Film Reviews by Steve

Hard to imagine that this folksy, corny biopic could work without the everyman qualities of James Stewart. Sam Wood returned to baseball- after Pride of the Yankees- and miraculously manages to excise nearly all the sentimentality from the life of Monty Stratton, a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox in the thirties who recovered from an above knee amputation to play again.

It's the ultimate Hollywood Americana, the story of a country boy from rural Texas who makes good in the major leagues. The rags to riches narrative of the first part of the film draws on the myth of the American dream. And the star gives us a character we can unconditionally root for. It adds up to cheerful optimistic cinema.

Unless the audience can suspend their cynicism, this isn't going to work! But it only once strays into mawkishness: when Monty shoots off his leg and commands his dog go for help... There are familiar archetypes; the unconditional love of his stoical ma, the drunk former star who cleans up to mentor Monty to the big time. This is the first time peppy June Allyson plays James Stewart's romantic interest.

There are cameos from major league baseball stars to convey a little authenticity on the field, though Stewart is clearly no demon pitcher. There's a great script which allows Monty far more wit than the usual Hollywood country boy. It's easy enough to mock its good hearted ideals, but for me it's the best baseball film of the studio era.

This is one where Jane's clothes keep falling off! When not swimming naked, Jane was shot in a two piece. In the later sequels, the censors ensured Maureen O'Sullivan wore a dress, after a fuss created by the Catholic League of Decency... She has a wonderful chemistry with her still-slim Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller) which is ostentatiously physical.  

The attraction today is for its pre-code exotica and the prestigious production values. There are acrobatics, magnificent sets, underwater scenes and a run out for MGMs zoo animals. Tarzan wrestles a mechanical crocodile. Viewed from today, he seems an ecological hero, as he seeks to defy the European ivory trade in his carbon zero, off grid wilderness...

Unfortunately this is no longer the fabulous family entertainment it once seemed: partly because of its antiquity; but mainly because of the racism. Not so much the British hunters treating Africans with such indifference, as that may be realistic. But because the indigenous people are stereotyped so grotesquely, as was usual in 1930s Hollywood.  

It is the best of the Weissmuller Tarzan films, with O'Sullivan a most beautiful Jane. Tarzan was never more monosyllabic, a kind of parody of fantasy machismo, but Johnny has a pleasant comic touch and the stars create plenty of screwball sparkle. But for all its various merits, the racism makes the film now a transgressive experience.

The best of the '30s Hollywood adventures. It's an improbable fantasy but so romantic that this hardly matters. Ronald Colman plays dual roles: the king in-waiting of a small middle European state who is kidnapped on the day of his coronation; and his distant, but identical relative, Major Rudolph Rassendyll, formerly of the British army, who steps into the royal shoes on the big day.

The Major is soon up to his neck in courtly intrigue, and dallying with the king's beautiful betrothed (Madeleine Carroll). The support cast is superb, particularly Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as a sort of wicked mirror image of the Englishman. Alfred Newman's score is alternatively rousing and tender. The solo violin motif that accompanies the love scenes is a wonderful tearjerker.

The film is so irresistible mainly thanks to Ronald Colman. He is phenomenal; so gallant and polished. Naturally... as an English gentleman, he possesses an instinctive regard for virtue, which he defends with an insouciant gift for adventure. Colman tosses off his self deprecating daring with an arch of the brow.  It's an endearing performance of limitless charm.

In the end, everyone left alive does their duty. The elegant princess gives up her love for the imposter. Maybe this was meant to invoke the recent British abdication crisis... Sure, this film is superficial and sentimental, but it is a fantasy of huge appeal, with a definitive action hero performance from its star.

Billy Wilder coldly picks away at the soul of Hollywood in this dark meditation on the film business: half horror, half thriller. It is a typically cynical Wilder vision, famously narrated by a dead man. William Holden is the minor screenwriter floating in the pool of forgotten silent film star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) face down with a bullet in his back.

The mansion Norma shares with her former director/husband, now servant (Erich von Stroheim) is a fascinating location: part morbid dream; part mausoleum. It is a kind of Hollywood purgatory, a development hell. Holden tries to finagle a deal with death, but he is doomed. He is a ghost writer.

