Parky at the Pictures (DVD 24/5/2012)

A MIDNIGHT CLEAR.

Adapted by director Keith Gordon from William Wharton's semi-autobiographical novel, A Midnight Clear (1992) is an intelligent pacifist statement that reflects upon the unpredictability, as well as the insanity of warfare. Making evocative use of the Ardenne Forest locations and the contrasts between snow and shadow, cinematographer Tom Richmond suggests that, even though everything appears black and white, there is always room for misunderstanding on the battlefield. The characterisation tends to stereotype and there is more than a hint of sentiment during the Christmas truce sequence. But the twist in the tale is devastating and not easily forgotten.

In December 1944, Major John C. McGinley orders an intelligence reconnaissance of 12 men to locate a villa in the Ardenne and use it as a post to monitor Wehrmacht activity. Each member of the unit has an IQ over 150, but only half reach the objective and 19 year-old Ethan Hawke explains in a voiceover how he assumed command with such reluctance that he refuses to sew the sergeant stripes onto his sleeve.

On arrival, the pressure of the mission prompts Gary Sinise to strip off his uniform and dashes into the trees. Hawke brings him back to base and fellow recruits Frank Whaley, Peter Berg, Ayre Gross and Kevin Dillon agree to say nothing more about the incident. Having seen on the road two frozen corpses grotesquely positioned in a dance clench, the band is happy to find wine and supplies of canned fish and a refuge away from the madness. However, the sound of laughter from the nearby German position is unnerving and, next morning, Gross (a Jew with a burning hatred of Nazism) builds a snowman with a Hitler moustache and uses twigs to spell out an obscene threat.

During the night, Gross (who speaks Yiddish) hears German voices outside seemingly appreciating his handiwork and when a patrol returns to report that it was confronted by a trio of Germans who simple melted away into the woods, Gross convinces Hawke that the enemy mix of old men and boys is as keen to survive this encounter as they are. When a map is found with markings suggesting a rendezvous, Hawke and Gross take a risk and return to coax Berg into impersonating an officer to conduct further negotiations.

That night, the Americans fear they are under attack. But the missiles are merely snowballs and both sides enter the fray with joyous enthusiasm before the Germans return bearing a tree decorated with candles so they can sing carols and exchange gifts. This spirit of goodwill prevails into the next meeting, at which it is agreed that a mock battle will be staged so that the Germans can be captured `with honour' so that there are no reprisals against their families back home. But the staged assault does not go according to plan and Knott is reprimanded by McGinley as he roars through towards what will be The Battle of the Bulge.

Although it's easy to criticise a film so heavily dependent upon narration and ethnic caricature, this remains a considered treatise on common humanity and the reckless folly of leaving the conduct of war to the generals. The performances are strong and the scenes in which the Americans watch their counterparts performing everyday chores in their foxhole and the Germans spare the patrol captured in their gunsights are particularly affecting. Consequently, it's possible to overlook the contrivances that cause the planned war game to go awry and the blatant callousness of McGinley's reaction to it.

PUNISHMENT PARK.

Peter Watkins was one of the leading political film-makers at a time when cinema was learning how to protest. Before the 1960s, Hollywood had been happy to support the government in times of national emergency. However, with the fragmenting of the studio system and the 1968 change in how American movies were censored, independent voices began to question Washington's conduct of foreign and domestic policy. Having already caused a storm in his native Britain with his harrowing, Oscar-winning account of a nuclear assault in The War Game (1965), Watkins turned his attention to the Nixon regime in Punishment Park (1971), which speculated on the lengths to which the embattled president might be prepared to go in order to silence his critics.

With protests rising as he plans to launch a new bombing campaign on the Laos-Cambodian border, Richard Nixon issues a statute inspired by the 1950 McCarran Internal Security Act, which allows the authorities to override Congress in ordering the detention of anyone deemed to pose a threat to the nation. Anti-war protesters, Civil Rights activists, Communists and feminists are among those taken into custody. Indeed, such is the success of the legislation that jails are soon overcrowded and a network of punishment parks are opened, which afford prisoners the opportunity to avoid capture for three days while crossing hostile terrain.

