Film Reviews by Steve

Delirious southern soaper set in New Orleans in 1852. Bette Davis is a headstrong, vain aristocrat of the slave owning class who loses her industrious, progressive fiancé (Henry Fonda) when she wears a scarlet dress to a ball when the convention was for maidens to wear white. After her capriciousness leads to the death of Fonda's brother in a duel, she seeks redemption during an epidemic of yellow fever.

The deep south setting allows an exotic, febrile melodrama even before the disease arrives. It's all top hats, billowing petticoats, neoclassical architecture and southern hospitality. Davis' blue blooded belle isn't likeable, but she gives star performance, creating a profound personality. The male characters are just context, even Fonda. She deservedly won the Oscar.

The portrayal of the slaves is uncomfortably careless. The North leaning Fonda is obviously a more liberal thinker, but the scene when the black characters express their excitement to be back on the plantation is hard to forgive. There is some mitigation. William Wyler portrays the haughty, rich southerners as misguided, even stupid, and about to be swallowed up by history.

The end when Davis accompanies the dying Fonda to the plague island is plainly preposterous but it gets by because of the exalted climax to Max Steiner's score. There's a handsome production generally. The ballroom scene is classic Hollywood. Jezebel is the work of a talented director at a great studio but the iniquities of slavery are less a concern to Warner Brothers than Bette's costumes.

Six years after Of Human Bondage, Bette Davis starred in another Somerset Maugham adaptation. But this time, with the Production Code at full tide, greater compromises had to be made. Davis empties her revolver into the body of her lover because he has has married a Chinese woman in colonial Singapore, but she cannot go unpunished as she does in the source play.

Bette gives one of her best and most interesting performances. Her character is lying for most of the film and she performs behind an inscrutable visage which doesn't signify a stiff upper lip, but her intent to not betray her guilt. And the suppressed Malayan locals are similarly impassive, unable to express themselves honestly before these corrupt, entitled occupiers.

The scene between Gale Sondergaard as the grieving wife and her husband's murderer is a meeting of masks. The unctuous facade of Victor Sen Yung as a Singaporean lawyer acting as a go-between for the two women is another deception. James Stephenson is excellent as Bette's biddable British lawyer who hides behind a mirage of ethical purity. The message is plainly anti-empire.    

The studio recreation of the east is exotic but plausible. Davis' costumes by Orry-Kelly are elegant. The camerawork is mobile and eloquent and very artistic, with the expressionist photography painting the fluttering, white-laced and guilty heroine within its shadowy net. Though censorship was an impediment, this is one of William Wyler's greatest films.

More foreign intrigue from Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg, set in the mysterious east during the Chinese Civil War, though naturally shot at Paramount studios. Sound technology had advanced since they made Morocco two years earlier and the camera moves with greater freedom. But it's still all shadows and cigarettes and shooting though diaphanous nets.

There's a cast of chain-smoking western fugitives with dubious pasts who might not be all they appear. Marlene used to be the respectable Madeline, but now she's a notorious adventurer. As she unforgettably clarifies: 'It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily'. Clive Brook is an old flame who was burned by Madeline many years ago.

So will the spark reignite as they travel by train though the hazards of war to Shanghai, and a ship for home? Clive Brooks was a terrible ham in everything he did and this is his signature role. And yet, the stiff, terse, detached Englishman is such an archetype in early talkies that he actually seems perfect casting! Anna May Wong makes an impression as a Chinese courtesan.

There's a remarkable moment then the director holds a close up of his star looking up into a light for a long thirty seconds... The story is very slight and slow and predictable. The film is more about the director's eye for an artistic image and Marlene's glamour at the peak of her allure. On those terms it doesn't disappoint.

This incredibly gloomy road noir is the best of the low budget crime pictures Anthony Mann made after the war. It's a love triangle. Joe (Dennis O'Keefe) escapes from prison and flees with a reluctant member of his legal team (the excellent Marsha Hunt), and his jealous moll (Claire Trevor) who loves him submissively and unconditionally.

The narrative is related by Trevor like a sombre dream, accompanied by the joyless drone of a theremin. Her introspective reverie is ethereal, like she is already dead. The real star of the film is the cinematographer (John Alton) who fills the screen with looming squares of inky darkness which have the oppressive expressionist dread of a Mark Rothko painting.  

The fugitive searches for the gangsters who sent him down with the promise of a financial sweetener. Only they have decided not to pay up. Raymond Burr and John Ireland are hugely intimidating as the hit men who try to rub out their former partner while the police chase him down to Mexico.

