Reviews

It's the mark of a bad film when some of its most serious scenes remind you of Monty Python. This one seems to consist entirely of out-takes from a movie that actually had a story.

There's not much here, only people running stupidly around in a landscape; the stupidity of war. Men are captured, and shot; set free, then are shot; told to get in the river, then are shot (this happens a lot); told to take off their shirts, then are shot (this happened even more - there were so many men taking their shirts off I began to get suspicious). Then the people doing the shooting get shot. Nobody who is shot looks like he has really been shot - a shot rings out, down someone goes - it's kids falling down in the school playground.

In fact, the whole thing looks like a group of schoolchildren separated into two teams then let loose in a large open area to play war games, hiding in the grass, climbing walls, one side ambushing the other, only to be ambushed itself. We are introduced to various army officers from both sides - the dialogue consists almost entirely of army officers giving commands - some of them are interesting characters, but none of them last long. They strut around casually selecting, casually killing, often failing or forgetting to kill and hardly bothering about it.

The latter is the theme of the film if there is one, the senseless, arbitrary, game-like nature of it; the men succumbing to their fate mindlessly - eager to die as soon as they can. The film vaguely follows the fortunes of one man, but we don't get to know him, and whether it takes place in one day, or several months, I've no idea. We get a succession of mainly disconnected, mainly senseless scenes that build into a bigger picture of senselessness.

Men barely in command of brains, hundreds of men of dismal nonentity, herds of them running around shirtless with no more humanity than horses. The Volga scenery is good and some scenes are artfully mesmerising, with a clarity and calm that reminded me of the opening scenes of Andrei Rublev (and predates it) - but that's all I could get extract from it. War is senseless. Man is stupid. We know that.

Few seem to understand what this film is about, which is rank misogyny. That's really all there is to it. Jeanne Moreau, an intelligent woman who admitted to craving the unconventional, was the driving force behind the project. She presumably understood the film's basic theme and went for it. Mademoiselle is sadistic, perverse, capricious, and emotionally comatose.

Based on a discarded screenplay by the sadistic homosexual Jean Genet who was on a mission to subvert normative society, and with some tweaking by others, including the doyenne of non-conformist romantic anguish, Marguerite Duras, and directed by Tony Richardson, who was himself in the closet at that time, the film's gay credentials now look obvious, though at the time the hidden meaning would have been relatively obscure and it is no surprise that viewers at the time found the meaning of the film as garbled as the various languages spoken in this French village.

In any case, it was hardly possible though to mask the sociopathic malice of the main character and the clear implication that heterosexual passion is a nasty disease - a kind of insanity - sufficient to lead, in women, to bestial submission and the destruction of men, and, in men, to, well, at least a terrible waste of resources (from a gay point of view).

The static, wide-angle compositions are a thing of beauty though and are worth watching for their own sake. The technique goes some way to represent Mademoiselle's placid detachment from normality, and serves to mask the obviousness of the message - without it, the film would have been too blatant for its own good. Unfortunately, coupled with misogyny theme, the catatonic presentation turns the story into a dreary and rather unpleasant slog.

A small-scale industrialist decides he's had enough, for no clearly elucidated reason, and does a runner. He discards his glasses, adopts a false name and lands first in a seedy hotel where he lies morosely in bed all day. Up to this point--apart from a dull television interview (did the French really take that kind of thing seriously?)--the film was intriguing enough, but once Mr Dé hooks up with a funky Bohmenian couple there is little further development. And thanks to the overbearing character played by Marcel Robert--some kind of gentle giant--the film becomes an irksome labour to watch, like a morose 'Jules et Jim'. The film would have been better off without the Bohemians altogether, and, we cannot but help suppose, so would Mr Dé.

The action is mainly static and bereft of interesting images or cinematic movement. People sit around or stand around lamenting about nothing in particular in mournful tones and spouting philosophical epigrams with a degree of pretentiousness that only the French don't realise is pretentious. The film is almost entirely composed of these conversations. Some scenes only serve to disengage, with odd behaviour (running up a gravel mound), blatant symbolism (pushing a car off a cliff), much awkward, self-conscious acting as if the actors were embarrassed to be bogged down in all the forced meaning, and terrible directing, such as when Mr Dé is sitting at a table in a cafe absurdly squeezed up to two other people who don't even look at him when he starts an unpleasant drunken tirade.