As is explained to the British and German news crews that have come to record a Californian park in action, the ordeal is arduous, but the successful will be freed. However, Group 637 learns that its task is to traverse a desert without food or water to reach an American flag some 50 miles away, Group 638 is preparing to be tried by a community tribunal that is predominantly made up of patriotic conservatives. Yet, as the debate grows increasingly heated within the tented courtroom, several members of Group 637 decide to dispense with the rules and resort to violence that is met with chilling brutality by the enraged police.

Despite the ingenuity of its provocative premise, this stylised docudrama is eventually undermined by its earnest execution. The decision to have both a group of hippy subversives and the reactionaries interrogating them played by non-professionals holding diametrically opposed views is inspired, as their improvised debates frequently boil over into the kind of slanging matches that occurred across a nation riven with social, political, ethical and economic crises. But the pursuit of those who have chosen to take their chances against armed troops and cops in the hope of avoiding their sentences becomes increasingly contrived, especially once the observing film units become actively involved.

In truth, the film's dramatic tone has dated badly. Yet, given the recent response to the handling of the War on Terror and the economic downturn, the majority of the issues it raises remain as chillingly relevant as ever.

RAID ON ENTEBBE.

Although it was made for television, Irvin Kershner's Raid on Entebbe (1977) was released in cinemas in this country. It received a reasonable critical reception and performed adequately at the box office. But its reissue on DVD hardly seems essential and the best one can say about it is that it is not Menahem Golan's inexplicably Oscar-nominated Operation Thunderbolt (1977) or Marvin J. Chomsky's Victory at Entebbe (1976), which was rushed into production to cash-in on the notoriety of the incident and shamefully wastes a cast including Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Elizabeth Taylor, Helen Hayes, Richard Dreyfuss, Anthony Hopkins and Linda Blair.

On 27 June 1976, an Air France flight from Athens to Paris was hijacked by four members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The plane was forced to land at Entebbe Airport near the Ugandan capital Kampala, where a further four PFLP sympathisers came aboard, while the majority of the non-Jewish or Israeli passengers were released. German Wilfried Böse (Horst Buchholz) issued the threat that unless 40 Palestinians being held in Israel and a further 13 activists jailed across Europe were released by 1 July his comrades would begin killing the hostages.

As Ugandan leader Idi Amin (Yaphet Kotto) made the most of his moment in the limelight, the Israeli cabinet under Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin (Peter Finch) began debating whether it would be possible to rescue their citizens without incurring excessive loss of life. Buying time by offering to negotiate with the terrorists, the Israelis formulated a plan to send 100 commandos 2500 miles storm the plane. Led by Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu (Stephen Macht) and Brigadier General Dan Shomron (Charles Bronson), the raid took place in the morning of the Sabbath on 4 July. All eight insurgents were killed, as were three hostages, 45 Ugandan soldiers and mission commander Netanyahu (the brother of future Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu), while Dora Bloch (Sylvia Sidney) was later murdered on Amin's orders, as she was being treated for her wounds in Mulago Hospital.

The leads are suitably earnest, while the impressive supporting cast includes John Saxon and Jack Warden on the military staff, Eddie Constantine and James Woods as the pilots, and Robert Loggia (Yigal Allon), Tige Andrews (Shimon Peres), David Opatoshu (Menachem Begin) and Martin Balsam, Allan Arbus and Dinah Manhoff among the passengers. Yet, even though a genuine attempt appears to have been made by Emmy-nominated screenwriter Barry Beckerman to present events as authentically as possible, little real attempt is made to understand the motives for the hijack. Thus, even though there is considerable tension in the deliberations of the Israeli cabinet and Kershner largely succeeds in avoiding the triumphalism that would blight such exploitative variations as Menaham Golan's The Delta Force (1986), this is more valuable as an insight into the attitudes of its times (many of which, of course, still pertain) than as an historical recreation.

