Parky at the Pictures (DVD 19/1/2012)

The highlight has to be the Charlie Chan collections released by Odeon, which contain between them 23 cases for Earl Derr Biggers's Honolulu sleuth to solve. The first dozen featured Warner Oland, while Sidney Toler headlined the second eleven. Neither actor was of Oriental origin and some will be uncomfortable watching a Swede and a Missourian playing a stereotypically inscrutable character whose fractured English is peppered with quotations from Confucius. But the mysteries produced by 20th Century-Fox are classic examples of the B movies that Hollywood churned out during the studio era to fill the lower half of double bills. Pacy, complex and packed with likely suspects, the stories are full of twists and surprises, not least in the casting of some famous faces in guest roles. Moreover, they are wittily scripted and hugely entertaining.

Charlie Chan first appeared on screen in the 1925 silent, The House Without a Key, and four of the subsequent 47 features are supposedly `lost forever'. Charlie Chan Carries On (1931), Charlie Chan's Chance (1932), Charlie Chan's Greatest Case (1933) and Charlie Chan's Courage all starred Oland, whose surviving 12 outings did as much as the much-maligned Shirley Temple vehicles to keep Fox solvent during the Depression. He died in 1938, leaving Charlie Chan at the Ringside unfinished. But rather than hand it over to Toler, the front office decided to reshoot the entire picture as Mr Moto's Gamble (1938), the third entry in a new franchise, in which Hungarian Peter Lorre essayed the eponymous Japanese shamus.

The first extant Oland offering is The Black Camel (1931), which centres on the murder of movie star Dorothy Revier after a visit to celebrated psychic Bela Lugosi. However, director Hamilton MacFadden presents a few amusing insights into a domestic bliss based around Chan's numerous children and also includes plenty of atmospheric shots of the Hawaiian locale. By contrast, series regular Eugene Forde contented himself with the odd landmark and rustic view in Charlie Chan in London (1934), which sees Oland dodging poison darts and being baffled by cryptic notes in getting to the bottom of a classic country house incident that numbers a young Ray Milland among the possible culprits.

The scene shifted across the Channel for Lewis Seiler's Charlie Chan in Paris (1935), which marked the introduction of Keye Luke as Oland's Number One Son, Lee. However, the search for a triumvirate of counterfeiters operating in the city sewers was somewhat upstaged by a customarily quirky turn as a sketch artist by Erik Rhodes, who was about to become a fixture of the Astaire-Rogers stock company at RKO. Rita Hayworth and the peerless Stepin Fetchit (in another of the scaredy cat roles that gave him limited scope to display his considerable talent) similarly provide a distraction in Louis King's Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935), which opens with the discovery of the corpse of an eminent archaeologist in a sarcophagus once occupied by an ancient priest.

James Tinling placed greater emphasis on fisticuffs than deduction in Charlie Chan in Shanghai (1935), as the Chinese government summoning Oland to smash a pitiless opium ring. But this moderate entry was soon overshadowed by perhaps the best in the entire series, Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936), in which Boris Karloff excels as the amnesiac tenor who escapes from an asylum after being accused of killing his wife and her lover. William Demarest also scores as the wisecracking cop one clue behind Oland and Luke, while Gershwin confidante Oscar Levant rises to the challenge of providing the musical interludes.

Sadly, the quality dipped again in Gordon Wiles's Charlie Chan's Secret (1936), even though it gets off to a tantalising start with heir Jerry Miley surviving the sinking of his ship only to be bumped off for his millions soon afterwards. Things improved later the same year, however, in Charlie Chan at the Circus, which sees Oland trying to keep his 12 offspring amused while helping owner Francis Ford discover the source of the threatening letters he has been receiving. Then, a couple of months later, Bruce Humberstone returned further to raise the tone in Charlie Chan at the Race Track, as Oland and Luke confront the gambling cartel who murdered owner George Irving after he stumbled onto their scheme when his horse under-performs in the Melbourne Sweepstakes.

