Rent or Buy

With terrestrial television screenings of monochrome movies becoming an increasing rarity, it's vital that UK labels make more prestige pictures and programmers from the past available to rent or buy. Otherwise, this country's already low standards of cine-literacy will decline even further and with them will recede the chances of the British film industry ever establishing itself on a par with its continental competitors. Would-be film-makers might be inspired by the pyrotechnics presented at the local multiplex. But they will only acquire an appreciation of narrative and character development from oldies produced at a time when storytelling mattered more than spectacle.

Thankfully, some distributors have a commitment to classic, cult and curio cinema and here are some of their recent offerings:

JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK (1930)

There are very few obscure Hitchcock pictures. But his 1930 adaptation of Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock is certainly one of the least known. It's good to see its arrival on disc, therefore, to mark the 70th anniversary of its theatrical release.

Set in Dublin during the Irish Civil War and introduced by Orator Barry Fitzgerald, the story centres on Juno Boyle (Sara Allgood) and her wastrel ex-seafaring husband, Jack (Edward Chapman), an unemployed drunkard who is known as the paycock for his habit of strutting around with an undeserved sense of superiority. Their limping son, Johnny (John Laurie), lost an arm while serving with the IRA, but he is troubled much more by the knowledge that he betrayed a comrade during the conflict. His sister, Mary (Kathleen O'Regan), is being pursued by neighbour Jerry Devine (Dave Morris), but her head is turned by solicitor Charles Bentham (John Longden), who informs Captain Jack that he has come into a fortune.

Eager to celebrate his news with bar owner Maisie Madigan (Maire O'Neil) and drinking companion Joxer (Sidney Morgan), Jack invites them to his newly decorated tenement flat to listen to his Victrola gramophone. But, during the course of a momentous evening, the Boyles are shamed by revelations about Johnny's treachery, Bentham's duplicity and Mary's pregnancy.

Although the primitive nature of the sound recording equipment dictated his approach to this celebrated play, Hitchcock found the action stubbornly uncinematic and his uninspired staging of the action leaves it looking a little calcified. Moreover, Hitch and screenwriting wife Alma Reville also missed much of the sly wit that underpinned the ultimately tragic events. Consequently, while this offers a fascinating insight into Hitchcock's limitations as a film-maker, it does a disservice to both O'Casey's text and the Abbey Theatre Players in the cast.

MODERN TIMES (1936)

It's presumed that Charlie Chaplin's key target in Modern Times, his swan song to the silent era, was the impact of the Depression and the dehumanising nature of industry. But it's as easy to see it as an attack on Hollywood's transformation into a film factory, which suppressed individual inspiration in favour of bankable movies for the masses.

Another myth worth dispelling is that it was a political statement reflecting Chaplin's radical views. This notion has arisen from references to such Soviet classics as Pudovkin's Mother (the scene in which Charlie picks up the red flag and finds himself at the head of a workers' demonstration) and the fictitious claims of Kremlin film chief Boris Shumyatsky that he persuaded Chaplin to append an anti-capitalist finale. The film's banning by the Fascists in Germany and Italy, and Chaplin's hounding by the House Un-American Activities Committee further fanned the flames of Communist collusion.

But Modern Times was nothing more than another instance of the Little Tramp taking on the system, as he had done throughout his career. Indeed, it has more in common with the liberal parables that Frank Capra was producing in the same period than with Stalinist agitprop. Equally, the scenes in which Charlie and Conklin get stuck in the machinery are as much a lampoon of Constructivist montage sequences like those in Eisenstein's Old And New than an endorsement of Stalin's Five-Year Plan, which was even more brutally exploitative than any fat cat enterprise in the West.

Chaplin clearly resented the way mechanised society had turned individuals into drones, and vented his disgust in the hilarious episodes with the conveyor belt and the automatic feeding machine. But he was also prepared to accept that labour was a means to an end, hence Charlie's scramble to secure a job at the re-opened factory to help the gamin realise her twee and shamelessly bourgeois dream of a cosy cottage.

This is an ambitious, accomplished and frequently uproarious comedy. The exuberant energy of Charlie's manic bolt-twisting at the factory, his hallucinatory heroics during the prison riot and his blindfold roller-skating balletics were remarkable for a 45 year-old who had been largely inactive for four years. Moreover, they proved that pantomime still had a place - even in an age of wisecracks and screwball.

