In the year she received the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Sam Wood's weepie Kitty Foyle (1940), Ginger Rogers returned to her light entertainment roots in Tom, Dick and Harry (1941), which reunited her with Bachelor Mother (1939) director, Garson Kanin. Boasting an Oscar-nominated script by Paul Jarrico, slick editing by future director John Sturges and cut-out fantasy sets by Van Nest Polglase (who had designed Rogers's Art Deco teamings with Fred Astaire), this is a charming example of the kind of romantic comedy that Hollywood continues to make, but without such lightness of touch.

Despite her movie-inspired ambition to marry a millionaire, small-town telephonist Ginger Rogers accepts the marriage proposal of car salesman George Murphy and that night dreams of a life filled with hard sells, cornball promotions and babies. Thus, when she connects a long-distance call between playboy Alan Marshal and New York girlfriend Lenore Lonergan, Rogers can't help wondering what it might be like being his wife.

Indeed, she is so lost in her thoughts that when mechanic Burgess Meredith pulls up in a flash foreign car and offers her a lift, she mistakes him for rich man and accepts his invitation for a date. She is quickly disabused when he takes her bowling. But, despite his humble origins, Meredith has charisma and because Rogers hears wedding bells when they kiss, she accepts his offer of marriage and, that night, dreams of living with him in a shack in amorous poverty.

Unfortunately, Rogers is still engaged to Murphy and has plans to see him the following evening. But Meredith waylays him by arranging a test drive and asks him to detour via Rogers's house so he can pick up his sweetheart. Murphy is dismayed by Rogers's betrayal and dumps the pair in the middle of nowhere. They are rescued by the passing Marshal, who is so gallant to Rogers that she dreams of hitting the town on his arm. Next morning, she engineers a spat between Marshal and Lonergan by disconnecting their call and accepts his invitation to party in Chicago, where she gets him drunk and dupes him into proposing.

Arriving home to find her other two fiancés awaiting her on the doorstep, Rogers promises to pick one the next morning. She dreams of being married to all three suitors at once and is so shocked by the prospect that she decides to go with Marshal. But fate has one last trick to play.

Occasionally overdoing the cutesy ditziness at the expense of her more customary working-girl cynicism, Rogers clearly revels in the opportunity to showcase her comic skills. Murphy and Marshal provide genial, if lightweight support. But Rogers is more than matched by the roguish Meredith, who demonstrates why some contemporaries compared him to Spencer Tracy. Kanin directs with the impish sophistication that characterised his script collaborations with wife Ruth Gordon, with the reveries being particularly amusingly staged on cardboard sets that reinforce the mood of absurdist satire.

William L. Pereira's production design proves equally key to Robert Stevenson's adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1943). Scripted by John Houseman, Henry Koster and Aldous Huxley, this may disappoint fans of the novel for its conspicuous abridgement. But it is easily the best of the 18 screen versions of this atmospheric gothic romance, with Joan Fontaine excelling as the eponymous heroine alongside Orson Welles, as the proud, but haunted Edward Rochester.

Having endured the scorn of her aunt, Mrs Reed (Agnes Moorehead), Jane (played as a girl by Peggy Ann Garner) is sent to Lowood School, where she is comforted by best friend Helen Burns (Elizabeth Taylor) after she is accused of lying and humiliated before her classmates by cruel clergyman Henry Brocklehurst (Henry Daniell). Heartbroken by Helen's death because of the school's appalling conditions, Jane (Fontaine) completes her education and is appointed governess to Adèle Varens (Margaret O'Brien), who is the ward of the temperamental and reclusive Rochester, who views Jane with suspicion after he is thrown from his horse during their first encounter.