This is the fag end of the leftist utopia that went up in flames the previous year. Yes, we get the loss of identity and sense of despair, but was there no other treatment than this? In 'The Bedsitting Room', Spike Milligan also dealt with the last flickering of the human spirit in a wrecked world, but that was a work of surreal genius. This humourless and tendentious allegory of lost hope is hard going and only fans of wintry atmosphere will find it worthwhile.

More screenwriting bravura from Mankiewicz who gives us the story from several sequential points of view, as in All About Eve. The script is acerbic, cynical, sullen, and strained, but full of great lines, lurid characters and some laugh-out-loud preposterousness (I'll give Mankiewicz the benefit of the doubt and assume that was intentional). However, despite the social sparks that fly in every scene that doesn't involve Ava Gardner, the film is laborious right from the off - Bogey's raincoat in the artificial downpour at the cemetery is a continuity nightmare. Much of the film is self-indulgent and overdone, such as the long scene outside Maria's home.

Gardner is a slow actress, wanting space before, during and after every line. In fact, Gardner kills the film almost completely. The life of Maria Vargas is of no interest whatsoever thanks to her rigid and comatose performance - she is quite unable to evoke any of the Carmen or Cinderella spirit that is supposed to be driving her character. The contradictions in the part written for her don't help - on the one hand she is aloof and untouchable and on the other she gives herself to any passing low-life. Virtually everything that happened only served to undermine our emotional attachment to her and it would have taken a very special and spirited performance to keep us caring. Sophia Loren would have done it right and would have been dynamite in this. Sorry Gardner fans, but there it is.

Oscar is the most interesting character in the film - they guy is wound tight and says everything with passion. By the end though, even the moral isn't clear, unless it is that nobody can ever be happy in life. We're left mainly feeling that a lot of sophisticated screen-craft didn't quite hit the spot.

This film seems to be largely out of favour, and it does have problems, but taken as an Ibsonian study of 20s flapper society, it's fine. Class, money, personality and style form a cocktail that looks far better than it tastes and this film captures the vacuousness being absurdly rich quite effectively. The tendency to overblow this story is strange though, as it's basically a chamber piece.

For a classic novel, Fitzgerald's story is ungainly, with an unconvincing mix of themes, the metaphorical nature of which is too transparent - such as the sordid road between Manhattan and the Eggs. Mainly it is misogynistic, and the film doesn't attempt to elucidate the real subtext of the story - Gatsby's implicit bromance with Carraway. Of course, Gatsby was not meant to be gay, only codedly gay - it was impossible for Fitzgerald to be literal, being firmly in the closet himself. That angle, as in the book, is more obviously portrayed by Jordan, whose role is to provide the clue.

It also perhaps simmers too long - it's a while before we meet the man, and the improbable lifestyles and flapper parties have to carry things along until the mystery of Gatsby's personality takes over. Unfortunately it is also a mystery why he is so attracted to shrill, neurotic Daisy (Mia Farrow) and that undermines what ought to be the driving dynamic of the film.

The tension does mount steadily in the latter part of the film though, amplified by the (now rather stock) stifling weather trick (did Tennessee Williams get it from here?). If Coppola's meandering script were a little more incisive, Farrow replaced by someone that Gatsby might have actually found desirable, and the camera pulled back a little from all the perspiring faces, this could have been a classic.

The greatest social revolution of the 20th century was the emergence of the teenager. Before the mid-50s teenagers didn't exist - people went straight from childhood to middle age - from Disney to Bing Crosby, apparently. Teens were neither a subject nor a market until rock and roll gave them a voice and James Dean gave them a presence. Up until then Hollywood had been in the grip of the old guard who had set things up in the 20s, and as they got older, film output calcified into stock formats - epics, melodramas, noirs, westerns to keep the old folk happy.