Humberstone also wielded the megaphone on Charlie Chan at the Olympics (1937), which saw Layne Tom, Jr. ably assist his father after Luke is kidnapped by spies while competing as a swimmer at the Berlin Games. Neatly integrating newsreel footage of the previous year's contentious Olympiad, this sprightly adventure also features cowboy star Allan `Rocky' Lane in a supporting role alongside legendary director Cecil B. De Mille's adopted daughter, Katherine. Few will struggle to identify the ne'er-do-wells, but the solution is less readily apparent Eugene Forde's Charlie Chan on Broadway, as Inspector Harold Huber teams with the Chans to determine whether which (if any) of character acting stalwarts J. Edward Bromberg, Douglas Fowley, Donald Woods or Leon Ames was responsible for the death of blackmailing New York chanteuse Louise Henry.

However, Oland's tenure came to an end later in 1937 with Forde's Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo, in which Huber plays a French inspector who gets Luke off an erroneous murder charge and then aids the investigation into tycoon Sidney Blackmer's missing bonds and the deaths of a casino messenger and a mobster. Unfortunately, while he gave the impression of being sagacious and quietly spoken as Chan, Oland was an alcoholic off screen and his behaviour became increasingly erratic following the breakdown of his marriage to Edith Shearn and he died in a Stockholm hospital after the lifting of a travel ban that had been imposed during his acrimonious divorce proceedings.

Fox decided to continue with the series after Oland's death and allowed Sidney Toler to inject a touch more humour into the character. Whereas his predecessor had worn no make-up, as he had inherited something of his Russo-Mongolian grandmother's facial features, Toler was primarily of Scottish descent and had to have his eyebrows shaped to make him look sufficiently Asiatic. Yet the same studio suits who took this decision saw no irony in casting Victor Sen Yung as Number Two Son, Jimmy Chan, as his new sidekick.

The dependable Humberstone took the reins for Charlie Chan in Honolulu (1938), which saw Toler solve a murder on board a docked freighter while awaiting the birth of his first grandchild. With a lion on the loose and Yung and Layne Tom, Jr. (as Number Five Son, Tommy) proving as much a hindrance as a help, this is played more for laughs than thrills and the promising start for the new team continued in Norman Foster's Charlie Chan in Reno (1939), as Toler and Yung head for the American divorce capital to help Pauline Moore demonstrate she had nothing to do with the death of the woman her soon-to-be ex-husband planned to marry.

A few months later, Foster was also at the helm for Charlie Chan at Treasure Island, which boasted a splendid guest turn by Cesar Romero as the bogus medium who tops Toler's list of suspects after he refuses to accept that writer friend Louis Jean Heydt committed suicide. Even more intriguingly, Toler travels to Paris for Herbert I. Leeds's Charlie Chan in City of Darkness (1939) to pair up with yet another of Harold Huber's inspectors to investigate the killing of a detested industrialist who may well have been selling munitions to the enemy in the wake of the Munich Pact.

If Leeds didn't fully exploit his tense geopolitical setting, Norman Foster did a much better job in Charlie Chan in Panama (1940), which set Toler the task of tracking down some Nazi saboteurs and a government mole before they could attack the US fleet. The excellent Lionel Atwill was joined in the supporting cast by Jean Rogers, Mary Nash and Jack `Lash' LaRue and he resurfaced later the same year in Eugene Forde's Charlie Chan's Murder Cruise, a remake of the lost Charlie Chan Carries On that sees Toler board a liner bound for California try to identify the strangler whose numerous victims include a Scotland Yard detective.

Ships had become something of a series staple, so regular writer John Larkin sought out a more atmospheric setting for Lynn Shores's Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum (1940) and art directors Richard Day and Lewis H. Creber expertly concocted a succession of creepy backdrops for escaped gangster Marc Lawrence to exact his revenge on Toler with the assistance of deranged plastic surgeon C. Henry Gordon. However, with war now raging in Europe, Fox decided to follow the example of the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes franchise in focusing the sleuth's powers on the Axis. Thus, in Harry Lachman's Murder Over New York (1940), Toler is coaxed away from a police conference to be confronted with agents bent on sabotaging a top secret bomber after another Scotland Yard buddy bites the dust.

Despite the resort to yet another shipboard setting, Lachman sustains the suspense to similarly good effect in Dead Men Tell (1941) after Ethel Griffies is murdered before she can join a cruise and Toler realises that his fellow passengers are seeking the missing pieces of a map that will lead to a $60 million stash of pirate booty. A matter of months later, Toler was on the move again in the same director's Charlie Chan in Rio, as he unites with Brazilian inspector Harold Huber to arrest singer Jacqueline Dalya for a murder she committed in Hawaii. However, she is found stabbed after a visit to a psychic and Toler and Yung have to uncover the significance of a broken brooch stolen from the murder scene.