However, she settles into the routine at Thornfield Hall alongside housekeeper Mrs Fairfax (Edith Barrett) and maid Leah (Mae Marsh). She even becomes fond of Rochester and is hurt when he announces plans to marry Blanche Ingram (Hillary Brooke). But he declares his love for Jane and she accepts his proposal. However, in the middle of the wedding ceremony, Richard Mason (John Abbott) reveals that Rochester is already married to his sister, Bertha, and the truth emerges about the strange incidents that Rochester had blamed on servant Grace Poole (Ethel Griffies).

The story takes a markedly melodramatic turn after Jane departs in the dead of night and has her life changed by an unexpected bequest while living with St John Rivers (John Sutton). But, despite her change in fortune, she is unable to forget the tragic Rochester and makes a shocking discovery on returning to Thornfield.

Moodily photographed by George Barnes and pointedly scored by Bernard Herrmann, this typifies Hollywood's reverential approach to `great literature' during the studio era. The dialogue has a grandiloquence that is designed to convey the timelessness of Brontë's prose, while the performances have a theatrical gravitas that always seemed a touch too mannered on the screen. But the leads are outstanding, with Fontaine essentially reprising the simpering innocence that earned her an Oscar in Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) and Welles slipping into the delicious hamminess that had helped make his directorial debut Citizen Kane (1941) so compelling.

Also worth noting are the practised villainy of the underrated Henry Daniell and the unforced freshness of Peggy Ann Garner, Elizabeth Taylor and Margaret O'Brien, who were among the most natural child stars of the period. Yet only Taylor successfully graduated to adult roles like Cleopatra, who could easily have been the inspiration for the queen played by the peerless Maria Montez in Robert Siodmak's Cobra Woman (1944).

Despite being photographed in Technicolor by W. Howard Greene and George Robinson, this has all the penumbric moodiness of the Expressionist silent fantasies made in the 1920s in Siodmak's native Germany. Indeed, avant-gardists Kenneth Anger and Jack Smith were so smitten by the sets designed by Alexander Golitzen and John B. Goodman and Vera West's costumes that they proclaimed this a camp masterpiece. But it's the performances of Montez, Jon Hall and Sabu that give this a touch of kitsch class.

Montez is first seen as Tollea, a South Sea island girl who is betrothed to Hall's big-hearted fisherman. However, on the eve of their wedding, Moroni Olsen reveals that he found Tollea in his boat after he was released from prison on Cobra Island, from which no outsider had previously ever escaped. He had raised her as his own daughter under the guidance of Catholic priest Samuel S. Hinds and she seems content to know nothing of her past.

However, Sabu had noted the sinister presence of blind-mute merchant Lon Chaney, Jr. and is convinced he is to blame when Tollea mysteriously disappears. Thus, he stows away on Hall's boat when he sails to Cobra Island to find her and they soon discover that Tollea is the twin sister of the wicked Naja, who not only rules with a rod of iron alongside high priest Edgar Barrier, but also conducts frequent human sacrifices to appease the angry god living in the volcano that towers above her palace.

Chaney turns out to be an emissary of the sisters' benevolent grandmother, Mary Nash, who hopes that Tollea can lead a revolt to overthrow Naja's tyranny. But it takes several captures, escapes and cases of mistaken identity before right can prevail. Although it can be read as a wartime allegory, with the religious fanatics being equated with the fascist leaders of the Axis, this is primarily a slice of delirious escapism, with writers Gene Lewis, and Richard Brooks even mining B adventures to give Hall a chimpanzee sidekick and hinder his progress with quicksand. But there is nothing in any Tarzan or Jungle Jim movie to compare with the frantically exotic trance dance that Paul Oscard choreographed for Montez and the special-effects snake devised by John P. Fulton.

The Dominican-born Montez fully justifies her nickname of the `Caribbean Cyclone' in this extraordinary sequence. But the thickly accented star is less dynamic in her exchanges with the equally inanimate Hall and it's left to Barrier, as the courtier with dynastic ambitions, to keep the convoluted plot on track with a gleefully unhinged display of ranting and scheming.

