Parky at the Pictures (DVD 8/5/2014)

ARMY OF SHADOWS (1969).

Having already recalled Vichy in Le Silence de la Mer (1949) and Léon Morin, Prêtre (1961), Jean-Pierre Melville returned to the extraordinary sacrifices made by ordinary men and women in resisting the Nazi Occupation in this sobering account of the quiet courage required in wartime. Faithfully adapted from Joseph Kessel's 1943 fictional account of the early days of the Maquis (and occasionally informed by Melville's own experiences), this is an undeservedly neglected film, whose reputation was damaged by critics claiming it glorified Charles de Gaulle, who had resigned the presidency in April 1969 following his hesitant handling of the previous year's May Days.

Having escaped from an internment camp in October 1942, Marseilles resistance leader Lino Ventura joins loyal lieutenants Paul Crauchet,  Christian Barbier and Claude Mann in strangling snitch Alain Libolt. Crauchet recruits ex-pilot Jean-Pierre Cassel to the ranks, unaware that his philosopher brother, Paul Meurisse is the Maquis supreme commander. Ventura is dispatched to London and, on the submarine voyage, meets Meurisse, who is going to be decorated by De Gaulle for his courage in defying the Gestapo.

Ventura's stay is cut short when he learns that Crauchet has been arrested and he joins housewife agent Simone Signoret in trying to spring him from a maximum security prison in Lyon. Cassel gets himself arrested and billeted in Crauchet's cell. However, the scheme to have him signed over to a fake prisoner escort detail fails and Cassel urges Crauchet to use his cyanide pill.

Signoret is keen for Ventura to flee to London, but he is captured and only rescued from a firing squad by an audacious smoke bomb raid. While hiding in a remote farmhouse, Ventura is visited by Meurisse, who informs him that Signoret has been arrested and that the Gestapo are threatening to harm her daughter unless she betrays her secrets. Against the wishes of Barbier and Mann, a plot is hatched to assassinate Signoret before she can talk.

Unflinching in its depiction of the grim realities of living under the jackboot, this fine film eschews romantic notions of heroism to focus on the sacrifices, suicides and slaughter involved in taking the underground fight to the enemy. Impeccably photographed by Pierre Lhomme and Walter Wottitz and designed by Théobald Meurisse, the contrasts between Marseilles, Lyon, Paris and London are stark and show how differently the war was being waged in each location. The performances are outstanding, with Ventura coolly conveying the anonymity required for effective heroism, while Signoret captures the pain involved in risking all to do one's duty. Opening with a chilling shot of the German army marching through the Arc de Triomphe and down the Champs Elysée, Melville directs with a steely detachment that makes the action feel like a carefully planned operation. But he also unearths the simple humanity of those who endured constant paranoia and fear with no guarantee of victory.

BAISE-MOI (2000).

Adapted by onetime prostitute Virginie Despentes from her own novel and co-directed by porn star Coralie Trinh Thi, Baise-Moi was dismissed on its release as a grandstanding exercise in misandry designed to show that women can be every bit as lustful and violent as men. Banned in France before Catherine Breillat, Jean-Luc Godard and Claire Denis led campaigns to have it reassessed by the censors, it has been claimed by some as an important feminist statement about transgressive desire, power and control. But, for all the raw courage involved in its making, it still takes a fair amount of reading between the lines to arrive at such a conclusion and this coarsely made picture continues to fail because it refuses to provide an adequate motive for the indiscriminate reign of terror conducted by a couple of girls just wanting to have fun.

Having killed brother Hacène Beddrouh after he calls her a slut for not following addict friend Lisa Marshall in resisting a gang rape by three strangers, porn star Raffaëla Anderson hooks up with prostitute Karen Bach after pointing a gun at her head. Deciding they are better off together than alone, Anderson and Bach (who has just strangled roommate Delphine McCarty and discovered that her drug dealer pal has been murdered) hold up a shop, shoot a woman at a cash machine and steal a car.

They blast the cops who detain them at a road block and invite witness Estelle Isaac to join them. Laying low at her house, they agree to eliminate an architect who has been annoying her brother. They also torture a racist who insulted them at a swingers bar before killing him and the majority of the patrons. However, as they reflect upon their spree, Anderson and Bach realise that it has been futile, as it has had no meaningful psychological impact upon them. Soon afterwards, Anderson is shot by the owner of a tyre shop when she goes to buy coffee. But, having exacted her revenge and burned her friend's body in the woods, Bach is prevented from committing suicide by the police.

There is a grim irony in the fact that Bach fails to kill herself here, as the 32 year-old succeeded for real with an overdose of temazepam in 2005. By then, she was known as Karen Lancaume and had starred in over 40 hardcore porn movies. Much was made at the time of the film's original release of the unsimulated nature of the sex scenes. But this authenticity is nowhere near as contentious as the violence, which often seems mindless as it is so random. This may be a study of nihilistic fury, but its sheer amorality and reckless exploitation corrupts the message by misdirecting the focus.