REPO MAN.

Fresh out of UCLA, 29 year-old Liverpudlian Alex Cox made a remarkable feature debut with Repo Man (1984), which quickly became one of the most iconic movies of the Reagan era. Bristling with punk attitude and a deep, but quirkily irreverent love of cinema, it has worn better than many other snapshots of its time and it is presented here in a cut approved by the director that is accompanied by such worthwhile extras as a 44-page booklet recalling the picture's origins as a comic strip.

Fired from his dead-end job as a supermarket stock clerk and dismayed that his counterculture parents have donated his trust fund to a shady televangelist, 18 year-old punk Emilio Estevez moves out of the family garage and drifts aimlessly around Los Angeles until he makes the acquaintance of Harry Dean Stanton. He works for the Helping Hands Acceptance Corporation and Estevez disapproves of the fact that he makes a living repossessing cars from those who can no longer afford their monthly payments. However, having given it a try, Estevez soon becomes hooked on the power of being a `repo man', the thrill of the chases that often follow a seizure and the lifestyle he can enjoy on his generous wages.

All seems to be going well, until Olivia Barash tells him about a 1964 Chevrolet Malibu that is heading north from New Mexico with four dead aliens in the boot. Initially, Estevez dismisses her claim. But, when he discovers that a reward of $20,000 is being offered for the capture of the car, he joins with Barash in a race against brothers Del Zamora and Eddie Velez to track down mad scientist Fox Harris, who has already incinerated a curious cop with a cargo that he has liberated from the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

With a pounding soundtrack featuring numbers by Iggy Pop, Black Flag, The Plugz, Circle Jerks, Burning Sensations and Suicidal Tendencies, this is a gleefully madcap road movie with plenty of sci-fi and film noir references tossed in for good measure. The most obvious is to Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955), but Cox resists the temptation to stuff the action with homages and, consequently, this retains its own distinctive personality. Aided by Robby Müller's exceptional cinematography, Cox follows in the footsteps of Wim Wenders in presenting a shrewd outsider's impression of an America all-too-willing to buy right-wing platitudes after a decade of social and political uncertainty.

Counting ex-Monkee Michael Nesmith among its executive producers and finding roles for such future members of Cox's stock company as Zander Schloss, Miguel Sandoval and Sy Richardson, this was supposed to be followed by a sequel entitled Waldo's Hawaiian Holiday, which would have followed Estevez's progress after he returned from space. However, Cox couldn't raise the funding and he passed the project on to Stuart Kincaid, whose version was either never completed or failed to see the light of day, depending on whose story you believe.

Ultimately, the story appeared as a graphic novel in 2008 and Cox finally revisited the scene of his biggest triumph with the 2009 microfeature Repo Chick, which starred Jaclyn Jonet as the celebrity heiress who has to get a real job in order to convince her parents not to disinherit her. This typifies the maverick unpredictability of Cox's film-making that has probably prevented him from fulfilling his enormous potential. But Repo Man remains a modern American classic and it would be splendid if its reissue prompted somebody at the BBC to invite Cox back for another stab at his much-missed Moviedrome series.

ROLLING THUNDER.

Among the first Hollywood pictures to explore the traumas endured by those who had served in Vietnam, John Flynn's Rolling Thunder (1977) was scripted by Paul Schrader before being significantly redrafted by Heywood Gould. As in Schrader's script for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), the returning veteran quickly discovers that America is anything but a land fit for heroes and he eventually loses his struggle to retain his psychological equilibrium. But, whereas Scorsese's masterpiece resisted the temptation to lurch into cheap thrills and melodrama, Flynn heads gung-ho into vigilante territory, with the result that a promising study of postwar emasculation becomes increasingly formulaic, trite and confused.

Seven years after he was captured by the Vietcong, Major William Devane arrives back in San Antonio, Texas with fellow POW Tommy Lee Jones. Devane advises Jones that things will be tough as he acclimatises to life on civvy street and suggests he wears sunglasses whenever he feels the strain. However, he also discovers that much has changed since 1966, as son Jordan Gerler no longer recognises him, while wife Lisa Blake Richards confesses that she wants to marry local lawman Lawrason Driscoll.