There's no question that this was one of the more lacklustre entries, but Lachman roused himself for a last hurrah with Castle in the Desert (1942), as Toler is called to a remote Mojave mansion by Douglass Dumbrille and his Borgia-descended wife Lenita Lane to reveal who has been poisoning his guests. Closer in tone to the classic English country house scenario and again splendidly designed by Day and Creber, this was one of the best Fox Chans. But the war against Japan seemed to persuade the front office to retire both of its Oriental detectives and the next time Toler had his eyebrows tweaked was in Monogram's Charlie Chan in the Secret Service (1944), which can be found alongside The Chinese Cat, Meeting at Midnight (aka Black Magic), The Chinese Cat (all 1944), The Jade Mask, The Scarlet Clue and The Shanghai Cobra (all 1945) in the three-disc Chanthology collection. However, fans will have to search US websites for Dark Alibi, Shadows Over Chinatown, Dangerous Money and The Trap and wait patiently for someone to release the 1945 outing, The Red Dragon, which is currently only available secondhand on videotape.

Those seeking something more cerebral might seek out the BFI's Classic Kurosawa Collection, a five-disc set that includes two features debuting on DVD in this country.

Having shattered the conventions of narrative linearity with Rashomon (1950), Kurosawa continued his revolt with Ikiru (1952), which divided into three segments to satirise Japanese bureaucracy, chronicle pen-pusher Takashi Shimura's reaction to the fact he has terminal cancer and reveal how he finally becomes the servant of his community after vowing to make the most of his final days. Despite the shifts in tone, Kurosawa sustains his insight into the virtue of a man whose atonement for a wasted life is symbolised by a reprise of the melancholic ditty he had once sung in drunken despair. There are mawkish lapses, but this is a masterpiece of humanist cinema and it's unfortunate that Kurosawa never achieved such intimacy again after he became obsessed with the jidai-geki style and knowing adaptations of literary classics.

However, he did produce the occasional acute commentary on the contemporary scene, with I Live in Fear (1955) reflecting on the reality of living under the shadow of the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet, while Kurosawa demonstrates typical technical mastery in switching between sinuous long takes and abrasive montage sequences, his decision to play what was originally conceived as a satire as a straight drama somewhat dissipates its efficacy. Toshiro Mifune conveys a harrowing sense of paranoia in what is essentially a pre-apoocalyptic revision of Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953), as his ageing industrialist tries to persuade his ungrateful family to relocate to a Brazilian hideaway to be spared the conflagration he is convinced is imminent. However, in destroying the foundry on which his wealth depends, Mifune comes to seem more like a delusional crank than a guardian angel and, for all its earnest humanism, this never achieves the tragic tone to which it aspires.

Madness again proves key to the action as, two years later, Kurosawa and Mifune returned to the 19th-century Edo Period to take a tilt at The Lower Depths, the Maxim Gorky play that had already been filmed as Les Bas-Fonds by Jean Renoir in 1937. Set in a tenement filled with eccentrics and ne'er-do-wells, the story revolves around the relationship between Mifune's thief and his cynical landlady Isuzu Yamada and her chaste younger sister, Kyoko Kagawa. Realising that her lover's eyes are roving, Yamada tries to dupe him into murdering her elderly husband, Ganjiro Nakamura. But his efforts to thwart the increasingly insane Yamada's plans backfire and his fate depends on Bokuzen Hidari, a genial pilgrim who is suspiciously protective of his past.

Audiences were mostly willing to accept this bleak allegorical indictment of their booming society. However, they were less forgiving of the epic 1965 medical saga, Red Beard, whose poor critical and commercial reception prompted Kurosawa to spend two fruitless years under contract to producer Joseph E. Levine in Hollywood. In many ways, this is a superior period soap opera set in a clinic for the impoverished. But Kurosawa shifts focus between the staff and their patients with measured assurance and uses subtle social asides to leaven the melodrama involving veteran doctor Toshiro Mifune and the newly qualified Yuko Kayama, who comes to see medicine as a vocation rather than an entrée into the realms of the rich and powerful.