The film's structure flew in the face of accepted wisdom. There was a narrative thread, but Modern Times was much more a collection of shorts than a linear story. Decades later, the essential message remains relevant. Production lines may not be the tyrannical terrors they once were. However, the unchecked growth of corporate power has resulted in the destruction of communities around the globe, while society continues to indulge its addiction to technology.

STAGE DOOR (1937)

Although Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve (1950) is usually hailed as cinema's bitchiest backstage drama, it can't compete for wisecracking authenticity with Gregory La Cava's bristling adaptation of Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman's hit Broadway play. Having instructed scriptwriters Morrie Ryskind and Anthony Veiller to remove the original's snooty snipes at Hollywood, La Cava incorporated dialogue improvised by the cast during rehearsals, as well as eavesdropped barbs hissed in the wings by the likes of Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers and Lucille Ball as they gave vent to their true feelings about the legitimate theatre and its poor cinematic relation.

The masterstroke, however, was the insertion of the `calla lily' speech from The Lake, the 1933 stage flop that had contributed much to Hepburn's reputation for being both a difficult actress and box-office poison. Not only do they hilariously lampoon the Great White Way literary pretensions, but they also reveal the much-maligned Hepburn as a great sport, who was willing to guy her reputation for the greater good.

Excellent though Hepburn is, however, she is upstaged by the supremely sassy Ginger Rogers, who revels in her sabbatical from the elegant perfectionism of Fred Astaire to reprise the blonde brassiness exhibited in Mervyn LeRoy's Gold Diggers of 1933. She rattles out wounding one-liners as she competes with tarty Gail Patrick for the affections of producer Adolphe Menjou. Yet Rogers also reveals a soft centre in encouraging teenage dance partner Ann Miller and consoling the luckless Andrea Leeds, as she misses out on yet another plum role and returns to the Footlights Club boarding house with a growing sense of desperation that will eventually threaten to overshadow Hepburn's big night.

With Constance Collier and Eve Arden stealing scenes as an ageing star and a sharp-tongued wannabe, this is both a rousing screwball comedy and a compassionate insight into the hardships endured by newly emancipated women during the Depression. Lovingly photographed by Robert de Grasse and directed by La Cava with the trademark pace and panache that should have earned him a place among the great studio craftsmen, this neglected gem was nominated for four Academy Awards (Best Picture, Direction, Adapted Screenplay and Supporting Actress for Leeds) and remains one of the sharpest feminist tracts produced during the studio era.

THE SAINT'S DOUBLE TROUBLE (1940)

Few British actors have been as consistently watchable on screen as George Sanders and there are two of the St Petersburg-born actor for the price of one in this RKO programmer loosely based on a story by Leslie Charteris. In addition to playing Simon Templar, Sanders also essays Boss Duke Piato, a diamond smuggler who frames Templar for the murder of a stone-cutting thief in the Philadelphia museum curated by his former tutor, Horatio Bitts (Thomas W. Ross). Naturally, the discovery at the scene of the crime of a card incriminating Templar, Inspector Bohlen (Donald MacBride) and his visiting ex-cop buddy Henry Fernack (Jonathan Hale) leaps to the inevitable conclusion. But the suave troubleshooter is too smart for his dastardly doppelgänger.

Notwithstanding Sanders's dual role, the chief attraction of this serviceable, but shamelessly contrived thriller is the appearance of Bela Lugosi as the Boss's Cairo contact, who smuggles the gems out of Egypt in a mummy's sarcophagus. Never one to underplay when a little eye-rolling would distract attention from his pronunciation problems, Lugosi is allowed to darkly amusing by director Jack Hively. However, he proves to be as peripheral a character as Helene Whitney, who was supposed to provide a little love interest as Bitts's daughter, Anne.

Sanders would play Templar twice more before switching to the Falcon series. To date, only The Falcon's Brother (1942) - which saw Sanders pass the title role on to his brother, Tom Conway - is available on DVD in this country. It's to be hoped that Odeon release the remaining titles in each series before turning their attention to such former staples of the school holiday TV schedules as Mr Moto, The Whistler, Dr Kildare, Maisie and the inimitable Andy Hardy.

