Dean's profoundly influential sullen charisma is still captivating.

Romance doggy style, beautifully drawn by the best animators Disney could muster in 1955, and a true classic.

This was the Mamma Mia! of its day, a nostalgic blast of popular Irving Berlin showtunes gift-wrapped in new-fangled VistaVision that danced its way to the top of the 1954 box office.

Everything from the masterly opening sequence to the ambiguous final shot indicates that this is the work of a prodigiously talented director.

What could be better than watching Doris Day reprise her signature role, whip-cracking away in buckskin as the deadwood stage comes a-rolling in over the hills?

It’s packed with in-jokes and lightly disguised portraits of real-life Tinseltown figures; Douglas’ character is reckoned to be across between David O.Selznick and Vallewton. But even without a knowledge of the background, this is sharp, cynical fun.

With Huston spending most of the shoot big-game hunting, it’s probably cameraman Jack Cardiff who deserves kudos for turning this odd-couple romance into such a colourful escapade through east Africa.

In its precision, perversity and stinging wit, Sunset Boulevard still has mighty sharp teeth.

Riddled with post-war despair, The Third Man is one of the great British movies. The zither music, the noirish cinematography, the taut writing and the raft of excellent performances combine in an engrossing thriller that matches America's finest.

There's much to relish here: a script which mixes pungent humour and tension, the pervading atmosphere of corruption and obsession, and a perfectly judged, tragically stoical performance from the sleepy-eyed Mitchum, not to forget Nicholas Musuraca's suitably shadowy cinematography.

A peerless example of Hollywood studio moviemaking, director Michael Curtiz turning the Warner backlot into a gloriously romantic vision of WW2-era Morocco crammed with real-life European exiles and larger-than-life character actors.

It's a visual feast, from the moody, horror-flick style opening which hovers over the gates of man-made mountain Xanadu, to the opera-house scene when we levitate hundreds of metres from Susan's awful stage debut to the workmen flinching in the rafters.

Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh create their own sizzle as Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara in a lavish four-hour epic that juxtaposes scenes of jaw-dropping majesty – that aerial shot of the Confederates’ wounded, for example – with moments of elegant intimacy and playful verbal jousting.

This phantasmagorical fantasy really does represent old-school MGM filmmaking at its best – sets, make-up, costumes and music combining to quite stunning effect.

One of [Hawks'] finest pictures: a swoony saga of fatalistic flyboys and the women who try to keep their feet on the ground.

Its relentless pot shots at war, religion and just about everything else making it more controlled chaos than movie.

An attractive if conventional biopic of French underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau.

Their wry, odd-couple chemistry is comfortingly familiar, but kept fresh by an insouciant realism that deftly avoids exotic cliché.

Despite risking life and sanity, these American Dreamers are surprisingly cheerful, making for a light-hearted study of eccentric hobbyists.

Its attempt to cram in both origin story and follow-up adventure makes it a long haul for the target tinies.

A western as inept as it is preposterous.

Blending archive footage, contemporary interviews and dramatic reconstructions, the film reminds us how dangerous the sport could be.

No, this isn't another tale about the son of the Almighty, but a perceptive, naturalistic study of disenchanted French youth, which effectively conveys the tedium and frustration of small-town life.

The sheer volume of potential readings eventually stalls on reductive soundbites about a faithless generation, but the set-pieces sizzle with style.

Blurring the fiction/documentary lines (it features non-professional actors), it’s spiced with eccentricities.