Undeniably damaged by his failed efforts to realise his vision of the Pearl Harbor epic Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), Kurosawa returned to directing after a prolonged absence with his first colour film, Dodes'ka-den (1970). Based on a series of short stories by Shugoro Yamamoto, the story of a group of social outcasts eking out a living on a rubbish dump has a Gorkyesque feel to it and again suggests that Kurosawa was only rivalled by Renoir, Ozu and Satyajit Ray for the title of `cinema's greatest humanist'. However, even though this earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film, one suspects the sedate blend of melodrama and fantasy may have worked best in its original 244-minute form, as this would allow the full development of such diverse characters as the mentally challenged boy dreaming he is a tram conductor (Yoshitaka Zushi); the mother who tries in vain to protect him from the neighbourhood bullies (Kin Sugai); the beggar and his son (Noboru Mitani and Hiroyuki Kawase) who live in an abandoned car; the lecherous drunk (Tatsuo Matsumura) who exploits his naive niece (Tomoko Yamakazi); the elderly engraver with a Zen-like sense of wisdom and compassion (Atsushi Watanabe); and the dutiful husbands (Junzaburo Ben and Shinsuke Minami) who dote on their put-upon wives (Kiyoko Tange and Yuko Kusunoki).

Around 100 minutes were excised and the negative was destroyed, so it is unlikely we shall ever witness Kurosawa's intended version. The subsequent distress caused by the bowdlerisation and the negative critical response prompted him to attempt suicide. However, he survived and entered one of the most fruitful periods of his entire career, in which he not only confounded his detractors, but also won a new audience impressed by the influence he had exerted on such Movie Brats as George Lucas.

While Kurosawa has commanded a sizeable following outside the traditional arthouse sphere, Theo Angelopoulos has always been one of the overlooked masters of modern cinema. A former critic in his native Greece, he trained at the famous IDHEC school in Paris, where he was profoundly influenced by the great film anthropologist Jean Rouch. However, his sombre, intellectually rigorous amalgamations of myth and history often adopt a Brechtian approach to narrative structure and the meditative long-take visual style of Michelangelo Antonioni and Miklós Jancsó. But Angelopoulos also attained a distinctive voice that alarmed the Greek authorities and earned him discerning band of admirers that will hopefully expand with the release of Artificial Eye's tripartite collection.

In his debut feature, Reconstruction (1970), Angelopoulos considers the collapse of the traditional rural community and its social and economic consequences. But, while he draws on a true story, Angelopoulos (who also plays a TV reporter) is less interested in the fact that a worker returning from Germany (Mihalis Fotopoulos) is murdered by his wife (Toula Stathopoulou) and her gamekeeper lover (Yannis Totsikas) than in the dereliction of a shared history that is symbolised by the couple turning against each other while under interrogation.

This individual and collective refusal to take responsibility is revisited in Days of '36 (1972), as the assassin of a prominent trade unionist (Kostas Pavlou) takes a conservative MP (Giannis Kandilas) hostage and the government prevaricates over tactics so as not to alienate potential political allies. But this intense denunciation of weak leadership is dwarfed by the epic masterpiece, The Travelling Players (1975), which employs an achronological structure and a bold mix of tableaux, slogans, monologues and songs to emphasise the fragmentation of Greece in the face of such momentous events as the pro-monarchy Metaxas dictatorship, the Nazi occupation, the Civil War and the restoration of democracy.

Comparing this mid-20th-century Greek tragedy with Aeschylus's Oresteia trilogy, this magisterial treatise on collective memory finds echo in The Hunters (1977), which points accusing fingers at those who benefited from the defeat of the Communists in 1949 in forcing the bourgeois conformists who discover the preserved corpse of a frozen partisan to reflect on their deeds over the previous 25 years. Bristling with judicious anger and audacious theatricality, this is challenging, but compelling film-making.

Concluding the `trilogy of history' that began with Days of `36 and The Travelling Players, Alexander the Great (1980) is a calculated dissection of myth that draws on the 1870 Dilessi incident - when some aristocratic British tourists were kidnapped at Marathon by a Greek bandit - to examine the national need to strip the derring-do of the past of its false glory and confront the realities of the present. Gloriously photographed by Giorgis Arvantis, this difficult drama is also a denunciation of foreign interference in Greek affairs and the cult of personality that had undermined the laudable tenets of communalism.