THE SEVENTH VICTIM (1943)

Long before Roman Polanski had Mia Farrow move next door to Satan worshippers in New York's Dakota Building in Rosemary's Baby (1968), Russian-born producer Val Lewton identified Greenwich Village as a hotbed of diabolism in this bleakly atmospheric thriller, which not only anticipates the use of chiaroscuro in film noir, but also the gruesome viscerality of Italian giallo. But, while director Mark Robson makes fine use of Nicholas Musuraca's eerie monochrome imagery, it's the allusions to evil, sexual deviancy, moral corruption and unnatural death in Charles O'Neal and DeWitt Bodeen's screenplay that makes this such an audacious picture for 1943.

On learning that married sister Jean Brooks has gone missing, Kim Hunter leaves her exclusive boarding school and heads to Manhattan to find her. She finds a noose in the room Brooks has been renting from the couple who own a cosy restaurant and accepts the help of failed poet Erford Gage in tracking her down after lawyer brother-in-law Hugh Beaumont and shady private eye Lou Lubin fail to uncover any clues. Eventually, Hunter discovers that psychiatrist Tom Conway is protecting Brooks. But she still has to confound the sinister Mary Newton if she is to prevent Brooks from becoming the seventh suicide to be sacrificed by the demonic sect that the bored Brooks had joined in search of some excitement away from her dull bohemian life.

A master of restraint and suspense, Val Lewton is one of the unsung heroes of Hollywood horror. His films were once staples of late-night television schedules, but the cult can begin all over again if Odeon follow this disconcerting chiller with the remainder of his exceptional RKO output. Saturating the city streets with repressed desire and creeping dread, this low-budget B movie restored the terror to screen horror at a time when Universal was parodying the monsters that had launched its Expressionist cycle in the early sound era. The performances teeter on the edge of excessive, while the plotline is just a touch too busy for its 71-minute running-time. But the current purveyors of torture porn could learn much about scaring an audience from this unnerving exercise in urban myth-making.

THE MASTER RACE (1944)

Herbert Biberman is now best known as one of the Hollywood Ten, who were jailed for refusing to co-operate with Communist witch-hunt launched in the late 1940s by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. It's clear to see where his political sympathies lie in this earnest and well-meaning attempt to alert Allied audiences to the discord that the soon-to-be-defeated Nazis could steak wreak in Europe and beyond. However, what is even more apparent are Biberman's limitations as both propagandist and director, as this is nowhere near as cogent or controlled as his admirable 1954 migrant labour drama, Salt of the Earth.

The basis premise of this post-invasion saga is sound. Recognising that the tide has turned, Wehrmacht colonel George Coulouris disguises himself as a Belgian guerilla fighter, whose family owns the local mill. Aware that Helen Beverly's late husband was a quisling, Coulouris blackmails her into accepting him as her heroic brother-in-law and gainsays the accusations of neighbour Osa Massen that Beverly and her daughter Nancy Gates were collaborators. Moreover, he attempts to blacken Massen's reputation by suggesting that her baby was the result of a love match with a German soldier rather than a rape.

Indeed, by sowing such seeds of dissent, Coulouris is not only able to throw Massen's father and brother (Morris Carnovsky and Lloyd Bridges) off their guard, but he also succeeds in enlisting the help of councillor Paul Guilfoyle, who agrees to blow up the jail holding the German prisoners of war (who could identify Coulouris) in exchange for his support in acquiring the mill for personal profit. Moreover, Coulouris also manages to create rifts between the villagers and the outsiders striving to help them, including American major Stanley Ridges, British captain Gavin Muir and Soviet doctor, Carl Esmond.

Ultimately, Biberman packs the plot with too many peripheral characters, whose concerns and actions merely distract from Coulouris's schemes and Massen's desperate desire to expose him as the war criminal he really is. But this offers fascinating insights into American attitudes to Occupied Europe in the months before D-Day and the extent to which an intellectual artist like Biberman felt he had to over-emphasise the case in order to drive home his message. Played with something akin to zealotry by a decent cast and evocatively photographed by Russell Metty, this is anything but subtle. But, while it was castigated by contemporary critics, it so powerfully achieved its goals that Biberman was prevented from directing again for another decade by the rabidly conservative studio system.

