Rent or Buy

The action opens with actress Isa Miranda about to go under anaesthetic after a failed suicide attempt and her life literally flashes before her eyes as she succumbs to sleep. Producer Mario Ferrari is less concerned with her fate than the prospect that his investment in her comeback picture will have been wasted. But such indifference sums up Miranda's existence from the moment she was expelled from her exclusive boarding school following an affair with a married music teacher.

Virtually imprisoned by strict soldier father Lamberto Picasso, Miranda is only allowed into society in the company of her envious sister, Nelly Corradi. However, at a dance thrown by Milanese banker Memo Benassi, Miranda attracts the attention of his frivolous son, Friedrich Benfer, who is forbidden from associating with such a woman of low repute by his disabled mother, Tatyana Pavlova.

Naturally, Pavlova finds herself in Miranda's care after Benfer flees to Rome and Benassi develops an infatuation that will not only ruin his reputation, but will also result in him being widowed. Yet, even after he has served a prison sentence for his indiscretions, Benassi is unable to stay away from Miranda and he follows her to Paris, where she has become a film star.

Prevented from attending the premiere of her latest triumph, Benassi is mown down by a speeding car. But, rather than spurn Miranda for bringing such misfortune upon his family, Benfer (who is now married to Corradi) renews his acquaintance and she feels, for the first time, that happiness is genuinely within her grasp.

Related in such broad outline, this may not sound like the stuff of genius. But Ophüls's tells his tale with such fluent economy that this ranks alongside his other accounts of doomed romanticism, Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948), Madame De... (1953) and Lola Montès (1955). He's certainly indebted to Isa Miranda for a performance of radiant vulnerability and to Daniele Amfitheatrof (under the pseudonym Daniel Dax) for a rich score that includes the La Scala opera that almost becomes the soundtrack to Miranda's life. But Ophüls's chief collaborations on this remarkable feature were with cinematographer Ubaldo Arata and editor Ferdinando Maria Poggioli.

Arata's camerawork is exceptional for a film made just four years after the advent of sound had supposedly condemned the camera to confinement within an ice-box designed to prevent the primitive microphones from picking up the whirr of its motor. The elegance of the tracking shots are a clear foretaste of the sinuous fluidity that would become Ophüls's trademark. However, Arata also attempts 360° pans that enable Ophüls to achieve the long takes that exploit every inch of Giuseppe Capponi's meticulously designed mise-en-scène (complete with an ominous staircase that is the scene of several traumatic incidents). Poggioli's editing is equally ingenious, as he dissolves through shot-reverse-shot sequences and cross fades through three superimposed images.

Some have criticised the screenplay for a lack of linear logic. But, in adapting Salvatore Gotta's novel, Ophüls and co-scenarists Curt Alexander and Hans Wilhelm recognise that, given her circumstances, Miranda's train of thought will be anything but coherent and they exploit the erratic nature of her recollections to reinforce the idea that this is a woman with no control whatsoever over any aspect of her destiny. Moreover, this imposition of dream logic allowed the writers to experiment with flashbacks, which were still a novel technique in the mid-1930s and had only made a significant impact in Hollywood the previous year in Preston Sturges's script for William K. Howard's The Power and the Glory.

Ophüls would end up a refugee in California, as would Fritz Lang, whose 1927 masterwork, Metropolis, is also released on a Eureka disc this month. Benefiting from extensive restoration, this is the longest version of the film that has been available since Lang's original cut and it does much to bolster often questioned claims that this was one of the most accomplished, as well as the most ambitious pictures of the silent era.

`I have recently seen the silliest film,' wrote H.G. Wells in May 1927, on seeing a bowdlerised version of Lang's sci-fi prototype. `I do not believe it would be possible to make one sillier.' The author, whose futuristic tales, `The Sleeper Wakes' and `A Story of Days to Come', had clearly influenced screenwriter, Thea Von Harbou, went on to claim that the film was a concoction of `almost every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in general, served up with a sauce of sentimentality'.

He was not alone in resisting a picture that took 17 months to shoot and strained to breaking point the resources of the famous UFA studios. The German public stayed away in droves, prompting the film to be pulled shortly after its glittering premiere and cut down from 150 to 120 minutes for an unsuccessful summer reissue.