The failure of his peers to heed the lessons of history prompted Angelopoulos to examine situations in which experience, love and faith count for nothing and this `trilogy of silence' contains some of his densest and most personal work, as the subtext in each is his relationship with his estranged father. In Voyage to Cythera (1984), he employs a film-within-a-film structure and casts Giulio Brogi as an alter ego film director to show how Civil War veteran Manos Katrakis returns from three decades in Uzbekistan to become an exile in his own country. And the notion of journeying through familiar terrain that no longer feels like home is further explored in The Beekeeper (1986), another Greek tragedy about the unbearable agony of change in which Marcello Mastroianni's bid to find new purpose in taking up the ancestral pursuit of apiculture clashes with the modernity of rootless hitcher Nadia Mourouzi.

This intrusion of Western ideals is also the theme of Landscape in the Mist (1988), a fairytale with nightmarish elements and moments of unexpected hope, as Tania Palaiologou and her younger brother Michalis Zeke run away from home in search of the father they believe lives in Germany. An odyssey containing more infamous than heroic deeds, this is a sobering study in despair and the failure of authority, which suggests the circularity of events by reintroducing the troupe from The Travelling Players, who are still striving in vain to stage their production of the classical tale of false ambition and betrayal, Golfo the Shepherdess.

A third trilogy opened with The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991), as the fragmentation of Europe following the collapse of the Iron Curtain prompted Angelopoulos to explore the notion of borders and belonging. Marcello Mastroianni again stars, as a reclusive small-hold farmer who bears such a striking resemblance to a disappeared politician that TV reporter Gregory Karr brings the missing man's wife (Jeanne Moreau) to help identify him. However, he succeeds only in intensifying the mystery.

As Europe realigned following the break-up of the Eastern bloc, Angelopoulos retained his status among the last of the great film philosophers and his mastery of composition similarly remained prominent as he melded myth, memory and odyssey in a series of poignant voyages of (re)discovery. In Ulysses' Gaze (1995), returning film-maker Harvey Keitel searches for lost movies by the pioneering Manakia brothers, who recorded a Balkans whose turn-of-the-century transition mirrors that of the post-Communist era. Another traveller reconnects with the past in hoping for a better future in Eternity and a Day (1998), as ailing poet Bruno Ganz communes with dead wife Isabell Renauld while rescuing young Achileas Skevis from a brutal adoption racket.

Finally, the focus falls on a emblematic couple in the first parts of a projected trilogy, which sees Nikos Poursadinis.and Alexandra Aidini run away together in a 1930s take on the legend of Paris and Helen in The Weeping Meadow (2004) and Michel Piccoli and Irène Jacob encourage director son Willem Dafoe to produce a picture about history's impact on the individual in Dust of Time (2008).

The latter is one of Angelopoulos's more exacting pictures, as it shows how events like the death of Stalin, Watergate and the fall of the Berlin Wall impacted upon a couple kept apart by forces they could never hope to control. Indeed, even in making a movie about his parents (Piccoli and Jacob), Dafoe's American-Greek director has to leave the Cinecittà studio in Rome to go in search of his missing daughter in the German capital. Eschewing the long takes that have become his trademark, yet still exhibiting a mastery of evocative imagery and emotive set-pieces, Angelopoulos brings a deeply personal intimacy to several epochal moments. Moreover, he coaxes a fine performance out of Bruno Ganz, as the elderly German Jew who has been devoted to Jacob over half a century of dramatic and often drastic transformation.

Operating at the opposite edge of the continent, Carlos Saura has similarly chronicled the transition from dictatorship to democracy with a courage and a stylistic distinctiveness that have place him in the eyes of many above Pedro Almodóvar as Spain's second most important film-maker after the peerless Luis Buñuel. Voucher holders may have to wait a week or three, but they would be well rewarded if they invest in the Flamenco trilogy that has become such a firm favourite that it has overshadowed his more audacious political work.

