Parky at the Pictures (DVD 19/5/2011)

Wheat farmer David Torrence has grave misgivings about letting naive son Charles Farrell travel to Chicago to sell his annual crop. He issues strict instructions on getting the best price and warns him about the perils of urban immorality. Heeding his father's words, Farrell ignores the flirtatious attentions of fellow train passenger Helen Lynch. But he is so overwhelmed by the pace of life in the Windy City and ashamed of being duped into underselling his wares that he gratefully accepts the kindness of diner waitress Mary Duncan.

She hates her job and being cooped in a single-room apartment in a seedy part of town. So, she accepts his marriage proposal and they head back to Blair, Minnesota and the awaiting Torrence's fury that his son has failed him. Mother Edith Yorke and sister Anne Shirley try to make Duncan feel welcome. But her father-in-law is convinced she is a gold-digger and he repeatedly rejects her attempts to please him and seizes every opportunity to question her character.

He finally succeeds in driving a wedge between the newlyweds during a hailstorm that requires the entire workforce to toil through the night in order to save the harvest. When foreman Richard Alexander damages his hand in the threshing machine, he makes a clumsy play for Duncan as she treats him and Torrence draws Farrell's attention to her struggle. Convinced Farrell is indifferent towards her, Duncan declares her intention to leave. But Alexander insists he will call the workers out on strike unless she becomes his mistress. As chaos descends, a fight breaks out between Farrell and Alexander and Torrence loads his gun in a bid to restore order.

The consequence of this gunshot will not surprise those familiar with the workings of American screen melodrama. But this incident also connects City Girl to the other pastoral masterpiece of 1930, Alexander Dovzhenko's Earth, which used its steppe setting to promote agricultural reform rather than simply entertain. Moreover, the romantic triangle links the picture to Murnau's Hollywood debut, Sunrise (1927), in which farmer George O'Brien was led astray from devoted wife Janet Gaynor by city temptress Margaret Livingston.

Indeed, Murnau again makes evocative use of Edgar G. Ulmer's production design, Ernest Palmer's lustrous cinematography and Katherine Hilliker's seamless editing to convey the contrasts between the metropolitan bustle, the joy experienced by Farrell and Duncan as they run through the fields and the desperate urgency of the nocturnal crop gathering. Set on producing a country equivalent of the `city symphonies' that were then attracting critical acclaim, Murnau called the film `a symphony of wheat'. But, while the visual technique was conspicuously audacious - as Murnau sought to expose the inertia of talkies that required actors to group around concealed microphones whose sensitivity precluded camera movement - the narrative is as conservative as anything made by DW Griffith in the previous two decades.

Yet there is something charming about the use of the mechanical caged bird to symbolise Duncan's entrapment and Torrence and Shirley's contrasting attitudes to urban modernity. The performances are equally engaging, even though Murnau was reportedly unhappy at having to reunite with Duncan (the star of his now-lost 1928 drama, 4 Devils) instead of teaming Farrell with his regular partner, Janet Gaynor. But what is most compelling here is the eloquence of the silence and the effortless combination of realism and poetry that has only since been matched in American bucolic cinema by Terrence Malick in Days of Heaven (1978).

As theoretical debate about the expressive use of sound intensified, Murnau was killed in a road accident the following year at the age of just 42. It would have been fascinating to see whether the man who had achieved such visual purity would have eventually reconciled himself to talking pictures. But one suspects he would have become as adept at using speech, effects and music as close contemporary Jean Renoir in Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932).

Buoyed by the reception of La Chienne (1931), Renoir and Michel Simon re-teamed on this adaptation of René Fauchois' boulevard comedy, in which Simon had starred on stage in 1925. Always a fan of Charlie Chaplin's Tramp, Renoir was keen to explore how an inveterate vagabond would respond to traditional bourgeois values. But while the intention was clearly satirical, this is not the declaration of class warfare that some critics have claimed.