There are many gorgeous gothic touches from Wilder and co-author Charles Brackett, like the funeral of Norma's dead chimp, or the wind that blows low eerie echoes through an old cinema organ. The film is full of delicious insights into cinema and its history. And there are fascinating cameos from legends of the silent era.

Holden is fine as the hubristic, cursed intruder, but Gloria is something more; she is truly strange. Norma entraps the writer in his journey through the moral emptiness of his desire to succeed at any cost.  There is the expressionist look of film noir, but it's Wilder's pessimism about human nature that most makes Sunset Boulevard a legend.

MGMs ambitious historical drama is one of the grandest productions of the 1930s. It recreates the brutal conditions on a British merchant ship in 1787, the year of the famous mutiny against William Bligh (Charles Laughton) led by Fletcher Christian (Clark Gable). Laughton overacts to huge effect, making Bligh one of the great screen villains, but also a caricature.

Ships' companies were sometimes press-ganged, or co-opted convicts who had their sentences transmuted. This Bounty is crewed by a gang of expat British character actors who have to combine providing the comic relief, singing nautical ballads and dancing the hornpipe with contributing a growing background noise of justified resentment.

 It's an epic adventure yarn that tells the broad outline of history faithfully. It only really slows during the sojourn to the tropical island of Tahiti, but we do get to see the surprisingly homoerotic cavorting of the bare chested Gable and Franchot Tone. It is the unbuckling of traditional order during this stopover that makes Bligh's resumed malevolence finally unbearable.

The story looks for a balance between its two protagonists. It must ultimately side with Christian but it doesn't overlook the harmful consequences of mutiny. The film tidies up its themes too conveniently to be credible. But as a spectacle, this is magnificent. It puts the historic, seagoing way life on screen with a lively vigour. It's still the best version of this story.

This untypical Frank Capra romance starts in the Chinese Civil War but soon becomes an unrequited love story between an American missionary in Shanghai (Barbara Stanwyck), and a Chinese feudal warlord (Nils Asther). This is an unusually lavish and beautiful production, epic in the early scenes of conflict, and then opulent at the palace.

 The missionary is saved from the chaos of the war by the powerful general. It's a vicarious adventure, as the horrified outsider becomes seduced by the brutal but sensual oriental. As she falls under his influence, she sees him less as an archetype and becomes absorbed by his eroticism.

She fits a common pattern for Americans abroad in cinema: evangelist, naive, hubristic and out of her depth. In trying to save his soul she destroys him utterly even while she falls in love with the man and his aristocratic luxury. He takes poison while she returns home merely chastened by her experience, a more sophisticated woman.  

This is a classic of the pre-code era. After 1934, even implying an affair between people of different races would be forbidden, as would the suicide. It's an imaginative and complex film. There is undeniably plenty of racial stereotyping, but actually by the fade out it is the American's intrusive Christianity which seems the more inexplicable, eccentric philosophy.

Fritz Lang's penultimate Hollywood film is a pulpy satire of American news services. Vincent Price is a media mogul who sets up a contest among his management team to compete for a new role in overall charge of his empire, leaving him free to play carpet golf and spy on his unfaithful, pneumatic wife (a blonde Rhonda Fleming).  

The Lipstick Killer is a psychopath murdering young women living alone in New York. Whoever impresses the boss with the most sensationalist coverage will get the job. They are eclipsed at every turn by Dana Andrews' Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and broadcaster.

 This is a lively, cynical, sexy film noir which is pessimistic about human nature and the media.  Everyone in the film is grifting everyone else. They would sell out anyone for story recognition or a step up. It's about the perennial themes of noir; greed and sex.  

Andrews is a little stiff in the lead. Perhaps appropriately as his character is drunk throughout. Ida Lupino shines as a sexy older woman hired for the 'female angle' but who mostly angles after Dana. It's a suspenseful thriller which climaxes with an exciting chase through the New York subway. Not Lang's best, but still a lot of fun.

This is the best MGM comedy of the thirties. Spencer Tracy is the editor of a tabloid that accuses rich girl Myrna Loy of infidelity. She and her father Walter Connelly are going to sue. Because it's not true. Tracy calls in his libel specialist William Powell to marry Tracy's girlfriend Jean Harlow, and then be gotcha'd with Myrna...  