Sadly, Montez would die just seven years later at the age of 39 after suffering a heart attack in her bath. By contrast, Olivia De Havilland, the star of Mitchell Leisen's To Each His Own (1946), is due to celebrate her 95th birthday in July, while her estranged sister, Joan Fontaine, is set to turn 94 in October. Scripted by Charles Brackett from his own story, this lachrymose dissection of hypocritical social propriety brought De Havilland her second Oscar after a Best Supporting win for Victor Fleming's Gone With the Wind (1939). It may not have worn well, but this remains a superior soap opera and says much about both American mores in the middle of the last century and the extent to which the Production Code prevented a grown-up discussion of them.

In wartime London, De Havilland prevents nobleman Roland Culver from falling off a roof during a New Year's Eve blackout. He persuades her to dine with him the following evening. But, on learning that a certain American army officer is due to arrive by train in the capital, she breaks the appointment and thinks back on her past in the station waiting room.

Towards the end of the Great War, De Havilland works in father Griff Barnett's drugstore in the small town of Piersen Falls. She harbours idealised notions of romance and refuses to commit to either boy next door Bill Goodwin or spoilt rich boy Philip Terry. Consequently, the latter spurns her to marry her friend, Mary Anderson. But when swaggering pilot John Lund breezes into town on a bond drive, De Havilland is so taken by his aeronautical skill and world-weary charm that she loses control after a post-dance kiss and soon afterwards learns from the doctor treating a sudden malady that she is pregnant.

Determined to keep the child after learning that Lund has been killed, De Havilland conspires with nurse Victoria Horne to leave the infant on the doorstep of a neighbour and offer to raise it as her own when the already harassed mother declares herself unable to cope with yet another mouth to feed. But the scheme misfires when the woman gives the baby to Terry and Anderson, who are mourning the loss of their own son. So, De Havilland has to content herself with looking after the boy on the nanny's days off.

But, when Terry's cosmetics business is exposed as a front for bootlegging, De Havilland proposes a legitimate chemicals operation to ensure her son can continue to live in comfort. But when Anderson accuses the pair of being secret lovers, De Havilland reveals the truth about Billy Ward's birth and even insists on taking custody. However, she realises that the six year-old misses the woman he regards as his mother and agrees to follow his progress from a discreet distance - right up to this reunion in Blighty. As was invariably the case in the woman's pictures of the period, the loose ends are tied in the most satisfyingly sentimental manner. But the contrivance is part of the appeal of this unrepentant melodrama, which marked De Havilland's return to the screen after a two-year absence that had been caused by a dispute with Warner Bros that changed the way in which stars were contracted by outlawing the imposition of suspensions for the refusal of demeaning projects.

Ultimately, `the De Havilland Decision' would play its part in the slow unravelling of the studio system, as power shifted away from the declining movie moguls to the now freelancing superstars and their wheeler-dealing agents. But this was very much a product of the Golden Age, with Hans Dreir's sets, Victor Young's score, Daniel L. Fapp's monochrome photography and Alma Macronie's editing all proclaiming the Paramount polish that had earned it a reputation for Continental chic. But it was the quality of the ensemble playing and the noble suffering (and occasional bitchy machination) of De Havilland that made this so engrossing.

The restraint of De Havilland's performance stands in stark contrast to Charles Laughton's blithely exorbitant display in Joseph Pevney's The Strange Door (1951), an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's story `The Sire de Maletroit's Door' that signalled the end was nigh for the Universal horror cycle that had started two decades before with Tod Browning's Dracula and James Whale's Frankenstein. Fittingly, the star of the latter, Boris Karloff, was on hand to contribute an exhibition of sympathetic malevolence that contained echoes of his work as Mary Shelley's monster.