This preamble is just to put Gidget into context. Trite and trivial now, it must have been vibrantly original at the time, spawning a mini genre of beach films and beach music through the 60s - this film was made a couple of years before the Beach Boys formed and the music in it is, bizarrely, still closer to Frank Sinatra than rock and roll. The authenticity of the innocent charm is the best thing about it, though titchy Sandra Dee (Gidget = girl-midget) is cute enough, and the good-natured sexual liberation is remarkable - a sixteen year-old is basically out to lose her virginity. Corny back-projection surfing is a must, there's a luau (new to me) and a wholesome family that gives it a Happy Days feel. But most of all it feels like the beginning of things.

For some reason (one can only presume his ego got the better of him) Bill Forsyth actually made a big-budget art-house film here. If that isn't an error of judgement sufficient to end a career, I don't know what is.

It's hard to fathom how he thought it would be possible for such a film to be released commercially. And while the producers presumably forked out for it without actually studying the screenplay - somehow persuaded that they should all go to Morocco to shoot some scenes on a beach and some dunes - it boggles the mind how the director and the producers managed to remain so far out of alignment on their target market, right through to the film's completion.

In any case, Warner Bros understandably couldn't market it to mainstream cinema audiences, and in a desperate attempt to salvage something, cut it severely and added a narrative voice-over to dumb it down. If anything, the surgery only made it worse. Not only has it lost its artistic integrity, it has a slapped-on narration - presumably in imitation of a bed-time story - that crops up at meaningful moments to let us know that it's a meaningful moment. The narration adds nothing, only patronises. Worse, it is incongruously done in strident tones and a raw, modern American accident. It's hard to think of a more botched attempt to salvage a film.

It's not a difficult film, but it does require some indulgence. Certainly, mainstream cinema-going viewers will only be nonplussed at having to think about what they are watching, having to tease subtleties, ambiguities, and ironies from a series of slow moving, wistful, existential stories.

Forsyth's original screenplay demanded even more indulgence, trying to extract depths of meaning out of every moment. This obsession at painting emotion is what really sinks the film - it's more literary than cinematic, and little of the attempt successfully translates to the screen. Thus, when Hector in the first story sees the boats coming in, he stands there hesitantly in full view of them and there is little sense of the absolute terror the screenplay he tells us he feels - mainly he comes across as simple-minded.

There is plenty, though, to appeal to the intelligent viewer who likes to reflect on life. The historical scenarios (except for the last segment) are interesting choices - it is rare to be taken to those times and places - some of them fairly unique. The moral or practical challenges presented to Hector each time are never boring. We like him for being hapless and benign, and we come to care for his welfare. This is excellent and engaging - for the thinking viewer - and is all the better for the straightforward technique, without any of the manipulative technology-driven tricks of modern Hollywood.

However, it's hardly an unsung masterpiece. No consistent theme emerges. Nothing really coheres into a whole. The stories needed to be much cleverer for it all to come together into a frisson of satisfaction at the end - nothing really does come together. Two of the stories have hopeful endings (if not entirely happy), the others have sad, wistful, or ambiguous endings. If there was significance in the ending of each, it was too subtle to grasp. By the last story we (might) realise that footwear seems to be a theme, though quite what the moral is there in terms of the human condition, is obscure. Other symbols, such as the windmill and the cross, if symbols they are, don't work at all, as almost everyone will miss them completely.

Worse, Hector hardly stands for the whole human race, having evolved apparently into the fashionably-sensitive liberal, the banality of which is revealed in the last story, which serves up the biggest cliché of them all: father issues, presented here with dismal earnestness as Hector bonds with his estranged children. When Hector is told that his son only needs a hug to solve everything, and his early-teen daughter gives him a little lecture on meaningful moments, I'm not sure whether my howls were of excruciation, disbelief, or disappointment.

Portrait of a working class community in Florence in the 1920s as the Fascists tighten their grip on society. It's set in a narrow street populated by market traders, cobblers, gossips, unfaithful wives, gangsters, with an old matriarch overseeing things from her window and the local Fascist on patrol down below. Mainly it follows the fortunes of three marriagable young women and their lovers, with, at the centre of the film, a brutal night of assassinations which changes the community forever.

It's quite dialogue-heavy - there's barely a moment without subtitles on the screen - and there's little humour, but it's well made and is suffused with a non-judgemental humanism that prevents things getting too morose. Mastroianni stands out among the cast, which includes an Olympic gold medalist discus thrower as a blacksmith. Particularly interesting to see a non-touristic side of Florence, when the place had a real lived-in feel.