So it's a farce! And that's a brilliant screwball set up. Naturally there are complications. Harlow falls for Powell and Powell falls for Loy. There's a superb script full of fast talking wisecracks set around the newspaper offices.  It was surely influenced by The Front Page, but I prefer this one...  

That's a hell of a cast, but it's Powell who excels. He shares a chemistry with all the other stars. No surprises that he is so good with Myrna, given they starred in 13 films together. This is a genuinely funny film. The angling scene where he tries to blag trout fishing with her and Connelly is a standout.

There is insight into the privileges of the super-rich; their cocktails hours and cruises and expensive hobbies and publicity headaches. It isn't too interested in the depression. The only working class character (Harlow) is treated shamefully. It's a classic social comedy, but it without the depth of Frank Capra's contemporary work.

Claudette Colbert- for my money- is the greatest female comedy actor in films. This is mainly a vehicle for her comic sparkle, and flair for suggesting a little bit more than she says. She plays an American showgirl who arrives in Paris in the rain wearing just a fabulous gold evening dress but without luggage or money.

She is picked up by a taxi driver of limited means (Don Ameche),  but soon is pretending to be the wife of a Hungarian aristocrat... for complicated reasons....  It's the Cinderella story. The charade will end at midnight. Will she be uncovered as penniless gold-digger by a high society superbitch (Mary Astor)?    

The film is a glorious dream of screwball fantasy. There is superb script by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett full of wit and innuendo. The director Mitchell Leisen proves a reliable imitator of Ernst Lubitsch. But everything is elevated by this cast, with John Barrymore very much at home in this kind of continental farce.

There are depths. Colbert starts off as a mercenary, but inevitably she must settle for something other than wealth and title. The charade must end.  She finds love with the cab driver, but the film is very clear that for the poor, love is usually not enough. This is one of the great comedies of the '30s.

 Frank Capra gives us an unlikely American hero, a rich man who wants to give all his money away! Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper) is an everyman from Hicksville who inherits $20m and moves to the bright lights of New York. Mr. Deeds is taken for a ride, but surely he can trust the fast talking newshound (Jean Arthur) he is falling in love with?

Cooper gives a signature performance as the provincial, tuba playing writer of greetings cards who grows disillusioned by ambient corruption. Arthur became a star as the tough cynic who repents. As ever, Robert Riskin's dialogue is full of sharp political wit, and he's brilliant at voicing Deeds' idiosyncratic wisdom.      

Some of the commentary on America in the depression feels like editorialising. Unlike other Capra/Riskin films, the message isn't spun into the thread of the narrative. They hammer away at the point that America needs to find a unified solution to the depression which includes the rich and the poor. At times the film seems as unworldly as its hero.

There are many incidental pleasures, like the unflattering portrayal of the Algonquin round table of New Yorker critics. Its theme is that a corrupt society will always make good people appear naive, even dangerous. Which is fair enough. Deeds wins out because Capra can't send his audience home without hope. But the fascists had seized power across Europe.

The boxing film was always an apt metaphor for the Hollywood left in the era of film noir. They expose the corruption of the system as the boxers fight each other rather than those with power. Their willing participation in their own exploitation and destruction made the sport a potent symbol for the myth of the American dream..  

This is is the best of these. Robert Ryan plays a no-hope puncher nearing the end, vaguely aware he will never be a champion. His next bout has been fixed by his manager, who doesn't even tell him because he thinks his man has no chance anyway.  He is literally the fall guy. He fights, but he fight isn't fair. He has been sold.

 The film plays out in real time over a terse, tense 70 minutes. Ryan (a boxer in college) is magnificent as a decent man who has never been corrupted by the hell he lives in, and so must destroyed physically. The outcome is heartbreaking. Audrey Totter is also very moving as his suffering wife.

The fight game is powerfully evoked: the brutal contests; the punch drunk veterans ; the wealthy racketeers. Hard-up punters pay rich promoters to see other poor men beat the hell out of each other. The hostility of the crowd towards the losers is so powerful and shocking. Robert Wise places us in the seats, among these voyeurs, another one of the mob.  

