HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL

 Unintentionally hilarious exploitation picture on the dangers of drugs in American high schools in the late fifties populated by high school kids played by actors who were at least ten years too old for their roles. Russ Tamblyn is the new student who's really an undercover cop planted in the school to find out who the dealers are. Jan Sterling is the glamorous and liberal teacher, Mamie Van Doren is Tamblyn's sex-pot of an 'aunt' while John Drew Barrymore is one of the bad guys.

Albert Zugsmith produced and Jack Arnold directed "High School Confidential" in 1958 and it was dated almost before it hit the screen. On the plus side it was very handsomely photographed in Black and White Cinemascope and the drag race sequence is certainly effective as is the climatic fight scene between the villains and some more civic-minded students lead by a very handsome and youthful Michael Landon before he built his little house on the prairie.

IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE.

 One of the better sci-fi movies of the fifties with intelligent direction, (by the great Jack Arnold), and an above average script making up for the lack of sophisticated special effects. OK, so the monsters look like wobbly jellies with one big eye and the acting is as wooden as we might expect from the likes of Richard Carlson and Charles Drake but at least at the time of the 'Red Menace' in an age of paranoia here was a sci-fi movie that said the invaders might not wish us harm after all. Originally filmed in 3D, though it hardly merited the use of the new technology, it has since gone on to be something of a cult classic.

HAMLET GOES BUSINESS

 The plot of "Hamlet" transferred to contemporary Finland then filmed in the style of a forties film noir with its tongue lodged firmly in its cheek. Aki Kaurismaki's "Hamlet Goes Business" is yet another of his many multifaceted treats exploring in large part the bizarre relationships between men and women only this time fleshing it out with yet another cod-thriller plot. So what if it steals from Shakespeare, (I can think of no better man), and at least this one clocks in at under ninety minutes rather than four hours. Good fun even if it lacks the emotional density we associate with the very best of its director.

KWAIDAN

 Masaki Kobayashi's ""Kwaidan" comprises of four ghost stories, each told in the kind of Kabuki-style that many Japanese films are famous for and all are visually highly attractive if a little on the predictable side, (only the third one really stands out from the others). Indeed, this is a movie in which style dominates with many of the frames looking like old prints but in terms of content the film is sadly lacking in substance. The cast, however, go at it as if they were performing some sacred text even if Kobayashi doesn't want to do anything as crude as breathe life into the proceedings, Still, as portmanteau pictures about ghosts go, it's definitely a cut above average. It's also, I feel, highly overrated.

DONOVAN'S REEF

 Unfairly dismissed at the time of its release "Donovan's Reef" now feels like, if not quite a late masterpiece, still something of a classic piece of Fordian hokum and an opportunity for a bunch of actors to enjoy themselves on, as Jack Warden's character describes it, "one of the most beautiful islands on earth". It's virtually plotless and on a formal level it hasn't moved on from the kind of films Ford was turning out in the forties and fifties and it might have been negligible had it been directed by anyone else but frame to frame Ford imbues it with all the affection and Fordian 'touches', including some spectacular Fordian brawls, that made him perhaps the primary director in American cinema.

Naturally, it's highly sentimental, quite misogynist and also highly ambivalent on the issue of race, (the Chinese get short shrift but Ford handles the issue of miscegenation with a lot more sensitivity than might have been expected), and it has in Elizabeth Allen a properly feisty Fordian heroine. Indeed the cast is first-rate. John Wayne, (who else), is Donovan who runs the local saloon, (hence the title), Lee Marvin is his sidekick, Jack Warden the local doctor and Allen's father, (her presence on the island and their relationship is as near to a plot as the film gets), while the supporting cast includes Marcel Dalio, Cesar Romero and Dorothy Lamour. You might call it a holiday film, particularly for the cast and crew, but if it is then you just might wish all holiday films were directed by Ford.

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.

THIS EARTH IS MINE

 Soap operatic romantic tosh of an unusually high order thanks mainly to the superlative direction of Henry King working, as he so often did, with sub-standard material. The setting is the California vineyards, the period Prohibition and this film, based on a novel by Alice Tisdale Hobart, is clearly a forerunner of such television series as "Dallas" and "Dynasty" with Claude Rains as the ruler of this empire, Dorothy McGuire, his ambitious daughter and Rock Hudson and Jean Simmons his grand-children who are in love with each other, (don't ask!).

It's the kind of film that attracted star players and did the business back in the late fifties with quality usually taking a backseat to quantity but King was something of a master at this sort of thing imbuing the ridiculous plot with a seriousness it didn't warrant. Rains and McGuire and, to a lesser extent, Simmons take the acting credits while Hudson just seems to be having a good time in the sure and certain knowledge he won't be winning any Oscars if he keeps making movies like this. No classic, then, but a very sturdy entertainment nevertheless.

RIVER OF NO RETURN

 One of Preminger's 'entertainments' and while "River of No Return" may be no masterpiece it's actually one of his most enjoyable films and one of the best Cinemascope movies of the early fifties, (Preminger was to prove to be a master of the widescreen). A western of sorts, it has Robert Mitchum, Marilyn Monroe and young Tommy Rettig going down the river of the title to escape some less than friendly Indians. With the river itself playing a major part in proceedings as well as several songs courtesy of Ken Darby and Lionel Newman it's not like any other western of the period. Mitchum is his usual laid-back self, Monroe is excellent and Joseph LaShelle's cinematography is outstanding making this a Grade A entertainment and something of a cult movie.

MONOS

 Boy soldiers are nothing new in international cinema with killers as young as ten gracing our screens in movies like "Beasts of No Nation". In the Colombian film "Monos" the soldiers are a mix of young men and women guarding an American hostage, (Julianne Nicholson), firstly on a remote mountainside and then in some unforgiving tropical jungle. Who these teenage warriors are fighting or why is never explained in a scenario that is part Kafka, part William Golding and part Werner Herzog.

There's only a slim semblance of a plot; instead director Alejandro Landes simply films his young cast, (who go by names like 'Bigfoot', 'Wolf' and 'Dog'), as they mostly fight among themselves, have sex or simply try to survive and what begins as just the kind of art-house movie designed to give art-house movies a bad name becomes, in its second half, the kind of savage 'adventure' movie Coppola might have made back in the seventies, indeed did make back in the seventies; there are sequences here as breathtaking as any in recent cinema. I simply couldn't take my eyes off it but whether it finds its audience is another matter entirely.

TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN.

 Another Minnelli movie about the movies and better, in its trashy, glossy way, than his overrated "The Bad and the Beautiful", (cleverly incorporated into this scenario to let us see what Kirk Douglas' character was like as a younger actor). This time he's a washed-up actor offered two weeks work in a film being shot in Rome's Cinecitta studios and directed by Edward G. Robinson with whom he's had a love/hate relationship stretching back awhile.

He's also got an oversexed ex-wife, Cyd Charisse, and women problems generally, (the cast also includes Daliah Lavi, Rosanna Schiaffino and Claire Trevor as Robinson's venomous wife). There's also a talentless young hack involved and he's played very well by George Hamilton. We are, of course, very much in "La Dolce Vita" territory or at least in the world of Eurotrash or Cannes where topless starlets meant more than the films being screened. The film itself is highly artificial which is just as it should be, pitched at just the right level of hysteria. Not a Minnelli masterpiece perhaps but essential nevertheless.