Hobo Priapus Boudu (Simon) falls into the Seine while searching for his missing dog. He is fished out of the water by bookseller Édouard Lestingois (Charles Granval), who extends his hospitality to the heavily bearded stranger, in spite of the misgivings of his prudish wife Emma (Marcelle Hainia) and his uppity maid, Chloë Anne Marie (Sévérine Lerczinska). Boudu is a boorish guest and, in addition to eating Lestingois out of house and home, he also makes amorous advances towards Emma and Chloë Anne Marie, who is her boss's mistress.

As the neighbours lobby to have Lestingois rewarded with a medal for his bravery, Boudu visits a barber and discovers that he has won a fortune with the lottery ticket that his host gave him on his first night to cheer him up. However, he soon finds wealth and domesticity burdensome and he makes his escape during an afternoon's boating.

Charles Grandval plays Lestingois as a thoroughly decent idealist, with a reverence for culture and a genial humanism that inspires him to seek the best for Boudu, even when he's at his most boorish. Indeed, this is a classic example of Renoir's pet theory that everyone has reasons for their actions and he resolutely refuses to judge, either the Lestingois's affectations or Boudu's inability to come to terms with an entirely alien lifestyle.

Renoir slyly suggests how easy it is to be seduced by comfort, but he is much more interested in celebrating nonconformism than condemning middle-class cosiness - hence Fauchois's hearty disapproval of Renoir changing the ending to allow Boudu to resume his life as a child of nature. Perhaps he would have been better disposed towards Paul Mazursky's remake, Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986), which panders to American audiences by reducing the characters to more obviously recognisable anti-heroes and villains.

A vein of Greek mythology runs through Boudu. But there's nothing fantastical about the location shooting, which uses long, fluid, deep-focussed takes to capture the flavour of both the Seine around the Pont des Artes and the Marne countryside. Looking out on to the neighbouring rooftops, the Lestingois apartment similarly feels like the scene of real life and this contextualising of the household within its milieu adds authenticity to Renoir's wry observations on contemporary society.

Renoir remains one of the undisputed titans of world cinema. Yet disappointingly few of his films are available on DVD in this country. The same was also true of Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu until the BFI started rectifying the situation. Now, alongside the ongoing Ozu project, comes Early Kurosawa, a four-disc set that gathers six features produced between 1943-47.

Born in Tokyo in 1910, Akira Kurosawa trained as a painter with an emphasis on Western art. He worked as a commercial artist before being apprenticed to film director Kajiro Yamamoto in 1936. He spent five years as an assistant director at the Toho studio before earning his first screenwriting credit on Yamamoto's Horse (1941), on which he also served as second-unit director and editor. Two years later, he made his bow behind the camera with Sanshiro Sugata (aka Judo Saga), which demonstrated an exceptional technical mastery for a debutant.

Some time in 1882, country hothead Susumu Fujita arrives in the city to attend a jujitsu school. However, he changes his preference after witnessing master Denjirô Ôkôchi deposit his students in the water during a bungled sneak attack. Ôkôchi is less than impressed with his new recruit after he becomes involved in a street brawl and informs him that he will never excel at martial arts unless he achieves satori, the Zen state of oneness with nature. Keen to prove he is afraid of nothing, even death, Fujita jumps in the lake beside the temple. However, during his soggy vigil, he is struck by the beauty of a floating flower and Ôkôchi congratulates him on finally reaching maturity.

Soon afterwards, police chief Ichirô Sugai announces that he is sponsoring a match because he wants to include judo in basic training. However, Fujita kills opponent Yoshio Kosugi by throwing him across the ring and his newly acquired reputation earns him the enmity of dandified judoka, Ryûnosuke Tsukigata. He also becomes a target for Yukiko Todoroki, who attempts to assault him with a knife before he is due to fight her judo master father, Takashi Shimura.

Fujita is smitten with the devout Todoroki and wins her approval when he visits Shimura in hospital after handing out a beating. Indeed, she becomes fearful for his safety as he prepares to face Tsukigata. But the midnight hillside bout proves to be a turning point for all concerned.

