Film Reviews by Steve

The last of the post 1945 cycle of black and white British World War II films which established the popular image of a generation of male stars. In this case Kenneth More as the super-brain behind naval intelligence, fighting the German navy in the Atlantic, and of course, plotting the demise of their famously unsinkable battleship.

The bulk of the film takes place in the underground nerve centre in London. Most of the scenes away from HQ are with the German officers on the bridge of the Bismarck. This saves money, but the action scenes, when they come, are extremely well realised. At times the realistic, procedural style of the film is a bit dry. And means a lot of talk.

This is principally a flagwaver that celebrates one of the crucial achievements of the war, and recognises the contributions of those involved. More's (fictitious) character is officious, but working for the right side. His adversary on the Bismarck (Karel Stepanek) is a sentimental Nazi who undermines his cause with his stubborn, irrational hubris.

Neither is likeable. They are promoted because in war, the outcome is everything. Scrape off enough superficial patriotism, and this begins to feel like an antiwar scenario; the skirmish seriously damages both sides. The real hero is Dana Wynter as a key backroom facilitator. Other than the spies, she is one of the few female role models in this era of WWII films.

Delirious melodrama set in a swanky hotspot in the West End. The film's stature among critics is possibly enhanced relative to the poverty of British silent films generally, but this is still an unusual and striking curiosity. And principally because of the performance of it's star, the Chinese-American Anna May Wong.

She plays a dishwasher in the Piccadilly, who becomes a sensation when she gets to perform a sexy, exotic dance number in front of the jaded, well heeled patrons. Which upsets the resident dancer, a fading jazz babe played by Gilda Grey, especially when the new girl attracts the interest of the boss (Jameson Thomas).

There are fascinating similarities with GW Pabst's Pandora's Box, starring Louise Brooks, released the same year. Both are about a femme fatale who destroys men through naive sexual allure. The director of Piccadilly, EA Dupont, was also German, as were his cinematographer and set designer. And the film looks spectacular.

Anna May, like Brooks, became famous overnight, before soon fading into obscurity. But both are indelible in their brief moment of stardom. They even share the same hairstyle! Piccadilly isn't quite in the same class. And it is poorly edited and implausible. But it's a landmark British film photographed with an abundance of style.

After 1945 there was a wave of thrillers about a US veteran going back to Europe to chase up some loose end from the war and invariably fall in love. This came towards the end of the cycle and is among the more entertaining. Ray Milland returns to Britain to investigate the mystery of his brother's death, and dally with Patricia Roc.

Jacques Tourneur had his own style, but there is a strong impression of Alfred Hitchcock here, maybe because the producer Joan Harrison was a close associate of the Master. The plot is standard. Milland basically confronts the survivors of the special operation in which his brother was shot. But this is a well put together suspense film made on a small budget.

The remainder of the running time involves the cute flirtation between the determined, disoriented American and the high maintenance British working girl. Milland played this part many time. Patricia Roc's role is mostly decorative, as an English rose, but with a thorn. Among the support cast, Naunton Wayne stands out as a slippery car salesman with a secret for sale.

This should appeal to fans of film noir, though there isn't any visual expressionism. Or a femme fatale. It's not as good as Tourneur's more celegrated UK film- Night of the Demon- but still a compelling mystery-thriller directed by a real craftsman.

The final part of Hammer's early seventies trilogy of sexy vampire horrors is a return to form after the disappointing Lust for a Vampire. It's mostly remembered for casting identical nineteen year old twins who had been featured in Playboy a few months earlier. Mary Collinson plays the pure, obedient sister. While Madeleine is the vampire.

I think. They're not easily identified, even without clothes. Actually, there's little nudity, but as a gimmick, this stunt casting really works. Otherwise there's a pretty good gothic horror story. Peter Cushing is quite compelling as a witchfinder who tortures and murders the powerless villagers while averting his gaze from the Satanic aristocrat (Damien Thomas) in the old castle.

Which of course the villagers storm in the rousing climax. The film really scores with the beautiful sets and authentic-seeming costumes, which must be among the best Hammer ever put together. There's a thumping score which often feels like it's about to drift off into a mariachi number.

