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Even here, however, dates are disputed, as Blackmail (which used RCA's Photophone sound-on-film system) apparently premiered at the Regal in Marble Arch on 21 June 1929, while Clue (which employed the British Photophone sound-on-disc process) went on general release on 16 December. What is not at issue, though, is that The Flying Scotsman is a highly entertaining relict of the bygone ages of steam and silent cinema.

After 30 years, Moore Marriott (who become better known as Will Hay's sidekick) is about to make his last run at the throttle of LNER's Flying Scotsman. But he will have to make the trip with a new stoker, as Alec Hurley is fired for drinking on the footplate and rookie Ray Milland takes his place. He promises to keep Marriott's record of never running late, but still goes on the town to celebrate his promotion and nearly gets into a fight with a jealous husband at the local palais de dance.

Milland manages to escape through a window with the help of Pauline Johnson (who just happens to be Marriott's devoted daughter) and he shows his gratitude by taking her to a fancy restaurant, where they annoy head waiter Dino Galvani by ordering ham sandwiches and bottles of brown and ginger ale. As Marriott is at a lodge meeting, Johnson invites Milland for a night cap and he steals her photograph from the mantelpiece for his collection. However, Marriott arrives home early and Milland has to sneak out, leaving Johnson to face her father's wrath.

Next morning, Milland gets into a fight with Hurley at the railway canteen and Marriott has to drag him away to get Flying Scotsman out on time. However, Johnson overhears Hurley swearing vengeance and she hops on to the train as it pulls out of King's Cross and keeps an eye on Hurley as he changes compartments. But she dozes off and misses him climb out on to the running board and over the coal tender to see Marriott and Milland jostling because the older man has realised it was his new fireman who had compromised Johnson's honour.

Marriott knocks out Milland with a shovel before being felled himself by a chunk of coal thrown by Hurley. But, as he attempts to disconnect the locomotive from its carriages, Johnson clambers down to help her father apply the brake and then rushes to the points to divert the carriages into a siding to prevent a crash.

Hurley accuses Marriott of trying to kill Milland. But, when he comes round, Milland insists he slipped while looking out of the cab and Hurley is taken away, while Johnson tends to Milland in the luggage compartment and Marriott and his guard get the train into Edinburgh Waverley on time. As watches Johnson and Milland go off arm in arm, he hopes that the old engine will remain in the family. But he cannot suppress a wistful sigh, as he knows he will never drive her again.

Any film with its first act played entirely in dumbshow and the second staged as a primitive talkie is bound to be something of a curio. But scenarists Victor Kendall and Garnett Weston ably mix melodrama, comedy and suspense to produce a rattling yarn, whose runaway train denouement would be much emulated in the coming years. None of the imitators could boast Sir Nigel Gresley's Class A3 4472 locomotive as a prop, however. Nor did they include such daring stunts as Hurley and Johnson (in heels) edging along the outside of the speeding carriages.

The debuting Milland impresses as the brash, womanising fireman, while Johnson shifts neatly from wallflower to heroine. But it's Marriott who makes the smoothest transition from silence to sound and his performance will surprise those only used to seeing him as the wizened, gap-toothed Harbottle, alongside Will Hay and Graham Moffat. The contrasts between the acting styles employed in the first and second halves are fascinating. But Theodor Sparkuhl's cinematography and AC Hammond's are also accomplished, while Castleton Knight's direction suggested the facility with actuality that would later see him entrusted with documentaries about the 1947 royal wedding, the 1948 Olympics and the Coronation.

The speed with which talking pictures replaced the silents was quite remarkable and British studios were soon able to entice American stars of the calibre of Edward Everett Horton (who was then a regular in Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals) to headline outings like Maurice Elvey's adaptation of the long-forgotten William Garrett novel, The Man in the Mirror (1936). Now 75 years old, this may seem a touch whimsical to modern audiences. But Horton revels in the rare opportunity to take a leading role (and a dual one at that), while the inimitable Alastair Sim steals scenes in a supporting role inspired by a celebrated Cambridge student hoax.