Filming on digital video in grungy light, Despentes and Trinh Thi appear to pull no punches. But they dropped a sequence depicting the killing of a child from the novel and this shrewd move exposes the calculated nature of the entire enterprise. Apparently, the impetus behind this `feminist warrior vision' was to be `so in your face that we will end up on your mind'. Fifteen years after the furore, this bid to blur the line between art and pornography seems strangely tame. The technical and dramatic flaws can be put down to inexperience and naiveté, but there is no question that the co-directors coaxed combustible performances out of Anderson and Bach. Moreover, while this radical paean to empowerment may be no more likeable than it was in 2000, it certainly seems far less objectionable. Nevertheless, it remains vastly inferior to Abel Ferrara's Ms. 45 (1981), which centred on mute seamstress Zoë Tamerlis Lund's reaction to being raped twice on her way home from work in New York's Garment District.

BETTY BLUE (1986).

There was a time when Jean-Jacques Beineix's Oscar-nominated melodrama, Betty Blue,  seemed to be playing at either the Phoenix or the Penultimate Picture Palace on a semi-permanent basis. Adapted from Philippe Djian's cult novel, 37°2 le matin, this was a key entry in the canon that came to be known as `cinéma du look' and it is presented here in a deluxe edition that contains both the original 121-minute theatrical version and the 185-minute director's cut.

Handyman Jean-Hugues Anglade has recently started dating Béatrice Dalle and can barely drag himself away from their bed to complete the task of painting 500 beach huts belonging to his landlord, Claude Confortes. Dalle tries to help him, but thinks Anglade is being exploited and pours pink paint over Confortes's car. She becomes more convinced that her lover is capable of bigger and better things when she finds some notebooks in his shack. However, he doesn't share her belief that he has the potential to become a great novelist and, having failed to summon any inspiration, returns to his painting. Angered by his timidity, Dalle torches their hut and the pair hitchhike to the suburbs to stay with her widowed friend, Consuelo De Haviland.

When De Haviland meets free-spirit Gérard Darmon, he offers Anglade and Dalle jobs at his pizzeria. She wants Anglade to dedicate himself to his writing and dutifully types up the manuscript. But he has lost interest since receiving a number of rejection letters, which he has hidden so as not to incite his increasingly unpredictable paramour. One night, she gets into an argument with customer Dominique Besnehard over an order and stabs him in the arm with a fork. When she discovers the publishers' slips, she similarly assaults one of the editors and, unsurprisingly, Anglade finds himself blocked when she urges him to begin another book.

He is grateful, therefore, when Darmon offers him the chance to run the piano shop he has inherited from his mother. The job comes with accommodation and Anglade adopts a white cat in the hope it will keep Dalle calm. But he discovers she is on medication and has his doubts when she shrugs it off as unimportant. Soon after she has an episode and rushes out into the street in her underwear, Dalles discovers she is pregnant. Overjoyed, Anglade tells grocer pal Jacques Mathou the good news. He even attempts to robs an armoured car in women's clothing to make life easier for her. But a visit to the doctor confirms the false alarm and Anglade struggles to control Dalle's raging emotions.

However, he returns one day from doing some odd jobs around the neighbourhood to learn from Mathou that Dalle has torn out an eye in her frustration. She is admitted to a mental hospital, but barely recognises Anglade, who attacks doctor Claude Aufaure for prescribing the medication that provoked her breakdown. Barred from visiting Dalle, Anglade sneaks on to the ward in disguise and whispers that his book is going to be published. Promising to ensure that the world will learn of their story, Anglade smothers Dalle with a pillow and returns home to cook chili and think back on happier times.

Strikingly photographed by Jean-François Robin and sublimely scored by Gabriel Yared, this has not worn particularly well. But it offers some invaluable insights into the 1980s and the kind of cinema that Beineix, Luc Besson and Leos Carax were striving to create. Anglade and the debuting Dalle spend lengthy periods copulating, when not chatting about topics great and small and larking around on the beach. But the emotional excesses of the storyline sometimes confound them, particularly during Dalle's descent from quaint kookiness into pitiable madness. There's no doubting that hers is a bravura performance and Anglade provides some selfless support. But Beineix often struggles with his pacing (in both versions) and the with integration of the more fanciful moments into what is primarily a work of poetic realism. Thus, while this remains compelling, it no longer feels like the essential viewing it once was.

IL BIDONE (1955).

Coming between La Strada (1954), and Nights of Cabiria (1957) in Federico Fellini's `trilogy of loneliness', Il Bidone (or The Swindlers) is a film of two halves. In the first, Fellini and co-scenarists Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli poke gentle fun at a nation gradually coming to terms with its post-Fascist decline and the harsh realities of the economic crisis that followed defeat in the Second World War. But the mood darkens, as Fellini lambastes the policies that lured the poor from the provinces in the expectation of jobs that didn't exist and stranded them in outlying shanty settlements that exposed them to temptation and exploitation. Thus, while this blend of neo-realism and Buñuelian satire cuts a little deeper than some of the maestro's early features, it also falls prey to some old-fashioned Catholic melodrama.