But such tinkering was nothing compared to the savaging it received in the States. Fearing for the picture's box-office prospects, even in its truncated form, Paramount hired dramatist Channing Pollock to completely rework the storyline for US consumption. What emerged was a melodrama about an army of steel workmen whose lack of souls proved their undoing. This version ran a mere 107 minutes, but it still underwhelmed audiences reared on a diet of slapstick, swashbuckling and schmaltz.

Only in the 1980s, after a meticulous reconstruction was undertaken using archive prints, old scripts and production shots, was Metropolis restored to something approximating Lang's original vision. Yet, in the interim, this much maligned movie was seized upon by cinematic grave robbers, who appropriated its futuristic architecture, its Expressionist interiors and its Constructivist underworld for their own, invariably lesser, flicks.

So why did this expensive flop come to exert so much influence and why has it so belatedly earned classic status?

Primarily, it was just too audaciously spectacular to ignore. From the opening cityscape onwards, there was an endless procession of grandiose set-pieces, each of which required countless extras and weeks of exhaustive preparation. For example, a thousand men, culled from the Depression bread queues, had their heads shaved for the Tower of Babel sequence. Many more stripped to the waist, at the height of the Berlin winter, in order to haul rocks into the mouth of Moloch, the city's giant furnace. Others had to swim for their lives as the catacombs were flooded during the industrialist Fredersen's desperate bid to punish his rebellious workforce, while the film's debuting star, Brigitte Helm, had to endure the scorching danger of real fire during the frenzied burning of the treacherous robot, Maria.

Lang always claimed that he had been inspired to make Metropolis after seeing the New York skyline for the first time. However, this was just another of the old fabricator's fancies, as Von Harbou had already completed the script before the couple took their transatlantic cruise. Yet, there's no doubt that the trip galvanised his ambition to produce the greatest film ever made.

Consequently, he demanded first use of Eugen Schüfftan's freshly patented mirror process for combining miniatures and painted artwork with live-action, which he employed on 13 separate scenes. In another, he utilised a primitive back projection system. But he was also dependent on the design genius of Otto Hunte, Erich Kettlehut and Karl Vollbrecht, whose monumental sets not only captured the city's fascistic modernity, but also augmented its forbidding scale.

However, the film's single most memorable image was created by cinematographer Karl Freund's assistant, Gunther Rittau. With its jagged flashes of light and its hovering concentric circles disguising an ingenious slow dissolve, the creation of the robotic Maria proved the template for every Frankensteinian sequence shot in Hollywood over the next decade and beyond.

It was certainly the physical aspects of the film that impressed director-in-waiting, Luis Buñuel. Although he considered the plot `trivial, bombastic and pedantic', he felt the industrial and scientific segments formed a `captivating symphony of movement....From the photographic angle, its emotive force, its unheard of and overwhelming beauty is unequalled.'

Adolf Hitler was also reckoned to be an admirer of the picture, although he would undoubtedly have been at odds with its rather twee political message - `Between the mind and the hands, the heart must meditate.' Indeed, the philosophising throughout has a fortune cookie feel to it, with the screenplay's combination of scripture, Marx, Wells and Verne earning Von Harbou merited criticism for her intellectual shallowness.

Yet it remains a cornerstone of screen science fiction. Metropolis originated the `utopian' sub-genre, which attempted to predict the shape of future civilisations. It defined the character of the mad scientist whose fixation with creating life resulted in an alliance with the forces of darkness. And it reinforced sci-fi's predilection for fantastical machinery and state-of-the-art special effects. It's far from flawless, but it did establish one of sci-fi's key principals - the need to take artistic, technical and commercial risks in order to astonish the audience.

As for the reconstruction, this is as close as we're likely to get to Lang's original intentions. The discovery of a negative in Buenos Aires in 2008 has enabled archivists to piece together pristinely restored footage with badly striated snippets that fill in gaps that have previously left the scenario feeling more confusing, fascistic and unintentionally gauche than it actually is.

