As Richard Nixon, Bob Halderman and every other politician caught in the wake of the Watergate break-in can tell you, it’s often not the original crime that will do you in but rather the cover-up. It’s a lesson that Mark Dixon, the cop at the heart of Where The Sidewalk Ends would have done well to have learned. The film opens in a police precinct where the cop corps is gathered to celebrate the promotion of Lt Thomas. He is a colleague of Mark’s who joined the force at the same time. However, while Thomas is racing up the institutional ladder Mark is still on the beat riding a patrol car. Worse yet, he has such a hot temper and a reputation for roughing up criminals, the first thing the district commander does after his friend’s promotion is to threaten Dixon with a demotion back into uniform. Not that he takes the slightest bit of notice. There is this local gangster by the name of Tommy Scalise, you see. He’s arrogant and seemingly untouchable. Mark is driven by an almost monomaniacal desire to take him down. When word gets to him that a dead body has turned up at one of Scalise’s floating crap games Mark gets himself to the crime scene in double quick time. True to form he assaults the gang boss then picks up the trail of the man in the frame for the killing. When Dixon finds him he once again lets loose with his fists, only this time the recipient ends up dead. It’s at this point he chooses the Watergate path. Rather than reporting the (accidental) death to his superiors, he cleans the crime scene, dumps the body in the river and arranges a trail that will implicate...

The first time Rose spies the handsome Tommy Swann in It Always Rains on Sunday she’s smitten. She’s working the bar in an East End London boozer when the saloon doors open and Tommy sweeps in wearing a double-breasted suit, a hat tilted just so and a cigarette dangling from his lips. Their eyes lock and when ordering his first drink, buys her one as well. She melts. A brief courtship follows and then a Sunday picnic where he produces a ring and pops the question. A happy marriage beckons, or so the audience believes. The next time they meet however, it’s an entirely different picture. This is several years later and Tommy has just escaped from prison. The police have set up a country-wide dragnet so the safest place he can think to rest up is at Rose’s house. The Anderson shelter in her back yard to be precise which is where she stumbles on him as she dives for cover on this inclement Sabbath. Those few years have been tough on her former lover. Gone are the good looks, the confident swagger and the dapper suit. What remains is an emaciated, bedraggled wreck. Penniless, terrified and ravenous with hunger. He begs Rose to hide him. For old times’ sake she agrees. This is the first time Rose has seen Tommy since his incarceration. In the years since she’s moved on with her life, marrying a widower and adopting his three children. and it’s into this environment that she must bring Tommy. Getting the family out of the way she secretes her former paramour into the marital bed, bringing him hot food while he makes plans to board a ship to Cape Town and freedom. At first Rose is not interested in her...

You’re a new arrival in a small, suspicious town, having just ridden in with your pal from a long cattle run. While you are kicking your heels at the local saloon a breathless messenger arrives through the swinging doors. The local, much admired, ranch boss has been murdered and his killers are on the run. The sheriff is out of town so a posse quickly forms under the aegis of his thuggish deputy sheriff, a charismatic retired General and a ranch hand long employed at the dead man’s stable. In part to make sure no suspicion lands on you, you join the posse, but you’re also disturbed by the intemperate mob and hope to be able to pour some oil on the vengeful waters if the guilty party is found. So opens William Wellman’s superb The Ox-Bow incident, a film that despite the brief running time of only 75 minutes, manages to hold a mirror up to human frailties as effectively as any you’re likely to see. Henry Fonda’s is the name above the title but as events progress it becomes clear he is not the main focus of the story. In the vast majority of his other westerns Fonda plays a classic white hat; strong, principled and dependable. But here he is shown in a much less worthy light. His introduction is as not so much as a drunk but certainly someone who operates at his peak with a few bourbons inside him and while he takes an early stance against the more brute elements of the mob, he is as interested in deflecting suspicion away from himself as he is in seeing justice done. The posse rides out and soon happen upon a trio camped out in the eponymous Ox-Bow canyon. Two...

