AN ACTOR'S REVENGE

A masterpiece and one of the finest uses of widescreen in all of cinema. Kon Ichikawa chose to film "An Actor's Revenge" in the style of Kabuki Theatre since that, indeed, is the film's subject or at least part of it. Yukinojo, (a magnificent Kazuo Hasegawa), is the leading actor and female impersonator in a theatre troupe when, one evening, he spies in the audience the men responsible for his parent's deaths and immeadiately he swears his revenge. What follows is a blackly comic tragedy, at once theatrical and yet wholly cinematic and quite unlike anything in Western cinema. The fact that Hasegawa is playing a dual role only adds to the magic and the mystification. Utterly extraordinary.

VIVA L'ITALIA

I think you need some knowledge of Italian history to full appreciate Roberto Rossellini's "Viva L'Italia" which has now largely been forgotten, (it's certainly no "The Leopard"), but this account of Garibaldi's fight to unify Italy still has a lot to recommend it; the battle scenes alone are some of the best on film and Rossellini shoots a lot of it in the same neo-realist style with which he made his name. It's less successful when it comes to the somewhat heavy-handed dialogue sequences and the largely wooden performance of its lead, Renzo Ricci as Garibaldi.

Like Visconit's "The Leopard" it was fundamentally butchered by its American distributors who cut the film, dubbed it, consequently altering Rossellini's message but they couldn't alter the look of the film; visually this is one of the most beautiful of all Rossellini's work and its recent rediscovery is certainly welcome.

THERESE RAQUIN

Not the best of Marcel Carne by any means but an intelligent, measured if somewhat conventional screen version of Zola's novel, nevertheless. Simone Signoret is "Therese Raquin", the married woman whose affair with truck-driver Raf Vallone leads to murder and blackmail. She is, of course, excellent but this is Vallone's movie; it is an effortless performance of an ordinary man caught up in events over which he has no real control. It's also superbly shot in Lyon by Roger Hubert and the updating to postwar France fits the plot perfectly. In an American setting this could be by James M. Cain though the climatic twist is neater than anything Cain might have given us.

A TALE OF TWO CITIES

Another literary classic gets the Hollywood treatment . What this 1935 version of "A Tale of Two Cities" lacks in sophistication it certainly makes up for in vigour. Jack Conway directed, (though Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur are credited with the handling of the crowd scenes, which are magnificent), and Ronald Colman is a splendid Sydney Carton doing a far, far better thing than he had ever done, The supporting cast are something of a mish-mash; Elizabeth Allan and Donald Woods are drips as Lucie and Charles Darnay but Edna May Oliver is terrific as Miss Pross and Blanche Yurka, a suitably terrifying Madame De Farge, knitting shrouds like there's no tomorrow which, of course, for many there wasn't. Subtle it isn't but even now it's still one of the most enjoyable epics of its period and vastly superior to the tepid British remake with Dirk Bogarde playing both Carton and Darnay.