The relationship between Fredersen (Gustav Fröhlich) and Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) is clarified by the revelations about their mutual love of Freder's mother, Hel (which echoed Lang's liaison with Von Harbou, who was Klein-Rogge's ex-wife), while Freder (Alfred Abel) is made to seem less of a headstrong ninny by his heroic deluge rescue of the mutinying workers' children. His ally Josaphat (Theodor Loos), 11811 doppelgänger (Erwin Biswanger) and Thin Man nemesis (Fritz Rasp) are also more fully rounded in the new version.

It's even possible to get a better understanding of the film's political message, which has long been the subject of conjecture. Von Harbou, who later became a committed Nazi, has Maria longing for a `Mediator' (or `Mittler' in German - sound familiar?), Lang is clearly more interested in telling a modern-day myth than finding dialectical meaning in the deliverance of the oppressed masses or the rise of a Nietzschean superman. Indeed, the invocation of the Joan of Arc story in the robot Maria's burning at the stake suggests this is either a Nibelungen with forbidding skyscrapers and subterranean caverns or an updating of the biblical story of the Whore of Babylon, who is both warned against in the monk's still-missing cathedral sermon and embodied by the rabble-rousing Maria in her highly sensual nightclub dance. Whatever the truth, Metropolis has lost none of its ability to inspire awe and provoke debate.

There is a chasm of difference between the technical quality of Metropolis and Walter Summers's The Battle of Ypres (1925). However, it's impossible to watch this reconstruction of events on the Salient between October 1914 and October 1917 without acknowledging the sincerity of the film-makers and without experiencing a numbing sense of regret that so many had to die so horrifically and so needlessly over a small strip of Belgian territory that became something of a bellwether as to the progress of the Great War.

Heavily reliant on intertitles, this is a fascinating mix of historical overview and celebration of individual acts of courage. The initial action centres on the advance of the Kaiser's army and the march of the British Expeditionary Force to counter it. Intriguing footage shows cavalry units preparing for one of their last frontline encounters and troops marching past the Cloth Hall that would soon be reduced to a shell by mortar fire.

The First Battle of Ypres commenced on 19 October and Summers stages scenes of the night fighting that caused Gheluvelt to be lost. He also refers to the senseless slaughter of the Royal Scots Fusiliers (who were mown down after refusing to leave their trench without orders) and the heroism of Brigadier General Charles FitzClarence - a Victoria Cross holder who perished leading a counter-attack by the 2nd Worcestershires - and Padre EJ Kennedy, who went unrewarded for galloping across the infamous Hill 60 to deliver a crucial message to prevent a convoy of ambulances from driving into danger.

The rearguard mounted by a Queen's College theology student, Second Lieutenant Geoffrey Woolley, is also cited, as he became the first Territorial officer to earn the Victoria Cross in holding Hill 60 against repeated attacks in April 1915. Woolley went on to become the chaplain at Harrow School. But fellow VC, Lance Corporal Fred Fisher, lost his life defending a Canadian weapons cache shortly afterwards.

This roll of honour approach continues with mentions to Captain Francis Scrimger of the Canadian Medical Service (who carried a wounded man on his back across No Man's Land), Private John Lynn (who was gassed at his machine-gun post) and Flight Sub-Lieutenant RA Warneford (who destroyed a Zeppelin). But Summers also stages combat sequences to emphasise the dangers posed by snipers and grenades, the exposure of going over the top and the relentlessness of the artillery peppering men staggering valiantly across terrain pocked with craters and awash with mud.

However, he also digresses to show the lighter side of life on the Western Front as soldiers relax at Poperinghe, the so-called `Hostess of the Salient'. In addition to offering such amenities as shops, a barber and a cinema, the town was also the site of Toc H, a saloon bar-cum-gentleman's club, where chaps could let off steam over a pint, a piano and a pillow fight. They could also read mail from Blighty and Summers shows how much a letter from home could mean to men desperate to escape the grim reality of their surroundings for just a few hand-scribbled lines.