Having long kept brother Paul Cavanagh imprisoned in the dungeon of the family castle, Laughton's usurping aristocrat plans to complete his revenge on his sibling by marrying niece Sally Forrest to the most disreputable cad he can find. However, his selection of Richard Stapley proves a misjudgement, as while he appeared to be a shiftless rogue in the local tavern (where Laughton tricks him into seeking his protection by faking a murder), he turns out to be eminently decent and sufficiently heroic to romance Forrest with due courtliness and to unite with count Alan Napier and loyal retainer Karloff in springing Cavanagh from his cell. But Laughton and Neanderthal henchmen William Cottrell, Morgan Farley and Michael Pate are not so easily vanquished.

Scarcely pausing from biting chunks out of Bernard Herzbrun, Nathan Juran and Eric Orbom's scenery, Laughton cackles his way through this rousing melodrama as though he was appearing in a pantomime. Yet the evident relish with which he delivers the quips in Jerry Sackheim's script only makes the predicament facing his adversaries seem all the more desperate, as he clearly couldn't care what happens to them, providing it's gruesome.

Stapley and Forrest are not the most prepossessing leads. But Pevney treats them like the subplot lovebirds in a Marx Brothers or Laurel and Hardy comedy and concentrates on the antics of Laughton and Karloff, whose disappointingly infrequent byplay often has a comic-straight man zing. Karloff would return to Universal for Juran's The Black Castle (1952) and Charles Lamont's Abbott and Costello Meet Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1953). But his future lay in television, which was also soon to become home to one of Hollywood's most enduring genres, the Western.

A handful of veteran stars kept the frontier picture alive, however, among them Audie Murphy, who headlines Herbert Coleman's Posse From Hell (1961) with the kind of pint-sized taciturnity that Alan Ladd had displayed in George Stevens's Shane (1953). But, while he had excelled in John Huston's The Red Badge of Courage (1951), the most decorated American soldier of the Second World War was never a screen natural and he is not only upstaged here by John Saxon's gauche city slicker, but also by the Lone Pine scenery captured by Clifford Stine's Eastmancolor camera.

Life is peaceful in the small town of Paradise until fugitive Vic Morrow takes over the saloon with henchmen Charles Horvath, Lee Van Cleef and Henry Wills. Having killed several residents, robbed the bank and abducted the innocent Zohra Lampert, Morrow rides off across the plains. But while the elders are organising a mass posse, deputy Murphy follows dying marshal Ward Ramsey's advice to limit the numbers to those capable of enduring a long, hard ride. Consequently, he sets off in pursuit with Frank Overton (who wants to avenge his brother's shooting), ex-army captain Robert Keith, Lampert's uncle Royal Dano, tough nut Paul Carr, experienced scout Rodolfo Acosta and the dandily dressed Saxon, who is coerced into saddling up by bank boss Ray Teal to ensure the stolen money is returned.

During the gallop through forbidding mountainous terrain, there are casualties on both sides and Murphy struggles to stamp his authority on the hot-headed Overton and the know-all Keith. But, even though they manage to trap the outlaws in a remote cabin and rescue Lampert, they still fail to prevent them from doubling back towards Paradise and Murphy and Saxon are forced to stand alone for the final shootout.

Very much in the sagebrush B tradition, this makes for undemanding viewing. Coleman keeps the action moving and allows Morrow, Lampert and Keith to have noteworthy scenes. But the rigid impassivity of Murphy's performance deprives his character of any depth (not to mention personality) and leaves the waggish Saxon free to steal almost every scene.

The mood couldn't be more different in Michael Gordon's Move Over, Darling (1963), which marked Doris Day's second collaboration with James Garner and furnished her with one of her most memorable movie songs. Reworking the screenplay of Something's Got to Give (which was abandoned shortly before the death of Marilyn Monroe), it's essentially a remake of the Cary Grant-Irene Dunne gem, My Favorite Wife (1940) - which was directed by the aforementioned Garson Kanin. But, while it contains a few more risqué lines, this is no more sophisticated than the screwball original and rather epitomises the kind of glossily superficial entertainment that Hollywood insisted on producing well into the Swinging Sixties.