SEALED CARGO (1951)

Edmund Gilligan's novel The Gaunt Woman is the source of this wartime drama, set against the Battle of the Atlantic. Solidly directed by Alfred Werker, it provides a valuable insight into an overlooked aspect of the Second World War. However, the effects aren't up to the quality of those produced by RKO when Vernon Walker was in charge of the SFX unit. Consequently, this works better as an espionage thriller than a maritime adventure.

Trawler skipper Dana Andrews operates out of Gloucester, Massachusetts with a trusted crew. So, when the radio packs up during a voyage to take top secret passenger Carla Balenda to Nova Scotia, Andrews suspects Danish sailor Philip Dorn of sabotaging his vessel. However, Dorn proves useful when the Daniel Webster comes across a stricken square rigger, The Gaunt Woman, which captain Claude Rains insists was abandoned by his crew before being torpedoed by the Nazis.

An overheard radio conversation between Eric Feldary and a German submarine betrays Rains's treachery, however, and Andrews and Dorn are forced to rescue the abducted Balenda and destroy the Danish ship before it can supply a pair of U-boats bound to attack a vital convoy.

Any film featuring Claude Rains is worth watching and here he expertly reprises the kind of sly villainy he displayed in Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious (1946). However, he is marginalised by the derring-do of Andrews and Dorn, who just do enough to suggest that some resourceful fishermen could confound a crack Nazi crew and destroy two Wolf Pack craft in the process.

THREE CASES OF MURDER (1955)

British cinema has always had a soft spot for the portmanteau and this triptych is as entertaining as it's inconsistent. While never on a par with Ealing's Dead of Night (1945), it feels closer in tone to the Somerset Maugham trilogy of Quartet (1948), Trio (1950) and Encore (1951) than such horror anthologies as Dr Terror's House of Horrors (1965), The House That Dripped Blood (1971) and Tales From the Crypt (1972).

Directed by Wendy Toye from a short story by Roderick Wilkinson, `The Picture' is a disconcerting fantasy, in which museum attendant Hugh Pryse is lured into a painting by the mysterious Alan Badel and pays with his life for both his own curiosity and Badel's macabre quest for artistic perfection. David Eady's `You Killed Elizabeth' is less sinister, as it chronicles the rift that develops between lifelong friends Emrys Jones and John Gregson when Gregson steals Elizabeth Sellars from the lovesick Jones and she promptly turns up dead.

By far the most intriguing segment, however, is `Lord Mountdrago', which was directed by George More O'Ferrall from a Somerset Maugham story about a Welsh politician's revenge after he is humiliated in the House of Commons by the swaggering Foreign Secretary. Ignoring the fact that a peer wouldn't be on the benches opposite a constituency MP, this amusingly deranged anecdote is made all the more engaging by the gloriously bombastic performance of Orson Welles, whose antics during the dreams haunted by the vindictive Alan Badel include attending a dinner party without his trousers and leading his parliamentary colleagues in a rousing chorus of `Daisy, Daisy'.

With Badel proving a malevolent presence in each vignette, this may be a mixed bag. But it's hugely enjoyable and it leaves one wondering why British cinema has allowed its proud omnibus tradition to lapse.

COMPULSION (1959)

In 1956, Meyer Levin wrote a bestseller about the notorious exploits of his former classmates, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the wealthy Jewish law students who killed a 14 year-old boy in order to demonstrate their intellectual superiority. The crime they committed in Chicago in 1924 had already inspired Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948), but director Richard Fleischer and screenwriter Richard Murphy's adaptation of Levin's fictionalisation coincided with Leopold's parole and gave the picture a cachet that its content didn't perhaps deserve.

Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman are suitably arrogant and neurotic as the friends convinced they are Nietzschean supermen capable of committing the perfect crime. But while there are homoerotic undertones to their relationship, Fleischer presents it more as a battle for control between a manipulative introvert and a thrill-seeking extrovert and, thus, robs the action of the sexual tension that informed Tom Kalin's account of the case in Swoon (1992). Indeed, Fleischer and Murphy seem less interested in the murder and fellow student Martin Milner's discovery of the culprits than in establishing the background to the courtroom sequences that will be dominated by Orson Welles, as the defence counsel based on the celebrated lawyer, Clarence Darrow.