Accepting that nothing can ever stay the same, Devane moves into the garden shed. But he begins having dreams about his time in Hanoi and even craves the pain and restriction he experienced in captivity. Moreover, he finds it difficult to hold a basic conversation and shies away from barmaid Linda Haynes, who has worn his identity bracelet throughout his incarceration and adds a silver dollar to the 2555 presented to him by the townsfolk (along with a new red Cadillac) to mark each day he was away.

Unfortunately, desperadoes James Best, Luke Askew, Charles Escamilla and Pete Ortega set their sights on the dollars and, on breaking into his home, jam Devane's hand in the garbage disposal unit when he refuses to divulge their hiding place. The terrified Gerler gives the game away and is shot dead, along with his mother. But Devane survives and proves evasive under questioning by Driscoll, as he has plans to exact his revenge as soon as he has mastered how to use his new hook hand.

Reckoning that the culprits will be shacked up somewhere in Mexico, Devane dupes Haynes into accompanying him on what she thinks is a vacation. However, she realises what he has in mind after he brutalises bar-room lowlife James Victor to get information and even agrees to act as bait to trap Askew. While they have an intimate moment in a motel room in El Paso, Driscoll crosses the border to save Devane from himself and kills Victor and Askew in a shootout in an abandoned house. But this is nothing to the carnage that Devane causes on reuniting with Jones (who had been planning to re-enlist) when they ambush the surviving trio in a brothel.

From the robbery onwards, this becomes increasingly implausible and winds up feeling like a latterday Western. A distastefully xenophobic undercurrent infects the pursuit, while the script offers no good reason why Driscoll should risk his career to mete out some unofficial justice or why Devane should suddenly ditch Haynes and enlist Jones for the final showdown. However, Flynn and his solid cast do enough in the opening third to justify revisiting this pugnacious picture, which continues to influence recent outings centring on those coping with similar pressures on their return from Afghanistan and Iraq.

SPECIAL FORCES.

Positive proof that French cinema can churn out generic tosh with the best of them, Stéphane Rybojad's Special Forces is a thick ear of a picture that seems to have been designed to challenge the `cheese-eating surrender monkey' image promulgated by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Critically mauled by domestic critics, this looks unlikely to fare better here, especially as it comes so soon after the death of Marie Colvin in Syria. However, it is also fatally undermined by the fact that Rybojad appears to have little idea how to film action, let alone construct a scene, and one wonders what cinematographer David Jankowski and editor Erwan Pecher must have been thinking throughout the project.

When Cambridge-educated Afghan warlord Raz Degan reacts badly to an article branding him `the butcher of Kabul' by famous journalist Diane Kruger, he abducts her along with friends Mehdi Nebbou and Greg Fromentin and her informer, Morjana Alaoui, who was sold into Degan's harem when she was a child. Determined to demonstrate his strength to the West, Degan releases a video of Fromentin's execution and the French government decides to send a crack unit under Djimon Honsou (fresh from a showdown in Kosovo) to rescue the captives from a secret location in Pakistan.

Leading a commando squad comprising Benoît Magimel, Alain Alivon, Raphaël Personnaz, Alain Figlarz and Denis Menochet, Honsou succeeds in liberating Kruger and Nebbou. However, Alaoui is killed and the problem of how to get back to base is compounded by the destruction of the radio set. Undaunted, Honsou leads his party towards the Khyber Pass and relies on his state-of-the-art weaponry to give him an edge over the pursuing tribesmen. Nevertheless, he is relieved to find sanctuary in a mountain village, where Kruger uncovers the tyrannical tactics of the Taliban and promises to expose them to the world.