Luckless Joe is another poor sucker lost on the dark roads of film noir. It is a powerful, melancholy film, with its compromised, cursed figures always moving in and out of the enfolding shadows. The familiar story is slim but its heavy, clinging fatalism has a way of staying in the memory.

Handsome, decently acted but feebleminded Civil War western. The film is unmistakably indebted to John Ford, with its knockabout comedy, broad support characterisations and lengthy punch-up which all eventually gives way to some sentimental drama.

James Stewart is a Virginian farmer with so many boys it is only possible to count them when they are sitting down to dinner together, saying grace. He refuses to send his men to fight, arguing that they are needed on the farm and it isn't his problem anyway. Of course he eventually discovers if they don't go to war, the war will come to them, and he has to get involved.

While there is impressive technical work, the film gets tied up in thematic contortions and idiotic plot lurches. Stewart was a pro-Vietnam voice, and would have seen a parallel with his family of refuseniks being forced to go and fight in an unpopular war. But in taking the side of the pro-slavers he actually makes his intervention hard to admire. So it doesn't work as propaganda.

It's not just that the story is relentlessly absurd, it is also badly constructed. Scenes are so disconnected, they grind against each other. New episodes start that have forgotten how the last one finished. The finale when the youngest son, lost in the war, turns up at Sunday mass propped up on a crutch is the last straw. Too many plainly ridiculous things have happened.

The ultimate film about the eighties political revolution and its economic Darwinism.

It's an acting masterclass with a magnificent ensemble cast, which Jack Lemmon just about shades as the corporate also-ran, way beyond his breaking point. Great actors must kill to get their hands on material as good as this.

A version of, and improvement on, David Mamet's 1984 Pulitzer Prize winner, which is my generation's Death of a Salesman.

A transcendental film about two identical young women (Irene Jacob) who live materially unconnected but similar lives, one in Paris, the other in Warsaw, with contrasting but linked destinies.

This ethereal film is a mystical experience which speaks to us in a visual, impressionistic language.

It is an exquisite, metaphysical poem from the great Krzysztof Kieslowski. Irene Jacob is luminescent in the demanding dual roles.

As much a vision as a film. A quiet, meditative and incredibly beautiful experience.

This version of Elizabeth von Arnim's 1922 novel (filmed badly in 1935) was originally made for the BBC but later given a cinema release by Miramax. Four women mostly suffering from disappointing marriages, the grey fustiness of London and English middle class life, and a lingering despair brought on by World War I, travel to the picturesque fishing village of Portofino in north western Italy. There, established in a castle rented to tourists, in the light and warmth of their surroundings, the society of local inhabitants and free from the restrictions of their usual lives, they begin to thrive and grow again.  So pure escapism. A vicarious fantasy. Yet such a beautiful one, which works like an opiate flooding our veins and then our hearts with sweet release. The light, the Italian locations, the beautiful performances, they all allow us a little of the peace and optimism that the ladies find within themselves, released by the Italian riviera. And in my 1991, that was glorious, charming and irresistible.

A great stroke of luck for Monty Python was that they got the sets from Franco Zeffirelli's 1977 tv epic, Jesus of Nazareth which allowed this film to look a whole lot more authentic than Up Pompeii. Life of Brian is a series of sketches harnessed to the story of (an alternative) Christ. Its attraction is mainly twofold: it is an inspired and intelligent skewering of the characteristics of religious fundamentalism; and it is very funny. There is little characterisation save Graham Chapman's Brian, but there are some inspired performances, such as Michael Palin's Pontius Pilate, and John Cleese's Reg, leader of the Judean resistance. Brilliant comical scenes keep on coming, like the pessimistic, equivocal prophet, or the Roman soldier correcting the Latin of Brian's graffiti. I'm not usually an admirer of the work of Monty Python as a collective, but this is their absolute peak, and the hyperbolic reaction to the film's release (the BBC discussion between Palin, Cleese and Malcolm Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark was lamentably witless on the part of the offended Catholics) indicated that a national, or global conversation was long overdue.