Even though five years have passed since Day was involved in an ocean plane crash, Garner has been reluctant to have his wife declared legally dead. However, the morning of his wedding to Polly Bergen has arrived and he feels he has no option but to attend crotchety judge Edgar Buchanan's court and secure the necessary documentation.

What Garner doesn't realise is that Day is not only alive and well, but she has just been returned to California by the US Navy after living on a desert island. Naturally, her first thought is for daughters Pami Lee and Leslie Farrell. But, in order to see them, she has to make her presence known to mother-in-law Thelma Ritter, who informs her of Garner's imminent nuptials.

Sporting the latest fashions and her trademark hairdo, Day hurries to the honeymoon hotel to keep Garner from consummating the union. But he seems more than willing to co-operate and feigns a back injury that enables him both to keep Bergen at bay and hire Day as a Swedish nurse. However, he then discovers that Day was not alone during her exile and he is even less amused when he learns that her companion was not feeble shoe clerk Don Knotts but beefcake Chuck Connors.

Given that there can only be one outcome, Gordon does a decent job in keeping this bedroom farce bright and brisk. He's well served by the perpetually perky Day and the smoothly assured Garner, while Ritter, Fred Clark and John Astin provide typically knowing support. But Bergen and Connors sometimes struggle with the near-impossible task of making the love rivals seem enticing rather than infuriating. Thus, while this often amuses, it's nowhere near as sharp as such Rock Hudson outings as Pillow Talk (1959) and Lover Come Back (1961) or Day's first brush with Garner in The Thrill of It All (1963).

A far cry from the swanky Beverly Hills sets designed by Jack Martin Smith and Hilyard M. Brown are the dingy Prague interiors created at Barrandov Studios by Bohuslav Kulic and Vera Líznerová for Jirí Weiss's stark allegory, Ninety Degrees in the Shade (1965). Scripted by David Mercer from a story by Weiss and Jirí Mucha, this British-backed production feels like the kind of television drama that was then being showcased in programmes like The Wednesday Play. Yet it also has much in common with such early Milos Forman pictures as Peter and Pavla (1964) and A Blonde in Love (1965), which confirmed the connection between the Czech New Wave and Free Cinema, which had been so crucial to the emergence of social realism in Britain at the end of the 1950s.

At the centre of the story is Anne Heywood, who works in an off-licence managed by married lover James Booth. She likes to spend her lunch hours on the banks of the Vltava River and is mortified to return to the shop one day to find government inspectors Donald Wolfit and Rudolf Hrusínský about to do a stock take, as she has been helping Booth sell whisky on the black market and fill the storeroom bottles with cold tea. Managing to stall the visitors, she succeeds in postponing the check until the morning and returns with Booth after hours to break in through the back door and remove the adulterated bottles. However, their efforts to purchase replacements as dusk descends upon the city proves more troublesome and the strain on their already fractious relationship soon begins to show.

For all his menace, Hrusínský also has an unhappy home life, with wife Ann Todd considering him a lackey of the state she despise, while teenage son Ladislav Potmesil constantly rebels against his creaking authority. Yet when he discovers the deception at the off-licence and witnesses Booth's willingness to let Heywood take the blame, Hrusínský finds himself torn between doing his duty and siding with the persecuted.

Shooting mostly in close-ups to emphasise the oppressive sense of constant surveillance and suspicion, Weiss adopts a stylised realism that he had first employed while making documentaries in Britain during the war. But he never solves the problem of integrating Heywood, Booth, Todd and Wolfit into a Czech cast and, consequently, the performances are distractingly uneven. Nevertheless, this offers a fascinating insight into life in the capital on the eve of the Prague Spring and suggests that Heywood (who will be 80 in December) was capable of being a fine actress under the guidance of a director who was prepared to see her as more than a former beauty queen.