Middle-aged confidence trickster Broderick Crawford tours the Italian countryside with his confederates Richard Basehart and Franco Fabrizi. They are prepared to do anything to scam a mark, whether it's flogging worthless wristwatches, signing fake housing certificates or swapping cheap winter coats for petrol. Their preferred routine, however, involves Crawford posing as a bishop and persuading hapless peasants (like a pair of elderly sisters) that a condemned man has buried loot on their land and that he is prepared to let them keep it in return for some mass offerings for the repose of the miscreant's soul.

Shady baron Giacomo Gabrielli organises the jobs and Crawford aspires to living the good life like Alberto De Amicis, who also started out on the bottom rung. However, when he attends a swanky New Year soirée with Basehart and his trusting wife, Giulietta Masina, he is humiliated when he pitches an idea for an operation and is laughed out of court. Eventually, Fabrizi gets a better offer and Basehart (who is a promising artist) decides to return to Masina. Crawford is also forced to take stock when he meets up with 18 year-old daughter Lorella De Luca, who hopes to train as a teacher, but lacks the 300,000 lire deposit to enrol. Crawford treats her to the pictures, but he is recognised by one of his victims and arrested as De Luca looks on.

Following his release from prison, Crawford is assigned a new crew by Gabrielli and sent out to repeat the episcopal scam. However, crippled peasant girl Sue Ellen Blake is so convinced that he is a holy man that she begs him to hear her confession and Crawford is so distressed at being faced with genuine goodness that he vows to ensure that De Luca never finds herself in similar penury. However, his new lieutenants catch him trying to withhold funds and beat him up. Left alone at the side of the road, Crawford is broken physically and emotionally and dies in the night.

Voiced by Shakespearean actor Arnoldo Forro, Crawford gives a magnificent performance that far surpasses his Oscar-winning turn in Robert Rossen's All the King's Men (1949). The look of utter dejection on his face when he is detained in front of his daughter is harrowing, but his expressions as he realises the error of his ways after Blake touches his vestments and as he lies in the dirt and accepts that his race is run are truly heart-rending. Crawford is ably supported by Basehart and Masina, while the minor characters (as is often the case in a Fellini film) feel like they have been brought in off the street to play variations of themselves.

Otello Martelli's photography would not be out of place in a Rossellini or De Sica picture, while Nino Rota's score counterpoints the action without tugging on the audience's emotions. But it's Fellini's deceptively taut control that prevents this from becoming mawkish. Indeed, the conclusion comes close to tragedy and those familiar with the more mischievous entries in the Fellini canon will be pleasantly surprised by this socio-politically trenchant and emotionally punishing drama.

CITY OF WOMEN (1980).

Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni were no strangers to dreams. They had created the most mesmerising reverie in screen history in 8½ (1963) and return to the subconscious and subjective meaning in City of Women. In fact, this might have been a collaboration between Fellini and Ingmar Bergman, as the idea first hatched when the pair were walking together in Rome in the early 1970s. But the pair couldn't agree on a setting and Fellini was left to try and reconcile his fabled adoration of women with his avowed ignorance of feminism and his fear that he was rapidly becoming a man out of his time. 

Waking on a train as it emerges from a tunnel, Marcello Mastroianni is so struck by stranger Bernice Stegers that he not only follows her to the bathroom, but off the train and through the countryside to the Grand Hotel Miramare, where he finds himself in the middle of a feminist convention on the subject of polyandry. He attempts to flee, but has to settle for sanctuary in a lift with Donatella Damiani. However, she takes him to a gymnasium and forces him to don roller skates while he is surrounded by a gaggle of angry women practicing groin kicking on a dummy. 

Falling down the stairs in his eagerness to escape, Mastroianni is aided by janitor Jole Silvani, who offers to take him back to the station on her motorbike. However, she stops off at a farm, where her attempt to molest him is interrupted by her mother. Frustrated in his efforts to catch a train by a carload of tripping women, Mastroianni is grateful for the intervention of Ettore Manni, who offers him a room for the night and invites him to a party. As he wanders around the house admiring the phallic sculptures and interactive erotic artworks, Mastroianni realises that his host is celebrating his 10,000 sexual conquest and feels somewhat uncomfortable when his wife puts on a kinky display of genital telepathy.

Mastroianni bumps into his own ex-wife, Anna Prucnal, and they indulge in a drunken argument before he is led away by the returning Damiani. At that moment, the police arrive and announce that they are going to demolish Manni's den of iniquity, but Mastroianni is too busy dancing with Damiani and her scantily-clad friends to notice. Exhausted, he crashes on a bed with Prucnal, only to wind up crawling beneath it to investigate some strange noises. He falls down a chute and seems to revisit his juvenile fantasies of sleeping with a babysitter, a nurse and a prostitute before he lands in a cage.  

Hauled before a court, Mastroianni is ordered to defend his record as a man. He survives the ordeal, but still climbs the towering edifice that was supposed to be part of his punishment and he floats away in a hot air balloon in the shape of Damiani. But he is still far from safe, as she starts shooting at the craft with a machine-gun and he starts to plummet. Naturally, this is where the dream ends and he wakes to realise that his glasses are broken. As he looks around him, he notices that the compartment is full of the women who populated his nightmare, which may be about to begin all over again, as the train plunges into another tunnel.