The fiftysomething Horton is a milquetoast of the first water. Bullied by business partner Garry Marsh, nagged by wife Genevieve Tobin and despised by mother-in-law Viola Compton, he is only admired by secretary Renee Gadd and Marsh's neglected wife, Ursula Jeans, who keeps bumping into him on trains and asking him to lend her books so she can get him alone. In truth, Horton isn't that fond of himself. But he has high hopes that a nitrate mines contract with the visiting Bogus of Bokhara will impress his doubters and help restore his own flagging self-esteem.

Typically, however, Marsh hijacks the project after Horton had done all the hard work and he returns home to admonish himself in the mirror. At that moment, a crack of thunder brings his reflection to life and he strides into the sitting room with all the confidence that Horton lacks. Feeling inadequate, Horton agrees to move out and his alter ego makes a move on the appreciative Jeans, who wonders what has happened to transform her husband.

Gadd and Marsh are equally curious in the office next morning, as the new Horton seizes the initiative on the Bokhara deal and whisks the Bogus (Aubrey Mather) and his interpreter (Sim) to the Shanghai Follies nightclub for a carousing session that is witnessed with growing trepidation by the real Horton. However, his troubles are only just beginning, as he finds a tipsy Jeans waiting for him in his room at the Ritz Plaza and he only just avoids Marsh after taking her home in a taxi.

The inverted Horton, meanwhile, has discovered that Mather and Sim are impostors and he delights in duping Marsh (who has concluded a worthless deal without Horton) into buying up nitrate shares before casually bankrupting him by revealing the truth. Convinced he can't compete with his dashing other self, Horton returns home to fetch his passport. However, the twosome realise that they only managed to save the day by working in tandem and, while shaking hands as a storm rages outside, they merge back into one man.

Notwithstanding the occasional transgression against political correctness, this is a droll Wodehousian romp that is smoothly essayed by a polished cast. Horton clearly enjoys playing against timorous type, while Sim is splendidly mischievous as the freeloading prankster spouting gibberish and attempting to cover up the careless Mather's more obvious faux pas. On the distaff side, Tobin and Jeans are rather marginalised, while the plot sometimes feels padded and the convolutions a little forced. But, while it's not a patch on Lothar Mendes's take on HG Wells's The Man Who Could Work Miracles (which was released the same year), this is still genially enjoyable.

Also released in 1936, Oswald Mitchell's Stars on Parade is twinned on a Renown double disc with Thomas Bentley's Cavalcade of Variety (1941). Showcasing the music-hall turns who were amusing audiences up and down the country twice nightly except Sundays, these are invaluable records of British show business in the middle of the last century.

Making adroit use of a street scene to link the acts, Stars on Parade opens with Edwin Lawrence delivering a wittily incoherent hustings speech before acrobatic dancers Sid and Max Harrison tumble through a routine that wouldn't have been out of place in a Hollywood musical. After Irish tenor and cornetist Raymond Baird perform 'That Old Fashioned Mother of Mine' and 'The William Tell Overture' respectively, Robb Wilton dons his familiar policeman's uniform to interrogate a woman who has confessed to poisoning her husband.

Wilton returns for an encounter with drunken toff Jimmy James after slick sets by trick cyclist Sam Barton, magician Horace Goldin and the Sherman Fisher Girls dance troupe. The lower half of the bill is completed by accordionist Pat Hyde (singing 'In a Shanty in Old Shanty Town'), impressionist Navarre, band leader Debroy Somers (conducting extracts from Wagner's 'Tannhäuser' and the curtain number, 'The Moon is Tired of Shining') and female impersonator Arthur Lucan (performing the Old Mother Riley sketch 'Waiting for Bridget' with Kitty McShane). But the standout is The Act Superb, a tableau vivant twosome dressed in whitewashed 18th-century costumes to strike Gainsborough-inspired poses with a horse and a couple of dogs. One wonders how an equivalent turn would fare on Britain's Got Talent.

