Man Of Aran (1934)

Irish-American Robert J. Flaherty, often called the "father of the documentary", shot this amazing record of the lives of fishermen on the remote Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland using funds from Michael Balcon's Gainsborough Pictures. Flaherty had originally been an explorer and had once discovered an island of his own in Canada's Hudson Bay. Turning to film as a means of exploring his fascination with remote and exotic communities existing in harsh conditions (he thought of himself as a Thoreau figure: "I haven't much use for towns"), Flaherty's previous career highlight had been Nanook Of The North (1922), but it was Man Of Aran that proved his masterpiece, nabbing the "Mussolini Cup" at the second Venice Film Festival and a legion of admirers, from Orson Welles to Luchino Visconti.

Flaherty's Man Of Aran introduces us to the inhabitants of this barren trio of rocky outcrops and chronicles the daily hardships they face. These isles have no natural resources whatsoever, meaning the redoubtable rogues who live there even have to create their own artificial soil from rubble, sand and seaweed just to be able to plant potatoes. Equally, much of their time is consumed hunting down monstrous basking sharks in order to have enough blubber to boil for lamp oil. The Aran Islanders are nevertheless happy and Flaherty captures them about their business in no little style, creating a vivid impression of the violence of the waves, the bitter chill of the wind and their unrelenting but cheery struggle to survive.

Although it has been criticised for fabrication (the family depicted were not really related and the premodern fishing practices shown had been abandoned half a century before), Man Of Aran remains rightly celebrated for its astonishing seafaring photography, a logistical triumph given the cumbersome and unwieldy nature of early film cameras. One far-sighted contemporary reviewer for the Sunday Express put it best when he wrote on April 29 1934: "This is a film which will influence directors all over the world. They will now perceive that there is drama in simplicity. One defiant face looking at the Atlantic after nearly meeting death can be a bigger thrill than hordes of tough guys retreating from the cops."

Rome, Open City (1945)

For Rome, Open City, Roberto Rossellini took to the streets of the Italian capital just two months after it had been liberated by the Allies to capture the plight of real people living among the ruins. Shot hurriedly using scrabbled together scraps of grainy film stock, some of which had previously contained newsreel footage, and funded by a donation from a wealthy local countess and whatever the director could raise in the city's pawnshops, the result took the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1946 and remains a classic of early neo-realism. It's also an ode to human endurance and a testament to the innate strength of a united community. Rosselini's film, co-written by Sergio Amedei and one Federico Fellini, is more emotionally manipulative and melodramatic than some later examples of the genre and is primarily concerned with the women and children living under German occupation in 1944 and their struggle to protect their Resistance fighter menfolk and keep food on the table. Anna Magnani, one of the few professional performers among the cast, stars as one such everyday heroine, a widow and mother who becomes a martyr when she is gunned down in the road while hysterically attempting to intervene in the arrest of her fiancé by the Gestapo. Magnani gives a magnificent performance that stands as a fitting tribute to the real-life Roman housewife Teresa Gullace on whose tragic fate her strand of the story is based. Maria Michi is also impressive as a night club singer who inadvertently finds herself a collaborator when her simple desire to lead a normal life is cruelly exploited.

The true centre of the storm though is Catholic priest Don Pietro Pellegrini (Aldo Fabrizi, also channeling a real person, the partisan sympathiser Don Guiseppe Morosini), who uses his position to move with comparative impunity and offer help and consolation wherever he can. His execution by the sadistic Major Bergman (Harry Feist) in front of a crowd of praying orphans is as brutal a finale as you're likely to encounter in cinema. As for Bergman, if his casual cruelty weren't a damning enough indictment, the criticism he faces from his own subordinate, Captain Hartmann (Joop van Hulzen), who would rather drink himself to death than plant the seeds of hatred, certainly hits home. Rome, Open City was followed by Paisà (1946) and Germany Year Zero (1948), making it the starting point for the director's second trilogy of the war, the prolific Rossellini having already completed The White Ship, A Pilot Returns and The Man With The Cross between 1941 and 1943 while deftly managing to dodge conscription with Il Duce's fascists.