While there's no gore, there is a sadistic edge to some scenes which is horrific and subversive. Neither god nor the devil is much help to the poor. The trilogy is supposed to be based on the stories of Victorian gothic writer Sheridan le Fanu, but this has strayed far from the source. There's occasional narrative drag, but the production alone makes it worth seeing.

Charming social comedy which once in motion achieves a kind of sublime, friction free state of entertainment. It draws upon the public persona of its big box office star Rex Harrison, who had a reputation as a womaniser. He plays an amnesiac who finds himself in Wales without memory, only to discover that his condition has resulted in six marriages and no divorces.

Harrison actually was eventually married six times and his philandering led to real tragedy. But this is a light comedy. They all want him back. The ballbusting lawyer (Margaret Leighton) hired to defend the bigamist, falls in love with him, as do the women on the jury. In a case of life imitating art, Rex began an affair with his co-star, Kay Kendall.

This might be overkill if it wasn't for the sublime touch of everyone involved, including Harrison, who is brilliant this kind of cheerfully ludicrous fluff. There's a genuinely funny script and an experienced comedy director in Sidney Gilliatt. The lovely Technicolor adds a little sweetness. Cecil Parker as the dismayed psychiatrist is just a bonus.

It's possible that in the era of #MeToo some will find this indulgence of the male ego a turn off. But watched in the spirit of the times there is one of the wittiest British scripts of the decade. And the cast squeezes all the laughs out of every line. This is is the comedy of manners made by experts; the kind of grown up frou-frou that Lubitsch used to make.

Tough, low budget heist drama which upends the moral code of fifties British WWII films and anticipates the anti-establishment values of the sixties counterculture. Two disaffected combat veterans team up with a Polish explosives expert to raid an army safe stocked up with cash to pay for an operation overseas. Something like Suez.

The trio break into barracks while the soldiers are leaving. As former grunts themselves, they know how to salute, but they are the foreign body which jams normal army machinery. No one stops them, but they keep breaching regulations. Stanley Baker is the leader with the sort of improvisational daring which would be invaluable in wartime.

He and Tom Bell are fuelled with the resentment that leads them to take on the system, but also makes it difficult to co-operate with each other. The two leads are excellent. German actor Helmut Schmid has less to do as the safe-breaker. It'd be interesting to know whether the makers considered him as a former Nazi soldier, but maybe that would be too subversive...

This is a really thoughtful, brooding crime story, which is given a touch of class by Baker's star quality. Three years earlier, The League of Gentlemen touched on similar themes, but this is a much angrier film. When Baker walks through the army camp burning it down with his flame thrower, it's not just a dramatic visual image, it's also a metaphor. Welcome to the sixties.

Landmark black comedy which is one of the key films of the sixties. Stanley Kubrick audaciously satirises the nuclear arms race between the cold war powers just two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis. And in particular, the strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction, which theorises that the outcome of a nuclear exchange would be so destructive it could never happen...

But there were near misses... Sterling Hayden plays a crazy, anti-communist US General who unilaterally launches H-bombs at Russia. This will trigger the Soviet Doomsday Machine which responds via a computer without human intervention. Yes it's a comedy... and it is genuinely funny mostly because of Peter Sellers' performances.

He plays three characters, including the ineffectual American President and a rather self-effacing RAF officer. But most sensationally, he is Dr. Strangelove, a sinister former Nazi now working in the Pentagon. Presumably the character's barely suppressed insanity is intended to suggest that US politics is slipping into fascism.

This is still a fine picture, though it doesn't feel as subversive as it once did. What is now most unsettling is that Hayden's certifiable extremism is no longer a joke. In the Age of Internet, fake conspiracies are central to American politics. How dystopian can the film seem once Donald Trump has been in the White House for real.

WWII submarine drama made during the Battle of the Atlantic. The propaganda is unusually realistic. The perilous pursuit of a battleship called the Brandenburg is fictional, but the film gives a potent impression of what combat in a submarine must have been like, but backed by the comical make-do typical of British war films,

It also informs the home front of the incredible risks which are routinely being taken by ordinary people. And to expect those who fight to come home changed. John Mills is the skipper, but the most prominent role goes to Eric Portman, a resentful loner who ultimately saves the crew through an act of selfless bravery.