The closer the fugitives get to the border, the more their ranks are depleted, as snipers take cynical pot-shots and Degan himself delights in dispatching Nebbou. Honsou rallies the remaining troops, however, and, when an avalanche prevents him and Magimel from going on further, he presents Kruger with a compass that had been used by some French soldiers in wartime Normandy so she can navigate her way through the Kush. Welcomed home by Admiral Tchéky Karyo, Kruger insists on heading back to the war zone to see if she can find her saviours.

There will always be a market for war movies featuring bullet-headed heroes who do what has to be done. But this is a crudely cumbersome effort that gets television documentarist Rybojad's feature career off to a thuddingly inauspicious start. Given the shoddiness of the characterisation, the performances are surprisingly effective, with Kruger having sufficient spirit to avoid being a helpless heroine, while Magimel brings a touch of blokey humour and Honsou embodies hulkish dignity. However, the scenario is strictly by numbers, while the depiction of the enemy and the villagers they terrorise is patronising at best and occasionally cringingly incorrect.

TWO-LANE BLACKTOP.

Clearly stung by the success of Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider (1969), Universal handed Monte Hellman the funds to make his own epochal road movie and he more than repaid the front office's faith with the wondrous Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). Previously known for the Roger Corman creature feature Beast from Haunted Cave (1959) and the existential Jack Nicholson Westerns Ride in the Whirlwind (1965) and The Shooting (1967), Hellman became an overnight cult hero. Yet, despite producing such interesting work as Cockfighter (1974) and China 9, Liberty 37 (1978), he never hit the same heights again, although he continues to work into his 80s, even though recent outings like Road to Nowhere (2010) haven't been widely seen.

James Taylor and Dennis Wilson are a couple of chancers who live in their grey 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air and get by challenging locals to street races. At the start of the film, they are leaving Needles, California along the fabled Route 66 and they stop only to pick up hitcher Laurie Bird in Flagstaff, Arizona. Cruising into New Mexico, the trio encounter Warren Oates, a middle-aged man with an indeterminate, but clearly frustrated past, who offers them out in his bright orange 1970 Pontiac GTO.

Stung by the fact that a man with such little knowledge of or love for cars should throw down the gauntlet, Taylor proposes that they race to Washington, DC, with the prize being the loser's pink ownership slip. However, it turns into more of grudge match when Bird, who has slept with both Wilson and Taylor, swans off with Oates, while they are competing at a race meeting in Memphis, Tennessee. Furious at being jilted, Taylor tracks them down to a roadside diner, where Oates is trying to persuade Bird to come with him to Chicago.

Unwilling to be tied down, Bird hops on the back of a motorcycle and speeds away, leaving her bag in the parking lot. Seemingly realising the futility of their wager, Wilson and Taylor depart for a drag race at a Tennessee airfield, while Oates drives on alone, telling anyone he meets a different life story and seeming to be as disinterested in where he is going as where he has actually been.

Marking the sole screen appearances of singer-songwriter James Taylor and Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson, this positively shrieks `counterculture classic'. Even Harry Dean Stanton cameos as a gay cowboy to add to the kudos already bestowed by Jack Deerson's stunning vistas and intimate peaks inside the gas stations, truck stops, cheap motels and hamburger stands that stud the endless highway. It's just a shame that nobody ever thought of releasing a Smell-o-Vision or Odorama version, so that the audience could share the petrol fumes and the smell of burning rubber that accompanies the endless talk about speed, spare parts and chassis.

The screenplay by novelist Rudy Wurlitzer and Will Corry (who also concocted the original story) is full of braggadocio and innuendo, but it also provides sly insights into the insecurities of the macho trio, as they hit the road more in hope than expectation. This sense of drift rather than draft is reinforced when Oates stops to pick up a couple of soldiers on furlough from Vietnam. But Hellman largely avoids overt references to contemporary attitudes and events and, thus, his film has acquired a timelessness that the more specific Easy Rider lacks. Yet, while it was claimed as the inspiration for the Cannonball Run, Two-Lane Blacktop was a commercial misfire. Subsequently, however, cineastes have claimed what the petrolheads ignored, with some even comparing the final sequence, in which the action slows down and the soundtrack recedes as the celluloid starts to blister and scorch, with the ending of Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966). The road to nowhere, indeed.