Compiled from the shorts Variety (1935), Variety Parade (1936) and Music Hall Parade (1939), Cavalcade of Variety is a much less accomplished picture. However, it was clearly cobbled together to raise wartime spirits and ventriloquist Peter Brough does a decent job in linking the clips (which were shot in noticeably different venues) from a box with his snootily sniping dummy, Jimmy.

Bandleader Billy Cotton kicks off proceedings with a swing version of `The Blue Danube', which includes a tap routine by black dancer Ellis Jackson, which would not have been permitted in a Hollywood picture of the time because the races were kept separate so that scenes depicting African-Americans could be excised from prints destined for the Deep South.

Following a Sherman Fisher Girls number, Eve Becke sings 'Angelino Piccolino' before the Australian motorcycle stunt team The Four Air Aces perform a series of daredevil feats on a precarious circular metal frame. American ukulele player Bobbie Henshaw struggles to follow this astonishing act and it's almost a relief when he finishes his rendition of Sousa's 'Stars and Stripes For Ever' and clown cyclist Sam Barton returns for another exemplary display on his collapsing bicycle.

After The Radio Three interprets 'These Foolish Things', Frank E. Fields and an unnamed woman perform a sketch about a couple pretending to be widowed in order to dodge their debts, which is followed by Phyllis Robins's charming take on 'When I Grow Up' and a splendid piece of nonsense by the Arnaut Brothers, in which they play giant birds hurling whistled insults at each other.

Less gratifying is the sight of GS Melvin dragged up as Brown Owl to lead a pack of Girl Guides in a number entitled 'The Old Fleecy Lined'. Tom Gamble' `The Solicitor' sketch is equally forgettable, as are the version of `Tulip Time' performed by Macari and his Dutch Accordions (although Brough's hope that Holland will soon be liberated is very telling) and Ernest Shannon's impersonations of Gordon Harker and siblings Claude and Jack Hulbert.

Unfortunately, time hangs even more heavily during song-and-dance man Jack Stanford's performance of 'I'm Nuts About Screwy Music', Noni and Horace's comedy piano-violin routine, the can-can version of 'Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay' by The Empire Girls and the finale that sees Mrs Jack Hylton's orchestra playing 'Taking a Stroll Around the Park' and 'Let's All Go Up in the Sky', which includes a Sherman Fisher tap dance and contributions by brass bands from both the Army and the Navy. Nevertheless, the earlier highlights more than compensate and this disc should be a must for all fans of old-time music-hall.

An entertainer also proves key to the action in the Boulting brothers' Brighton Rock (1947), which is being re-issued to coincide with the DVD release of Rowan Joffe's coolly received 1960s update. Despite the fact he co-wrote the screenplay with Terence Rattigan and greatly admired Richard Attenborough's performance as juvenile gangster Pinkie Brown, novelist Graham Greene never liked this adaptation, as it tacked a happy(ish) ending on to a bleak and unrepentantly Catholic study of evil and damnation that was intended to confront postwar readers with the need for religion in an increasingly secular society.

The story is set during the 1930s and opens with reporter Kolley Kibber (Alan Wheatley) arriving on the south coast to participate in a promotional competition for the Daily Messenger. However, he is really Fred Hale, who was responsible for the death of mobster William Kite and he is recognised by a member of the gang that is now run by 17 year-old Pinkie Brown. He exacts his murderous revenge on a fairground ghost train and has Spicer (Wylie Watson) impersonate Kibber so that nobody suspects anything is amiss. But when Spicer is spotted leaving a photo card by naive café waitress Rose (Carol Marsh), Pinkie begins dating her to prevent her from going to the police. However, when news breaks of Kibber's demise, Pierrot show chanteuse Ida Arnold (Hermione Baddeley) becomes suspicious and quizzes Rose about the identity of the man she served. Having been threatened by Pinkie, Rose keeps quiet. But Spicer is less cautious and , having been overheard questioning the teenager's leadership, he is pushed down the stairs to his death after surviving a racecourse knife attack by goons working for rival thug Colleoni (Alan Wheatley).