Film-making in wartime Japan was strictly regimented, with all pictures having to reflect the policies of the militarist government and boost morale. Consequently, 17 minutes were cut from Kurosawa's release print for its failure to reflect the safe themes contained in Tsuneo Tomita's source novel. However, the director was relieved that he had managed to avoid overt propaganda and been allowed to experiment with fluid tracking shots, visual symbolism and self-reflexive editing. He was also possibly surprised to be asked to produce a sequel, two years later.

Given the storyline's increased propagandist element, it's hardly surprising that Kurosawa put such little effort into the direction of what many regard as his most negligible outing. Susumu Fujita returns as the eponymous hero, who is still in thrall to master Denjirô Ôkôchi and now married to Yukiko Todoroki. However, he feels responsible for the death of her father and spends as much time on the road seeking bouts as possible.

He is pursued by the younger brother of his original nemesis - who is again played by Ryûnosuke Tsukigata - and their climactic duel on the slope of a snow-covered mountain recalls the earlier night-time showdown in the wind. But Fujita's principal foe this time round is American boxer Roy James, who becomes aware of his prowess after he comes to the aid of a cabby being pestered by drunken American sailor, Osman Yusuf. James takes on all-comers at the US Embassy for the amusement of the staff. But Fujita is far from daunted by his perfidious pugilism and enters the ring to teach the arrogant imperialists a lesson.

Clearly the censors missed the fact that Kurosawa had succeeded in making an anti-American film in the style of his great hero, John Ford. However, he is far from focused on either Fujita's domestic difficulties or the contrasting chivalric codes of judo and boxing. Consequently, while this is considerably better than the vast majority of today's sequels, it remains of interest primarily because it was released after the defeat of Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, by which time Japan was under occupation by American forces.

In between the two parts of Sanshiro Sugata, Kurosawa rejected an invitation to pay tribute to the Imperial Navy's Zero pilots and made The Most Beautiful (1944), a paean to patriotism that was produced under the auspices of the Office of Public Information. In many ways, it is similar in feel to the docudramas then being produced in Britain. However, some have detected in the lingering shots of the manufacturing processes a connection with the Soviet Constructivism that was so crucial to the montage style of the late silent era.

In the factory town of Hiratsuka, Takashi Shimura is the production chief for a company specialising in precision lenses for bombsights. He meets with Yôko Yaguchi and Sayuri Tanima, the representatives of the female workforce, and asks them to increase their quota to half of that achieved by the men. Stung by the implication from counterparts Sôji Kiyokawa and Ichirô Sugai that they are not doing their full bit for the war effort, Yaguchi insists that they will attain two-thirds of the output and urges her colleagues to keep working in the face of exhaustion, illness and domestic pressure.

Naturally, the women rise to the challenge, even though one breaks a leg and another contracts tuberculosis. However, Yaguchi herself if forced to face the most testing of crises, as she decides to put country first and works long shifts that prevent her from spending time with her dying mother. The long, lingering final shot of the tears welling in her eyes is worthy of a much finer film and one wonders whether Kurosawa fell in love with his future wife as he was capturing this deeply moving show of affection.

In fact, the pair spent much of the shoot arguing, as Kurosawa forced the cast and crew to live in a workers' dormitory and learn the jobs that the non-professional extras were doing. The tactic worked, however, as Jôji Ohara's camera alertly conveys the dedication and expertise of women who were still denied the right to vote under the Japanese constitution. Ironically, Kurosawa would only make one more film with a female protagonist, No Regrets for Our Youth (1946; see below), which was produced at the request of the American occupiers.

