YEAR OF THE DRAGON

 When Michael Cimino made "Year of the Dragon" he was no longer flavor of the month. Crowned King of the Hill with only his second feature, "The Deer Hunter", his star plummeted when his third film, "Heaven's Gate", became the biggest flop in Hollywood history, at least as far as the studios and the public were concerned, despite its being a masterpiece and one of the greatest of all American films. After its commercial failure it seemed like Cimino might never work again but you can't keep a good man down even if it did take five years before he got behind the camera again.

Co-written by Cimino and Oliver Stone from Robert Daley's novel, "Year of the Dragon" was a gangster epic, part Jimmy Cagney and part De Palma's "Scarface" set in Chinatown with Mickey Rourke as the potentially racist cop caught in the middle of a Triad gang war and John Lone as the Chinese drug lord he has to go up against. It's not a great film with thick-ear dialogue and mostly so-so performances, (though both Rourke and Lone are excellent), and it did little to redeem Cimino's sullied reputation but it's certainly very stylish and fast-moving with a number of first-rate set-pieces and was definitely undeserving of the five Razzie nominations it received.

MOROCCO

 A classic example of rhinestones turning into diamonds before our eyes Josef von Sternberg's "Morocco" might have been just another tawdry pre-code melodrama that was turned into something approaching art by virtually everyone involved. Firstly, there's Lee Garmes' shimmering cinematography, the crisp no-nonsense and really rather erotic screenplay by Jules Furthman based on the play "Amy Jolly" by Benno Vigny and then there are the matchless performances of Marlene Dietrich as Jolly, a young Gary Cooper as the insolent legionnaire Tom Brown and Adolphe Menjou as the rich older man who thinks money can buy anything including Dietrich.

It marked the second teaming off Dietrich and von Sternberg after "The Blue Angel" and their first in Hollywood and it set the template for the films that followed, particularly in how they looked and in the forthrightness in the way Dietrich's sexuality was portrayed, a seductress and not just of men; in the film's famous opening number she appears in male garb and kisses one woman on the mouth. Cooper, too, was never more sexually attractive and the film clearly made him a star. Too flimsy in terms of its melodramatic plot to be ever considered a great film it is, nevertheless, one of the most memorable of its period and one that stands up to repeated viewings.