Realising that Rose still poses a threat, even though she is hopelessly smitten with him, Pinkie proposes (knowing that a wife cannot be forced to testify against her husband). Crooked lawyer Prewitt (Harcourt Williams) arranges a quickie ceremony and Pinkie records a nasty message on a shellac disc in a sideshow booth and gives it to rose as a wedding present. Darrow (William Hartnell) dislikes the way Pinkie treats Rose and when he discovers he has talked her into a suicide pact, he joins forces with Ida to rescue Rose from the end of Brighton pier.

Known as Young Scarface in the United States, this was the closest that British cinema got to the brutality of the Warner gangster cycle that had made stars of James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart. Indeed, only St. John Legh Clowes's adaptation of James Hadley Chase's pulp classic No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948) would prove more shocking to contemporary audiences. Yet, by having the record stick, as if by divine intervention, Greene felt that the Boultings had bowdlerised his story and he continued to dismiss the picture as `gamey' for the rest of his life.

Nevertheless, even though Pinkie's mob are more like spivs than gatling-wielding racketeers, John Boulting and cinematographer Harry Waxman convey the seething mood beneath the seaside sunniness, while John Howell's sets capture the seediness of the resort's bars, tea shops, theatres and boarding houses. Condemned in its day for cheap sensationalism, the film has since been hailed as a herald of the realism that would come to dominate British cinema a decade later. Moreover, it also established a tradition that was furthered by Joseph Losey's The Criminal (1960), Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg's Performance (1970) and Mike Hodges's Get Carter (1971) before it was devalued by the BritCrime wave that followed Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998).

It's instructive to compare this flawed classic with Ernest Morris's The Sicilians (1964), a later attempt to cash in on the American mob movie that is presented with Operation Diplomat (1953) in another Renown double bill. Shot on a shoestring at Shepperton Studios, this is typical of the B-movie thrillers that were churned out by producer Ronald Liles to fill a market that was soon to disappear as going to the pictures became a more youthful pursuit and older patrons opted to stay home and watch the telly.

Having named names to save his skin during a New York syndicate trial, Sicilian exile Robert Ayres learns that his son has been abducted at London airport and makes plans to come to Europe and find him. However, the case is already being investigated by American diplomat Robert Hutton and Scotland Yard inspector Reginald Marsh, who decide to exploit the fact that Hutton's choreographer girlfriend Susan Denny has gone to work in Paris to make contact with French inspector Eric Pohlmann and do some snooping around the club run by the boy's mother, Ursula Howells, and her ex-Maquis husband, Alex Scott.

Once in France, Hutton is attacked in his hotel room by Scott and then drugged at the club before being deposited on a flight home. But, having gleaned information about Howells's past life following a meeting with estate agent Warren Mitchell, he returns to the Crevette club to confront her with evidence of bigamy and kidnap, just as Ayres arrives for a showdown with the dangerous Scott.

The slenderest of plots is stretched to breaking point here by the addition of comic digressions involving stage door keeper Michael Balfour and plane passenger Patricia Hayes and a quartet of cabaret routines by singer Maggy Saragne and Denny's dance troupe. Nevertheless, the performances are bullish and it's amusing to contrast such ruthless killers as Ayres and Scott with Marsh's avuncular plod.

Despite being directed by John Guillermin, Operation Diplomat is little better. However, there is more substance to the Francis Durbridge storyline, while Guillermin and dp Gerald Gibbs's use of the metropolitan and dockland locations is admirably evocative for a picture backed by the notoriously brassic Nettlefold Productions and Butcher's Film Service.

Lured into an ambulance on Westminster Embankment, surgeon Guy Rolfe is taken to a remote suburban villa and forced at gunpoint by Sydney Tafler to operate on munitions tycoon James Raglan. However, he learns from disgraced colleague Anton Diffring that Raglan has been kidnapped and he teams with resourceful nursing sister Patricia Dainton to find where Raglan is being hidden before he is smuggled to Eastern Europe.

