BEYOND THERAPY

 Proof that even Robert Altman can cook a rancid turkey. "Beyond Therapy", which he co-wrote with Christopher Durang from Durang's play and which, to Durang's dismay, he proceeded to change radically, is about the kind of New Yorker's who read 'The New Yorker' or are just found between the pages of 'The New Yorker' and who spend half their lives on the psychiatrist's couch.

It's clearly meant to be a comedy but it's one in which every joke has been drained of humor making it hard to believe that this was made by the man who gave us "Nashville" or that actors as talented as Glenda Jackson, Jeff Goldblum, Julie Hagerty, Tom Conti, Christopher Guest and Genevieve Page would lower themselves to appear in it. Surely everyone involved must have realized what a crock they were involved in. Shockingly bad.

STAGE DOOR

 Some of the best dialogue ever heard in an American movie delivered by a mostly female cast all of them at the top of their form. The setting is a theatrical rooming house populated by wannabe actresses. There's Katharine Hepburn, (the high-brow Vasser type), Ginger Rogers, (the low-brow chorus-girl type), and the others, (Lucille Ball, Constance Collier, Eve Arden, Ann Miller and Andrea Leeds who was Oscar-nominated as the tragic Kay).

Amongst the men are Adolphe Menjou, (a big producer, what else!), Jack Carson, Grady Sutton and Franklin Pangborn, none of them a match for the girls. Of course, the source material was a play by Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman which might account for the sharp wit though this cast certainly helped. The director was the great and undervalued Gregory La Cava who won the New York Film Critics' Best Director prize for his work. Something of a classic, in fact, that deserves to be better known.

THE TRIAL OF JOAN OF ARC

 Bresson at his most austere with a subject in keeping with that austerity, "The Trial of Joan of Arc" may lack the formal beauty of Dryer's film and Florence Delay may not be Falconetti but what Bresson's film has are Joan's words spoken directly from the manuscripts of the trial so this is probably as close we are likely to get to what actually happened.

Of course, with no wider backstory, other than what history has told us, it is difficult to place these events in a broader context which isn't to say the film doesn't work on its own terms. What we are seeing is a fragment of the tapestry rather than the tapestry itself while both Delay and Jean-Claude Fourneau as Bishop Cauchon are perfectly cast. Not one of Bresson's masterpieces, then, but quite extraordinary nevertheless.

7 WOMEN

 Now considered in some quarters to be a masterpiece and one of his finest films, John Ford's final film "7 Women" was neither a critical nor a commercial success at the time, (though the magazine Cahiers Du Cinema did name it as one of the ten best films of the year). The 7 women of the title are missionaries in 1935 China; at least six of them are, the seventh, played by Anne Bancroft, is the new doctor who joins them. The only man, outside of a few Chinese servants, is teacher Eddie Albert, that is until warlord Mike Mazurki comes calling with rape and pillage on his mind.

In many respects this is just another Ford western albeit with a Far Eastern setting and a very fine one it is if not quite the masterpiece some people think it is. For Ford it's also quite explicit in its attitude to sex particularly in its barely hidden lesbian subplot with head missionary Margaret Leighton lusting after young teacher Sue Lyon, seemingly unable to live down "Lolita". Bancroft, when she arrives, isn't just a breath of fresh air but a smoking, swearing, sexually liberated outsider who proves to be more than a match for the invaders.

Like "The Man who Shot Liberty Valance" it's clearly shot on sound stages and like that earlier classic is redeemed by an old man's experience of the world at large as well as an ambivalent attitude towards organized religion with each of the characters beautifully sketched and played. Add plague to the proceedings and you have one of Ford's most unlikely films but one as deserving of our attention as any that preceded it.