Despite Fellini's efforts to come to grips with feminism, this is much more a film about masculine insecurity than womanly strength. Despite lengthy consultation with leading feminists (some of whom helped shape the script), Fellini seems more prepared to mock Mastroianni's fantasies and flaws than he does to engage with the basics of gender politics. Consequently, there is something cartoonish about the majority of the female characters and, no matter how loudly Fellini might protest about admiring them and loathing the objectivism of the male gaze, he is more intent on lamenting the proscription of flirtatious ogling than on celebrating a new spirit of equality and respect.

Repeating tropes from several earlier outings, Fellini is deeply indebted to production designer Dante Ferretti and cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno for the picture's captivating visuals. He also owes much to his screen alter ego, Marcello Mastroianni, whose inexpert dalliances may seem harmless beside Manni's predatory machismo. But this is a satire that tries to bat for both sides and the winking depiction of male boorishness ultimately undermines its decent, if confused intentions.

THE CONFRONTATION (1968).

Coming between The Round-Up (1965), The Red and the White (1967) and Red Psalm (1971), Miklós Jancsó's The Confrontation has rather been overlooked. It didn't help that it was due to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival that was abandoned because of the May Days. But this is much more accessible in its analysis of the abuse of power than the aforementioned and is certainly due for reappraisal. Shooting in colour for the first time, Jancsó uses the early days of one party rule in Hungary to reflect upon his own postwar experiences, the aims and methodology of revolution and the unrest that became synonymous with 1968.

As the Communists seek to reinforce their grip on power in Hungary in 1947, young zealots take to the streets in a bid to prevent the military from intervening on behalf of the forces of convention. As policeman András Kozak watches a display of passive resistance in the face of army vehicles, the red-shirted Lajos Balázsovics leads a group of students into the Catholic school run by Father József Madaras with the intention of introducing the pupils Marxist-Leninist ideology. He urges his captive audience to consider the role of personality in history, as well as the validity of Christianity in an unknowable world.

While Balázsovics urges cautious indoctrination, deputy Andrea Drahota is convinced that shock coercion is the only way forward. Exploiting democracy for her own ends, she ousts Balázsovics and uses her new power to force the Catholic kids to embrace the new freedom that Communism alone can bring. She also encourages them to denounce and purge each other and stages a grand book burning before she is reminded that the Nazis employed similar tactics to stifle freedom of expression and thought. Kozak appears to have more sympathy with Balázsovics's methods, which seem to have been sanctioned by the hierarchy. But, once chaos has descended, it becomes increasingly difficult to prevent actions from taking precedence over words, even after the arrival of some older delegates from the People's Colleges, who strive to impose a semblance of reason and order.

Positing the beauty, serenity and certainty of the past, while also warning of the dangers of succumbing to blind revolutionary ardour, this may seem like an exercise in fence sitting.  Yet, while Jancsó (himself once a committed Stalinist) refuses to take sides in this battle for hearts and minds, he and co-scenarist Gyula Hernádi do ask important questions about the uniformity of the message being espoused and the validity and integrity of the methods being employed to disseminate it. Thus, while he challenges the emotive exploitation of patriotic folk songs and protest propaganda, he also queries how well those seeking to impose their ideals actually understand them and the wider implications of their enforcement.

As always, staging the action in long takes (around 30 in all) filmed with languid discretion by Tamás Somló, Jancsó once again demonstrates his mastery of composition, particularly during what must be the most distinctive song-and-dance routines in screen history. His use of colour symbolism seems a little simplistic at times (most notably in regard to Balázsovics's scarlet shirt and the black and white of the nuns' habits), but his hesitancy to condemn or condone reflects a deeply personal dilemma, as he seeks to stay the right side of the state censors, while also using the spontaneous passion of the Soixante-Huitards to review his own more pragmatic radicalism.

JOSEF KILIAN (1963).

Running a mere 40 minutes, Pavel Jurácek and Jan Schmidt's Josef Kilián is an unsung gem of the Czech Film Miracle that pays sly homage to Franz Kafka, while also mocking Czechoslovakian bureaucracy and the ease with which an authoritarian regime can instil paranoia and a daunting need to conform. Trapped in a world he scarcely understands, but determined to do something a little bit different, Karel Vasicek finds himself in a shop that rents cats. Without quite knowing why, he allows Consuela Moravkova to talk him into taking one home for the evening and is appalled to discover, the following morning, that the premises have vanished and that he is now liable to a sizeable fine for the late return of his feline. Adding to Vasicek's woes is the fact he has to find his old acquaintance Pavel Bartl in order to break some bad news. However, he also rather hopes that he might know a way out of his cat quandary.

Starkly photographed by Jan Curík to make Prague look as forbidding as it did to another Josef K, this is just as ominous as Orson Welles's adaptation of The Trial (1962), but every bit as acerbically absurd at Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985). Each office is more sinister than the last. But most chilling of all is the empty room with a telephone, where the Vasicek's bemusing odyssey reaches its end. Even corridors lined with filing cabinets and adorned with propagandist slogans and steepling staircases seem to lead nowhere, unless one comes tumbling down them and Jurácek and Schmidt archly crosscut Vasicek's bruising buster with a shot of the pedestal of the Stalin Monument that had been dynamited the previous year as the Party sought to distance itself from its shameful past.

