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Based on a novel by Philip MacDonald, The Lost Patrol (1934) is set in Mesopotamia in 1917 and follows a British army unit on a reconnaissance mission in the desert. Officer Neville Clark refuses to entrust sergeant Victor McLaglen with his orders. So, when he is shot by unseen Arabs, the patrol is stranded with no idea where it is or where it is supposed to be heading.

During an impromptu burial service, Boris Karloff betrays both his fierce faith and his mental fragility and McLaglen keeps a close eye on him after the unit reaches an oasis beside an abandoned mosque. Rookie Douglas Walton is placed on guard and, in the dead of night, he confides in McLaglen how he broke his mother's heart by enlisting underage. By the morning, however, Walton has been killed and the horses stolen, leaving the remaining nine men stranded and increasingly fractious.

Veterans JM Kerrigan and Paul Hanson trade tales of past heroics in a bragging manner designed to raise spirits, while the gentlemanly Wallace Ford and Reginald Denny do their bit to support McLaglen in rallying lower-class recruits Billy Bevan, Alan Hale, Brandon Hurst and Sammy Stein. But morale takes another dip when Hale is shot out of a palm tree while on lookout and Hanson and Hale are sent on a desperate bid to summon assistance after drawing the short straws in a ballot that further frazzles Karloff's nerves.

The return of the rescuers' mutilated corpses, Wilson's senseless sacrifice and Denny's reckless decision to go hunting the enemy by moonlight leaves McLaglen alone with Ford and Karloff. Hope flickers briefly when pilot Howard Wilson flies over the area. But his eagerness to help the beleaguered troops proves his undoing and McLaglen and Ford are left to fight a hopeless rearguard after Karloff is gunned down in a blaze of messianic bravura.

Deftly sketching character and building tension with each new setback, Nichols exposes both the brutality and futility of combat, as well as the false consolation provided by rank, class and religion. Ford and cinematographer Harold Wenstrom reinforce this oppressive and slightly subversive atmosphere by using shots of the dunes to stress the isolation and vulnerability of the outpost and the impossibility of spotting a lethal enemy in such a featureless expanse.

He also draws fine performances from an estimable ensemble. Reprising the role played by his brother Cyril in Walter Summers's 1929 silent version, Victor McLaglen exudes everyman decency and devotion to duty. But Boris Karloff excels as the wild-eyed zealot, who is restrained for his own good before he escapes his tethers to stride towards the foe wrapped in a biblical cloak and brandishing a giant crucifix. Max Steiner's bombastic, Oscar-nominated score adds unnecessary melodramatic stress to the scene. But it perfectly encapsulates the insanity of the situation and daringly questions whether Christ himself died in vain, as humanity has since continued to treat life so cheaply.

Nichols approached the price of life from a jauntier perspective in Man Hunt (1941), a riveting adaptation of Geoffrey Household's serialised novel Rogue Male that was originally earmarked for Ford, but instead allowed Fritz Lang to prick consciences about America's continued neutrality in the Second World War. Starting from a faintly ludicrous premise, this develops into a highly satisfying thriller that demonstrates once again Lang's visual mastery and his talent for depicting despicable wickedness.

Caught in the act of subjecting Adolf Hitler to a `sporting stalk' in the grounds of Berchtesgaden, big game hunter Walter Pidgeon is badly beaten by the SS and hauled before Nazi bigwig George Sanders. Even though his weapon was loaded, Pidgeon denies trying to assassinate the Führer and insists that he now finds killing repugnant and solely enjoys the thrill of the chase. Sanders mocks his weakness and demands that Pidgeon signs a confession that he was dispatched on his mission by the British government. But he refuses to provide the Reich with a pretext for war and foils a fake suicide charade before escaping across the Channel with the help of Danish cabin boy Roddy McDowall (who was making his screen debut).

Once in London, Pidgeon enlists Cockney waif Joan Bennett to help him lose lugubrious tail John Carradine and reach his politician brother Frederick Warlock to explain his predicament. They agree that Pidgeon should lay low to prevent Sanders from capturing him and forcing him to put pen to paper. But a skirmish on the Underground results in Carradine's murder and Pidgeon has to go into hiding in Lyme Regis. What he doesn't know, however, is that Sanders has abducted Bennett and that they are both are in grave danger.

From the opening prowl of Arthur C. Miller's camera through the Bavarian undergrowth to the showdown between Pidgeon and Sanders at the mouth of a Dorset cave, this is a rollicking yarn that almost makes a virtue of its highly improbable plot twists. Ordinarily, one would castigate the ease with which Pidgeon flits away from Germany, the recklessness of his decision to return to Bennett's digs when he knows his whereabouts have been rumbled and the gung-ho folly of his bid to parachute behind enemy lines and finish what he started. But such is the confidence of Lang's conviction that viewers are not just swept past the implausbilities, but they also begin longing for more.

