FUNERAL PARADE OF ROSES

 An underground art-house hit that is said to have influenced Stanley Kubrick when he came to make "A Clockwork Orange", "Funeral Parade of Roses" has built up a considerable reputation over the years and since it deals with the lives of a group of trans bar-workers in Japan, has also become something of a gay classic. It's mostly plotless, more a series of fragments built around the character of Eddie who works as a hostess and is played by Peter who was also in Kurosawa's "Ran" and it's filmed by director Toshio Matsumoto as a kind of homage to black and white gangster flics filtered through the gaze of someone like Godard and it's as much about the process of making a movie as anything else. It's certainly one of a kind and very much an acquired taste. Brilliant, indlugent, pretentious; it's all of these but at least it's never boring.

RUBY GENTRY

 Another of King Vidor's hot-house melodramas about another girl from the wrong side of the tracks who marries on the rebound while still carrying the torch for the bad apple who threw her over in the first place. Jennifer Jones is "Ruby Gentry", pouting and pushing her ample bosom in the faces of all comers, Charlton Heston is the heel she pines after and Karl Malden is the nice, if somewhat overly jealous, widower she marries.

It's just the kind of sow's ear that Vidor was expert in turning into a silk purse; style oozes from every frame and both Jones and Malden are excellent. Even Heston, playing a bad boy for a change, passes muster. Of course, hysteria is never far from the surface and at just eighty-two minutes there's a lot of plot to cram in. What might have been just tawdry in the hands of a lesser director here becomes something of an American tragedy.

COLOR OUT OF SPACE

 OK, it gets progressively sillier as it goes along and by the time we reach the apocalyptic climax Richard Stanley's "Color Out of Space" has stretched our credulity to breaking point but until then, as sci-fi/horror flics go, this has all the makings of a cult classic. It's based on a H. P. Lovecraft story and centres on a family of five whose remote forest home, (somewhere in the United States though the movie was made in Portugal), is hit by a meteor, complete with the requisite aliens that such movies have to have but unlike the big sci-fi disaster films of the past this is a decidedly low-key affair that is genuinely creepy in the best sense, at least until Stanley pulls out all the gory stops.

A fine cast, headed by Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson and very promising newcomer Madeleine Arthur keep things fairly realistic for most of the running time and by centring on a small group of people, Stanley is able to build the frighteners very nicely. Of course, you won't take any of it seriously but there are enough nightmare moments to make this one of the best sci-fi/horror hybrids of recent years and as Criswell might have said in "Plan 9 from Outer Space", 'Keep watching the skies'.

THIS COULD BE THE NIGHT

 Not quite a comedy, a drama or a musical but something of all three, "This Could Be the Night" is one of the Robert Wise movies that seems to have slipped off the radar which is a pity as it's actually very entertaining. It's certainly got a great cast. Jean Simmons is the schoolteacher who gets a part-time job as secretary to nightclub owner Paul Douglas but doesn't hit it off with his partner, Anthony Franciosa...at least initially. Five minutes in and you can see exactly where this movie is headed but a first-rate supporting cast, (Joan Blondell, the great Julie Wilson, Neile Adams, J. Carrol Naish, Rafael Campos), ensure a pleasant ride. Throw in Ray Anthony and his orchestra and some good musical numbers and what's not to like.

THE SHOES OF THE FISHERMAN

 My heart didn't exactly leap for joy when I saw that Michael Anderson was the director of "The Shoes of the Fisherman". At best, Anderson was a reasonable jobbing director whose main claim to fame was that he helmed that elephantine Oscar winner "Around the World in 80 Days", (and I felt I was there for everyone of them), as well as "The Bum Dusters", sorry "The Dam Busters", (you can tell I'm not a fan), and yet his fairly epic screen version of Morris West's novel actually works. Of course, with a more incisive and intelligent director it could have been something really special but even with Anderson at the controls it's a smart, hugely entertaining and ultimately moving picture with a good all-star cast all acquitting themselves admirably, (Anthony Quinn is excellent as the reluctant Pope and there's great work, too, from Vittorio De Sica, Leo McKern and especially Oskar Werner as various members of the clergy.

In case you don't know, the fisherman in question was Saint Peter, acknowledged to be the first pope and all subsequent popes are said to walk in the shoes of the fisherman. West's book is about the first Russian pope who does something very radical in order to both feed the world's poor and prevent World War Three. Of course, with a topic as topical and as controversial as this the book was a huge bestseller and the film version did make money. It's not a great film, (it's actually overly simplistic), and Anderson was never a subtle enough director to add depth though the scenes dealing with the Conclave of Cardinals and the election of the new pope have a documentary-like brilliance rare in a major feature film. Ultimately, this handsome looking film does exactly what it says on the tin and for that alone we should be more than thankful.

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JUDGE ROY BEAN

 It may not be a late masterpiece but John Huston's movie "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" isn't just one of his most underrated films but also one of his best. It's a picaresque western, (the title is a bit of a giveaway), with an even more laconic than usual Paul Newman in the title role with a supporting cast of 'guest stars' including Huston himself. It also introduced a young Victoria Principal, (Pam Ewing herself), and had Ava Gardner pop up as Lily Langtry.

Of course, Huston doesn't take any of it seriously. This is a blackly comic western, beautiful written by John Milius and with dialogue ripe for quoting, done as a series of set=pieces built around that terrific cast and, of course, it owes nothing to any other vision of Judge Roy Bean we may have seen, (Newman's about as far removed from Walter Brennan as it's possible to get). As an opening title says, this isn't the way it was but it's the way it should have been and it's a total delight.

HELEN OF TROY

 Even the hardiest of Robert Wise fans tend to give this one a miss, (which isn't surprising if you have to sit through the overture), but it certainly isn't the worst of the widescreen epics that the studios churned out in the fifties in an attempt to drag audiences away from their television sets. "Helen of Troy" was another international co-production, filmed at Cinecitta and various locations in Italy and it certainly looked the part, (the battle scenes are particularly spectacular). Unfortunately, the script is a mish-mash of bad dialogue and well-known phrases, (at one point Helen actually says 'Beware of the Greeks bearing gifts'), mouthed in English by leads who couldn't really speak the language.

Rossana Podesta who played Helen is said to have learned her lines phonetically while Jacques Sernas, (Paris), has a voice clearly not emanating from the rest of him. Then there's a young Brigitte Bardot while various Spartans and Trojans include Cedric Hardwicke, Niall MacGinnis, Torin Thatcher, Harry Andrews, Ronald Lewis and Stanley Baker as Achilles the Heel. It's not much of a movie but as schoolboy adventure yarns go it's certainly entertaining and will brighten a dull afternoon any day.

FINGERS

 "Fingers" is now generally regarded as James Toback's best film; Jacques Audiard clearly liked it enough to remake it as "The Beat that My Heart Skipped" and with Harvey Keitel in the lead it could sit quite comfortably on a double-bill with Scorsese's "Mean Streets". Keitel plays Jimmy 'Fingers', a gifted classical pianist with a passion for fifties and sixties pop tunes who, rather than using his fingers on the concert stage, acts as a sometimes vicious collector for his loan-shark father, (Michael V. Gazzo), and the movie comes over as a gangster flic with art-house pretentions.

A fairly young Keitel is terrific as always and he makes the psychotic musician a pretty scary figure while the supporting cast sometimes feels like a who's who of the casts of "The Godfather" movies, "The Sopranos" etc. But the film itself is much too loose for its own good and it meanders when it should be gripping us. Still, Toback makes good use of his New York locations and the whole thing is just weird enough to make an impression. It was never going to be 'popular' but it has cult movie written all over it.