Jurácek would go on to co-script Karel Zeman's The Jester's Tale (1965), Vera Chytilová's Daisies (1966) and Schmidt's Late August at the Hotel Ozone (1967). He would also direct Case for a Rookie Hangman (1970), which took its inspiration from the third book of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. But he never worked in cinema again after the picture was shelved as part of the post-Prague Spring crackdown.

MAN OF MARBLE (1976).

In 1976, Andrzej Wajda helped change the mood of Polish cinema with Man of Marble, which centres on film student Agnieszka (Krystyna Janda), as she seeks materials for her diploma project and discovers the truth about Mateusez Birkut (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), a Stakhanovite brick layer from the 1950s who was lionised in a propaganda film by Party-friendly director Jerzy Burski (Tadeusz Lomnicki), only to be persecuted after an accident turned his thoughts to social justice.

Wajda first tried to mount this exposé of socio-political attitudes in Stalinist Poland in 1963. However, the Script Assessment Commission refused to sanction the film for its negative depiction of the past, although the screenplay was published that August in the Warsaw weekly, Kultura. Thirteen years later, liberal culture minister Josef Tejchma passed the project for production and, even though every attempt was made by the Party to marginalise it, Man of Marble became the cornerstone of the Cinema of Moral Anxiety that helped shape Polish political consciousness in the run-up to the foundation of the Solidarity trade union in 1980.

In many ways, this is a Polish Citizen Kane, as it opens with pastiche newsreel footage as Agnieszka begins her researches and is then structured around a series of flashbacks inspired by her interviews with key figures in Birkut's life. Her first encounter with Jerzy Burski, who has clearly profited from  his collaboration with the State, recalls Birkut's career as a shock worker at Nowa Huta, the new town created by the Communists as a symbol of the economic miracle they were sponsoring.

This is the most satirical segment of the film, as it mocks Burski's tailoring of reality to make it look more impressive for the cameras. However, it ends with Birkut's hands being permanently damaged by a hot brick and  Agnieszka's meetings with Witek (Michal Tarkovsky) - Birkut's workmate on the day of the `accident', with whom he would later be jailed as an industrial spy - and Birkut's now-alcoholic wife, Hanka Tomcyzyk (Krystyna Zachwatowicz), are much more sombre and reflect the crushing of the Polish spirit in the 1950s and 60s.

Yet, Wajda ends on a more positive (and eerily prescient) note by having Agnieszka (whom he modelled on emerging director Agnieszka Holland) befriend Birkut's son, Maciek (also Jerzy Radziwilowicz), who is a worker at the Gdansk shipyard, where the Solidarity campaign would begin three years later. Very much a national epic, this is a complex portrait of misplaced idealism and betrayed trust and, although it's not an easy watch, it remains Wajda's most important work, even though more attention was paid to Man of Iron (1981), as it coincided with the emergence of the Solidarity trade union.

LA NOTTE (1961).

This is the central segment of Michelangelo Antonioni's celebrated `alienation' trilogy, which also comprises L'Avventura (1959) and L'Eclisse (1962). Its action centres on novelist  Marcello Mastroianni and his wife Jeanne Moreau, as they visit his dying editor, Bernhard Wicki, at the start of an indolent day that will culminates in them contemplating infidelity with strangers - he with Monica Vitti; she with Giorgio Negro - before they are reunited to make passionless love outdoors as dawn breaks.

As in so much of Antonioni's work, the inability to communicate in a dehumanising society is the pivotal theme and he moves his characters with chilling precision around a city that's every bit as barren and hostile as L'Avventura's volcanic island. Ostensibly, Mastroianni and Moreau have an enviable lifestyle. They attend a book reception, patronise a trendy nightclub and receive an invitation to a wealthy industrialist's estate. But they don't enjoy anything and are so innured by habit and indifference that they manage to avoid adultery more through boredom than fidelity and only make love on the golf course out of mutual self-pity rather than any conviction that they can save their decaying 10-year marriage.

But, they're not alone. The film's sole sympathetic character is the dying Wicki. But even the hospital visit is disrupted by nymphomaniac Maria Lya Puzi's bid to grab Mastroianni, who only escapes thanks to the intervention of two callous nurses. This encounter finds ironic echo in Mastroianni's dogged and pointless pursuit of Vitti at her father's mansion and his empty attempts at seduction are thrown back at him when he fails to recognise the love letter that Moreau reads to him before they screw without passion on the grass. This exposure of the emptiness of Mastroianni's prose suggests his failure as a novelist, as while he is commercially successful, he no longer has anything worthwhile to say.

La Notte is every bit as technically accomplished as L'Avventura, with Gianni Di Venanzo's camera following the action with meticulous fluidity or spying through the rain-spotted car windows to record Moreau and Negro's wordless conversation. But it's never as dramatically satisfying, with its depiction of a bleak existence relying too heavily on the laboured symbolism of Moreau's walk through the redeveloped Milanese suburbs where she had once been content and the contrast between Vitti's vibrant attitude to life and art and Mastroianni's flaccid ennui. This may have won the Golden Bear at Berlin, but it lacks the desperate humanity of its triptych companions.