WARRIOR.

Ever since Wallace Beery won an Oscar for playing the punch-drunk pug whose death breaks the heart of his young son in King Vidor's The Champ (1931), audiences have been suckers for boxing pictures with a sentimental domestic subplot. Collaborating with co-scribes Anthony Tambakis and Cliff Dorfman, director Gavin O'Connor taps into this winning formula with Warrior, a second foray into violent sports after O'Connor made his feature bow with the 2004 ice hockey saga, Miracle.

Ex-Marine Tom Hardy is keen to bury the hatchet with Nick Nolte, the father who made his childhood a misery, but is now trying to beat the booze and rebuild his life after getting religion. Frustrated by their discussion, Hardy goes to a local Philadelphia gym and pulps professional fighter Erik Apple with a flurry of blows and becomes an internet sensation when mobile phone footage goes viral. Such is the sudden interest, that Hardy is invited to participate in the Sparta mixed martial arts tournament that offers a $5 million prize that he could use to help the struggling family of a wounded comrade.

However, just as Hardy asks Nolte to become his coach, his physics teacher brother Joel Edgerton comes home seeking similar assistance. A onetime ultimate fighting contender, he needs to get back into shape to win the money he needs to pay for his youngest daughter's heart surgery and to prevent his house from being repossessed. However, when rumours spread about his participation in Sparta, he is suspended without pay by his school and starts training with buddy Frank Grillo to make a few bucks in minor bouts. When Grillo's biggest hope is injured, he agrees to back Edgerton's bid for glory.

Meeting for the first time in 14 years, Hardy and Edgerton bicker about the family drama that caused the latter to leave home and miss their mother's death. However, Hardy soon has more to worry about than old scores, as the man whose life he saved in Iraq recognises him from the online clip and the press transform him into a national hero. But his celebrity is short-lived, as it is revealed that he deserted after his unit was wiped out in a friendly fire incident and the Military Police announce that they will arrest Hardy as soon as Sparta is over.

It doesn't take William Goldman or a similar screenwriting guru to work out that Hardy and Edgerton will meet in the title decider in Atlantic City. Few will fail to predict the final outcome, either. But this isn't about surprises. It's about reassuring realities in a time of uncertainty on both the home and the frontline and many a tough tear will be shed over this macho hokum. O'Connor makes sure that Masanobu Takayanagi's camera captures the rippling torsos and snarling expressions, while Mark Isham's score (with a little help from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony) sweeps between lachrymose strings and pounding rhythms, as the focus shifts from fraternal wrangles to the explosive fight sequences choreographed by JJ `Loco' Perry.

Resistible and pitiable in equal measures, Hardy and Edgerton are suitably buff and bluff. But it's Nolte who steals the picture (and he knows he's doing it) with mannerisms he seems to have picked up from watching one of the grizzled, late-career cameos given by John Huston, who directed the 1956 screen adaptation of Moby Dick, the Herman Melville novel with which the penitent and almost pathetically self-abasing Nolte is obsessed. However, O'Connor also merits praise for his gutsy evocation of the sweaty backstreet gymnasia and the resort's tawdry neon glitz, as well as for daring to present without apology the unregenerate blue-collar chauvinism that still provides the bedrock of American society, if no longer its culture.

MURDER BY DECREE.

We end this week with a couple of Sherlock Holmes mysteries, but there's no sign of Benedict Cumberbatch or Robert Downey, Jr.

Written by John Hopkins, Murder By Decree (1979) turns around the long-held belief that the Jack the Ripper killings were committed by Queen Victoria's son, the Duke of Clarence. It is directed by Bob Clark with a drollery that falls somewhere between Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) and Nicholas Meyer's The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976), although there are moments when it edges a touch too close to the Spike Milligan-scripted Two Ronnies serial, `The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town' (1976).