As was often the case at this stage of his career, Welles is essentially limited to a cameo. But instead of deploying his customary scene-stealing bombast, he delivers his denunciation of capital punishment with an imposing restraint that only increases its trenchancy. Ultimately, the message seems to matter more than the melodrama, with the result that the subplot involving Diane Varsi as Stockwell's love interest smacks of contrivance. Nevertheless, this is offers fascinating insight into Hollywood's changing attitude to contentious topics as the studio system fell into terminal decline.

HERE WE GO ROUND THE MULBERRY BUSH (1967)

A former editor, Clive Donner produced the music drama Some People (1962), the Pinter adaptation The Caretaker (1963) and the class comedy Nothing But the Best (1964) before he decided to become a chronicler of Swinging Sixties mores with What's New Pussycat? (1965) and this Stevenage-set rite of passage. However, instead of creating a new kind of acerbic and candid social satire, Donner succeeded only in pointing the way to the low-budget sex comedies that sustained the flagging British film industry in the 1970s.

This is a pale imitation in every way. Hunter Davies's source novel was inspired by JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, while Donner's approach to the story of a naive youth striving to lose his virginity owed much to John Schlesinger's Billy Liar (1963), Richard Lester's The Knack…and How To Get It (1965) and Lewis Gilbert's Alfie (1966). The pair manage some astute insights into class, peer pressure and the new permissive society. But they are consistently swamped by the broad humour that forces Barry Evans and his co-stars to adopt a style of elbow-jogging mugging that seems even more out-dated than Donner's persistent use of jump cuts, extended close-ups and pseudo-psychedelic design. The wine-tasting incident involving Denholm Elliott and Maxine Audley is a case in point, although its slapstick eagerness is more appealing than the modish gyrations in the orgy sequence that appeared to be parodying the more graphic romp in Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966).

Lost in self-analysis and daydreams when not pursuing girls like Angela Scoular, Judy Geeson and Adrienne Posta, the debuting Evans (who would achieve small-screen infamy as the tutor in the racially dubious sitcom Mind Your Language) lacks the presence of Tom Courtenay, Michael Crawford and Michael Caine. But he has a nervous charm that makes his hapless efforts to impress the elusive Geeson somewhat endearing. However, he's not helped by the quip-laden dialogue or Donner's determined trendiness.

One good thing did come out of the picture, however. Hunter Davies approached Paul McCartney to compose the title track and their meeting led to the commission for the only authorised biography of The Beatles. In the event, Steve Winwood stepped into the musical breach, with The Spencer Davis Group guesting in the church dance scene.

SMALL TIME (1996)

Shane Meadows is a fine film-maker and his splendid debut featurette perfectly showcases the offbeat observation of the everyday and delight in mundane detail that make his work so distinctive and appealing. Set on Nottingham's Sneinton estate, the action centres on a pair of twentysomething no marks and their relationships with their girlfriends and fellow members in a gang hamstrung by its incompetence and lack of ambition.

Meadows is the leader of the pack and fancies himself as something of a criminal mastermind. However, the theft of some dog food and a raid on a car boot sale hardly put him in the Capone bracket and while the impressionable Jimmy Hynd and Leon Lammond are content to follow his often confused orders, childhood pal Mat Hand is beginning to lose faith - especially as the mother of his child, Gena Kawecka, is sick of hearing Meadows beating up her friend Dena Smiles in their adjoining council house.

Culiminating in an botched assault on a massage parlour, this is an often hilarious low-life comedy. But, for all the coarse wit of the crackling dialogue and bullish slapstick of the inept villainy, this is also a perceptive study of the ignorance and inertia that prevents so many working-class lads from realising, let alone fulfilling their potential. Moreover, Meadows also captures the hopelessness that drives these outsiders to drink and the violence that their excesses engenders. Reeking of cheap booze and sour naturalism, this epitomises the kind of unflinching, but self-deprecating social realism that Britain does better than anybody else.

