‘Who was the last man in Cathy’s life?’ The goodish 1949 film noir crime thriller Take One False Step stars a stalwart William Powell and and a sexy young Shelley Winters. 

‘Who was the last man in Cathy’s life?’ ‘Is there a ‘Cathy’ in your past?’

Director Chester Erskine’s 1949 Universal Pictures black and white film noir crime thriller Take One False Step is adapted from the novel Night Call by Irwin Shaw and his brother David, and stars William Powell and Shelley Winters.

Better not take out an old flame as married college professor Andrew Gentling (Powell) does, or you too could be chased by the law when she disappears, apparently murdered. None too plausible, is it?

But the cast and crew of this goodish mystery movie don’t take one false step...

The 1953 British drama The Heart of the Matter is an interesting film of one of Graham Greene’s best novels. Trevor Howard is effective as the unhappily married British security policeman who has a guilty fling with a young Austrian refugee (Maria Schell).

Director George More O’Ferrall 1953 British black and white drama film The Heart of the Matter is an interesting but gloomy and only just adequate version of one of Graham Greene’s best novels.

However Trevor Howard is ideally cast and very effective as Harry Scobie, the unhappily married British security police officer stationed in World War Two Sierra Leone, who has a guilty fling with Austrian refugee young woman Helen Rolt (Maria Schell) in the absence of his sick wife Louise (Elizabeth Allan).

Harry Scobie is then troubled by...

Director Alan Clarke’s 1987 drama Rita, Sue and Bob Too is an unattractive sex comedy about two Bradford schoolgirls, Rita and Sue (Siobhan Finneran, Michelle Holmes), who fall for and have a sexual fling with a slimy married man, adulterous businessman Bob (George Costigan), while babysitting.

Lacking enough charm, good humour and warmth, Clarke’s film attempts a liberated view of working-class schoolgirls struggling to get out of a social rut, but soon falls back on sexual stereotypes (randy men, frigid wives, naughty schoolgirls) and crude racial caricatures.

Andrea Dunbar’s attempt to tell a realistic story of working-class Yorkshire life is undermined by the attempted changes in tone and pace through in turn being serious and light-hearted...

The deservedly much admired 1972 French New Wave classic film Love in the Afternoon [L’Amour l’après-midi] [Chloe in the Afternoon] stars Bernard Verley, Zouzou, and Françoise Verley, and is the last of the six of writer-director Eric Rohmer’s moral tales, following Claire’s Knee [Le Genou de Claire] (1970). It is memorable occasion and a fitting conclusion to a very fine sequence of films.

Bernard Verley stars as the young and successful married businessman Frédéric Carrelet, happily married to English teacher Hélène (Françoise Verley), and father to a child and expecting another. One day, Chloé (Zouzou), once the girlfriend of an old friend of Frédéric’s, appears in his office, hungry and homeless. They begin spending afternoons together, just talking about things...

Director Gene Kelly’s 1967 bedroom farce A Guide for the Married Man assembles a whole army of familiar Sixties comedy faces to illustrate the dos and don’ts of marriage, and the pluses and minuses of unfaithfulness.

Walter Matthau, Robert Morse, Inger Stevens, and Sue Anne Langdon are the welcome players who star in this thoroughly entertaining, grown-up comedy, in which Paul Manning (Matthau) learns the ropes of unfaithfulness with the help of smooth guide Ed Stander (Morse), his best friend who has been cheating on his wife.

Sue Anne Langdon plays Irma Johnson, an attractive blonde who lives nearby and catches Paul’s roving eye. Lovely Inger Stevens plays Paul’s wife, Ruth...

The 1932 romance Back Street is the first of three Universal Pictures film versions of Fannie Hurst’s famous tearjerker novel about a woman (Irene Dunne)’s devoted love for a married man, a rich and handsome banker (John Boles), who is betraying his wife. 

Director John M Stahl’s 1932 romance Back Street is the first of three Universal Pictures film versions of Fannie Hurst’s famous romantic tearjerker about a woman (Irene Dunne)’s devoted love for a married man, a rich and handsome moustachioed banker (John Boles), who is betraying his wife (Doris Lloyd).

The lack of clarity in the screenplay and sense in the direction are giving the piece problems here, but the redoubtable Dunne finds a way through, and the Victorian melodrama- style weepie story is definitely strong enough t...

Douglas Sirk directs this heady 1957 four-hankie, majorly tear-jerking romantic melodrama, a remake of the 1939 hit When Tomorrow Comes, with Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer, based on the original story A Modern Cinderella by James M Cain, the author of The Postman Always Rings Twice.

This time it stars husky-voiced June Allyson as Helen Banning, an American librarian in Germany, working for the US Information Service in Munich. There meets handsome doctor Morley Dwyer (Keith Andes) but rejects him and then she falls in love with the formidable continental charmer and classical symphony conductor Tonio ‘Tony’ Fischer (Rossano Brazzi).

But, naturally, it turns out that Tony is a married man and cannot leave his wife Reni Fischer (Marianne Koch, billed as Marianne Cook), who is mentally i...