The anthology film is a difficult beast to tame. For every Night on Earth there is a corresponding Four Rooms. Cinema may be forever blessed by Yesterday, Tomorrow & Today but it would also do well to forget Amazon Women on the Moon. By the very nature of the project, the tone of the film is likely to be inconsistent, and this discordance will be amplified if multiple directors take part. By all these accounts Visions of Eight should fail, which is why it’s such a delight that the film works so well. Arthur Penn opens proceedings with a surreal study of athletes launching themselves skyward with the pole vault; Kon Ichikawa, who four years earlier delivered perhaps the greatest Olympic tribute with Tokyo Olympiad, slows the hundred metre final down to a point where we can see sinews flexing and tendons rupturing; Claude Lelouch studies losing competitors while Miloš Forman dissects the decathlon. But for me the most accomplished segment is Mai Zetterling’s sublime journey into the world of the super heavyweight lifters. Coming in at a bare eight minutes the sequence starts with warm up exercises in deserted plazas, bizarre squat thrust locomotion around the backstage area and the surreal pantomime of performing the actions of the clean and jerk with a naked bar devoid of weights. Then with a clang of metal dropped on cement, we are thrust into competition. With only the sounds of the crashing kilograms and the occasional droning voice of the announcers the competition amplifies. Competitors watch their rivals from stage left, half hidden by curtains; unsuccessful lifters drop the bars and tumble over backwards; Britain’s Terry Perdue struts back and forth, exhaling loudly like a bull about to be unleashed from a pen. He takes so...

You can almost imagine the scene as it played out, no doubt under the influence of hallucinogens and booze, in Rome some time in early 1978. Fellini’s cameraman on 8 1/2 looking to become a director in his own right and Italy’s answer to Roger Corman shooting the breeze about the recent slew of fantastical, and profitable films: The Exorcist; Demon Seed; The Omen; Close Encounters; Rosemary’s Baby. Hey let’s try our hand making one suggests Guiliano Paradisi, the wanna be director, an Exorcist knock-off maybe. I already made one of those replies Ovidio Assonitis, schlock producer extraordinaire. It did really well and “young girls possessed by evil facing off against a messenger of God” are just the ticket but if we’re going to do this I want to spice it up. That movie Star Wars that came out last year? It made millions, let’s throw in a sci-fi angle, make this some kind of intergalactic struggle of good and evil. We can even magic up a space ship or two for the final battle. Molto bene, where we going to film it? Well, Roma for the interiors but for the sports set pieces and exteriors, I figure Atlanta. Atlanta…in America? replies Paradisi, scratching his head. Si, I have some pull with a local distributor there, I made a couple of rip-off pictures with him already. He’s going to love this one… By all rights 1979’s The Visitor really should have sunk without trace. The plot is a stale tale of demonic possession, the soundtrack overwhelms almost every scene and the editing is at times frustrating enough to provoke, not so much walkouts, as genuine stampedes towards the doors of any theatre it plays. Paradisi does, however, have three trump cards he plays to...

How sweet it is to be a fan of Film Noir, to sit down of an evening to watch a Neo-Realist picture, a good one at that, and find as the reels unspool you’ve stumbled into gritty crime territory. How’s this for an opener? A couple of cons are on the run from a group of determined plain clothes cops in a railway station, one that’s teeming with women on their way to harvest the Po Valley rice crop. In possession of a stolen diamond necklace (hot ice as the likes of Dashiell Hammett might have it) the flatfoots are closing in, which leaves the pair only one choice: him to split in one direction and her to blend into the crowd of itinerants and take the train North. They’ll have to lay low but at least they’ve bought themselves some breathing room, which is as good a Noir premise as you could hope for. Things start to get interesting when Francesca, the moll to Walter’s gunman, folds herself into the ranks of the female rice field hands. The quota for unionised workers is already full but she catches a break when Silvana, a veteran of the rice game, gets her both a place on the unofficial work crew and a berth in the dorm room. Silvana is not all she seems however. She may be a poor village girl, trapped in a cycle of itinerant work but she saw Walter running from the station cops and clocks Francesca stowing the stolen diamonds inside her mattress. She grabs the loot the first chance she gets and switches dorms. What follows is a gripping showdown in the rice fields that sees both of the women at the forefront of opposing campaigns. Silvana agitates for union...