Played with evident relish by Christopher Plummer and James Mason, Holmes and Watson first become intrigued by the case in the autumn of 1888 because Scotland Yard inspectors Foxborough and Lestrade (David Hemmings and Frank Finlay) have gone out of their way to avoid consulting them. Indeed, even when they do express an interest in the Whitechapel murders after a visit by some decidedly shady characters, Commissioner Sir Charles Warren (Anthony Quayle) and Prime Minister Lord Salisbury (John Gielgud) are at pains to insist that they have the situation under control, even though they patently haven't.

The investigation initially leads the pair to psychic Robert Lees (Donald Sutherland), who tries to mislead them. But the trail eventually takes them the East End, where street walker Mary Kelly (Susan Clark) is harbouring a secret that she is willing to risk all to protect, and former servant Annie Crook (Genevieve Bujold) is paying the price for marrying out of her class. However, it's not just prostitutes who are in danger, as the fiercely patriotic Watson is brutally attacked. But Holmes's nose for a clue eventually leads him to discover the existence of a macabre cabal (not unlike the Freemasons), whose links to the Establishment extend to Buckingham Palace.

The title rather gives the game away, so this is never a traditional Conan Doyle whodunit. Besides, Holmes had locked horns with Saucy Jack before in James Hill's 1965 Hammer outing, A Study in Terror. Instead, this is an intelligent dissertation on the wielding of power in late-Victorian Britain and the limitations of forensic science. The psychic subplot proves something of a red herring and the climactic reasoning for withholding the truth from the press and the public will seem spurious in this age of tabloid intrusion and sensationalism.

However, Harry Pottle's sets and Judy Moorcroft's costumes are admirable, while the performances are impeccable. Plummer brings a wry sophistication to Holmes, while Mason eschews the buffoonery patented in Hollywood by Nigel Bruce to create a Watson whose support for the monarchy is as unswerving as his insistence that he has an inalienable right to spear rather than crush the last pea on his plate.

SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES.

There have been over 25 screen adaptations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous Sherlock Holmes mystery since it appeared in The Strand Magazine between August 1901 and April 1902. Alwin Neuss starred in the first version in 1914, since when Ellie Norwood (1921), Basil Rathbone (1939), Peter Cushing (1959), Jeremy Brett (1988) and Benedict Cumberbatch (2012) have all attempted to crack the case. Even Peter Cook donned the deerstalker for Paul Morrissey's bizarre 1978 variation. But the most curiously engaging interpretation was filmed on location in the Soviet Union by Igor Maslennikov, with Vasilij Livanov and Vitali Solomin as the denizens of 221B Baker Street.

Scripted by Maslennikov and Yuri Veksler for the TV series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, this two-part take sticks reasonably closely to the text. However, a vein of offbeat humour courses through the action, with Nikita Mikhalkov displaying a petulant dislike of porridge and a fondness for a dram in his bullishly hammy rendition of Sir Henry Baskerville. Indeed, several of the performances are somewhat exaggerated in order to lampoon British customs and eccentricity and to enhance the hero's sense of superiority. But, while the actorly grandiloquence of Evgeny Steblov's Mortimer and Oleg Yankovsky's Stapleton is occasionally distracting, it never deters from the enduring fascination of the story about a family curse and the savage beast roaming the moors and marshes around Baskerville Hall.

Maslennikov and cinematographers Dmitri Dolinin and Vladimir Ilyin make splendid use of the bleak landscape to reinforce the mood of entrapment that is intensified by creaking wooden interiors that simultaneously suggest shabby grandeur and menace. With Livanov off screen for much of the time, Solomin makes a steady Watson, who interviews neighbours like Frankland (Sergey Martinson) and his daughter Laura Lyons (Alla Demidova) with a gravity that continues into the duty he feels towards protecting Sir Henry and stepping back to allow his courtship of Beryl Stapleton (Irina Kupchenko). Genuine suspense may be lacking, but this is palpably atmospheric and few would object if more entries from this handsome and intriguing franchise found their way onto disc.