The film's targets multiply - workers' rights, racism, feminism - and for 1953 this is pretty amazing.

The routine story - members of a scientific expedition exploring the Amazon discover and are menaced by an amphibious gill man - is mightily improved by Arnold's sure sense of atmospheric locations and by the often sympathetic portrait of the monster.

Effectively banned in Britain until 1968, Brando's biker seems disarmingly tame by comparison with the wild angels he spawned. Yet the film isn't half bad as it sets up characters and situation with neat economy, tracing the seeds of explosion when the Black Rebels ride into town, are detained by a minor accident, and hang around trading insults with a rival gang.

Page won an Oscar nomination for this, her first film role, but Wayne's guileless performance is even better: gently self-mocking, while still every inch the embodiment of the conviction that "a man ought to do what he thinks is best."

The energy of the music and of the supercharged Day just about prevail over the lethargy of Butler's (non-)direction.

Half-hearted, half-baked, and at least half-watchable.

This covers much the same ground as Robert Rossen's earlier feature, All the King's Men, and Robert Collins' later telemovie, The Life and Assassination of the Kingfish. In decidedly more idiosyncratic style, however, with Cagney's aggressive energy suggesting the particular populist allure of the Southern shyster/demagogue.

The film is anonymously directed, functionally paced and hysterical at times, though it seduces as a hot-blooded spectacle that stitches emotional detail onto the epic canvas of history.

Updated from London 1890 to contemporary California, George Pal's version of the HG Wells novel still works pretty well, thanks to its attractive special effects.

A treat.

Perhaps too deliberately charming for its own good, but this adaptation of a Paul Gallico novel about a 16-year-old waif who falls unhappily in love with a carnival magician (Aumont), thus adding to the bitterness of the crippled puppeteer (Ferrer) who loves her from afar, is actually rather delightful, thanks to Caron's touching performance and Walters' delicately stylish direction.

The problem is that the two moods aren't properly cross-fertilised, with the resolute bleakness of the settings and Wilder's direction positing a reality that is constantly undercut by the comic opera crew of Germans headed by Preminger. A fascinating film, nevertheless.

The 3-D process leaves the image somewhat murky, but you can discern sparks of authentic pulp poetry throughout.

Price is fun (this was the film that typed him as a horror star), the fire in the waxworks is good for a gruesome thrill, and De Toth brings off one classic sequence with Kirk fleeing through the gaslit streets pursued by a shadowy figure in a billowing cloak.

The slow pace and persistent solemnity reduce tension, prefiguring the portentous nature of Stevens' later work. That said, the cast is splendid, and both the emotional tensions between Ladd and Arthur, and the final confrontation with Palance, are well handled.

Clift (as the priest) and Malden (as the cop) make this worth watching, but it's heavy going at times and the more literary aspects of the script, adapted from Paul Anthelme's play (written in 1902), are uncinematic to say the least.

The dialogue and script are fatuously Americanised from Scott's original, but these chivalric Hollywood sagas still have a strange poetic quality about them, perhaps partly because of the way they unscrupulously and inaccurately ransacked literature and history for ideas and images.

If you can view it without thinking of Disney f***ing about with yet another children's classic and relax in the studio's last decent use of Technicolor, then you're in for a treat.

Worth seeing for Hathaway's superbly crafted direction, even if it needed a Hitchcock to merge the symbolism of the location (the falls, the belltower) with the themes of sexual domination and envy.

Vincente Minnelli’s 1952 movie about the movies wears its golden-era confidence as big and bold as Kirk Douglas’s shoulder pads, and it’s pretty close to film heaven.

Few cinema artists have delved into their own lives and emotions with such ruthlessness and with such moving results.

Framed as a deathbed reminiscence, the film does tend to ramble, and seems particularly uneven in its mixture of back-projected wildlife footage, studio and location work, while Peck's weighty Harry Street remains resolutely aloof, to the point where he will not deign to expire.

Ford's flamboyantly Oirish romantic comedy hides a few tough ironies deep in its mistily nostalgic recreation of an exile's dream.

The plot is so simple that psychological interest is needed to sustain it, and this would require stronger performances than those Widmark and Monroe give.

This is a lazy, episodic, conventional but strangely charming variation on the old comedy formula of initially hostile misfits falling in love (here platonic).

It’s a more self-consciously artful film than its predecessor, an admirable spectacle rather than an entrancing human story. But as a work of pure, imaginative cinema, it comes close to genius.

Forget Jones' rustic English (Kentucky? Australian?) and the melodramatic clichés (boots trampling posies): the haunting, dreamlike consistency recalls that other fairy story of innocence and menace, The Night of the Hunter.

Credit should also go to the crew; to Jack Cardiff for his frond-filled imagery and maestro sound recordist John Mitchell for his atmospheric soundscape.