BLUEBEARD'S EIGHTH WIFE

 One of Ernest Lubitsch's lesser known films but an essential part of the canon nevertheless and why wouldn't it be with its Charles Brackett/Billy Wilder screenplay and with Cooper and Colbert as the leads. It's as frivolous as they come with Cooper and Colbert meeting cute over a pair of pajamas and marrying in a flash making Colbert Cooper's eighth wife but one determined that if there is to be a ninth then at least Claudette will come out of it rich.

Throw in David Niven, Edward Everett Horton, Franklin Pangborn and Elizabeth Patterson and you have the perfect cast. Of course, it's all very silly but it may also be proof that silliness might just have been what Cooper was best at while his leading lady is simply perfection. Belly laughs are largely absent; this is a slight affair by Lubitsch standards but even minor Lubitsch is a treat.

EXPERIMENT PERILOUS

 This highly unusual B-Movie has been totally forgotten even among aficionados of both its star, Hedy Lamarr and its director, Jacques Tourneur. It's hardly one of Tourneur's masterpieces but it's a fascinatingly noirish mystery nevertheless and Lamarr is excellent as the beautiful woman who may or may not be mad or the victim of a controlling husband. He's Paul Lukas who, despite winning an Oscar for playing a sympathetic anti-fascist, was always at his best playing the bad guy. The hero is George Brent, the good doctor trying to figure it all out and make sense of a chance meeting on a train.

In many respects it's a fairly typical 'women's picture', closer to a Gothic Romance than a film noir and its period setting may remind you a little of "Gaslight" and there's good supporting performances from the likes of Albert Dekker, Margaret Wycherly and George N. Neise. If Lamarr was no Greta Garbo she was still one of the most beautiful women ever to grace the screen and if you need proof of that you need look no further than here. More than a curiosity, this has a lot to recommend it.

THE TRIALS OF OSCAR WILDE

A year before Basil Dearden's groundbreaking "Victim" Ken Hughes gave us "The Trials of Oscar Wilde" and while the word 'homosexual' is never uttered no other mainstream film before it tackled the subject with such a degree of frankness, leaving audiences in no doubt as to what the film was 'about' from the very opening scene. Of course, Wilde's 'trials' are of great historical importance in that, not only was the reputation of a great artist destroyed, but subsequently the case opened up a debate of homosexuality that lasted for several decades. It could even be argued that this film, as much as "Victim", was tantamount in helping change the law in the UK.

It is a deeply serious film with none of the anachronisms we usually associate with biopics and historical dramas and it's beautifully acted by the entire cast. Peter Finch is a superb Wilde, (he won a BAFTA for his performance), John Fraser. A perfectly petulant Bosie, Nigel Patrick, a suitably sardonic defender and Yvonne Mitchell, a wonderfully underplayed Constance while James Mason is brilliant as Sir Edward Carson, defender of the Marquis of Queensbury in the initial case, (his cross-examination of Wilde is a tour-de-force).

It is also a beautiful looking film, superbly photographed in widescreen by Ted Moore and designed by Ken Adam. At exactly the same time as the Hughes film came out there was another version of the same events simply entitled "Oscar Wilde" with Robert Morley in the title role and while Morley was splendidly cast the film itself was vastly inferior.

 

BLIND CHANCE

 Best known for his 'Decalogue' and 'Three Colors Trilogy' Krzysztof Kieslowski isn't really thought of as an overtly political film-maker but his 1987 "Blind Chance" is a deeply political film but also one that is as emotionally intense as the largely humanistic films that followed it. It is, in fact, three stories in one with Witek, (an excellent Dlugosz Linda), the hero in each as he strives to be the maker of his own destiny.

Each begins with Witek, a medical student, racing to catch a train. In the first he catches it, (barely), meets an elderly communist and becomes a party member and then finds his ideals put to the test when he falls in with a group of radicals. In the second scenario he misses the train, having knocked over a guard and is arrested, leading to his involvement with the underground and with religion and in the third he again misses his train but this time stays with the woman he loves, marries, continues his studies and becomes a doctor.

The idea isn't new, of course, though usually it's the stuff of romantic comedy but Kieslowski's genius is to show how such a seemingly random act can have such a profound effect on an individual's life and how love, faith and politics can be so irrevocably intertwined. The ideas presented are undeniably complex and yet Kieslowski makes it all look so simple and the end result is really quite extraordinary. This isn't just a key work in the Kieslowski canon but one of the best Polish films of the last forty years or so.

DRIVE

 Nicolas Winding Refn's tremendously stylish crime flic is the epitome of neo-noir as Ryan Gosling's monosyllabic getaway driver falls for neighbor Carey Mulligan and then finds himself embroiled in a heist involving her husband, Oscar Issac and some very unsavory gangsters in an Edward Hopperesque Los Angeles. Like all of Refn's films "Drive" looks terrific but it also pulses with a sense of danger thanks in large part to the presence of bad guys Ron Perlman and an unlikely Albert Brooks, (brilliant as usual), as well as some incredible outbursts of violence from an otherwise seemingly docile Gosling.

Indeed, this is a movie that is perfectly cast throughout. Gosling, Mulligan, Issac, Bryan Cranston and Christina Hendricks are all excellent even if it is the stunt drivers who are the real stars. Also the triangular relationship between Gosling, Issac and Mulligan is unusual and beautifully handled in a way that noirs of the past would almost certainly have ignored. A small classic and one that has already achieved cult status.