Scotland Yard inspector Ballard Berkeley is less than convinced by Rolfe's story, however, even when he claims that Diffring was murdered by bogus cop, Eric Berry. Indeed, not even the death of patient Avice Landone (after she attempted to warn him that nephew Brian Worth's nurse girlfriend Lisa Daniely is not to be trusted) can bring Berkeley round. But he changes his tune when Dainton is snatched and a bid to trap the Mr Big behind Raglan's disappearance misfires.

The action then becomes slightly mired, as Rolfe attempts to find Dainton and Tafler and Daniely are bumped off by an unseen assassin. But the climax is exciting enough and while Rolfe cuts a suitably chiselled hero, it's more fun watching Berkeley in the knowledge that he would close his career playing Major Gowen in Fawlty Towers.

Ernest Morris's Echo of Diana and Shadow of Fear were both produced a decade later and form the last of this week's Renown twinnings. Neither is particularly remarkable. But they each feature a spirited performance by Clare Owen, while the latter co-stars Anita West, who had recently resigned from Blue Peter after just 16 shows because she feared that her imminent divorce from musician Ray Ellington would set a bad example for younger viewers.

Betty McDowall is distraught when she learns that husband Dermot Walsh has been killed in a plane crash in Eastern Europe. However, she is confused by conflicting reports provided by diplomat Peter Illing and further disturbed by a newspaper tribute signed `Diana'. She asks journalist friend Clare Owen to investigate, but a meeting with receptionist Marianne Stone and a trip to a Surbiton address prove fruitless.

But, when Owen's flat is ransacked, secret service colonel Geoffrey Toone suggests that the women collaborate with reporter Vincent Ball, a wartime friend of Walsh whose home has also been burgled. However, while Owen and Ball are busy searching for clues, McDowall is informed that Walsh is alive and she agrees to follow contact Raymond Adamson's instructions in order to slip out of the country and join him.

Morris suspensefully follows McDowell's progress from a Guildford pub to a backstreet attic (where she changes clothes and dons a blonde wig) and thence to the dockside hotel where she is to await her ship. But the resolution of the mystery is rather disappointing, as Toone suddenly realises she is being held hostage by a spy ring desperate to capture the secrets that Walsh had been carrying. Nonetheless, the story rattles along and the performances are more than adequate.

Morris had little more to work with in Shadow of Fear, a tale of industrial espionage that opens in Baghdad with American oil man Paul Maxwell sharing a drink with colleagues John Murray Scott and Tony Wager and local contact, Eric Pohlmann. However, Anita West's arrival at the bar unnerves Wager and he later comes to Maxwell's room to urge him to deliver a message to his boss back in London.

West sits next to Maxwell on the flight home and he is further surprised to be met at the airport by plain clothes men Edward Ogden and Robert Russell, as well as by girlfriend Clare Owen. On learning that Wager has been murdered, Maxwell agrees to go to a London hotel to meet with John Arnatt. However, he turns out not to be a copper, but a foreign agent who demands to know the information that Wager had confided.

Having refused to co-operate, Maxwell is held overnight and kills Russell when he attempts to smother him. Making his escape at dawn, he hides out with Owen, who suggests they head to the coast, as her uncle, Colin Tapley, has friends in the security services who could help them. Aware that Arnatt has sent West and Alan Tilvern to watch Maxwell and Owen, MI5 men John Sutton and Reginald Marsh suggest that they book into a hotel and behave as normal holiday-makers in the hope of luring the enemy into the open.

Surviving a bid to run them over on a narrow bridge, Maxwell and Owen go for a swim. But they are seized on the esplanade and taken out to sea in Arnatt's boat. However, the plan to eliminate Maxwell before he can divulge his secrets is confounded by the coastguard in an ending that is too drably downbeat to even qualify as anti-climactic. Yet, even though this is utterly devoid of suspense, it still passes the time amiably enough and Sutton, Marsh and Tapley are unintentionally amusing as the bachelors mucking in together to confound the foe.