PLEIN SOLEIL (1960).

Released at the height of the nouvelle vague, Plein Soleil (or Purple Noon, as it was known on its original UK release) made a star of Alain Delon. It also attracted a cult following, with future director Martin Scorsese among its more vocal adherents. Yet it only received mixed reviews at home and drew the ire of Patricia Highsmith, who felt that René Clément and co-scenarist Paul Gégauff had compromised her novel, The Talented Mr Ripley, by giving in to conventional morality and implying that her anti-hero would pay for his crimes. Anthony Minghella also tinkered with the ending in his 1999 take on the story, which starred Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow. But, for all its polish and fidelity, this is inferior in many regards to Clément's version, with Damon's inability to match Delon's ruthlessly enigmatic lead being the most crucial.

Impecunious American Tom Ripley (Alain Delon) is offered $5000 to travel to Italy to persuade friend Philippe Greenleaf (Maurice Ronet) into taking some responsibility and returning to San Francisco to take over his father's business. However, he soon becomes seduced by Greenleaf's indolent lifestyle and revels in being able to have whatever he desires at any time of the day or night. The exception, however is Greenleaf's girlfriend, Marge (Marie Laforêt), who is writing a book about Fra Angelico and dotes on him without knowing a thing about the seedier side of his character. Indeed, the cruel streak manifests itself during a trip to Rome, when he taunts a blind man and abuses a woman they pick up during a night's carousing. Furthermore, while on a yachting trip from Taomina, Greenleaf lures Ripley into a dinghy and allows him to drift out to sea for several hours in the blazing afternoon sun.

Having been rescued and treated for severe sunburn, Ripley plots to murder Greenleaf and assume his identity so he can continue living in the lap of luxury. He starts by driving a wedge between Greenleaf and Marge by planting a pair of earrings in his jacket. When she accuses him of cheating on her, Greenleaf loses his temper and throws her manuscript into the Mediterranean and she insists on being put ashore. Alone with his erstwhile friend, Ripley calmly announces that he intends to kill him. Initially thinking he is fooling around, Greenleaf laughs off the threat. But there is no playful twinkle in Ripley's cold eyes and Greenleaf begins pleading with him to spare him in exchange for a sizeable sum. Ripley spurns the offer, as he knows he will have access to unlimited funds once he has traded places. But he appears to have a change of heart in order to catch Greenleaf off his guard and stabs him viciously before tossing his anchor-weighted body overboard and returning to port.

Naturally, Marge is surprised to see Ripley alone. But he convinces her that Greenleaf has gone off by himself and embarks upon a tour of Italy. In addition to forging his signature, Ripley also starts to impersonate Greenleaf's voice and mannerisms and even manages to exchange their passport photographs. However, when he takes a suite in a Roman hotel, Ripley attracts the suspicions of Greenleaf's buddy, Freddie Miles (Billy Kearns) and his girlfriend (a cameoing Romy Schneider). He pays with his life, but Ripley disposes of his body in such a cavalier fashion that it is discovered and the police open a murder inquiry.

Such is his composed cunning, however, that Ripley begins to play a dual role in order to implicate Greenleaf in Mills's death. He leaves a suicide note that suggests his guilt and produces a will that leaves the entire family fortune to Marge. Moreover, in consoling Marge, he steals her heart and they move in together. But, just as Ripley seems to have succeeded in transforming his fortunes, Greenleaf's boat is taken into dry dock and it is discovered that the anchor chain has wrapped itself around the propeller and trapped Greenleaf's decomposing corpse. As the film ends, Ripley agrees to drop in at police headquarters, oblivious to the turn that events have taken.

Strikingly photographed in rich, shimmering colours by Henri Decaë and impeccably designed by Paul Bertrand to convey the lavish opulence of the jet set, this is one of the best looking French films of the 1960s. Françoise Javet's neat editing and Nino Rota's unnervingly jolly piano score reinforce the audiovisual timbre that complements the stealth of Clément's direction. He paces everything so carefully, so that the motive for the crime, its execution and its ramifications play out in their own time. Such deliberation also allows the audience to assess the personalities of the characters and draw their own conclusions as to where guilt should lie.

In only his third film, the 24 year-old Delon is mesmerising, as he shifts from pathetic gratitude and seething envy to cool calculation and unsuspecting confidence. His expression as Kearns accuses him of being a parasite is chilling. But Ronet also excels, as the arrogant and manipulative gadabout (who may be repressing homosexual desires), whose callous disregard for anyone's feelings means that he almost deserves his gruesome fate. There is something Hitchcockian about the way in which Delon goes about keeping Ronet alive and he seems to relish the challenge of maintaining the illusion more than he does reaping its benefits. Yet, for all his criminal intelligence, Delon appears to be on the verge of being undone by caprice in the closing scene - although who would be entirely surprised if he had a ready answer to each question the cops might pose?

THE SUN IN A NET (1962).