Judex (1963)

Georges Franju directed this supremely stylish revival of the French pulp series by Louis Feuillade about a mysterious moral avenger and master of disguise who dishes out vigilante justice to the powerful and corrupt. Preceded by a well-loved silent serial in 1916 shot by Feuillade himself,  Franju's remake casts American magician Channing Pollock in the title role, a individual whose countenance is as stern as that of the buzzard mask he sports in the iconic still above. Judex, who usually favours a slouch hat and cloak, has his sights set on villainous banker Favraux (Michel Vitold), a cruel and avaricious blackmailer. Our hero harasses his mark with poison pen letters (a detail recalling Henri-Georges Clouzot's Le Corbeau, 1943) before faking Favraux's death at a masked ball and kidnapping him. However, Judex's actions only prompt the latter's black-hearted mistress Diane (Francine Bergé) to rob the financier's estate, a plot that ultimately endangers the life of Favraux's gentle daughter Jacqueline  (Édith Scob, whom you might recognise from Franju's horrific Eyes Without A Face or indeed last year's Holy Motors). A convoluted mystery ensues, played with admirable seriousness by all concerned.

Franju was a master image-maker and Judex is filled with witty visual touches. Two women, one a cat burglar all in black and the other an acrobat in a white leotard, fight it out on a moonlit rooftop. The amiably doltish detective Concatin (Jaques Jouanneau) sports a deerstalker cap and chuckles over a well-worn copy of Fantômas, (another Feuillade creation) at his desk. A disguised nun lies stricken in the road, waiting to trick an ambulance driver into braking so that she can jack him at knife point. Excellent stuff, in other words. Perhaps the highlight though is the surreal costume party scene, which was inspired by the work of caricaturist Jean-Ignace-Isidore Gérard Grandville, who mocked bourgeois manners and mores with his 1829 book Les Metamorphoses Du Jour in which his fellow countrymen are depicted with the heads of beasts, fowl and grasshoppers for satirical purposes. Judex is available on DVD from Eureka, whose Masters of Cinema release also includes Franju's later but similarly styled  Nuits Rouges (1974), an inventive but terminally naff mystery concerning a criminal mastermind in a scarlet balaclava, brainwashed henchmen, a host of silly gadgets and the lost treasure of the Knights Templar.

Cheyenne Autumn (1964)

John Ford's final Western was this overlong but visually stunning account of the Northern Cheyenne Exodus of 1878-79, which saw the starving, displaced tribe lose patience with the US government's failure to provide for its people after dumping them on an arid reservation in Oklahoma and head north in search of their old buffalo hunting grounds in Wyoming. Mexican actors Ricardo Montalbán and Gilbert Roland play Cheyenne elders Little Wolf and Dull Knife, who lead the seemingly hopeless trek home before being driven apart by desperate circumstances, while Richard Widmark stars as Captain Archer, the conscience-troubled US Cavalry officer charged with pursuing and containing the Cheyenne but unable to muster much enthusiasm for the job knowing full well the poverty and neglect these dignified, stoic people have suffered. Among Archer's troop, Mike Mazurki is memorable as a Polish-born sergeant reluctant to be made a Cossack, having left behind their horseman's cruelty in the Old World, and Patrick Wayne, son of John, makes an impression as an impetuous young lieutenant out for revenge for the death of his father, long lost in the Indian Wars. Edward G. Robinson also pops up as Carl Schurz, Secretary of the Interior, and Karl Malden makes much of his role as Captain Oscar Wessles, a cornered German captain prone to hiding behind orders and shirking personal responsibility.