This isn't a prestige production, but Anthony Asquith's accomplished direction makes it a cut above the glut of low budget action films made during the war. While the episode when Portman almost singlehandedly seizes a Nazi fuel depot with his practical German and a lot of pluck is unrealistic, the skill of the cast and creatives make us want to believe.

The crew represents a cross section of regions and classes. These are ensemble roles, though the credits list the cast in order of rank! The home lives of the men are a turmoil which they occasionally revisit on leave, but are unable to resolve. They walk away to execute extraordinary acts of courage. Asquith acknowledges their sacrifice.

Few of the many musicals released in the UK in the 1930s offer much entertainment today. The exceptions are the ones made by Gaumont, usually directed by Victor Saville and produced by Malcolm Balcon, which were better budgeted than the rest and looked to Hollywood for style and inspiration.

And crucially they starred Jessie Matthews, the biggest personality in British films during the depression. She was also in the stage version of Evergreen in 1930, a musical by Rogers and Hart, written and set in London. The daughter of a famous singer in the Edwardian music hall secretly poses as her dead mother in a nostalgia revue.

The plot rests on mistaken identity, and is indisputably crazy. But then, normal for a musical. At heart, it's typical of a Warner Brothers storyline, as the starving chorus girl becomes a star. The dance scenes are not in the class of Busby Berkley, but they are still distinctly good. There are some fabulous gowns too.

Jessie could dance in multiple styles, with her trademark high kicks prominent. She was a fine screwball actor and counterintuitively sexy. Her singing voice feels dated now and she has that strange, obsolete posh accent they all had back then. But her incredible star presence is undimmed. Gaumont never allowed her to go to Hollywood, which is cinema's loss.

Lance Comfort again fashions a compelling suspense film out of a meagre budget. There are no stars, no elaborate lighting arrangements. The set decoration is dismayingly threadbare and flimsy. And yet this is an unusually absorbing B feature.

And Comfort scripts a compelling premise from a forgotten novel by an obscure writer. A suave, married suburbanite (William Franklyn) works for a firm which designs safes for banks. He staggers home after an assault in a bomb site, to find he has been missing for three weeks and has no memory of where he has has been.

And the detective hired by his wife (Moira Redmond) to find him has turned up dead. Which is an excellent film noir set up! Pure Cornell Woolrich. Sadly there's no money for expressionist visuals. Franklyn lacks real star charisma, but he is still fine as a noirish everyman caught up in a plot beyond his comprehension.

Nigel Green stands out among the support cast of likely suspects, though it's more memorable to encounter Anthony Booth as the head of the criminal gang! The easily listening soundtrack isn't typical of this genre but fits in with a key plot feature. Comfort has been reappraised as a key director of British Bs. This isn't his best, but still an effective thriller.

Exuberant adaptation of Henry Fielding's epic satirical comedy, published in 1749. This won the Oscar for best film, with nine other nominations. Possibly much of its critical success was down to the fresh, innovative style inspired by the French New Wave. Those novelties now look a bit gimmicky. They give the film motion, but don't lock gears with the substance.

But it works brilliantly as a broad sweep of Georgian Britain, whether in the town or the country estate, with its support cast of thieves, ladies of dubious virtue and lusty squires. Albert Finney is well cast as Tom Jones, a foundling of sound heart and good countenance. He is fundamentally moral and the trouble he encounters indicates a corrupt society.

My pick of the three female actors who were nominated in a supporting role is Diane Cilento as an incredibly lecherous strumpet. While the film is a festival of uninhibited camera trickery, it is also an actors film. Their characters are all archetypes which are mostly made memorable by an exaggerated, comic grotesquery.

Except for Finney and his pure true love, played by Susannah York, who are beautiful. John Osborne's script inevitably takes liberties with the extremely long novel. The comedy isn't actually funny and leaves the impression that the film may have been more fun to make than it is to watch. But, its satire on the hypocrisy of fine folk still finds the target.

Droll supernatural suspense film which was scripted by Nigel Kneale as a comedy but eventually shot by Hammer as straight horror. Consequently the tone is quite uneven. It's genuinely spooky at times, but slips into farce towards the end.