Verbatim rerun of Camus's study of motiveless murder. Quite competent (except for the lamentable fight scene) but on the whole adding no artistry of its own, and with its lengthy courtroom scenes, rather dull. Mastroianni is also utterly wrong for the part. What really interested me here is what attracted Visconti to the project, which bolsters my suspicion that this is one of most misunderstood novels of the twentieth century, along with Kafka's The Trial. Let's see: life as meaningless and absurd, somewhat angst-ridden, nibbling away at society's mores, an ambivalent attitude towards women. Hmm.

Consider that the eponymous Stranger may well be the Arab, not Meursault - a significant shift of focus that doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone. Certainly Meursault is hardly an outsider, as the translated title claims. His only fault is a certain impassivity - the word is repeated at key moments - it is really his impassivity that condemns him. But why has he become emotionally impotent? Consider that Meursault is compelled back along the beach towards the Arab accompanied by melodramatic dazzling sunlight and dizziness. That the murdered man is an Arab only aligns this scene with a certain age-old North African cliché that Wilde, Gide and Bowles knew all about. In any case we can't assume it is meaningless. The dizziness is his disorienting attraction to the Arab that drives him to distraction. The five shots could stand for a different kind of shot - consider that we only have Meursault's word for what happened, and evidently whatever did happen cannot speak its name (another age-old cliché). Writ larger, the murder itself is a metaphor for his visceral rejection of a certain kind of intolerable desire.

This is much more interesting than mere antisocial nihilism - not just an errant frame of mind but a potentially life-blocking quasi-existential condition. If Camus was in the closet, his anguish must have been deep. Of course, there's no evidence at all that he was, and plenty that he wasn't, but I will be scrutinising his work closely in future in the light of these circumstantial indicators, plus the rather salient fact that Visconti was attracted to the story.

This has the same actors as Uzak, playing very similar characters. It also has the Ceylan's parents in leading roles - playing a film director's parents. It's fairly self-indulgent - there can be no doubt that Ceylan only knows one thing, and that he is filming it here - but that's precisely the reason to come to Ceylan: to get away from the commercial stuff, to get some glimpses of ordinary people more or less struggling with their lives.

This film has few pretensions, only aiming to show us various people from small-town Turkey, each with their own petty preoccupations. It takes its time, but when it's hot and the sun is dappled by leaves against the wall, why rush? These things are worth capturing for their own sake, because times and places change, people die and disappear - and the world is fascinating despite our weariness. The message is implicit in the very making of the film, which is a record of the making of a film.

This kind of thoughtful, gently sentimental film-making surely owes a lot to Kiarostami and the Iranians. Ceylan is halfway between that and Tarkovsky, just as he is geographically. Clouds of May is not something you need to see - Uzak was a better distillation of what he has to offer in terms of original cinema - but it leaves an impression of things you feel you ought to have more time for, and which are perhaps among the most important things.

Ray is the western face of Indian film-making. He also has a personal talent that is reminiscent of David Lean - intelligent, sophisticated, impeccable - that shows you exactly the right things, exactly what you felt you wanted to see. The story is of a taxi driver who sets himself up in a village with the help of a drug baron. Moral anguish ensues.

It's a long film and gives itself plenty of time to tackle a host of ethnic, social and personal issues: love, envy, pride, impetuosity, lust, hope, despair, corruption - too many to heap onto one man really - and we get a bit tired of 'Singhji' after an hour or so. It's odd because he is bad-tempered for a lead character whereas the 'bad guy', the corrupt businessman, is extremely good natured and likable.

The theme is the struggle to get ahead, embodied in the taxi driver's efforts to get past the cars ahead of him, or beat a train to its destination. The scenes on the dusty roads are among the most interesting as villagers and cows hurl themselves out of his way. Any intelligent film automatically contains humour, but the little chap playing the mechanic - familiar from other Ray films - is there for good measure.

Everything is in conflict here: caste against caste, boss against employee, business against business, woman against man - it's a tough old world. Ray put famed Bollywood goddess Waheeda Rehman among the low-life and the effect is startling. She takes a long time to make an appearance, but towards the end she spices up the film like a hot curry and it's worth the wait because you can't take your eyes off her.