Subverting the tenets of Socialist Realism, Štefan Uher's The Sun in a Net (1962) is usually regarded as the first picture of the Czech New Wave. Adapted by Alfonz Bednár from three of his own short stories, it was so full of innovative symbolism that Karol Bacílek, the head of the Slovakian Communist Party, denounced it for using a solar eclipse and a dried-up riverbed to suggest the repressive bankruptcy of a regime that had held power since February 1948. But Uher managed to slip much subtler criticisms of daily life into almost every scene, while also shocking censors and public alike with his frank attitude to sex and his audacious musings on the sensuality of physical labour, the strength of joined hands and the merits of benevolent lies.

Student Marián Bielik enjoys poking fun at 15 year-old Jana Beláková, as they lounge around on a Bratislava rooftop listening to the radio in the heat of the summer sun. A keen photographer, Bielik likes to think of himself as his girlfriend's intellectual superior. But she is happy to put up with his snipes, as anything is preferable to mediating with younger brother Peter Lobotka between their adulterous father, Andrej Vandlík, and blind mother, Eliška Nosálová, who has to have everything described for her and rather makes the most of an incapacity whose cause is something of a family taboo. Thus, when Bielik volunteers at a summer work camp (a task he willingly undertakes as his father is a derided member of the intelligentsia and he hopes showing such loyalty to the state will help get him into college), Beláková cosies up to cocky youth Lubo Roman and not only reads him Bielik's letters from the farm (in which he claims to be a latterday Robinson Crusoe), but also let him fondle her under her bathing suit.

Bielik also finds a new companion in Olga Šalagová, who strips off to her underwear to work beside him in the fields and bathes with him in a pool that supposedly bestows virility. She also compliments him on the photograps of hands he has started taking. Moreover, Bielik has also run into Vandlik's father, Adam Janco, in the nearby village of Melenany, and starts to get a better understanding of the reasons for the tensions in Beláková's household. Thus, he returns to the city in a very different frame of mind and sees things much more clearly than he did during the cloud-shrouded eclipse at the start of the summer. By contrast, Lobotka is still prepared to tell his mother what she wants to hear and even informs her that the river by the swimming pontoon is flowing freely when, in fact its level has dropped dramatically.

Seeing and believing are key themes of this poetic, but daringly provocative feature, which departed significantly from Uher's debut study of another group of 15 year-olds in We From Grade 9, Study Group A (1961). In some ways, this has much in common with another Iron Curtain picture from the same year, Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water. But it also recalls Ingmar Bergman's Summer With Monika (1953), thanks to its knowing insights into the innocence of adolescence and Stanislav Szomolányi's glorious use of location and natural light.

Uher employs all manner of devices to aid and impede clear vision, with the shots of mirrors, windows, and still and rippling water contrasting adroitly with those of sunglasses, fishing nets and pieces of smoked glass. But Uher, composer Ilja Zeljenka and sound designer Rudolf Pavlicek also make inspired use of radio and television blare, off-screen voices, a discordant recorder, the roar of overhead jets, Western pop music and natural noises to show an supposed idyll under assault from an imposed ideology that nobody seems to understand or want. The sequence of the youths voting emphasises this point, as while the ballot appears to be democratic, Uher implies how easily the individuality conveyed in Bielik's hand snaps can be negated in a show of compromised unanimity.

TRANSPORT FROM PARADISE (1962).

A few months after a party from the Danish Red Cross had been duped into believing that the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia was a model facility, SS commander Hans Günther hired Jewish film-maker Kurt Gerron to make a short documentary that could be used to convince other humanitarian agencies and the Vatican that residents were being well treated and allowed to enjoy a measure of social and cultural freedom. Gerron was shipped off to Auschwitz almost as soon as the project was completed and, now, only some 20 minutes remain of Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area (1944), whose alternative subtitle was `The Führer Gives the Jews a City'. But the incident was recalled in Zbynek Brynych's Transport From Paradise (1962), which, like Jan Nemec's Diamonds in the Night (1964), is based on the experiences screenwriter Arnošt Lustig first recorded in his book, Night and Hope. 

General Knecht (Jindrich Narenta) arrives in the Czech town of Terezin in 1944 to inspect the concentration camp known within the Third Reich as Theresienstadt. Although it runs as efficiently as any of the more notorious extermination centres, this ghetto is better maintained so that the outside world can be shown how well the Nazis are handling their `Jewish Question'. However, with the dignitary on his way, David Loewenbach (Zdenek Stepánek), the chairman of the council, announces that he wants nothing more to do with selecting residents for the transports heading to Auschwitz and Treblinka and refuses to sign any of the documentation that allows the bureaucrats to state that they had nothing to do with implementing the Final Solution.

With Loewenbach dispatched to the cells to face `special treatment', the more compliant Marmulstaub (Cestmír Randa) takes his place and the pen pushers can get back to counting and stacking suitcases and making arrangements for the next departure from the train halt. Behind this air of civility, brutality occasionally surfaces and Obersturmfüher Hertz (Ilja Prachar) is often responsible. His driver, an educated, Czech-speaking conscript named Binde (Jirí Vrštála), detests his boss and sympathises with the inmates. But he appears powerless to help them, as regular searches are made for the apparatus that permits the production of posters and the Vedem magazine. However, when he comes to realise exactly what is happening at the camp, Binde not only allows one pleading prisoner to escape, but also shoots a woman who begs to be spared the misery of deportation.