Frustrated in his efforts to make the big-budget jidai-geki Doko Kono Yari, Kurosawa turned to They Who Step on the Tiger's Tail (1945), which was adapted from Gohei Namiki's 1840 Kabuki play, Kanjincho, which was itself based on the anonymously written Noh drama, Ataka. Running just 59 minutes, it would prove to be his shortest film and also one of his most misunderstood. The US authorities thought the film paid too slavish lip service to the ancient Bushido Code and withheld it until 1952, by which time Kurosawa had become internationally renowned for Rashomon (1950). But, in fact, this is a lampoon of feudal tradition that incurred the wrath of Japanese conservatives for allowing an aristocratic master to be whipped by his servant.

When a 12th-century prince becomes convinced that his brother, Iwai Hanshiro (billed here as Shubo Nishina), is plotting against him, he sends troops to arrest him. However, Hanshiro flees to the northern town of Hiraizumi with six loyal warriors led by Ôkôchi Denjirô. Realising the need to travel incognito, Denjirô suggests his travelling companions disguise themselves as monks and add chatty porter Kenichi Enomoto to their number as they approach a checkpoint manned by stern lord Susumu Fujita.

Much of the action is taken up with Denjirô's ingenuity and Enomoto's buffoonery. The latter's prattling nearly gives the game away on several occasions. But the former impresses Fujita (who clearly recognises Hanshiro, but seems well disposed to his cause) by unfurling a blank scroll and improvising a prospectus for a temple the monks are supposedly supporting. Thus, it's respect among adjuncts rather than obeisance towards superiors that ensures Hanshiro's safe passage.

Reveling in their game of wits, Denjirô and Fujita give masterly performances. But Enomoto has divided opinion, with some finding his verbosity wearying and others his performance hammy. A cross between the Porter in Macbeth and the Fool in King Lear (both of which Kurosawa would later film, as Throne of Blood, 1957 and Ran, 1985 respectively), his simian interloper was devised by the director himself. His antics can seem a little excessive. Yet he also provides a subversive, contemporary corrective to the historical attitudes and there is something touching about his awkward dance after he wakes following a night of celebratory drinking to find himself alone with a small reward for his services.

Kurosawa continued to risk the ire of his fellow countrymen with No Regrets for Our Youth (1946), which was inspired by the 1933 Takigawa Incident, when Kyoto University law professor Takigawa Yukitori was suspended by education minister Hatoyama Ichiro for advocating Marxism. However, the focus falls more on the academic's daughter and her relationship with two of his students.

Dismayed by the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, Professor Denjirô Ôkôchi informs his class that the militarist regime can only bring the country to its knees. He also denounces the policies of education chief Taizô Fukami and is warned by colleague Masao Shimizu that his activities will lead to his incarceration. While wife Eiko Miyoshi is equally fearful, daughter Setsuko Hara admires her father's courage and takes a shine to his star pupil, Susumu Fujita, whose radicalisation has seen him become increasingly estranged from best friend Akitake Kôno.

Five year pass and, while Ôkôchi has become a champion of the poor, Fujita is serving a prison sentence for his views. Notwithstanding Kôno's admonition, Hara vows to support him and, despite Ôkôchi's misgivings, she leaves for Tokyo to be with him. However, he is accused of attempting to sabotage the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. Ôkôchi offers to defend him at his trial, but Fujita is murdered in his cell and Hara takes his ashes to his mother, Haruko Sugimura, in the countryside. She finds peace toiling in the fields and overcomes initial suspicions she is a spy and the derision of the visiting Kôno to become a popular workers' leader.

Given that this was released as the House UnAmerican Activities Committee was preparing to investigate Communist activity in Hollywood and that its visual style owes more than a little to works of Sergei Eisenstein and Alexander Dovzhenko, it's somewhat surprising that the occupying authority allowed this left-leaning melodrama to pass. However, the denunciation of fascistic ideologies clearly mattered more than pacifist liberalism and one can only presume that the censor equated Hara's progress from bourgeois brat to woman of the people with the many American movie heroines who had made sacrifices to do their bit on the home front.

Hara gives a typically sincere performance, although she demonstrates greater steel than in her collaborations with Yasujiro Ozu during her interrogation by sadistic police chief Takashi Shimura after Fujita's arrest. But, while her character is more rounded than Fujita and Kôno's more stereotypical hero and villain, Kurosawa would never again prioritise the female perspective.