An apology for the plight of Native Americans and their treatment by the white man from a director who frequently depicted them as villains (think of murderous Comanche chief Scar in The Searchers, 1956), Cheyenne Autumn is a lavish production on an impressive scale, rightly cherished for its heartfelt sorrow and sympathy and for Oscar-nominated cinematographer William H. Clothier's handsome Technicolor photography. However, it is undeniably a much less tight and disciplined work than some of Ford's best. I personally could have done without the comic interlude in Dodge City, featuring knock-about cameos from James Stewart, Arthur Kennedy and John Carradine as Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and crooked gambler Major Jeff Blair playing poker and gadding about with rustlers and hookers, a sequence that provides an unwelcome tonal interruption and was cut from some versions of the film's release by Warner Brothers, in spite of its star turns. A strange decision by Ford to revisit characters he had already had the final word on in My Darling Clementine in 1946 and not an entirely successful one. 

All That Heaven Allows (1955)

Douglas Sirk again teamed Jane Wyman with Rock Hudson, following the success of the previous year's Magnificent Obsession, for this exquisite cross-class romance about affluent New England widow Cary Scott (Wyman), who falls for tree surgeon Ron Kirby (Hudson) only to cave-in to social pressure from the snobbish country club set and end the relationship, before realising her mistake when he is badly injured in an accident. Like its predecessor, All That Heaven Allows is as unashamedly theatrical in its plotting as it is heavy-handed in its themes and symbolism (the smashed Wedgewood teapot, the deer at the window) but manages to transcend its obviousness to become a thing of beauty and surprising power.

Sirk once more presents us with a sumptuously photographed model American town before scratching beneath the surface to reveal the sadness and want that is the inevitable consequence of the oppressive conformity required to build and maintain it. For Wyman's genteel Cary Scott, a college graduate turned homemaker typifying Betty Friedan's "problem that has no name", self-denial for the sake of social approval is both pointless and guaranteed to spawn a lifetime of unhappy a spinsterhood sat alone in front of the television because the community she aspires to please is fundamentally corrupted by plenty and entitlement. The townsfolk, typified by resident bitch Mona Plash (Jacqueline De Wit) and drunken lecher Howard Hoffer (Donald Curtis), are cruel, prurient, grasping and anxious for scandal, anything to distract them from the "quiet desperation" Thoreau diagnosed. Sirk makes inspired use of reflective surfaces to capture Cary's unhappy mirror image and therein repeatedly emphasise that she is imprisoned by her privilege: status symbols and the material trappings of success are just that, traps. Cary will only ever escape by biting her thumb at prevailing attitudes and following both her own heart and "nature boy" Kirby's example, as his bohemian friends Mick and Alida Andersen have done, even if moving into that lovingly renovated watermill home means incurring the resentment of her own waspish, self-involved offspring. 

All That Heaven Allows improbably takes its title from the Earl of Rochester and was remade by Rainer Werner Fassbinder as Ali, Fear Eats The Soul in 1974 and effectively again by Todd Haynes in his 2002 Sirk homage Far From Heaven. It also struck me as clear influence on Tim Burton's popular Beauty and the Beast fable Edward Scissorhands (1990), in which another unconventional and lonely gardener, this time a man-made goth and a specialist in topiary rather than silver-tipped spruces, falls for a suburban girl before similarly suffering persecution at the hands of a torch-wielding mob of bored middle class housewives.

Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)

Tennessee Williams was the hottest ticket on Broadway in the fifties and Hollywood wasted no time in adapting his work for the big screen, often drafting in the playwright himself to knock out a script. Indeed, a small cottage industry soon erupted to capitalise on booming demand for the writer's popular melding of psychological trauma, steamy sexuality and expressionistic Southern Gothic stylings. Warner Brothers proved quickest on the draw, releasing their version of The Glass Menagerie starring Kirk Douglas and Jane Wyman in 1950. Elia Kazan's A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) for Warner and Richard Brooks' Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958) for MGM remain the best remembered of the Williams adaptations of this period, but I've always been fond of the hysterical Suddenly, Last Summer from Joseph L. Mankiewicz. This balmy, stifling melodrama was produced by Sam Spiegel and shot at Shepperton Studios in Surrey (those extras playing lunatic asylum inmates all look unmistakably British), boasts a script by Williams and novelist Gore Vidal and an enviable cast, which makes particularly inspired use of the great Katharine Hepburn's arch and haughty persona.