In front of his Red Cross visitors, Knecht makes a show of being impressed by the way the Jews regulate their community and notes the attempts to sustain education and a thriving cultural life. He also shows encouragement to Gerron (Martin Gregor), as he embarks upon his film project (the real Gerron had been the first to perform `Mack the Knife' as Tiger Brown in the 1928 Berlin production of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera and had co-starred with Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings in Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel, 1930). But Knecht sees nothing of the grimmer realities, as boys queue up outside the hut where Lizinka (Helga Cocková) gives them their last (and, in many cases, their first) taste of female comfort. Instead, he watches the following morning as the populace is forced to line up in a field and wait until their names are called, when they are expected (regardless of their age or health) to run across the sodden turf to the waiting train.

As Knecht departs, the locomotive pulls away and the camp commander sends an underling off on a bicycle to buy a bottle of champagne, so they can celebrate passing the inspection. The wail of the whistle and the squeak of the pedals leave an indelible impression and will prompt many to seek out Claude Lanzmann's harrowing documentary, The Last of the Unjust, which profiles Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, who was the last surviving leader of the Jewish Council. Much has been made of the fact that Brynych could make a bleak farce out of the Shoah just 17 years after the war ended. But camp survivor Alfred Radok returned to Theresienstadt within three years to make Distant Journey (1948), which he described as an `artistic report' on the unspeakable acts he had witnessed.

Abetted by Milos Alster's sound design and Jirí Sternwald's score, Jan Curík's camera refuses to flinch from the chillingly authentic details in Karel Skvor's production design (with even the mannequins in a tailor's shop window being forced to wear a yellow star on its lapel), while the exemplary ensemble recreate the sense of surreality as the doomed tried to make the best of the time remaining to them and their gaolers resorted to casual violence to rouse them from the nightmare through which they were sleepwalking. Brynych and Lustig refuse to spare the viewer and there are moments of unbearable poignancy and quiet horror that are equally devastating, as the terrifying banality and grotesque inhumanity of genocide are recreated in stark black and white.

THE WHITE DOVE (1960).

Admirers of Marketa Lazarová (1967), The Valley of the Bees (1968) and Adelheid (1970) will be delighted to see František Vlácil's feature bow, The White Dove (1960), arrive on disc. Having spent a decade making documentaries and shorts after learning the rudiments of film-making in the army, Vlácil wrote his simple story in collaboration with Pavel Kopta. But dialogue is at a premium in this majestic blend of neo-realism and enchanted expressionism that made such a deep impression that its influence can be felt in pictures as far apart as Ken Loach's Kes (1969), Henri Safran's Storm Boy (1976) and Boudewijn Koole's Kauwboy (2012).

The action opens in Belgium, as some racing pigeons are released en masse to make their way home. On a remote Baltic island, Katerina Irmanovová is teased by her fellow fanciers as her bird fails to return. But she never gives up hope and keeps coming to the beach in the certainty that it will find its way back to her. In fact, the bird is in Prague, having been blown off its course. But it very nearly perished when the wheelchair-bound Karel Smyczek took a pot shot at it with his air rifle and it was only revived by the speedy reactions of neighbouring artist Václav Irmanov, who had happened to be sketching the creature when the shot rang out.

Irmanov persuades Smyczek's mother Anna Pitašová that he needs to take responsibility for his actions and the self-pitying boy starts nursing the bird back to health. He reflects on the accident that led to him damaging his back in a fall and Vlácil uses the wire mesh that Smyczek had been climbing to match cut to the empty coop that so pains Irmanovová. She is made the victim of a cruel practical joke by local boy Hans Peter Reinecke, whose taunting has echoes in the bullying that Smyczek once endured from his classmates. But the comparisons between the lonely children are never forced, as editor Miroslav Hájek and sound designer František Fabián make the transitions between the coastal idyll and the landlocked capital seem as natural as a rolling tide or a whisper of the breeze.

Taking a leaf from Albert Lamorisse's The Red Balloon (1956), Vlácil avoids sentimentality and eschews lengthy passages of dialogue to ensure that his young leads feel comfortable in front of the camera without having too many lines to remember. The odd printed word does appear on the screen amusingly to undercut the resulting naturalism. But, even though he is forever striving to find visual means of conveying ideas and emotions, Vlácil and cinematographer Jan Curik resist pictorialism or nouvelle vague gimmickry, even when depicting the recovering bird in Irmanov's artworks (which were actually produced by Theodor Pištek and Jan Koblasa).

At its most brooding when the `dove' is being stalked by a black cat named Satan, Zdenek Liška's score makes agile use of differing styles and moods to reinforce the connection between the children, who never meet. But, thanks for Irmanov's diligence in tracking down Irmanova, this delightful film gets the happy ending it deserves, although Vlácil concludes dramatically by having Irmanov slash the face off the sculpture he has been making of Smyczek, as the insensitive boy appears not to have learned as much from his experience as the artist had hoped.