As humans we all too often imagine ourselves masters of our own destiny but fate will play games with us and frequently the twists that send life spinning away from any preconceived plans rest on a single act. So it is in The American Friend. Bruno Ganz plays Jonathan Zimmerman, a mild mannered restorer and framer of paintings who lives an unassuming life in Hamburg. Attending an auction one day he senses something not quite right with a deceased artist’s newly discovered painting and when introduced to the man behind the sale he refuses to shake hands. “I’ve heard of you” he says cryptically before leaving. This both intrigues and frustrates the man scorned, not someone to displease for it turns out this is Tom Ripley. Yes, that Tom Ripley. The sociopath charmer, from Patricia Highsmith‘s novels you may have seen portrayed on screen by Alain Delon, Matt Damon or John Malkovich. Here he is played by Dennis Hopper who might seem a peculiar fit but he works wonderfully. Ripley is obliged to kill a man for a friend in need and knowing this beyond his temperament he manipulates events so that Zimmerman is bribed, cajoled and harried into taking the job. Zimmerman, you see is suffering from a terminal blood disease and so vague is the prognosis that the Grim Reaper may have his way at any moment. Because of this he becomes an easy target for a smooth sell along the lines of “You’ll be gone soon – don’t you want to make sure your wife and son are left comfortable?” Thus he finds himself in Paris, gun in hand and black & white glossy mugshot of future victim in his pocket. He bumbles his way through the job which pleases his...

Right from the very beginning of Sisters you know you’re in for something especially creepy. The great composer Bernard Herrmann, responsible for the likes of North By Northwest, Cape Fear, Vertigo and of course Psycho drapes the opening credits – slow closeups of a human embryo – with quite the most unsettling, martial and brassy score. This films has rightly been identified as director De Palma’s most open tribute to Hitchcock and the choice of composer backs this up but the story line is as much an homage to the contemporary Gialli of the early 70s. A young New York couple, Danielle and Phillip, meet on the set of a TV show (under the very Hitchcockesque title Peeping Toms) and go on a date together. Despite a brief appearance of her ex-husband the date goes so well they both end up in her apartment and spend the night together. It continues going swimmingly and he proves to be such a stand up guy that when he discovers it’s her birthday – shared with her twin who he’s heard in the next room – he goes out and has a big birthday cake made. It’s only when he returns and tries to present it to her (foolishly accompanied by a large kitchen knife) that he realises it’s the worst, last mistake he will ever make. From this point on the film moves in two directions. We delve deeper and deeper into Danielle’s psyche and at the same time follow another character, Grace Collier, a reporter of some repute who lives in the apartment opposte Danielle and saw the murder of Phillip taking place. The sequence is a tantalising one, shot in immaculate split screen that posits a dying Phillip attempting to alert the Grace through...

“Personally, Veda’s convinced me that alligators have the right idea. They eat their young.” It’s difficult to know how much more Mildred Pierce could have done to win the Oscar in 1945. Director Michael Curtiz had put in some stirringly patriotic pictures throughout the recently won war, not least the adored Casablanca. The spitfire script was adapted from a James M Cain novel (by, amongst others, William Faulkner), it features one of the dastardly protagonists of all time and Joan Crawford in the central role is at the very height of her powers. It seems, however this galaxy of greatness was not enough for the Academy voters. When they met on the evening of March 7th 1946 they chose The Lost Weekend for Best Picture, plumbing as the Oscar constituency often does, for a film that wallows in morose introspection. Not that The Lost Weekend is a bad picture, mind you. I mean Ray Milland and Howard da Silva, what’s not to love? But it is somewhat limited. It’s a snapshot of a few days in the life of a man on a downward slope and rewards the audience with only the mildest redemption at its close. In comparison Mildred Pierce is a magnum opus that tracks the growth of a bright young woman hemmed in by the limits of a suburban life. In this case it’s a loser husband (he’s a fairly decent guy but a loser is a loser) and two daughters. The bills mount up, the girls’ education becomes more expensive with each passing day and to top it off her husband begins to have an affair in plain sight. Clearly a change in direction is needed. Her useless spouse gets the boot, Mildred turns her cake making business up a...