If Kurosawa here presented a romanticised vision of political opposition, he provides a more authentic snapshot of life in postwar Tokyo in One Wonderful Sunday (1947). While not exactly duplicating the locational trenchancy of neo-realism, Asakazu Nakai's shomin-geki visuals still capture a credible sense of time and place and take the sentimental curse off a storyline that has bears the equal influence of Charlie Chaplin and Frank Capra.

War veteran Isao Numasaki and fiancée Chieko Nakakita cannot afford to marry. He shares a room in a rundown tenement, while she lives with her parents. However, they meet up every Sunday to spend some time together and try to think more about what they might achieve in the future than about the frustrations of a present built on the broken promises of the past. Numasaki is naturally pessimistic and his mood dips throughout the day. But Nakakita is more hopeful and returns after an argument to prove to him that, even in the worst of times, life isn't all bad.

With only 35 yen between them when Numasaki meets Nakakita at the train station, they decide to go to the zoo. The stop off en route to play baseball amidst the rubble with some children and Numasaki ends up 10 yen poorer. It begins to rain and he is accused of being a beggar by a dance hall bouncer when they try to visit Numasaki's friend. Instead, they look at a house they can't possibly afford and, as they dream of opening their own coffee shop, they realise they don't even have enough to pay the bill and retreat in embarrassment to his flat.

Nakakita resists Numasaki's amorous attentions and runs off into the rain. But, just as he thinks he has lost her for good, she returns with a suggestion that they go to a performance of Schubert's `Unfinished Symphony'. Unfortunately, the touts have bought up the cheapest tickets and they are locked out. But they slip inside after the performance is over and Numasaki begins to conduct an invisible orchestra and the couple is back in love as he walks her to the last train.

Whereas an entire genre of `rubble films' emerged in postwar Germany, few docudramatic accounts of life among the bomb sites were produced in Japan. Indeed, Kurosawa avoids dwelling on the hardships of defeat to concentrate on the difficulties of making a fresh start. But, while Numasaki occasionally plumbs the lower depths, Nakakita consistently encourages him to keep the faith that Japan will recover, their fortunes will improve and they will finally be able to marry and start the family that will enjoy the better tomorrow.

Adapted from a novel by Ton Satomi, Yasujiro Ozu's Late Autumn (1960) is a domestic drama of the more traditional kind - if anything by this master of subtle subversion could ever be described as conventional. Having been the daughter in Late Spring (1949), Setsuko Hara plays the mother in this melancholically satirical reworking, which ranks among Ozu's finest achievements. Mocking the patronising chauvinism of the older generation and championing the cause of youth, Ozu even parodies his own tatami mat shooting style and his habit of breaching the supposedly sacrosanct 180º line denoting a film's accepted axis of action. But you don't have to know anything about screen technique to enjoy this saga about the efforts of a trio of pompous salarymen to marry off the widowed Hara and her twentysomething daughter, Yoko Tsukasa.

Seven years after the death of her husband, Hara has established a cosy routine with Tsukasa, whose office job has helped her become an independent young woman. She is less than amused, therefore, when Shin Saburi, Nobuo Nakamura and Ryuji Kita (who have known Hara since their student days) choose a memorial service for her father to suggest that she finds herself a husband. Unwilling to be tied down, Tsukasa insists that she couldn't leave Hara alone. Undeterred, the meddlesome trio intimate that Hara has consented to wed the widowed Kita. However, nobody has bothered to inform Hara and she is bemused when Tsukasa accuses her of being unfaithful to the memory of her first love.

In typical Ozu fashion, the drama unfolds in the most restrained manner. Yet he unleashes a little intemperate intensity when Tsukasa's workmate, Mariko Okada, launches into a tirade against Saburi, Nakamura and Kita for their rumour-mongering and interference. Moreover, Ozu concludes on a wryly bittersweet note, as no sooner have Hara and Tsukasa returned from a reconciliatory trip to a country spa than Tsukasa marries Keiji Sada - the very suitor that Saburi had picked for her at the outset.

