in rhyming couplets and break into song. Their relationship is so fertile with innuendo that it's their matrimony that seems salacious, and the affairs of their friends which appear the dull convention.

In the face of such conjugal joy, what can Genevieve Tobin and Roland Young do but try to break them up? Her, by seducing Maurice, Roland by exploiting this dalliance to divorce his unfaithful wife.  The suggestiveness of this film is astonishing, and hilarious.

Chevalier has a unique charisma, addressing the camera directly and audaciously, singing in his boulevardier style songs of sex and infidelity. Like Oh That Mitzi! and What Would You Do? Lubitsch's films are groundbreaking, gravity free celebrations of the great game of love.

This Buster Keaton classic  is strikingly similar to Harold Lloyd's earlier The Kid Brother, but on a different scale. Keaton's location shoot is more striking and his sets and stunts more ambitious. I think Lloyd's film is funnier. Both play ingenues, though in their mid thirties. Harold makes a romcom. This is more of an action comedy.  

Buster is a bookish milksop brought up by his mother on the east coast. He leaves to work on his dad's ramshackle river boat, and falls in love with the daughter of the owner of a fleet of state of the art steamships. A situation desired by neither father. Love conquers all, but not until Buster has proven himself by saving everyone from drowning in a cyclone.  

The film is best known for its astonishing final 25 minutes when the town is ripped apart by the high wind and washed away in a great tide. Including the famous gag of the front panel of a frame house collapsing over a hapless Buster, saved by an open upstairs window. It was a stunt he had used before, but not as impressively.   

Credit to the scenery and props department, their work on the storm scene is phenomenal, and complements Keaton's extraordinary performance as the man fighting nature. It is a tour de force and one of the great passages in cinema. Just watching him walking into the wind is worth your ticket. And no one falls as well as Buster.

This is a sweet boy-meets-girl romcom, until the amazing last twenty minutes of action when Harold Lloyd rousts a huge redneck who has stolen public money from his dad. Harold plays the weakling youngest son of a family of tough rustic musclemen led by his father, the sheriff. The boy admires them devotedly, and dreams of being just like them.

The virtuous Jobyna Ralston comes into town with a crooked medicine show, and her associates steal the town's savings.  So Harold goes to get the money back, employing the inventive intellect that no one else in the family or community has any interest in; they being thick in the arm, and in the head.

Lloyd plays his usual archetype, a skinny, optimistic do-gooder we can root for. The film is dense with charming, clever gags and the set-piece climax on a wrecked ship gives the hero plenty of opportunity to display his wholesome determination as well as the star's genius for physical comedy.

 Lloyd made more at the box-office in the 1920s than any of his great contemporaries. But it's 1927 and the talkies will change everything.  Lloyd did better than some, though his clean-cut hero went out of fashion in the screwball era. But, for me he is the funniest of the silent comedians.

This kicks off like a typical late fifties noir as Elmer Bernstein's big band scores a familiar montage of the neon lit streets of Manhattan. Then James Wong Howe picks up his camera and, wanders through the avenues and backstreets, clubs and theatres of Broadway. This location tracking was completely new for film noir and it  still looks fabulous.

Despite the human corruption and the noir aesthetic, there is no actual legal crime.  JJ Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) controls Broadway through his popular newspaper column and the secrets he holds over its players. He owns press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) because Falco needs the column. In turn the agents court Falco for his access to Hunsecker.

The screenplay was written by Clifford Odets, the liberal who named names to HUAC. The cynical showbiz food chain of Broadway represents the iniquities of capital and politics. The big cat feeds on the vulnerable minions of the neon jungle. Hunsecker has an unspoken incestuous obsession with his sister and leans Falco to break her engagement to a jazz guitarist

Manhattan is controlled by the syndicate which means Hunsecker, a populist with a god-complex who brazenly drums out his phoney patriotics and dares anyone to demur. He has a logo which gives him the eyes of Big Brother. There are no good guys and no sweeteners at the fade out. It is an intelligent, artistic work of overwhelming pessimism.

Buster Keaton perfected his Great Stoneface persona over years in vaudeville and dozens of shorts dating back to 1917. By Sherlock Jr. he was at his peak. He plays a projectionist who aspires to be a detective. Unfortunately he is fitted up by his unscrupulous rival for a girl to appear the thief of her father's pocket watch.

Then Buster falls asleep while showing a film about a jewel thief, and dreams that he enters the screen and solves the crime. As it is a dream, the events become increasingly surreal. Other silent comics used incongruous back projection, but here Buster interacts with his fantasy, distorting the events.

It's a brilliant set up. Keaton was also an extraordinary physical comedian, and the action is full of amazing acrobatics. Like when he stands on a huge water-pipe as it swings across the road and deposits him in the passenger seat of a getaway car. Which actually broke his neck...

 The contrast between Keaton's deadpan exterior and his outrageous escapades is the key to his comedy. It is hard to watch Keaton's extravagant, show-stopping stunts and not be overwhelmed by his ambition and craft. He is the most enterprising and gifted of all the '20s comedians. Sherlock Jr. is his masterpiece.

Though made in the 50's, this is typical of the film noirs of a decade earlier. There is a femme fatale, portrayed by the incomparable Gloria Grahame. Glenn Ford is the ill-fated male dupe back from the war. Only now it's Korea rather than WWII. He returns to resume his job on the railways.

Gloria plays a traditional enough archetype, a sexually distorted looker motivated by greed. She seduces the engine driver to persuade him to murder her violent, abusive husband (Broderick Crawford). For most of the film she seems a victim who is physically and mentally tormented by this jealous brute. And she was sexually assaulted at sixteen by her guardian.  