Saura's star was Antonio Gades, who had spent seven years with Pilar López's dance troupe before choreographing for the Opera of Rome and La Scala in Milan. Returning to Spain on the death of Franco in 1975, Gades followed a brief stint as director of the Ballet Nacional de España by forming his own company. But his place in Spanish musicals history was finally assured when he acceded to producer Emiliano Piedra's suggestion that Saura should direct a film version of Alfredo Manas's flamenco interpretation of Federico García Lorca's tragedy, Blood Wedding (1981).

Shooting on a bare rehearsal stage and inserting interviews with Gades and his cast, Saura places as much emphasis on the dedication that the dancers need to perform art of this calibre as on the Lorca storyline, in which a man pursues the woman who had jilted him at the altar. Moreover, Teo Escamilla's dramatic lighting and fluent camerawork capture the intimacy and symbolism of the music and movement with a passion that was entirely new to dance cinema.

The process of production is also central to the Oscar-nominated Carmen (1983), a denunciation of Francoist chauvinism that also warns against the folly of attempting to subjugate modern Spanish womanhood. Life imitates art here, as Gades becomes obsessed with Laura del Sol during his search for a new star to embody the spirit of his flamenco variation on Mérimée's salutatory tale. Consequently, the dance becomes increasingly intense and exhilarating, joyous and tragic, as the blend of folk music and opera both sends up and celebrates Bizet's famous score.

Del Sol returned for El Amor brujo/A Love Bewitched (1986), the final part of this sublime triptych, in which Saura again makes a virtue of artifice by deploying a handful of props and a deserted sound stage to convey the mood of the vibrant Gypsy shanty, in which Gades courts his childhood sweetheart, Cristina Hoyos, who is grieving for Juan Antonio Jiminez, the husband who betrayed her with Del Sol's fiery temptress.

Passion is replaced by lust in the 19 steamy titles contained in The Russ Meyer Collection: 19 Upstanding Classics. Before The Immoral Mr Teas (1959), the naked human form had tended to be seen on screen in smokers, educational shorts, moralising melodramas and naturist films. But Russ Meyer's cheeky account of door-to-door salesman Bill Teas's encounters with a bevy of buxom beauties launched a new sex-exploitation genre, whose sub-divisions came to be known variously as `nudie-cuties', `roughies' and `grindhouse'.

Never subtle and far from enlightened in their attitude towards women, sexploitation could never be described as entirely innocent. But Meyer brought an impish wit to pictures he invariably wrote, produced, photographed and edited, as well as directed. Few would agree with those critics who insist that his depiction of such buxom actresses as Kitten Natividad, Erica Gavin, Lorna Maitland, Tura Satana, Uschi Digard, Edy Williams and Darlene Gray was a subversive exercise in female empowerment. But Meyer was never afraid to mock male chauvinism and weakness and there was always a hint of the ridiculous about his softcore cavortings.

There's not much to distinguish, let alone recommend Eve and the Handyman (1961), Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962), Europe in the Raw (1963), Lorna (1964), Mudhoney, Motor Psycho (both 1965), Mondo Topless (1966), Common Law Cabin, Good Morning... and Goodbye! (both 1967), Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers! (1968), Cherry, Harry & Raquel (1970), Black Snake (1973), Supervixens (1975), Up! (1976), Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979) and Pandora Peaks (2001). But Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) and Vixen! (1968) are genuine cult classics that proved crucial to the emergence of both the counterculture that challenged the postwar status quo and an alternative American cinema that was feasibly independent of the Hollywood studio system.

The sex is conspicuously raunchier in Swedish Erotica: The Complete Collection, which contains a judicious mixture of the documentary and fictional titles that helped Scandinavia earn its reputation for softcore smut in the 1970s.

In 1969, Cliff Richard led a demonstration against the London screening of Torgny Wickman's sex education film, The Language of Love. One of the banners read: `Sweden - more pornography, more suicides, more alcoholism and more gonorrhoea every year.' HM Customs seized the print, only for the film's notoriety to be reinforced by the fact it was the porn flick to which Travis Bickle takes Betsy in Taxi Driver (1976). Nowadays, however, it is perhaps best known because the score was composed by Benny and Björn from ABBA.