The tone is considerably larkier in Gilbert Gunn's What a Whopper (1961), an Adam Faith vehicle that was scripted by Doctor Who icon Terry Nation from an idea by Jeremy Lloyd and Trevor Peacock. Essentially Carry On Nessie, this is a lightweight, but likeable romp that follows three pals to Scotland, as they bid to create a media stir around the Loch Ness Monster so that struggling author Faith can interest a publisher in his latest book.

Faith lives in a backstreet artists' community with painter Charles Hawtry, sculptor Lloyd Reckord, cook Carole Lesley and composer Terence Longden. Having just been served with an eviction notice by bailiff Clive Dunn, he needs money quickly and hits upon the plan of floating a homemade creature in the Serpentine, taking a photo of it and then using Longden's cacophonous electronic music to convince the simple Scottish folk that Nessie really exists.

So, having given hobo fisherman Spike Milligan a fright in Hyde Park, Faith sets off in a hearse with Longden and Lesley, whose drunken father Freddie Frinton is in hot pursuit because mother Fabia Drake refuses to allow her to marry a beatnik. En route, the friends pick up French hitch-hiker Marie-France and she agrees to let them stay in her room at the loch-side hotel run by Sidney James and Ewan Roberts, who are suspected of trout poaching by local sergeant Terry Scott and his doltish constable, Gordon Rollings.

Much hilarity involving fish, bedroom windows and speaker cable ensues, as Faith seeks to win over locals like postman Wilfrid Brambell by plying them with free drink. However, he has less luck with fanatical clansman Archie Duncan after being forced to shelter in his croft and is ready to give up when he loses the snapshot he hoped would convince the assembled press. But, just as all looks lost, the water on the loch begins to ripple...

Nobody could mistake this for a comic masterpiece. But there's much to enjoy here, including John Barry's theme song, Faith's self-guying rant against a pop star named Eden Charity, Carol Lesley's adorable ditziness and the customarily excellent support playing of Sid James and Freddie Frinton, who has been rather forgotten in his homeland, despite being a household name in Germany because of his 1963 comedy, Dinner for One, which is a huge Yuletide favourite. It's also a pleasure watching the likes of Milligan, Hawtrey and Brambell making the most of the slim pickings that the British film industry afforded them at the height of the social realist new wave.

Czech-born Karel Reisz was a leading figure in this age of kitchen sinks and angry young men. But he broke away from working-class grimness to explore mental breakdown in Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966). Adapted by David Mercer from his own Sunday Night Play, this was a provocative picture that shocked many with its absurdist approach to a sensitive issue. However, time has not been kind to a bleak comedy that says more about the time in which it was made than its subject matter.

Returning from Greece on the day that bourgeois wife Vanessa Redgrave divorces him, artist David Warner vandalises their home and moves into her car parked on the street outside. Redgrave takes out an injunction against him and makes plans to marry gallery owner Robert Stephens. However, Warner interrupts their love-making with a loud tape recording of a rocket launch and later succeeds in blowing up ex-mother-in-law Nan Munro with a bomb under the bed.

Redgrave has the car towed away while Warner is visiting mother Irene Handl, a Stalinist café owner, who insists her son accompanies her each year to Highgate Cemetery to accuse Karl Marx of being a class traitor. However, Redgrave feels sorry for him when he is recommended for psychiatric care and they sleep together. Warner hopes for a reconciliation, but he blows his chances when he gets wrestler Arthur Mullard to kidnap Redgrave and whisk her off to a camp beside a Welsh lake, where he fantasises that they are Tarzan and Jane.

Jailed for abduction, Warner is released on Redgrave's wedding day and he gatecrashes the reception in a gorilla suit and scales the walls after pushing Stephens into the cake. Amidst the chaos, the suit catches fire and Warner makes his escape on a stolen scooter that he rides into the Thames. Washing up near a rubbish tip, he struggles to remove the ape head and begins hallucinating that he is being readied for execution by a firing squad. Unsurprisingly, Warner is sent to an asylum. But, as he works on a flower bed representing a hammer and sickle, he gets a visit from Redgrave, who has some exciting news about her baby.