Yuuharu Atsuta's static, colour camerawork and Tatsuo Hamada's precise interiors reinforce the mood of formalism that reflects Japan's rigid social code. But this is amusingly shattered by the vivacious Okada, whose feisty appeal for constructive change contrasts with the angry iconoclasm of the incoming nuberu bagu, who would dismiss Ozu as relict of the silent past. As technically deceptive as it's socially astute, this is a superb example of the gendai-geki brand of petit-bourgeois melodrama. Moreover, it reveals Ozu's underrated talent for directing actors, with Setsuko Hara (who will be 90 in June) excelling as the mother who accepts loneliness as a reasonable price for her daughter's happiness.

Ozu was only 60 when his remarkable career closed An Autumn Afternoon (1962), a typically subtle, but shrewd study of family obligation and the relentless advance of time. Making only his second film in colour, Ozu keeps his camera still and at its customarily low angle, giving the viewer the freedom to explore the meticulously composed frame, while also concentrating on Chishû Ryû's touching performance, as the widowed book-keeper who reluctantly convinces 24 year-old daughter Shima Iwashita that it's her duty to marry and leave him to the companionship of his drinking buddies. Suffused with genial humanity, this warm, wise tale is both pure cinema and a sheer delight.

Having served as a naval captain during the war, Ryû resigned himself to the salaryman routine in order to be a good father to Iwashita and her brothers Keiji Sada and Shinichirô Mikami. Now, even though Sada is married to Mariko Okada and has a decent job, Ryû still helps him out with a loan to buy a refrigerator (despite the fact he has just splashed out on some golf clubs) and indulges Mikami's every whim. But it's only when old friend Nobuo Nakamura urges him to let Iwashita marry before she becomes too old that he thinks of her as anything other than his doting companion.

He has a further change of heart after attending a school reunion with Nakamura and remarried academic Ryuji Kita when he helps drunken teacher Eijirô Tôno get home and feels so sorry for his spinster daughter Haruko Sugimura that he agrees to introduce Iwashita to a 29 year-old medical assistant in Nakamura's firm. However, she hints that she has a crush on Sada's workmate Teruo Yoshida and Sada sounds him out. Unfortunately, even though he once had feelings for Iwashita, he grew tired of waiting and is now engaged to another woman.

Fighting her disappointment, Iwashita consents to an arranged match and, on the day of her wedding, Ryû drowns his sorrows with Nakamura and Ryuji. On his way home, he drops into a bar. Hostess Kyoko Kishida reminds him of his late wife, while the patriotic march being sung by some of her patrons brings back memories of his time in uniform. But, rather than feeling maudlin, he reasons that if he can survive defeat, then he can cope with the loss of his daughter and he heads back to his empty home.

Made shortly after the death of Ozu's beloved mother, this already poignant drama acquired additional resonance by virtue of the fact that it proved to be his swan song. Co-scripted by Kogo Noda, the scenario is nostalgic and optimistic without being mawkish. Moreover, it also depicts a nation finally reconciled to its peacetime fate, as while Ryû and former sailor Daisuke Kato lament the increase in Western influences as they speculate about how things might have turned out had Japan had triumphed in 1945, neither is particularly dissatisfied with their lot.

Although he would live for another 16 years, Fritz Lang had already concluded his directorial career by the time Ozu died. But, instead of looking forward, he returned to his past with the The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb (1959), the two-part the sub-continental epic that proved to be his penultimate project. Made three years after his last Hollywood picture, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), this was Lang's first German production since he fled the Third Reich in 1933. However, despite the ambition of producer Artur Brauner, it lacked the panache of Joe May's 1921 duology, The Indian Tomb (The Mission of the Yogi and The Tiger of Bengal), which Lang had scripted from a novel by then-wife Thea von Harbou, let alone the visual majesty of Lang's silent Wagnerian fantasies Die Nibelungen: Siegfried and Kriemheld's Revenge (both 1924).

