KING OF KINGS

One of the most politically charged of all Biblical films, Nicholas Ray's "King of Kings" was almost universally condemned at the time of its release, (wags dubbing it "I Was a Teenage Jesus"), it's now rightfully come to be regarded as one of the most intelligent and least sentimental of all
Biblical epics. Jeffrey Hunter makes for a highly photogenic Jesus, heading a remarkably good cast that includes Siobhan McKenna as his mother, Hurd Hatfield as Pilate, Viveca Lindfors as Claudia, Harry Guardino as Barabbas, Robert Ryan as John the Baptist, Rip Torn as Judas and Ron Randell as the centurion Lucius.

While sticking to traditional stories of the New Testament, Philip Yordan's excellent screenplay then largely abandons the usual Biblical pieties in favour of more modern, colloquial speech while three Directors of Photography, (Manuel Berenguer, Milton Krasner and Franz Planer), ensure it's consistently good to look at. It's also surprisingly blood-thirsty, something else that might not have gone down too well with Christian groups and audiences at the time; however, both as a genre piece and as a crucial part of Ray's canon, it really shouldn't be missed.

FORTY GUNS

One of the strangest, and also one of the greatest, westerns ever made, Samuel Fuller's masterpiece "Forty Guns" has all the tropes of a conventional western but subverts them almost as wildly and as blatantly as Mel Brooks did in "Blazing Saddles", the difference being Fuller's movie has all the beauty of a great western as well as a degree of psychological depth unusual even in the late fifties. It also has Barbara Stanwyck in one of her greatest performances. If Joan Crawford came across as a camp icon in "Johnny Guitar", Stanwyck is the very personification of female sexuality, right up there with her performance as Phyllis Dietrichson.

Of course, she also wears the trousers on the Drummond ranch, commanding her forty guns and riding roughshod over what local law and order there is. That's mainly in the form of Dean Jagger's weak-willed sheriff who has the hots for Stanwyck and Jagger is magnificent in the role. The male lead is Barry Sullivan, (very good here), as the bounty hunter out to arrest one of those forty guns and falling foul of Stanwyck's vicious, rebellious younger brother, John Ericson, while falling in love with big sister at the same time. Naturally, this being a Samuel Fuller film, there's quite an emphasis on, shall we say, the more Freudian side of violence; the phallic nature of guns, Stanwyck's ability with a whip etc. and while it stops short of suggesting anything incestuous between Stanwyck and Ericson, their relationship is certainly on the passionate side. Not a great success at the time, it's now considered one of the definitive cult movies.

CLOSE-UP

Abbas Kiarostami's film "Close Up"isn't a documentary although it deals with incidents that have happened and 'the actors' are the real people involved 'acting out' those events, and it's a masterpiece. The events it depicts concern a Mr Sabzian who introduced himself to an Iranian family as the director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, promising to put them in his new film, his arrest for fraud and his subsequent trial. Everything we see happened but what we get is a dramatic 'reconstruction', played out by the participants themselves. It's part of Kiarostami's genius that the 'performances' he gets are superb, particularly from Hossein Sabzian himself, (if this is 'acting' it may be the greatest performance by a non-professional ever). The result is a wonderful love letter to the cinema, to those who love it and, of course, to Sabzian that is both very funny and deeply moving as well as a brilliant deconstruction of the whole movie-making process. (Is the final sequence actually happening as in a real documentary or is it too a reconstruction?). It has just been voted the 42nd greatest film ever made; it's easy to see why.

THE MULE

"The Mule" is Clint Eastwood's 37th feature film as a director and it's a classic. Eastwood was 88 years old when he made it, directing and once again starring, this time playing a 90 year old drugs mule. It's not only one of his very best films, both as a director and as an actor but also one of the best American films of recent years. The cracker script by Nick Schenk is based on a Sam Dolnick New York Times Magazine article about a real 90 year old drugs mule and was, I guess, probably the perfect vehicle for Eastwood, (he's not only roughly the right age but still fit enough to carry it off).

Of course, Eastwood is also probably the last of the great classicists working in American cinema with a body of work as fine as any of the great traditional filmmakers of the thirties and forties and he just seems to get better with the passing of time. His performance in "The Mule" is superb and he's got a great supporting cast including Bradley Cooper, Michael Pena, Laurence Fishburne, Dianne Wiest, Ignacio Serricchio and Andy Garcia. There's nothing remotely ostentatious about his work here; like all of his best films this is simplicity itself. It's also supremely entertaining and often laugh-oud-loud funny and I urge you to see it.