Not long after he was badly disfigured in a serious car wreck and only hired at the insistence of Taylor, Montgomery Clift stars as Dr John Cukrowicz, a Chicago surgeon relocated to a rundown New Orleans mental hospital to specialise in lobotomy. Exasperated by the institution's lacklustre facilities, Cukrowicz gladly accepts when wealthy local widow Violet Venable (Hepburn) demands an audience. It transpires that Violet is still grieving for the loss of her son Sebastian, an aesthete and poet, who perished the summer before while holidaying in Spain and is demanding that Cukrowicz employ his skills on her niece, Kathy (Taylor), a disturbed young girl who remains traumatised by the same circumstances that led to Sebastian's death. Cukrowicz meets Kathy, who appears perfectly sane, if a little bi-polar, and resolves to help her, ignoring her aunt's attempts to blackmail him into hurriedly carrying out an operation in exchange for a shiny new hospital wing.

Clift anchors the film as the doctor-turned-detective tasked with unraveling the mystery of what really happened to Sebastian Venable in the summer of 1937, the key to Kathy's "sickness", but it's really a two-hander, with the honours just about even between Hepburn and Taylor. The stately Katharine is astonishing in the opening scene with Clift in which she descends from the ceiling in her customised gilded elevator, discoursing on Byzantine emperors and proceeding to chronicle her deeply unhealthy relationship with her son in a conservatory stuffed with primordial hothouse flowers. However, Liz is increasingly impressive (and no stranger to Williams country), absolutely nailing her final monologue, in which Sebastian's horrific demise is finally recalled in a sleazy and nightmarish flashback implying rent boy cannibalism, no less. A genuinely haunting episode that's beautifully played by an actress whose skill is too often neglected in favour of smirking about her admittedly farcical private life. Her co-star in that intense psychodrama, Richard Burton, would, incidentally, appear in John Huston's The Night Of The Iguana (1964), the film that marked the end of Hollywood's feverish enthusiasm for exhausting the Tennessee Williams back catalogue.

The Ramones - Teenage Lobotomy

The Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954)

As Marilyn Monroe points out to Tom Ewell in The Seven Year Itch (1955), Gill Man isn't so bad, he just wants to be loved. This was a common trait among B-movie monsters of the fifties, most of whom aped King Kong's pursuit of unavailable women, with dear old Robot Monster probably the horniest and loneliest of the lot. Still, it's hard to disagree with fish boy's taste in abductees: Julia Adams is quite lovely and marvellously athletic. The scene in which she and this scaly evolutionary nightmare perform a sychronised swimming act together in the depths of the Amazon (without her even realising it) is as startlingly beautiful as it is unsettling. In fact, the film's underwater cinematography is probably its finest asset, other than the exceptional creature design by Millicent Patrick, whose contribution was not properly acknowledged for over half a century. Hats off to her then and to James C. Havens, who handled all scenes shot below the waterline while Jack Arnold directed the bickering expedition party aboard the Rita. Also deserving of a nod are Ben Chapman and Ricou Browning, the poor devils inside the rubber suit tasked with bringing Gill Man to life. You can check out some superb behind-the-scenes action shots from the making of the movie over at Spin Serpent, incidentally.

Thematically, Universal's 3D extravaganza is another revenge-of-nature horror but its script (apparently spun out of an anecdote about legendary mermen told at a dinner for Citizen Kane in 1941) explicitly draws parallels between its marine biologists' journey into the heart of darkness with modern space exploration. The fear of uncharted species and the possibility of other worlds representing new dangers discussed in Arnold's film caused critic Peter Biskind to label it a conservative cautionary fable, warning Americans against the dangers of straying from home. But take heart: the chances of running into a prehistoric aqua beast in Brazil or anywhere else are reassuringly remote. If you're planning on going to the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio, you should be fine.