Less Hitchcock, however, than writer Norman Krasna, who at his best could twist conventional characters and plot patterns in such beguiling ways that you'd almost forget their antiquity. This comes near his best.

A delight from start to finish, with everyone involved working on peak form.

A superbly crafted melodrama, even if it never manages to top the moody montage with which it opens.

Disney's attempts at the visual illustration of Beethoven and Co - a dubious exercise anyway - produce Klassical Kitsch of the highest degree. Awesomely embarrassing; but some great sequences for all that, and certainly not to be missed.

Don't be misled by the Berkeley credit - this is no girlie extravaganza. Rather, it's the second of those musical concoctions designed for the strident, irrepressible Rooney to dominate with Garland tagging along.

It's the cattlemen vs homesteaders plot, present in all its particulars, but refracted through the star personae of Cooper and Brennan.

A thoroughly enjoyable affair, complete with some of his most memorable set pieces.

The first half has pace, and the wisecracking wit is often laid on thick and fast by Jerry Wald and Richard Macaulay's script, particularly in a scene with Ann Sheridan as a roadside café waitress. All the performances are good.

Surprisingly dry and droll. Aldous Huxley's contribution to the script undoubtedly helped, but it is the cast which carries it.

Leigh, in her first film since Gone With the Wind, is fresh, needy, poignant, while Taylor's unexpectedly assured restraint allows her to carry the film's surge of emotion.

Adapted from Thorne Smith's fantasy about sexual role reversal, this probably seemed daring once, but hasn't worn well.

Grant's habitual skill at playing the faint-hearted prig is such that one can almost overlook the moments of mawkish sentiment and gentle complacency about the country club milieu.

Somewhat tonally inconsistent; following the social comedy of Monte Carlo and suspense of Manderley, the pace slackens in the crime procedural of the final half-hour, which is all tell and no show. Still, Hitchcock shows superb technical control and attends to his trademark motifs, from monstrous mother figures to the fetishisation of clothing (strong foreshadowings of ‘Vertigo’).

Ford's film, shot by Gregg Toland with magnificent, lyrical simplicity, captures the stark plainness of the migrants, stripped to a few possessions, left with innumerable relations and little hope.

Pinocchio, in fact, probably shows Disney's virtues and vices more clearly than any other cartoon.

Playing superbly on the personae of his leads, Leisen creates a movie of warmth and immense style, which never quite trips over into excessive sentimentality.

It’s a film that makes you want to sharpen your barbs and sling sass with the adults.

For my money, this is Lubitsch’s masterpiece, an immaculate conflation of his sprightly shooting style, expertly layered wisecracking and bracing realism, all topped off with a romantic subplot that offers a nakedly joyous celebration of young, serendipitous love.

Impressive adaptation of Steinbeck's novel, made at the same time as The Grapes of Wrath (though released earlier) and matching Ford's harsh lyricism in its evocation of the Depression, the desperation of the migrant farmworkers, their pipedreams of a little place of their own some day.

The whodunit element is less gripping than the original's study in soaring megalomania, but Price's urbanely mellifluous voice makes him an admirable successor to Claude Rains, and John P Fulton's special effects are well up to par.

Flawless performances, pacy direction and a snappy script place it head and shoulders above virtually any other spoof oater.

Most impressive for its frantic pace and its suggestion that in times of Depression almost everyone is corruptible, it's also a perverse elegy to a decade of upheaval.

Quintessential Capra - popular wish-fulfilment served up with such fast-talking comic panache that you don't have time to question its cornball idealism.

While the star himself effortlessly commands attention, the film around him too often collapses in a welter of rhubarbing locals, piffling model work, and the most cardboard sets Elstree could offer. The result is weird, but not wonderful.

Like Chaplin’s The Kid or ET The Extra-Terrestrial, The Wizard of Oz simply lays bare primal emotions, exposes our childhood anxieties about abandonment and powerlessness and brings to light the tension between the repressive comforts of home and the liberating terrors of the unknown marking all our adult lives.

The finest of three screen versions of PC Wren's tale of heroism in the French Foreign Legion (the others were made in 1926 and 1966, the latter a travesty). Pictorially ravishing, it features a memorable opening with a fort garrisoned by corpses, and the high adventure tone carries on from there.

Composed of serio-comic scenes from small town life, heavy with a future perfect sense of Myth-in-the-making, it's driven by tensions between insignificance and monumentality that explode in the histrionic splendour and excess of the celebrated final sequence: Abe Lincoln setting out to scale unseen heights against the portentous gloom of a gathering storm.

Dunne, quite simply, is a marvel, deliciously caustic when required, genuinely illuminated by passion, touchingly stoic when events turn against her, while Boyer gains in humanity by using his suave Gallic charm as a mere cover for raging self-doubt. The constantly shifting emotions of their lengthy final scene make it a mini-masterpiece of acting, writing and direction.