Cinematographer Larry Pizer, art director Philip Harrison, editors Tom Priestley and Victor Procter and composer John Dankworth all merit mention for their contribution to this frenzied farce. But the modishness of Reisz's direction binds it so firmly into a 60s straitjacket that everything seems that little bit too arch and knowing. Moreover, the madcap comedy, surrealist interludes, Communist diatribes and domestic melodramatics never quite gel into the coherent whole that had made the RD Laing-influenced BBC original with Ian Hendry so powerful.

Warner excels as the working-class anti-hero whose obsession with King Kong (1933) and Tarzan movies is manifested in the clips that clutter his reveries, while Stephens and the Oscar-nominated Redgrave do well in largely unsympathetic parts. But the countercultural satire based around Warner's regression into a primitive simian state is less subversive or amusing than Handl's wonderfully bileful tirades against the middle-classes and fond memories of a husband who would have placed anyone who had attended a public school in a chain gang.

Just as Warner has his epiphany at Battersea, so Kit Gleave finds solace on the towpath below Hammersmith Bridge in Duffer (1971), a compelling (and occasionally repelling) experiment in screen storytelling by expatriate Canadians Joseph Despins and William Dumaresq that has been released under the Flipside banner to mark its 40th anniversary. Strikingly photographed by Jorge Guerra and accompanied by a haunting piano score by Hair composer Galt MacDermot and eerie snatches of electronica by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's Delia Derbyshire, this is a daring, if homophobic hybrid of Oedipal nightmare, Joycean monologue and Lynchian magic realism that has only been matched by Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End (1970) in providing such a disconcerting insight into the psycho-sexual torments of adolescence.

As Marie-Jeanne Savigny leans on the bridge and gazes downstream, Gleave wanders into view to sit on the bank and begin reading his book. In a stream of consciousness voiceover (in which his words are actually spoken by Dumaresq), he confides that these private moments help keep him sane as he juggles the two lovers in his life: sadistic loner James Roberts (a pseudonym for Dumaresq) and plump prostitute Erna May.

Gleave much prefers sinking into May's feather bed and sharing an almost incestuous intimacy that contrasts harshly with the humiliations he endures at the hands of Roberts's paternal grotesque. Yet, he reasons that it would be cruel to deprive Roberts of such simply pleasures as attempting to suffocate him by stuffing cotton wool up his nose, coercing him into participating in porn movies and sodomising him in the hope that they can conceive a child.

But Gleave clearly resents having his naked torso covered in the worms that Roberts plucks from his mouth and retreats in desperation to May's basement bolthole after each session of abuse to make love with her in the time it takes for a vibrating toy monkey to descend its metal pole. Yet he cannot resist returning to Roberts to be his `womanimal' and when his tormentor becomes broody, Gleave's belly begins to swell and he steals a baby from a woman in the street. However, such is his state of confusion - he's not sure whether he might have taken a doll from a little girl - that when Roberts batters the infant, Gleave asks tobacconist Lisa Doran to check whether it's human or not and proceeds to dump the bundle in a dustbin.

Again seeking sanctuary with May, Gleave snuggles contentedly under the covers as she goes to give Roberts a piece of her mind. But he suddenly fears for her safety and, on discovering something awful in the wardrobe, Gleave finally takes out his fear and loathing on the cowering Roberts.

But do Louis-Jack and Your Gracie exist or are they merely figments of Duffer's over-active imagination? Despins and Dumaresq provide no easy answers, however, even though the combination of monochrome dumbshow and florid voiceover suggests that the indoor sequences may not be as real as the street scenes, with their harsh everyday occurrences, manipulative advertising slogans and starkly polemical graffiti.

What is clear is that this is a remarkable achievement. It was filmed on 16mm at weekends by a three-man crew and dubbed while Despins (who was then working at the BBC) was editing the footage. The mummed performances are almost unique in British cinema for their audacious stylisation, with Roberts particularly impressing with a display of feral derangement that appals whether he's force feeding peaches to Gleave to determine whether he's pregnant or mistreating the resulting doll/baby before destroying it.