This coda is merely the prelude, however, to a concluding segment on the pitiless Battle of Passchendaele, which erupted at 3am on 7 June 1917 and continued in torrential rain that turned already risky sorties into suicide missions. Summers pays tribute to Lance Sergeant John Moyney and Private Thomas Woodcock of the Irish Guards, who each received the Cross of Valour for holding the line for 96 hours at Broenbeek. He also commemorates the resilience of three VC winners: South African-born, Ireland-raised Captain Clement Robertson, Australian Lance Corporal Walter Peeler and Canadian Lieutenant Robert Shankland, who respectively led a tank assault on foot, single-handedly took a German pill-box and left Passchendaele Ridge to fetch reinforcements and then held Bellevue Spur with his platoon.

Yet Summers never glorifies warfare or diminishes its horrors. Admittedly, some of the re-enactments lack the pyrotechnic heft to do more than hint at the ferocity of the conflict. But contemporary audiences were suitably impressed, albeit never in the same numbers that had greeted producer Walter F. Jury's The Battle of the Somme (1916) and The Battle of the Ancre and the Advance of the Tanks (1917), which combined mock and actual footage filmed by Geoffrey Malins and John McDowell. Seen today, Ypres is short on cinematic sophistication. But, sometimes, compelling content simply has to take precedence.

Finally, Italian director Sergio Sollima also considers the qualities that make a good leader, while questioning popular conceptions of the Old West in Faccia a Faccia/Face to Face (1967). Coming between La Resa dei Conti/The Big Gundown (1966) and Corri, Uomo, Corri/Run Man Run (1968), this spaghetti western may not have done as much for Sollima's career as the `Dollars' trilogy did for Sergio Leone's. But it helped ease his transition from making rather kitschy sword-and-sandal adventures to tough urban crime thrillers and it's to be hoped that Faccia's companion pictures will find their way to disc in this country soon.

While convalescing in Texas, New England academic Gian Maria Volonté is outraged by the treatment being meted out to shackled bandit Tomas Milian by a callous sheriff and his deputies. However, in attempting to give the wounded Milian succour, Volonté succeeds solely in becoming his hostage and only escapes execution by promising to nurse his captor back to health.

Alone in the wilderness, the pair develop an uneasy relationship, with Milian seeming to respond positively to the liberal professor's theories on violence and crime. However, when Milian hatches a plan to reform his gang, Volonté is so seduced by thrill of illegality that he begins to challenge Milian's authority after the band settles a dispute between corrupt bigwigs in Purgatory City and resorts to its old ways by robbing a mail coach. But, just as Volonté begins to acquire a taste for criminality after killing a man to save his new friend during a shootout, Milian decides to lay low in the backwater of Puerta de Fuego after new recruit William Berger (who is really an undercover Pinkerton agent) guns down lawman Federico Boido on the well-heeled Angel del Pozo's property.

This moment of weakness allows Volonté the chance to seize control. But the bank robbery he devises in a nearby town goes horribly wrong and he returns alone to the isolated settlement that the authorities have long needed a pretext to raid, as it's home to numerous reformed outlaws who have previously evaded capture.

It's fascinating to witness Volonté's physical and psychological transformation in this under-rated genre picture. Initially feeble and pompous, he objects vehemently when Milian's men read aloud the letters from which they are stealing after the attack on the mail coach and then uses cutting logic to chastise Southern aristocrat Lidia Alfonsi after she casually refers to a runaway `slave'. Yet, by the time he leads the bank raid, Volonté has assumed the demeanour of a desperado and he thinks nothing of jeopardising the idyllic community that has given him sanctuary.

Becoming increasingly vigilant and thoughtful, where he would once blunder in all guns blazing, Milian's own transformation is equally accomplished, as is William Berger's duplicitous turn as the detective, who murders a man in cold blood to earn Milian's trust and then exploits his growing reluctance to use a six-shooter in order to arrest him. Carol André also shows well as the cowgirl besotted with Milian, as does Jolanda Modio, whose naked river bath signals Volonté's shocking shift from city slicker to frontier brute.

But Sollima deserves much of the credit for persuading these excitable actors to tone down their performances and their pitch is as perfect as Ennio Morricone's score, editor Eugenio Alabiso's pacing and cinematographer Rafael Pacheco's camera moves. Italian genre cinema is too often dismissed for its excesses, but this is worthy of comparison with anything produced in the 1950s by Anthony Mann or Budd Boetticher.