Slickly photographed by Richard Angst on Helmut Nentwig and Willy Schatz's kitschily Orientalist sets, The Tiger of Eschnapur opens with architect Paul Hubschmid arriving in India to construct schools and hospitals for maharaja Walter Reyer. While in transit, Hubschmid had fallen for half-Irish temple dancer Debra Paget after he had protected her and servant Luciana Paluzzi from a man-eating tiger. He is dismayed, therefore, to discover that not only is Reyer intent on making Paget his new maharani, but that, as a foreigner, he is also forbidden from entering the temple.

Having watched Paget dance before a giant statue of Siva for high priest Valéry Inkijinoff, Hubschmid becomes convinced that she is in danger and quickly realises that prince René Deltgen intends using her to discredit Reyer and, with the help of fellow royal Jochen Brockmann, usurp the throne. But, in attempting to break into the forbidden zone of the palace to rescue her, he is captured by Deltgen and forced to duel with another tiger before fleeing into the forest with Paget.

Meanwhile, Hubschmid's assistant, Jochen Blume, has become concerned for his boss's safety and he summons his sister Sabine Bethmann and her husband Claus Holm to Eschnapur to rescue him. But, with Hubschmid and Paget having lost their horses to exhaustion and their way during a sandstorm, it seems as though they may be too late to prevent Deltgen and his cavalrymen from dispatching them.

As this is essentially a glorified serial, The Indian Tomb continues directly from this cliffhanger climax, with Bethmann and Holm agreeing to build an ornate tomb for Reyer while they try to find Hubschmid. He is being detained in the labyrinthine dungeons beneath the palace, along with Paget (who thinks her beloved has perished) and a leper colony that has been quarantined to prevent it from infecting the entire city. Reyer proposes to punish Paget for her treachery by entombing her alive. But he is tricked into marrying her by Deltgen, whose scheme depends on convincing Inkijinoff that he is no longer fit to rule after consorting with a defiled woman.

But that is when Bethmann and Holm find Hubschmid and guide him through the subterranean maze in time for a showdown with both a penitent Reyer and the incandescent Deltgen (and a pit full of crocodiles).

The ending is so inevitable that only the most inexperienced movie-watcher will be surprised by it. Indeed, anyone who managed to catch Cobra Woman (1944), the Jon Hall and Maria Montez campfest discussed in this column a couple of weeks ago, will recognise the basics of the rather simplistic plotline. Moreover, they will also recognise the Expressionist heritage shared by Lang and its director, Robert Siodmak, who also left Germany after the Nazis came to power. However, Lang relies more on long shots with a static camera, as he was seeking to recreate the tableaux feel of his heyday and many will spot the allusion to the catacombs of Metropolis (1926) in the second film.

Regrettably, this old-fashioned feel also extends to the depiction of the Indian characters and this patronising exoticism may trouble modern viewers. But it's difficult to dislike this audacious, if hokey attempt to recapture past glories and no picture containing such an obviously fake stunt tiger can be all bad.

Just as Lang was coming towards the end of his time behind the camera, three young Italian directors were starting to make their mark and Ermanno Olmi's Il Posto (1961), Pier Paolo Pasolini's Mamma Roma and Bernardo Bertolucci's The Grim Reaper (both 1962) are all now available on the increasingly essential Mr Bongo label.

Variously known in English as The Job and The Sound of Trumpets, Il Posto was Olmi's second feature after he had acquired a reputation for producing documentary shorts. There is certainly an authenticity about his depiction of the Milanese company that teenagers Sandro Panseri and Loredana Detto find themselves working for after surviving an arduous application process. But this is much more a compassionate study of the passing of youth and fanciful ambition and the incremental creep of dull routine and lifelong responsibility than a (neo-)realist insight into the world of work during the so-called Italian economic miracle.