But the implication that same sex intercourse is not as `normal' as that between a man and a woman has since earned the picture a questionable reputation. Nevertheless, even those alienated by its dubious sexual politics should still find this as audiovisually challenging as its less contentious companion piece, The Moon Over the Alley (1976).

If Duffer's text occasionally sounds like bad doggerel, Dumaresq's dialogue and lyrics for this singular Notting Hill musical perfectly suit the mood of heightened realism that is established by vagrants Doris Fishwick and Peter Farrell, as they observe the moon's portents while settling down to sleep in the alley behind German émigré Erna May's rooming house. The area has been earmarked for demolition by the council, but Despins is quick to point out that the erection of yet another soulless high-rise will destroy the sense of multi-cultural community that exists so contentedly around the Portobello Road.

Endlessly mangling her words, May scolds husband John Gay and teenage son Patrick Murray and constantly chivvies her tenants for the rent. But there's indulgence in her mother-henning, even though she is viewed with suspicion by newsagent Norman Mitchell's shrewish wife, Joan Geary, who heartily disapproves of Murray seeing her daughter, Lesley Roach. However, they somehow manage to sneak out together and snuggle happily in a near-empty cinema to watch Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's It Happened Here (1965), a fantasy about the Nazi occupation of Britain that is scarcely the ideal date movie.

Irish lodger Sean Caffrey also gives May a wide berth, but that's because he is always broke, even though he is about to start a second job at the post office to supplement his meagre earnings from the local pub. He hopes to marry Vari Sylvester, who has been his girl for 18 years. But he's appalled to discover that she has been working in a Soho strip joint to make the big bucks that could finally allow them to wed.

Caffrey has just been joined at the Warwick Castle by Jamaican Leroy Hyde, who has also moved into May's townhouse with wife Sharon Forester and their baby. She sings lullabies with the radio and invites Murray and new Californian resident Bill Williams for coffee and a discussion of the latter's ambition to become a pop star. But not everyone is so accepting and Hyde, Forester and two of their friends are bundled into the back of a paddy wagon during a white, liberal demonstration against a supermarket that suddenly turns tense. Luckily, Williams finds the infant in its pram and brings it home and everyone laughs about the incident rather than fulminating against the police's institutionalised racism.

Indeed, instead of arresting innocent bystanders and dope-smoking buskers, the local coppers would do well to keep an eye on 10 year-old Debbie Evans, who waits outside the pub until closing time while blowsy mother Ginny Lewis gets sloshed and picks up her latest sleeping companion. Street musician Miguel Sergides takes pity on Evans and teaches her a song. But she continues to be stalked by elderly loner Basil Clarke, whose penchant for offering her sweets and following her home finally attracts the attention of a gang of likely lads (although it's never made entirely clear whether Clarke is a paedophile, a disenfranchised grandfather or just a concerned citizen).

The sudden eruption of violence against Clarke and then Murray and Roach (after they're ambushed during a backstreet smooching session) lets reality come rushing into this unlikely neverland, where the rhythms of life prompt virtually everyone to break into song. But Despins never sentimentalises the situation and just about keeps cliché and caricature at bay by channelling them into McDermott and Dumaresq's songs, which draw on pop, gospel, reggae, folk and show tune traditions to comment on the passing scene and provide insights into lives of naive hope and anguished disappointment.

The majority of the numbers are neatly integrated into the narrative. But those performed in the Warwick and the Meard Street club sit more awkwardly, although Sylvester's buttock-flashing routine is a splendid pastiche of the sort of saucy ditty presented in Soho cabarets. However, each song is sung with a sincerity that is reinforced by Peter Hannan's affectionate monochrome photography and the benevolent direction of Despins, whose bold bid to impart a Brechtian spin on a Gracie Fields-style musical on the eve of the punk revolution deserves to be much better known.