Due to reach 80 on the very same day, Rita Moreno was another talent for whom producers (within an institutionally racist industry) struggled to find suitable projects, even after she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in West Side Story (1961). Consequently, Hubert Cornfield's The Night of the Following Day (1968) was only her third feature after lighting up the screen as Anita and she is disappointingly under-used as Marlon Brando's moll in this intriguing, but scarcely scintillating adaptation of the Lionel White novel The Snatchers that belonged to the fallow period that Brando endured between One-Eyed Jacks (1961) and The Godfather (1972).

Nothing seems amiss, as stewardess Moreno attends to Pamela Franklin on a flight into Paris. But she is part of a gang that kidnaps the heiress on the airport road and demands a ransom from her father, Hugues Wanner. While Moreno distracts snooping gendarme Gérard Buhr at the Normandy backwater in which they're holed up in a dune cottage, Brando and her brother, Jess Hahn, debate the wisdom of hiring outside muscle Richard Boone on what is supposed to be their last caper. But the prospect of a bumper payday keeps the quartet together, even though Moreno has to resort to cocaine to steel her nerves.

However, her habit causes her to miss a late-night rendezvous at the local airfield and Brando and Hahn are forced to accept a lift from Buhr, whose innocent prying into Moreno's flimsy story about an ailing husband ratchets up tensions that are further exacerbated by Boone's sinister threats to Franklin after he catches her trying to escape. Brando is close to walking away, but he knows Franklin's safety depends on returning her to Wanner and he sets up an elaborate diversion at the local radio mast to ensure a smooth exchange at Jacques Marin's café.

Naturally, things don't go according to plan and the picture ends with Brando and Boone hunting each other across the sands. But the surfeit of moody silences and awkward conversations have already had an enervating effect that this sudden rush of activity is unable to arrest. Boone is sullenly menacing and Moreno trendily vulnerable, as the addict unsuited to criminality. Sporting blonde tresses and tight t-shirts designed to showcase his toned torso, Brando also has his moments of simmering intensity. But, despite Willi Kurant's excellent photography, the mix of acting styles and nouvelle vague tropes never quite gels and this has to go down alongside John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) as one of the more interesting misfires of Brando's wilderness decade.

Finally, this week, comes John Cassavetes's sixth directorial outing, Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), which, like Tom, Dick and Harry, features a heroine whose concept of love derives entirely from the movies. Yet Los Angeles museum curator Gena Rowlands still allows herself to be strung along by Cassavetes's married heel and hectored and eventually assaulted by blind date Val Avery. Moreover, she even finds herself falling for Seymour Cassel, the ageing hippie car park attendant who rescued her from the eerily unstable Avery and whose all-consuming passion tips her into four days of bonding, bawling and bewilderment.

A former prom queen who is about to hit 40, Rowlands confides in best friend Elsie Ames that she is looking for a Clark Gable. Thus, it makes no sense whatsoever for her to date Cassel, who is such an unkempt loser that even shrewish Jewish mother Katherine Cassavetes struggles to find a good word for him. Rowlands's own mother (Lady Rowlands) is even less impressed and wonders why a daughter with seemingly so much going for her always has to make such heavy weather of romance.

Cassel is certainly hard work to be around. His inarticulacy frequently reduces him to expressing himself with bellows and the thumping of doors, vehicles and anything he can land his fist on in order to emphasise his point. Rowlands knows he is wrong for her. But, after so many disappointments, she wonders whether this frog just might turn out to be her prince after all.

Cassavetes clearly saw this latterday screwball as an urban fairy-tale and staged several incidents on the street to reinforce their semi-improvised realism. But he dispenses with the polished rapport that characterised the romcoms of yore and replaces it with shouting matches and mock heroic brawls that somehow convince the audience to root for the unlikely lovers. The supporting performances are splendid, with Timothy Carey being drolly deranged at an all-night restaurant and Cassavetes himself being perfectly hateful as the adulterer who brings his kids with him to break up with Rowlands to avert his wife's threatened suicide. Mothers Rowlands and Cassavetes also excel in the excruciating dinner scene. But it's the emotionally raw byplay between Cassel and Rowlands that makes this so credible and affecting.