This is an adaptation of a novel by one of hardboiled fiction's most pessimistic writers, David Goodis, a poet of impoverished lives ruined by dumb misfortune. It is glamourised a little for the screen, but is still subdued, like a sad, heartbreak ballad.  

Aldo Ray tells the story with a catch in his voice like a corny torch singer; a sentimental ill fated deadbeat. He is being tracked by a pair of relentless killers convinced he has pocketed the loot from their bank raid. Rudy Bond and Brian Keith are a fine double act as the menacing heavies.

There are relishable support performances from Anne Bancroft as the low rent model Aldo Ray picks up in a bar and James Gregory as a resourceful detective chasing up the stolen money.  Stirling Silliphant's screenplay conveys the weariness of Goodis' prose and the threadbare lives of his characters.  

It is mostly set in Los Angeles and the oil fields of California, but concludes in the winter snowdrifts of Wyoming. Like On Dangerous Ground the film contrasts the dirty city with white rural snowscapes. The death of a villain by snowplough must be unique in cinema! This stylish film is one of the classic LA noirs.

Fritz Lang's final Hollywood film is anti-death penalty. A novelist seeks to prove the fallibility of justice by planting clues to indicate that he is the killer of a burlesque dancer. He intends his publisher to then reveal the evidence was faked, proving circumstantial evidence is too precarious to justify capital punishment.  

No such luck. This being a Langian world, subject to the indifference of fate, the writer's accomplice is killed in a car accident the day the jury is to deliver its verdict! With the writer (Dana Andrews) on death row, his estranged fiancée (Joan Fontaine) works to clear his name.

There is a big final reveal, which though unlikely is still enjoyable... The weakness of the film is its stars. Andrews gradually ossified through the fifties and Fontaine is about 20 years too old. And the film looks awfully low budget. The bonus is its trashy burlesque setting and the sassy dialogue of its support cast of strippers.  

The police don't seem too bothered when they find out they were building a case against a writer researching a book. But though the story is improbable, it is still suspenseful and its many twists pay off.  And the film does actually make a reasonable case against capital punishment.

Robert Wise's polemic against capital punishment is based on the real life case of Barbara Graham who was executed in San Quentin in 1955 on unreliable evidence. It's a procedural film which explains how the prisoner is processed from her conviction, all the way to the death penalty. The system is characterised as barbaric and legally hazardous.    

The story casts doubt on her guilt and argues that she was ill-used by a defective judiciary and the parasitic media. It was based on Graham's letters, and articles by a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who initially condemned her, but eventually tried to save her from the gas chamber.

Graham was a prostitute with a history of petty crime. She lies by reflex. She is also represented as an affectionate mother who a victim of domestic abuse. Susan Hayward- one of the very best dramatic actors of the fifties- is superb as the complex, condemned woman. 

Wise actually puts us inside the gas chamber with Graham, trapped within the voyeuristic gaze of the press and representatives of law and order. The film makes a powerful case (though has been criticised for altering facts) but it's Hayward's intense, kinetic performance that ultimately dominates.

With Dr. X (1932), one of a pair of horror films made by Warner Brothers in the early '30s, shot with mostly the same cast and crew and both in 2-strip technicolor. The greens and browns of this process give The Mystery of the Wax Museum an unusual and exotic look, allied to the striking deco sets (even in the morgue!). Fay Wray gets top billing, but is in a supporting role.

The film is carried by Glenda Farrell as the sort of fast talking girl reporter that got her typecast.  Lionel Atwill plays a waxwork sculptor in London whose creations are destroyed when his partner burns down the gallery in an insurance scam. These statues were the artist's closest confidents, and his face and hands are scorched in the blaze.

He reopens in New York years later and overcomes his disability by ordering corpses that look like his lost works and coating them in wax. Fay Wray looks the image of his long ago favourite, Marie Antoinette. The horror is mostly confined to the last ten minutes, particularly when Wray pulls off the maniac's wax mask to reveal the hideous distorted face beneath.

This is a wonderfully entertaining film. While we're waiting for the exotic horror of the climax, the tough, fast talking dialogue is a delight. Farrell is a blast and establishes a rapport with everyone she shares the screen with. The wax museum premise became a horror staple, but this is the best version and a marvellous swan song for the 2-strip colour process.