The ferocity of the debates between Sanders and Pidgeon is remarkable considering the care that Hollywood was still taking in the spring of 1941 to avoid antagonising Berlin. But Nichols always had a social conscience and the exiled Lang probably had little need to goad him into presenting the Nazis as sadistic tyrants and the British as good eggs abiding by the rules of the game. However, it was seemingly Lang's idea to leave the German dialogue untranslated to unnerve American audiences and there is real menace in both Carradine and Sanders's sneering self-assurance.

By contrast, Bennett plays her eager seamstress (although Lang strongly hints that she is really a prostitute) with a chirpy sense of deference that makes her `gor blimey' chit-chat with Worlock's blue-blooded spouse (Heather Thatcher) and her dewy-eyed devotion to the wryly stiff-uppered Pidgeon all the more adorable. Her accent is hilariously Hollywood Mockney, but her besotted petulance and cheery pluck make her one of Lang's most attractive heroines.

The only female presence in Andrew Marton's 1964 adaptation of James Jones's classic Second World War novel The Thin Red Line is a fleeting dream cameo by Merlyn Yordan. Otherwise, this is a hard-nosed, Hawksian study of men doing what they have to do to establish a beachhead on Guadalcanal in the spring of 1942. Made on a much lower budget than Terrence Malick's all-star 1998 version, this often has the feel of a TV-movie. But the performances are committed and Marton's experience as a second unit director enables him to bring some much-needed viscerality to the action sequences.

Married just eight days before he shipped into the Pacific, Keir Dullea is viewed by tough nut sergeant Jack Warden as a potential weak leak in the unit commanded by Ray Daley and Kieron Moore under short-fused colonel, James Philbrook. Consequently, Warden riles Dullea on the ship, on the pretext of teaching him how to accept orders rather than thinking for himself. Yet all he succeeds in doing is provoking Dullea into stealing an unguarded officer's pistol, so he can protect himself if necessary.

Landing on the island, Dullea is subjected to more hectoring and his frustration causes him to savagely kill a Japanese soldier patrolling the jungle and Warden mocks him for lacking self-control. Moreover, he volunteers him for a reckless mission to scale some rocks above a heavily mined swamp to cause an avalanche that will clear the terrain for the American advance. Daley thinks the plan is madness and confides in Moore that Warden and Philbrook would be considered lunatic in civvy street, yet in a combat zone they are deemed heroes.

Daley is punished for his views by being awarded a medal and a desk job and fellow captain Jim Gillen assumes his command. He sanctions an attack on a nearby village and allows the men to celebrate their easy victory by plundering booty abandoned by the enemy. However, the unit has walked into an ambush and only 27 survive the onslaught. Yet they are still expected to take out some hilltop machine-gun nests and Warden and Dullea find themselves having to rely on each other to win the day.

Despite offering some intriguing insights into the combative nature of battlefield cameraderie, this is a standard issue diatribe on the hideous absurdity of warfare. Both Dullea and Warden deliver solid performances, but they are always enacting roles rather than inhabiting their characters. Bernard Gordon's dialogue is equally heavy handed. But Marton's no-nonsense direction conveys something of the bullet-headedness needed to do one's duty and live to tell the tale.

Similar themes are considered by Anatole Litvak in Decision Before Dawn (1951), Peter Viertel's adaptation of George Howe's novel Call It Treason, which was based on an actual incident during the Second World War. Photographed by Franz Planer in a semi-documentary style amongst the rubbles of postwar Germany, this is more a dissertation on patriotism and the moral issues facing both Allied and Axis combatants than a tale of derring-do.

Having been wounded out of the signal corps, lieutenant Richard Basehart joins colonel Gary Merrill's special intelligence unit in Armentières in the winter of 1944. The plan is to train German POWs willing to spy on their former comrades, but Basehart is far from convinced he can trust either earnest medic Oskar Werner or cynical sergeant Hans Christian Blech after they volunteer for the programme. Nevertheless, Basehart bids farewell to Maquis contact Dominique Blanchar and parachutes behind enemy lines to hole up with Blech in a safe house in Mannheim, while Werner heads to Nuremberg for news of a Panzer commander who is rumoured to be ready to surrender.

Determined to save his country from further damage after witnessing the execution of a friend, Werner is one of the first `good Germans' to appear in a Hollywood film after the fall of the Third Reich. Indeed, he is so dedicated to his medical oath that he delays his mission to treat irascible colonel OE Hasse. But, laudable though Werner's intentions are, Litvak doesn't quite avoid sentimentalising them and it's fascinating to compare the Russian émigré's depiction of demoralised Germans fearfully awaiting defeat with those presented in Wolfgang Staudte's `rubble film' The Murderers Are Among Us (1946) and Roberto Rossellini's Germany, Year Zero (1948).