Seen at a remove of four decades, there's nothing remotely shocking about Wickman's calculating attempt to depict graphic scenes of a sexual nature within a serious scientific treatise. Indeed, the pontification of gynaecologist Sture Cullhed, psychologist Maj-Brith Bergström-Walan and sexologists Inge and Sten Hegeler is rooted more in good sense than bad taste and the imagery is very tame compared to that shown in the various 3-D guides that are now available. Actually, it's a racing certainty that viewers will end up sniggering at the po-faced bedroom re-enactments and the very 1960s split-screen sequences - complete with animated diagrams - used to demonstrate a range of intimate techniques.

The same director's More About the Language of Love (1970) is even less interesting, as the Hegelers again hold forth on such topics as homosexuality, sex and disability, the use of drugs and the need for young and old alike to embrace their desires without shame. Two years later, Wickman focused on the attitudes and appetites of an ordinary family in Love Play: That's How We Do It. However, he clearly didn't trust this vérité actuality to bring in the punters and spices things up with yet another `live' show featuring Jack and Kim Frank. It's hardly edifying and barely educational or entertaining. But before anyone gets too sniffy about the picture, it was photographed by Tony Forsberg, who would later shoot Fanny and Alexander (1982) and In the Presence of a Clown (1997) for Ingmar Bergman.

The star of the remaining features is Christina Lindberg. In addition to becoming Sweden's most famous centrefold, Lindberg made 22 films in countries as diverse as Germany, Japan and Tunisia. However, the best known are the trio included here - Gustav Wiklund's Anita (1971), Torgny Wickman's Exposed (1973) and Wiklund's Wide Open (1975).

Subtitled The Shocking Account of a Young Nymphomaniac, Anita offered an early role to Stellan Skarsgård, who plays a psychology student who recognises the emotional fragility that prompts Lindberg to sleep with all and sundry in the hope of shocking her parents into showing some affection. For the most part, the action is packed with post-Kinsey psychobabble that again serves as justification for such softcore sequences as the one in which Lindberg strips for the guests her father has invited to his home or when she examines her body in the mirror with a pouting defiance that suggests narcissism rather than the intended disgust.

But this DeMillean juxtaposition of sin and suffering recurs in the other Lindberg titles on view. In Exposed, she falls victim, while her parents are away on holiday, to older lech Heinz Hopf, who has taken photographs of her posing naked on his bed and plans to blackmail her into some kinky bondage sessions or he'll show them to her naive boyfriend, Björn Adelly. However, Lindberg has clearly given sex a lot of thought and she fantasises throughout the story about cavorting in the woods with Janne Carlsson (and then being chased to her doom by his jealous lover, Birgitta Molin) and being forced to explore her lesbian side at an orgy in Hopf's flat.

Although it's not always easy to distinguish between fact and fiction, she seems to exact terrible revenge on Hopf during an S&M encounter. But her relationship with him here is positively benign compared to their dangerous liaison in Bo Arne Vibenius's Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1974), which was one of the inspirations for Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. This outing also teamed Lindberg with Solveig Andersson, with whom she would reunite in what would prove to be her last starring vehicle, Wide Open.

Andersson plays a journalist whose relationship with cabby Kent-Arne Dahlgren is hardly helped by the leering presence of his drunken father, Åke Fridell. In a bid to spice up their love life, they go to a party to launch an arty sex film that just happens to star Andersson's younger sister, Gunilla Larsson. The trio end up in the sack together and Andersson leaves soon after for an assignment in Copenhagen.

In her absence, Dahlgren and Larsson get up to no good with Lindberg and her abusive boyfriend Leif Ahrle and find themselves being pursued by gangster Jan-Olof Rydqvist over a stash of drugs hidden in a stolen mink coat. Naturally, the plot is little more than an excuse to set up the kinky sequences like the knickerless can-can dance. However, there is nothing vaguely arousing about the sight of Ahrle humiliating Lindberg by forcing to do housework in the nude and assaulting her in a stable.

Around the time these movies were being made, Sidney James was still the King of the Carry Ons. However, at the turn of the previous decade, the series was in its infancy and James faced an uncertain future having been dropped from Hancock's Half-Hour by its insecure and envious star, who was convinced that Sid the sidekick was getting too many laughs. Tony Hancock's long-serving scribes, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, clearly enjoyed writing for the South African, however. Thus, they created his own starring vehicle, Citizen James, which launched in November 1960 and ran for three seasons.