Cinematic version of The Who's classic concept album plays like a return to the kitchen sink values of the early sixties (which is when the action is set). Quadrophenia elects for an unglamorous presentation of working class locations, distant from most of the usual chic of the decade; though the teenage mods do long for the elegant materialism that is hoarded elsewhere, and the status that will always be out of reach. The story, lifted from the impressionistic lyrics of the rock opera is mostly reportage; the amphetamines, the mod sound, the beach fights and the knee tremblers. But the film fuses with the soundtrack brilliantly, offering a profound empathy for adolescent yearning. This stems from Phil Daniel's authentic performance, and from Pete Townshend's songwriting, particularly the ethereal, spiritual ache of I'm One and Love Reign O'er Me. One of the great films about the brief tragic metamorphosis that happens between being a teenager, and being a wage slave.

The Graham Greene source novel was a joyful, optimistic affirmation of life and the film gloriously conveys those emotions on to the screen. At his mother's funeral, a naive, mundane middle aged bank manager Henry Pulling (Alec McCowen) meets for the first time the capricious Aunt Augusta (Maggie Smith) who initiates him into an adventure incorporating her many, varied and usually eccentric or criminal associates and friends scattered across the more glamorous cities of Europe. Henry is shaken out of his complacency and led to the unsurprising conclusion that it is the impulsive and resourceful Agatha who is his real mother, and not the conservative woman who brought him up. And he begins to discover the Agatha dormant within. This is a feelgood experience, set in beautiful locations and gorgeously acted by its eclectic cast, particularly Smith and McCowen. It's surprising to me that this film has such a poor reputation. It feels like mainlining nirvana. Unsentimental optimism is a rare commodity on screen and this picaresque, secular pilgrimage delivers its surge of serotonin with a lot of style and wit.

Clarke earned a reputation for making violent and uncompromising dramas for the BBC, and when his Play for Today version of this story was shelved by the broadcaster, he and writer Roy Minton made an even more brutal cinema version. Scum is the best prison drama the UK (probably any country) has ever made, and that includes the many POW films. It is a sensational exposure of the British borstals of that period, soon to be abolished. The story centres around two offenders' fight for the supremacy of their part of the system, to be the 'daddy'. A battle ultimately won by Ray Winstone's Carlin. These prisons socialise the inmates to conform with the prevailing culture, but the values they learn to adhere to, are utterly insane. No one survives. The institution and the sentences are incidental to the real savagery of the experience; these boys brutalise each other. The rape and subsequent suicide of one of the characters is particularly harrowing. This is a film where the lack of budget actually enhances the look of the drama. All is grim, and hostile, and malign. 

A tour de force from Tom Hardy, as he is filmed in monologue on a car journey in real time; we hear his side of a series of conversations on his car phone. It is a testament to Hardy's great performance that such an impediment is overcome with ease, and the film is so compelling and emotionally rewarding. Similar credit should go to the writer/director Steven Knight, who creates a world of loneliness, and alienation and a sense of a country which has lost its way. Hardy finds himself divided between his work as a construction manager, and his responsibility to a woman he had an affair with, who is going into labour. Really, it is a character on a journey to find integrity and honour, and overcome the obstacles of his own family and environment. It is about learning how to be a man.  

This was a great leap forward for Dirk Bogarde who was never quite so convincing before Hunted. He portrays a murderer who travels across country with a small boy (John Whiteley) who has witnessed his crime. The boy is abused by his guardians and is starved of love and hungry with the need to give affection. They flee north pursued by the police and of course, their relationship deepens and they effectively save each other. It is an episodic road film in which the pair cannot trust anyone but each other. I think this is the best of Charles Crichton's many fine films for Ealing, it is understated for such a melodramatic narrative, the evocation of industrial Britain is satisfying and we really care about these two. There were quite a few films made after the war about a child's unconventional relationship with a surrogate parent (these two made another, The Spanish Gardener), and this is one of the best examples.

Mike Leigh had seemed to have lost his alchemic ability to distil contemporary life in the mid noughties, and how timely he should return to form in 2008. The year the banker's crash triggered austerity. The period when social media began to amplify the splintering of England. It is from the frontiers of this divided nation that Leigh and his cast are reporting. The brilliant Sally Hawkins lives the personality of the title; but she is tough and combative as she needs to be given that experience will burn away your optimism like a match. The core of the film is the exposure of her dayglo, might-never-happen but sincere and conscientious primary school teacher to a trigger-unhappy, randomly prejudiced conspiracy-theorist driving instructor created by Leigh regular Eddie Marsen. Happy-Go-Lucky emotionally channels the anger, the passive aggressive anxiety which is the hum in the wires of the circuits of contemporary British life. Typically the film has divided its audience hugely! Here we are, twelve years on and it seems all the more prescient that Leigh made this when he did.