Litvak is more persuasive, however, in showing how friend and foe alike mistrust the spies - with Wilfried Seyferth excelling as an SS man who seeks to exploit Werner's generosity before betraying him - and Werner ably conveys the sense of isolation that is compounded by his dismay at seeing the state of his homeland. His encounters with ordinary citizens are sensitively staged and there's a geniune poignancy to the sequences in which he and café entertainer Hildegarde Knef discuss their hardships and fears. Less convincing, however, is the climactic shift into adventure mode after Werner tracks down Basehart and Blech and they have to dodge German patrols in the Mannheim ruins after they're rumbled by a snivelling Hitler Youth.

Hollywood was suitably impressed, however, and Decision Before Dawn drew an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. Editor Dorothy Spencer was also cited, but neither won and the film has been somewhat forgotten since. However, it would now make for a decent triple bill with Steven Soderbergh's The Good German (2006) and Max Färberböck's A Woman in Berlin (2008).

In stark contrast to this grinding exercise in monochrome austerity, Twentieth Century-Fox producer Jerry Wald pulled out all the CinemaScopic stops for Martin Ritt's The Long, Hot Summer (1958). Drawing on William Faulkner's novel The Hamlet and the short stories `Barn Burning' and `The Spotted Horses', this typified Hollywood's approach to classic American literature during the late studio era. At the very time that French critics were castigating verbose vehicles with impeccable production values and stylised thesping, this Mississippi melodrama piled on the Masterpiece Theatre excesses to produce a polished piece of middlebrow art that owed little or nothing to cinema and even less to life.

Smouldering laconically and occasionally twinkling his famous blue eyes, Paul Newman stars as a drifter with a bad reputation for barn burning, who is given a lift into the rural backwater of Frenchman's Bend by schoolteacher Joanne Woodward and her flighty sister-in-law Lee Remick. Newman comes to the mansion looking for work and accepts a poor sharecropping deal offered by Remick's husband, Anthony Franciosa, who is keen to throw his weight around while disapproving father Orson Welles is taking a rest cure.

Once Welles returns, however, Franciosa's weakness is consistently exposed by Newman's calculating opportunism and he is soon clerking in Welles's store and being considered as a husband for the free-spirited Woodward, who has been wasting her affection on momma's boy landowner, Richard Anderson. However, when Newman dupes Franciosa into digging outside a ramshackle cottage for some buried gold, the worm turns and he locks Welles in a burning barn in the hope that Newman will be blamed for the crime and he can finally be the lord of all he surveys. But Franciosa lacks the courage of his cowardly convictions and is pathetically grateful to be forgiven and restored to his position of mewling subservience as wedding bells echo around town.

With everyone emoting for all they're worth, this Southern Gothic saga is stuffed with fascinating clashes in acting styles. Newman and Woodward (who would marry soon after the picture wrapped) both employ a less-is-more brand of the Method, while Welles plumps for a Force 10 bombast that forces Franciosa, Remick and Angela Lansbury (as Welles's homely mistress) to overplay wildly in order to make an impression. Yet the performances are wholly in keeping with the overwrought eloquence of Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank's screenplay, which is often as overpowering as Joseph LaShelle's glossy colour photography, as Ritt misguidedly insists on gussying up what stubbornly remains soap opera with ideas above its station.

Style similarly dominates substance in Bryan Forbes's Deadfall (1968), an airless adaptation of a Desmond Cory novel that makes modish use of tropes imported from the European new waves, yet creaks with pregnant pauses and meaningful glances that signify very little. Opening with a garish collaboration between composer John Barry and Shirley Bassey and closing on a resounding anti-climax, this is chiefly of interest for providing an insight into how film-makers responded to the new psycho-sexual latitude afforded them by 1960s permissiveness and the overdue collapse of the Hollywood Production Code.

Michael Caine is a cultivated jewel thief, who has checked into a sanitarium posing as an alcoholic in order to keep tabs on wealthy target David Buck. While ensconced in the lap of near-luxury, Caine receives an unexpected visit from Giovanna Ralli, the striking wife of ageing cracksman Eric Portman, who suggests that they go into partnership to tackle a well-stocked safe in a Spanish villa before attempting to shake down Buck.

More intrigued by Ralli than the prospective loot, Caine agrees and soon finds himself rumpling impossibly crisp sheets in tasteful love scenes that show off cinematographer Gerry Turpin's penchant for rack focusing and Forbes's fondness for forcing the viewer to read the minds of his impassive protagonists. Old friend Leonard Rossiter tries to warn Caine about the complexities of Portman and Ralli's relationship, but he's in too deep by the time he discovers that Portman has a gay crush on him and that Ralli is really his daughter.