Something of an Indian classic.

Stiff, humourless fantasy in which a chap gets sucked into a surreal nightmare after meeting a woman in a nightclub and finding her dead on the road shortly after. You can sense the writer-director desperately trying to strip away the ordinary meaning of things, only to inadvertently reinforce them by means of allusion and connotation, of which the film is largely comprised, as there's little original here. Much of it seems to be a nod to Melville, with our despondent hero being some kind of secret agent in a raincoat.

It's a game that feels as though it's being made up as it goes along - the girl's a ghost, no she isn't, it was all a dream, no it wasn't - the only interesting thing is the auteur's ulterior motive in making the film. Clearly you can't trust reality, or your idea of it - the ultimate paranoia. If that's it, it's simplistic, and unfortunately it's none too amusing or entertaining, apart from the chick on the bike. Surrealism being some decades past its sell-by date at this point, the sense is of Robbe-Grillet having his finger on the pulse of a cadaver.

Bette Davis is trouble looking for a target. A Richmond girl bored with her declining family, running off with her sister's husband is only the beginning as she leaves a generally destructive trail behind her, though it's more recklessness than malice.

As with The Little Foxes, the film links immorality and economics. Davis is aligned more with her shrewd businessman uncle - and a pretty lewd relationship that is - than with her own father, whose escutcheon, at the beginning, we see knocked off their former home. Davis may overdo it a tad with the wide-eyed hysteria but she's given the dramatic leeway - everyone else is rigid - and she's pure entertainment. Good sister Olivia de Havilland has a relatively dull part but makes something quite beautiful out of it.

It's obscure to everyone why the two women have man's names (Stanley and Roy) and it certainly creates an odd effect. Huston's directing is immaculate, craftsmanlike, crisp and disciplined. The music is a also feature. If Davis isn't sashaying to the jukebox and the Victrola, she's being smothered by Max Steiner's symphonic score that has a fateful down-stepping motif like a staircase to hell.

In the best Warners style it takes you by the lapels, slaps you about a bit, and pushes you back into a chair.

Alaskan melodrama in which Richard Burton rises from unemployment to cannery mogul, getting everything he wants through ruthless determination. Carolyn Jones is the other side of the coin, a woman who fails through indetermination to get anything she wants out of life - including Burton.

It's another Edna Ferber novel about industrial pioneers with an underlying environmental message (the devastation of fish stocks). It's unappealing and humourless, with Burton laying it on too thick, and the drama driven by unpleasant people finding excuses to get on each others' nerves.

Then (like Ferber's Giant) it starts to creak across generations with lots of unconvincing aging and new characters appearing late in the film we are surprised to have to care about. Finally, just to ratchet up the excitement, it gets all political.

Watching pack-ice breaking up would be more satisfying.

Modern day adaptation of a section of Proust's magnum opus that is true enough to the book in its theme and events and interestingly has the Marcel character still sunk in an archaic, aristocratic world.

KD Lang lookalike Stanislas Merhar does a good job doing the insulated, emotional (and physical) frailty, trapped in an adolescent infatuation of towering poetic naivety, all the while consumed with jealousy by the suspicion that his live-in girlfriend is an active lesbian behind his back.

It's slow. There's a lot of prowling around his creaking Paris apartment, lots of talking in cars - we seem to be taking entire journeys in real time. Akerman gave herself an easy directing job. The use of classical music is lazy - Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata is suitably Proustian, but Rachmaninov's Isle of the Dead is absurdly melodramatic, especially when played incongruously, Godard-fashion, over serene images.

Those familiar with the writer and director can easily pull back the gauze to reveal the real issues - an inverted couple struggling to maintain a hetero relationship - but that is so superficial it hardly seems worth special effort and the film works better with the ambiguity in place (as intended), with the implication that naivety (misunderstanding, confusion) is at the root of jealous passion. The Marcel character is so naïve that in the sex scenes he doesn't even know that he is supposed to put it in - doing the movements without getting undressed (he's in bed in his overcoat in one scene). That was strangely tragic, and although it may have been a stylisation to symbolise their failure to connect, it was easier to take it literally.