The BBC's recklessly short-sighted policy of wiping tapes to save money means that several episodes have been lost. But those that survive have been released for the first time on DVD and it's good to see them finally available alongside James's other fondly remembered sitcoms, George and the Dragon (1966-68) and Bless This House (1971-76).

Reuniting with fellow Hancock discard Bill Kerr, Sid essayed Sidney Balmoral James, a shifty charmer whose penchant for gambling at Sydney Tafler's betting shop reflecting his off-screen love of a flutter. The regular cast was completed by Liz Fraser, as the girlfriend who has been waiting seven years for Sid to pop a question that doesn't end up with her lending him cash for another get-rich-quick scheme. Indeed, Sid is perpetually on the fiddle, whether trying to fix a race between some waiters, flogging snake oil and cigarettes, losing Liz's savings and the café's takings and wagering Tafler that the loyal Liz will go on a date with him.

However, after the first six episodes, Galton and Simpson made way for Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise's chief gagmen Sid Green and Dick Hill, who dispensed with Kerr and Fraser and shifted the scene from Charlie's Nosh Bar in Soho to the house James shared with Tafler (who no longer played bookie Albert Welshman, but stooge Charlie Davenport) and from which he sallied forth in the name of justice for the little people. Only one show remains from each of the ensuing series - `Elope', which sees Sid and Syd trying to keep a runaway couple from reaching Gretna Green - and `The Watchdog', in which they offer to set up a home security service after catching a burglar in the act. Neither is as funny as its predecessors, but watching a consummate professional like Sid James in action is always a treat.

Despite his varied experience, Michael Portillo is markedly less assured in front of the camera. Nevertheless, he proves an amiable companion in the second series of Great British Railway Journeys, as he embarks on five trips that follow the formula established in travelogue series like Coast to enable him to hop off at points of interest en route and show how trains have not only shaped the landscape, but also the very social fabric of the country since the 1820s.

Armed with George Bradshaw's Victorian Railway Guidebook, Portillo first negotiates the route from Brighton to Cromer and learns about the Crystal Palace, the rise of London's West End, the Necropolis Railway that transported corpses to Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey until the 1940s, the manufacture of the Enfield rifle, the influence of railways on Newmarket racecourse, Cambridge's role in the evolution of Association Football, the fine art of eel trapping, the 19th-century plan to drain the Wash like the Dutch polderlands and the reason why Norfolk black turkeys became a fixture of the festive feast.

Heading to the opposite side of the country, Portillo next follows the route of the Irish mail train, as he ventures between Ledbury and Holyhead. Along the way, he encounters a pedigree Hereford bull, visits the world's first iron-framed building and iron bridge, samples some Cheshire cheese, discovers a secret wartime chemical plant and the country's first artist colony, scales the highest peak in Wales and learns how railways profited previously remote mussel, slate and sea salt industries.

Switching coasts again, the next odyssey takes Portillo from Newcastle to Melton Mowbray and includes a pilgrimage to the factory in which George Stephenson built the first locomotive. He also goes in search of a lost pit village, drops in at Durham Cathedral, explores Dracula's Whitby, takes a Turkish bath in Harrogate, discovers why it's not to shoddy to live in Batley and learns the tricks of making Stilton and Melton Mowbray pies.

Then it's south to London Bridge for a trek that will take him to Hastings. Along the way, he finds out about Greenwich Mean Time, navigates the world's first underwater tunnel, comes to appreciate the importance of hops, paper and whelks to the Kent economy, learns the significance of timetables to the growth of cricket as a national pastime, follows in the footsteps of Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims, uncovers a secret Great War port and becomes better acquainted with the Duke of Wellington and William the Conqueror.

Finally, Portillo sallies to the other end of the country to journey from Ayr to Skye. Following a tour of Robert Burns's home town, he discovers the impact of the railways on golf, stumbles upon the Paisley tartan hoax, sees the Dumbarton yard in which the Cutty Sark was built, wanders the bonnie banks of Loch Lomond, sips a glass of Oban whisky, solves a 19th-century geological mystery and gleans the importance of kippers and crofting to the Highlands.

Portillo may not be Michael Palin, but he seems genuinely interested in the people he meets and the stories he hears. Moreover, the trains are as splendid as the diverse terrain and there can be few more pleasant ways for the armchair traveller to see this Sceptred Isle.