All of this might have been more shocking had the characters engaged in frank and passionate discussions about their conflicted emotions. But Forbes keeps them circling each other in enigmatic exchanges and significant silences that are only broken by Barry's mellifluous score and the strains of the guitar concert that Forbes intercuts with the first heist. Consequently, this feels like a gauche pastiche of Michelangelo Antonioni attempting a Freudian variation on Rififi. It might have made for passable late-night telly about 20 years ago, but now it simply seems mannered and dated. Nevertheless, it's still a must for fans of Sir Michael.

Unfortunately, A Taste of Excitement (1970), Don Sharp's adaptation of Ben Healey's novel Waiting for a Tiger, is much less essential. Once again, it's an adequate time passer. But the plot convolutions are cumbersome and several of the performances are lacking in charisma and conviction.

Shortly after encountering a dying man on the Dover-Boulogne ferry, Eva Renzi narrowly escapes a bid to run her car off a winding Riviera road. Cap Ferrat inspector Alan Rowe is nonplussed, but psychiatrist George Pravda takes a disconcerting interest in Renzi's case, especially when she announces that she is being followed by the sinisterly moustachioed Peter Bowles. With Renzi uncertain who to trust, Peter Vaughan and Francis Matthews arrive from Scotland Yard to inform her that the deceased had attempted to pass her vital information about an industrial espionage ring and that her life is in danger. However, when Matthews is bumped off, Renzi finds herself reliant on visiting artist David Buck for protection from local bigwig Paul Hubschmid and his loyal assistant Kay Walsh.

Somewhat improbably known in the United States as Why Would Anyone Want to Kill a Nice Girl Like You?, this slightly surreal thriller feels more European than British. Sharp allows Paul Beeson's camera to track and zoom at will, while Keith Mansfield's score hammers home each plot twist with a freneticism that is rarely matched by a cast that too often seems to be going through the motions.

Vaughan, Matthews and Pravda contribute typically solid turns, while Renzi makes a vaguely vulnerably heroine. But Buck is nobody's idea of an action man, while Bowles looks faintly ridiculous as he pursues Renzi with all the malevolence of a sitcom stalker. The biggest disappointment, however, is the wasting of the great Kay Walsh in a glorified cameo as the gun-toting brains behind the feeble Hubschmid's operation (which still makes little sense even after everything is explained).

If A Taste of Excitement is often unintentionally amusing, Marty Feldman's The Last Remake of Beau Geste (1977) is sadly short of laughs. Owing much to the Mel Brooks style of parody that Feldman had studied at first hand while acting in the films Young Frankenstein (1974) and Silent Movie (1976) and directing for the short-lived TV series When Things Were Rotten (1975), this seeks to satirise both PC Wren's notions of Englishness and dynastic honour and the many Hollywood movies they inspired.

Distraught at siring a daughter, Sir Hector Geste (Trevor Howard) purchases a pair of identical twins from the orphanage run by Miss Wormwood (Irene Handl) and entrusts them to the care of Crumble the butler (Spike Milligan). However, Beau (Michael York) and Digby (Feldman) prove to be neither similar in looks nor attainments and while Beau develops into a dashing gentleman, Digby becomes a hapless sidekick who quickly attracts the ire of Sir Hector's new bride, Flavia (Ann-Margret).

With their father perishing in instalments after over exerting himself in the bedroom, the brothers and their pretty sister Isabel (Sinéad Cusack) discover Flavia's plans to sell the ancestral seat and fritter away their fortune. However, the scandalous disappearance of an heirloom diamond prompts Beau to join the Foreign Legion in a bid to restore the family name, while Digby agrees to take the blame for the theft and is jailed by an over-zealous judge (Hugh Griffith) for 900 years to save his sibling's reputation.

Determined to track down the gem, Flavia arranges with the prison governor (Terry-Thomas) for Digby to escape and follows him to North Africa, convinced that Beau is the real culprit. However, they arrive just as General Pecheur (Henry Gibson) orders the tyrannical monopedic Sergeant Markoff (Peter Ustinov) and his toadying oppo Boldini (Roy Kinnear) to lock horns with the bellicose sheikh (James Earl Jones) who has been threatening Fort Zindernauf.

Feldman's jailbreak and his mirage encounter with Gary Cooper (from William Wellman's 1939 film of Beau Geste) are the standout moments, along with Jones's subtitles lesson from Rudolph Valentino. But, while the cast couldn't try harder to make the gags work - whether they're puns, smutty entendres, madcap musings or bits of slapstick schtick - more miss than hit, including a running joke involving Ted Cassidy as a blind legionnaire and Avery Schrieber's cameo as a used camel salesman. Thus, for too much of the time, this is one of those comedies where it's obvious that those making it are having much more fun than those watching it.