With liberties like that though, and done so earnestly, it's craves some indulgence. The worst problem is that the girl is comatose and unattractive, showing nothing of Albertine's sprightliness and guile that gave that character her painful duplicity. The ending too is a disappointment.

The paranoia of the self-perceiving mind was the basis of a kind of literary movement in France for a while. An amalgam of surrealism, popular psychology, and war trauma - Robbe-Grillet was one of its notables. Here, Jean-Louis Trintignant plays a kind of memory-muse, returning to a village occupied by the Germans after the war, purporting, at first, to be a missing resistance hero, but is rebuffed by the locals and constantly changes his story while making a laconic play for the man's widow, sister and maid.

The Sapphic trio of women are the film's chief feature, the camera picking out hundreds of gorgeous poses as they prowl uncertainly around bare rustic interiors. Trintignant underplays it, playfully, as does the director. It's never solemn, with dazzling washed-out images. A picturesquely shabby Czech village seemed to have been commandeered for the production.

The mutating story of the man and his fabrications, and the meaning behind it - presumably guilt - is less interesting than the creativity in the visuals, which are never less than striking, and in the editing, which is sheer artistic genius.

Distinct from the British New Wave is the 'swinging London film cycle' which really kicked off in 1965 and contains some fine films.

This is a weekend in the lives of a bunch of big-haired Kensington girls, yah, when it was apparently possible to live in Kensington and be penniless. It could easily be the story of the young Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous.

Francesca Annis is the new arrival, quickly getting hit on by Ian McShane. The scenarios are predictable enough: all night parties, stumbling home at dawn, discovering someone is gay, feckless boyfriends, even one of those "there's something I have to tell you, Vic" scenes.

It's basically domestic - with tea-making detail and shouting to the milkman out of the window - but vibrant enough, and with a lot of smart repartee. To add a bit of maturity there's a quaint sub-gangland subplot with Klaus Kinski (sounding like Peter Lorre) as their hard-but-not-all-bad landlord getting his comeuppance.

It's melancholy in places but never dour and it works well as the story of a mildly wild weekend in swinging London - and the sight of Ian McShane's dancing technique may never leave you.

I spent the whole time asking myself whether I was enjoying this. I tried, but I'm still not sure. I did appreciate the film making. The director clearly asked 'what can we do with the camera?' and the answer was 'anything'. There were many beautiful shots that had me hitting the pause button. A lot of it had an experimental feel - but that wasn't the problem. The story, based on an original screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro (perhaps they should have stuck to the original), felt like it was concocted by different people trying to outdo each other with silly ideas (tapeworms, beer-filled glass legs, sleeping in the snow, a character based on Gavrilo Princip - you quickly stopped asking why) - but that wasn't the problem either.

The film might have been a collaboration between David Lynch, Orson Welles, Eisenstein, and the Brothers Quay - each of them disagreeing what the film should be about. It was worth trying. I quickly got used to the extremely smudgy effect - as if the lens had been smothered in vaseline - and I appreciated Isabella Rosselini (looking and sounding like her mother) and the big-eyed Maria de Madeiros.

The backdrop was a music contest between international contestants to find the world's saddest music. The face-off heats was pure Python but it was all kept strangely distant. There were several problems: the emotional drama between the father and the two sons was dreary, as such issues always are. Secondly, it wasn't funny, and that was because it was all art and no emotional intelligence. Thirdly, it said nothing. It was full of ideas, but they were all microscopic, worked out at scene level - or even frame level. The whole thing put together didn't add up to anything. In the end, the images were everything, and that is always going to be disappointing.

Kurosawa is one of my pet dislikes - the samurai stuff leaves me cold, the social dramas seem off the mark, and the crime capers just dreary. Part of the problem is that the man is humourless - I don't think I've seen a funny Kurosawa film, or even a funny moment. Still, here at last is something endurable. I had to overlook quite a lot in order to get to like this film but it was worth shifting aside the garbage to appreciate the gems.