Eventually we learn that much of the web the wife spins to entrap the fall guy is lies. She is damaged by exploitative men, but our sympathy finally snaps when we see the moral vacuum she has learned to conceal. She's quite a horrifying figure. Though ultimately unredeemable, we see that as a woman in that period, her options are limited.    

No one played hot sleazy trouble like Gloria. The noir plot is interesting, and Fritz Lang exploits the railway setting for suspense and shadows and symbolism. GG and Ford are incandescent together- as they were a year earlier in another Lang noir. It's not quite as great as The Big Heat, but still a genre classic.

 This is the best of half a dozen excellent, independently produced dramas directed by London born Ida Lupino in the 1950s before she moved onto a career in television. She also co-wrote the tense, laconic original screenplay based on recent real life events.

Two old army buddies on a fishing trip pick up a hitcher who turns out to be the serial killer murdering drivers all along a rural highway in Southern California. He forces the friends to drive 500 miles to a small harbour town where he plans to escape to Mexico.

He will kill them on arrival, but sooner if they don't play ball. It's a race against time while the cops close in as the men drive south through the desert. It's mostly a three hander.  Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy are perennial support actors who seize a rare chance to lead. William Talman is sensational as the manipulative psychopath.

This is an incredibly suspenseful film which makes a virtue of desolate desert locations as  it plots the shifting balance of power. Every stranger triggers a crisis. The pals are tough and resourceful, but it is Talman as the menacing killer with a fascistic worldview who stays in the memory.

Humphrey Bogart visits the family of the dead soldier he fought beside in Italy: his father (Lionel Barrymore) and widow (Lauren Bacall). Bad timing. The hotel they run on the Florida Keys is taken over by gangsters led by Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) while the building is battered by a mighty hurricane. Escape is impossible.  

It's the same set up as The Petrified Forest (1936) in which Bogart played the outlaw Duke Mantee as the last gasp of the wild west, an individualist. But Rocco is far more insidious. He buys the political process and operates in plain sight, subverting justice, raking profit out of the system.

This time Bogart is on the right side of the law.  He plays his signature role, the loner who won't stick out his neck for anyone (but then does). But his status as an outsider is no longer a symbol of American isolationism in early WWII, as it was in Casablanca. It is because having survived  the war, he is disillusioned by the hold men like Rocco have on America.

Crime is now organised and corrupts legitimate business. This would become a key theme of fifties mob films. The politician on the make and gangster bosses protected by the cops and City Hall would become familiar film noir personnel. Bogart and Bacall's last film together is a classic. Kudos too for Claire Trevor's well deserved Oscar as Rocco's boozy moll.

Poverty row cult film based on the Bonnie and Clyde legend directed by Joseph H. Lewis who shot many classy low budget noirs. John Dall and Peggy Cummins are dynamite together as two outlaws compelled in different ways by their fatal obsession with guns.

She is a poor, sexy circus shooter who acts by reflex, triggered either by violent crime or lust. He is a working class kid who finds status through his talent with a gun. Driven by his desire for her, he is drawn into crime, holding up stores, and then banks, leading to murder.  

Dall and Cummins are sensational. They are made for each other, except, he can't kill, and she has to kill! Cummins is a revelation. She is hot trash, so happy when she is stealing, so fulfilled when she is killing. It's a miracle that she got this part. It's unlike anything else she did.

There's a sassy script from the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo and the direction is ostentatiously stylish. It is set in a timeless rural west it has the feel of a depression era gangster film, all getaway cars and shoot outs. The wild, desolate locations in poor rural towns conveys a powerful ambience of encroaching despair.

It's is a face off between a detective (Cornel Wilde) and sociopathic mob boss (Richard Conte).  The gangster defines high achievers as those most able to hate, as they will destroy others to reach their goals.  But that also applies to the cop, who will take his adversary down by any means .  

He will even sacrifice Conte's traumatised moll (Jean Wallace) who Wilde has fallen in love with. She is a cultivated, educated woman in an environment where those accomplishments have no value. The detective exploits his murdered, stripper girlfriend too: 'I treated her like a pair of gloves. If I was cold, I called her up'.

The gangster's deputy (Brian Donlevy) is a traumatised punch bag who can't take it anymore. Or dish it out. Empathy is his tragic flaw. His demise, shot in silence when Conte removes Donlevy's hearing aid is classic noir: 'I'm gonna give you a break. I'm gonna fix it, so you don't hear the bullets'.  

This is expressionist art, photographed by noir legend John Alton. There is a tough, ominous screenplay from Philip Yordan which is sometimes tender but usually brutal. By '55, censorship was being eased. The murders are violent and onscreen, and there's a pair of obviously gay hitmen. It's one of the best B films ever made.

This violent true story may be the nearest Hollywood got to the style and daring of Italian neorealism. It was shot with a documentary crew while the real world events were still taking place. There is no incidental music, just ambient sound. It was filmed on location at the actual places where the events happened.  

The film begins with interviews with local people who attest to the authenticity of the film. Director Phil Karlson even got actors to wear the clothes of the people they portrayed! The cast was resolutely unstarry. Kathryn Grant would become well known but this was her debut.

The incidents in the film are hard to believe. A city in Alabama was controlled by a criminal gang who used violence and murder during elections to control the public, and ran the police to ignore vice and to suppress reform. There was no law and order. The film was made while the court case trying the killers was still in progress.  

This is an inspiring story of bravery and determination.  It's a rare example of a film about organised crime being defeated through democratic processes, rather than a single heroic vigilante. It is a classic work of cinema vérité made at almost no cost.