What enchants, really, is the relationship between Nick and Nora as they live an eternal cocktail hour, bewailing hangovers that only another little drink will cure, in a marvellous blend of marital familiarity and constant courtship, pixillated fantasy and childlike wonder.

Every line of dialogue is calculated bliss, the chemistry between the leads is magnificent, and the backdrop of Depression-era America allows for a prescient and amusing subplot about how well-heeled urbanites are compelled to misbehave when they have no money in their designer pockets.

Fred and Ginger teamed for the first time as featured artists in the big production number, 'The Carioca': 'I'd like to try this thing just once' says Fred, launching the movies' greatest partnership. Otherwise notable mainly for the non-stop opticals which turn the film into a series of animated postcards.

The film was rushed out to capitalise on its predecessor, with none of the subtext, but the animation is up to scratch, the action and direction efficient, and there is a nice melancholy to Denham’s regret for his previous conduct, which aptly prolongs the mournfulness of the original’s ending.

Most of the blame must rest with McLeod, whose incredibly cackhanded direction piles on the whimsy by the bucket-load and can't come to grips with the absurdity at all.

Surely the definitive version of Louisa May Alcott's novel, sweet, funny, perfectly cast, and exquisitely evocative in its New England period reconstruction.

Genius just about covers it.

The real strengths of the movie are John P Fulton's remarkable special effects (Rains removing his bandages to reveal nothing, footsteps appearing as if by magic in the snow), lending much-needed conviction to the blatant fantasy; and the fact that we never see the scientist without his bandages until the very end of the film.

The honesty and robustness of the images prevents the movie from lapsing into pretension or preciousness; it remains extremely interesting as a source of Cocteau's later work.

By far the best part of the film is its first hour, fast, furious and funny as Cagney sets out to convince his nervous backers that his idea for live prologues to accompany talkies can be made to work.

Allegedly based on the career of Clara Bow (who, like Lola, had a parasitic family and a duplicitous private secretary), Bombshell is a prime example of Jean Harlow at her comic best.

Nary a tear-jerking trick is missed (our family loses one son to the Titanic, the other to World War I), and the strangulation is compounded by the staginess since the film, at Coward's insistence, slavishly followed the Drury Lane production.

If this glorious pile of horror-fantasy hokum has lost none of its power to move, excite and sadden, it is in no small measure due to the remarkable technical achievements of Willis O'Brien's animation work, and the superbly matched score of Max Steiner.

Reviving the musical's fortunes in one fell swoop, Bacon and Busby Berkeley's backstage saga set the benchmark for the putting-on-a-show subgenre not by means of plot (a thin and hackneyed affair about a young understudy finding stardom when she covers for the temperamental diva) but through sassy songs and dialogue and dazzling mise-en-scène.

Lightly brushing at least three separate genres, this good-natured yarn (from a story by Edmund Goulding and Benjamin Glazer) eschews conflict at every turn.

The 'Nashville' of its day, Grand Hotel's reputation has outgrown its actual quality, and it is now interesting only as an example of the portmanteau style: an interwoven group of contrasting stories allowing a bunch of stars to do their most familiar turns.

The Brothers have never been so chaotic or so aggressively funny.

There are occasional flourishes that testify to the director's ingenuity and ability - Expressionist lighting, faces looming over spiral staircases, hats blown off in the wind - and Hitch throws in plenty of knockabout English humour, but the plotting is half-baked and the special effects are so crude that they make the back projection in Marnie look like the last word in verisimilitude.

Its seminal importance in the early gangster movie cycle outweighed only by its still exhilarating brilliance, this Howard Hughes production was the one unflawed classic the tycoon was involved with.

Tod Browning's heartbreaking, empathetic story of circus life is one of the most striking, unforgettable movies ever made.

Von Sternberg, who was forever looking for new kinds of stylisation, said that he intended everything in Shanghai Express to have the rhythm of a train. He clearly meant it: the bizarre stop-go cadences of the dialogue delivery are the most blatantly non-naturalistic element, but the overall design and dramatic pacing are equally extraordinary.

A subversive and psychologically rigorous take on RL Stevenson’s tale of severed souls, ‘Dr Jekyll’ combines gothic horror, aristocratic romance and madcap Freudian psychodrama into a dizzying, exhilirating brew.

Set in WWI France, the film is Garbo's even before she appears on screen to dazzle her willing audience; once there, it becomes impossible to dissociate the legend of the star from the myth of Mata Hari.

It’s pleasantly perverse, but somehow never quite gels. Still, it’s a fascinating keyhole into a central Hitchcockian idea, the notion that the weirdest behavior comes not from criminals, but our friends and neighbors.

A stark, solid, impressively stylish film.

With Monkey Business, their first screen original, the team cast caution to the winds, helped by a perky script and some lunatic sight gags.

Cagney's energy and Wellman's gutsy direction carry the day, counteracting the moralistic sentimentality of the script and indelibly etching the star on the memory as a definitive gangster hero.

Milestone's direction, veering between stagey two-shots and extravagant but purposeless camera movements, doesn't help either.