Again, there is no humour here, only a silly story about a rookie cop who has his gun stolen, resulting in a hunt for the lost article whose weary obsessiveness is as horribly monomaniacal as Bicycle Thieves. The cop, Toshiro Mifune (the big guy from the Seven Samurai), has a face like a young Gregory Peck but a personality so melodramatically emotional that we wonder if he should be resting in some kind of institution. The senior cop is - oh Christ - it's Takashi Shimura, the old git from Ikiru. About half an hour in, I'm seriously thinking of giving up. They've gone looking, on a hunch, for a guy in a baseball stadium - they find him among 50,000 people. I'm thinking: I'd much rather watch a version where they don't find him.

None of this bodes well, but then Kurosawa - as if he really believes in this stuff - starts to crank out some pretty impressive scenes. We notice we are constantly peering through things and between things, through window frames into hovels, through smudgy glass doors, rainy windows, gauze curtains skeined with flowers, billows of smoke - all done in the ravishing von Sternberg manner.

We note that, instead of choreography, he places people strategically within a frame, drawing diametric patterns with faces scattered within a room, and lets the compositions -always elegant and effective - relate the meaning. In particular, there are portraits of two women from the sleazy underworld that stand out - he really lavishes attention on them and it does the film the world of good because the cops have long become tiresome.

The weather is close and the tension is building (way too much mopping of the brow from Shimura) - an old trick to build atmosphere, but it does provide the opportunity for several climactic scenes that run concurrently as the storm breaks.

The story is worthless, but watch it for the technique.

The first time I saw this many years ago I wasn't particularly impressed. I couldn't see how it appeared on so many 'best films of all time' lists. I still can't. There's really very little here. An old man has a few wistful memories. Uh huh...and...?

The main problem is that the old man is simply not worthy of interest. He has had a distinguished career as a doctor and is on the way to pick up an honorary degree. Are we supposed to sympathise with such a successful life? And, quite amazingly, his mother is still alive, a sprightly woman in her nineties. Life and death doesn't really come into context until both your parents have died (so I found), so the mere existence of this old woman undermines much of the poignancy the old man is supposed to be feeling. This women is even older - let's hear about her instead.

Then we have the white-flannelled folk in the dacha about whom we learn more than we want to know but not enough to make them interesting. None of it was adding meaning or emotion or even an introspective feeling about life and death.

There isn't even any sense that the old man is going to die any time soon - he looks good for another ten years or so. Nor does he come to any startling Scrooge-like conclusions of his own past. He is supposed to be crabby and antisocial but he doesn't appear that way at all - another thing that undermines the film's own intentions.

And Bergman is guilty of using too-obvious metaphors again: the three young hitchhikers are so clearly intended to represent youthful devil-may-care that they are impossibly idealised and behave like no human beings you will ever come across in your lifetime - no more than cartoons.

At best, it's a decent little chamber piece, but it's intellectually impoverished and misses it's own targets by a mile. I can't see anything great about it. Sorry Ingmar.

Chekhovian drama of simmering but subtle sexual politics as a rural household of ladies post WWI is thrown into emotional turmoil at the reappearance after a number of years of an eligible friend and neighbour. The women, with one exception, are not young but at that touchy, tragic age when they are clinging to the last traces of their good looks. There are five of them, apparently sisters, several with failed marriages, now with nothing to do but laze around their fine country home.

The film works quite well as a study of such women, but it's really about Victor, a man in failing health and with intimations of mortality, who is on a solemn Tolstoyan quest for meaning. His emptiness is clearly linked to failed opportunities with women - they begin to suspect there is a particular reason. Walled in by his own weakness, regret, and resignation, the sudden attentions of all the women only throws him into more confusion. Comprised largely of social visits, there's a nice period atmosphere and the whole thing is understated, sombre and faintly tragic. Quite a fine film.

Delightful lesser-known comedy with Leslie Howard as an accountant trying to save an ailing film studio aided by stand-in girl Joan Blondell. Plenty of in-jokes regarding Hollywood expense accounts, foreign directors, prima donnas and ham actors - with fun poked particularly at Shirley Temple who is mentioned several times by name and impersonated twice, including by Blondell. It all boils down to whether the studio's latest film will be a success, and the previews ain't good. Bogart appears as a producer with a Scottie dog under his arm (to no apparent purpose), playing it almost too forcefully, as if he doesn't know it's a comedy. Howard mainly does double-takes, more or less giving the film to Blondell who takes it and runs off with it, effortlessly cute and smart and charming.