THE BROTHERS BLOOM (2008)

Having attempted to rework the shamus move in Brick (2005), director Rian Johnson turns his attention to the caper picture in this brisk, but unremittingly glib tale of conning siblings and their very different ambitions. Veering between the verbal wit of Preston Sturges, the Goonish knockabout of Richard Lester and the smart alecy cinematicism of Wes Anderson and David O. Russell, Johnson proves himself to be a magpie of impeccable taste. But, for all the willingness of a sporting cast and the proficiency of cinematographer Steve Yedlin and production designer Jim Clay, this overly familiar premise soon succumbs to smugness and self-indulgence and all-too-rapidly outstays its welcome.

Tutored in the dark arts of scamming by Maximilian Schell, Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody have become consummate crooks. But, while Ruffalo delights in dreaming up ever-more intricate hustles, Brody has grown tired of assuming roles and working out the angles. Thus, he announces that their tilt at New Jersey heiress Rachel Weisz will be his last dupe. However, his priorities change when he falls for the guileless target, who blossoms as the brothers lavish attention upon her.

Too preoccupied with quirkiness and ingenuity to let his stars interact, Johnson has produced a pastiche that lacks the wit, charm and control of the sources to which it seeks to pay homage. Consequently, this feels more like an extemporised shaggy dog story rather than a carefully scripted scenario and this uncertainty of direction and tone prevents Johnson from pulling off the would-be poignant finale. Hurtling dizzyingly between Eastern European locations, this clearly wants to be something that John Huston or David Mamet might have concocted. But it turns out to be a misguided indie variation on Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988).

TRASH HUMPERS (2009)

Evidently designed to defy explanation, Harmony Korine's non-movie has been shot on low-grade videotape to capture the bizarre antics of a trio of miscreants in old-age make-up. Without once making the slightest sense, it is a self-indulgent muddle of sub-standard surrealism and contrived provocation. Yet, not only does it occasionally shock and amuse, but this resolutely non-linear farrago also contains the odd mock-realist image of unexpected poignancy.

Opening with nocturnal shots of Rachel Korine, Brian Kotzur and Travis Nicholson simulating sexual acts with wheelie bins, tree branches and anything else then can frot against, the action follows their perambulations around the seedier parts of Nashville, Tennessee. Having encouraged a podgy schoolboy to beat a doll's skull with a hammer, they seek out a friend who delivers a treatise on the advantages of being without a head. Next, they souse a mess of pancakes in washing-up liquid and force feed them to two blokes joined at the head by a padded pantyhose, who proceed to pay for their supper by giving a sock puppet play about Siamese twins.

Following a spanking encounter with three voluptuous prostitutes (one of whom winds up singing `Silent Night'), the unholy three listen to a beer-bellied bigot recall being trapped in a room with a black man. His tale is topped, however, by a white-bearded fellow in a French maid's uniform, who declaims a disquisition about living in squalor as the trio lets off firecrackers. Having smashed in his head and left him lying in a pool of blood, they then recline on a porch, as a man in a neck brace cracks resoundingly unfunny homophobic jokes. Going inside, they engage in a kinky suffocation game, as an unkempt chap plays electric guitar.

Meanwhile, Harmony Korine, who has been periodically popping in and out of view, drives through the streets and claims he can hear people's pain. However, he decries their insistence on settling for stupid conformity and proceeds to film the threesome dragging dolls across some wasteland behind their bicycles, before closing on a close-up of Rachel cuddling a baby under a street light and the `Three Little Devils' ditty that has been the theme for their mischief suddenly becomes a lullaby.

Wildly esoteric and woefully short on genuinely transgressive wit, this is guaranteed to polarise opinion. Variously recalling Lars von Trier in The Idiots (1998) and TV shows like Jackass, Bo' Selecta, Little Britain and Family Guy, it never remotely approaches the scabrous satire achieved by René Clair and his confrères in Entr'acte (1924), let alone Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí in Un Chien andalou (1928) and L'Age d'or (1930). Yet there is more than a hint of mockery at consumerism and bourgeois morality and even if Korine fails to convince that there is a rebellious regressive child in all of us, he still succeeds in pulling off the supreme Dadaist ruse of forcing the viewer to search for meaning in situations that may very well contain none at all.