Joan Fontaine stars in her final big screen performance. She doesn't create the kind of camp, gothic monster other female survivors of the studio system were conjuring up in the sixties, but conveys a sensitive, affecting impression of a vulnerable woman.

She plays a spinster taken on as the headmistress of a rural school after recovering from a mental collapse. The village church fell into disrepair years ago... and she suspects the locals are practicing witchcraft. But who would believe her? And what if the suspected sacrifice of a schoolchild was just a ruse to entrap the chaste newcomer?

Which is just as good a narrative as it was seven years later in The Wicker Man. Unfortunately, The Witches ultimately pulls up short of the horror potential of the climax. There's a splendid support cast playing the village of inscrutable/inbred oddballs, led by Kay Walsh as the completely nuts head witch. It's a minor genre picture given a touch of class by its star.

 Eerie ghost story adapted by regular Twilight Zone writer Richard Matheson from his own novel. Presumably he had read Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House because the set up is similar, as well as the title. A team of experts in the paranormal are hired to spend a week in a cursed castle and produce definitive proof of malign possession.

The key personnel is Pamela Franklyn as a jittery medium and Clive Revill as the rationalist who proposes to throw science at the problem. It is immediately clear that this isn't all happening in someone's head. Eventually the boffin wheels out his supercomputer with which he intends to rid the house of its degenerate demon.

The premise has lost some freshness in recent years, as there has been a glut of ghost stories. What distinguishes this one is the really unsettling photography and set design which gives the film the feeling of a nightmare. There's a spooky score of electronic atmospherics. And the effects are state of the art for the period.

There's a sensational moment when Franklyn's body starts to produce ectoplasm! The final explanation isn't a strength, but the late appearance of Michael Gough as the mummified body of an evil Edwardian gentleman is quite disturbing. There is a touch of the grotesque to the horror. It's not as stylish as The Haunting, but it's much more macabre.

At the turn of the sixties there was a glut of low budget British crime films, short enough to play on the bottom half of a double bill. The sort of b&w police drama which was becoming a regular on tv. This is among the best of these. Production values are threadbare, but there is a fine script and imaginative direction from Cliff Owen in his debut feature.

William Sylvester plays a maverick intelligence spook who goes undercover for Scotland Yard to infiltrate a gang of bankrobbers. But he finds a fulfilment in crime absent from regular work. There is camaraderie, and greater independence and dignity. The pay is more rewarding and he soon falls for a crooked moll played by Mai Zetterling.

She gives the most memorable performance, costumed to look like a Scandinavian Lizabeth Scott. The plot is suggestive of those Hollywood syndicate films of the fifties in which the mob operates like a legitimate business. Only this goes further in blurring the lines; licensed corporations are portrayed as similarly corrupt. What's the difference?

There is something unusually compelling about Offbeat. The photography is no more than functional, but the story is told coherently and with genuine suspense. The jazz soundtrack is a cliché, but it still works. The characters are all credible, and there are interesting themes about capitalism and the human cost. This is far better than it needs to be.

Karel Reisz's adaptation of Alan Sillitoe's angry young man novel is one of the key films in the British New Wave, a movement which favoured social realist portrayals of working class life. And like the book, it's a mixed success. The narrative strives for authenticity, but mostly deals in ordinariness, and the events of the story soon became genre clichés.

So there's the drinking contest, the bunk up with a married woman, the inevitable pregnancy and abortion, the trenchant shop floor philosophy... Sillitoe's screenplay labours to present a society he assumes is unfamiliar to us, but conveys little else. His dialogue is intended to be naturalistic, but it is awfully flat.

Still, there are positives. He captures a generation while it was still taking shape, which has disposable income in contrast to their parents, the survivors of war and the depression. Best of all is the voice of his antihero, Arthur Seaton. Paragraphs of internal monologue are transferred into the film. And Albert Finney produces his signature performance.

He has charm and bravado, but a feeling of menace moves under the surface. Unfortunately, Reisz's style is plodding and worthy and he relies heavily on his emerging star. There is some evocative footage shot around Nottingham by Freddie Francis, and a truly exceptional soundtrack from John Dankworth. But this period piece is now more interesting than entertaining.