Waking to watch his father get ready for work in their humble, converted stable home, Panseri simultaneously feels grateful that he has the opportunity to avoid manual labour and resentful that he has had to abandon hopes of becoming a surveyor to apply for the clerking job that could help see his younger brother through school. His father wishes him well as he heads for the station to travel from the small town of Meda to the country's financial capital. But Panseri is quickly daunted by the size and impersonality of the corporate headquarters and is hugely grateful when he receives a kindly smile from Detto, a French candidate with whom he spends an idyllic lunchtime window shopping and drinking coffee in a bustling café.

Indeed, the pair have such a nice time after the rigours of the written exam that they are nearly late for the afternoon's physical and aptitude tests, as they hurry back hand in hand through traffic, a building site and a park where walking on the grass is strictly forbidden. Yet, while Detto gets a secretarial post, Panseri has to content himself with becoming a messenger and he spends the next few weeks lingering in corridors in the hope of bumping into her. However, he hardly ever sees her and she even fails to show at the New Year's Eve dance. But his disappointment is tempered by the death of a clerk and Panseri is installed in the desk nearest the door to start what will probably be a job for life, unless he can somehow kick against both fate and the system and follow his star.

The emphasis doesn't entirely fall on Panseri and the future Signora Olmi, however. A poignant digression follows their colleagues home to reveal the disappointing domesticity that awaits the newcomers. Indeed, any hope Panseri has of working his way through night school are surely dashed by the sight of the aspiring novelist scribbling furtively under a sheet and the time-server who heads for the pub in a bid to forget the day's thwartings and indignities with a drink and a mournful aria.

Partially inspired by Olmi's own experience at the Edisonvolta electrical company (whose building served as his location), this is a bittersweet comedy of working manners that commends the courage it takes to endure the daily grind. Prowling around spaces designed to boost productivity and destroy the soul, Lamberto Caimi's deep-focus camera captures the banal repetitiveness and oppressive efficiency of the office routine, which is reinforced by Carla Colombo's rhythmic editing and Giuseppe Donato's ambient sound mix. But, while his use of architecture to reflect character is as acute as that of Michelangelo Antonioni, it's Olmi's sensitive direction of his non-professional leads that makes this so engaging, with Panseri's almost imperceptible expressions conveying gauche timidity as ably as Jack Lemmon's more effusive display in Billy Wilder's similarly themed Oscar-winning gem, The Apartment (1960).

The contrast between the bemusedly dutiful Panseri and the surly wastrel essayed by Ettore Garofolo in Mamma Roma could not be more pronounced. Whereas the smartly dressed Panseri makes sacrifices for his family, the scruffily besuited Garofolo scrounges shamelessly off mother Anna Magnani, who is forced to resume her old trade of streetwalking when his card-playing and romantic misadventures leave him despondent and broke. Yet Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was making his second feature after establishing himself as a contentious Marxist poet and intellectual, refuses to present Magnani as a tragic figure driven to debasement by mother love. In fact, she returns to her corner with an enthusiasm that was entirely absent from her brief stint as a market stallholder.

Magnani is first seen at the wedding of her former pimp Franco Citti, where she drunkenly engages in taunting bride Maria Bernardini in a raucous sing-song exchange that not only reveals her brazen blowsiness, but also her love of life and her attachment to the man who may or may not be the father of her child. She may well have been married twice herself, but there is no knowing whether the decrepit Fascist forced upon her by her parents or the criminal who abandoned her at the altar are genuine or figments of an imagination that is allowed to run riot during stream-of-consciousness monologues that Magnani delivers as the strides the streets of Rome with a swagger that never quite disguises the vulnerability that bitter experience has long taught her to suppress.

Freed from servitude to Citti, Magnani returns to her unprepossessing slum, where the greenhorned Garofolo meets the lowlifes who will lure him into debt and larceny. But, even after she starts selling vegetables, moves to a smarter apartment opposite a cemetery and begins seeking the advice of priest Paolo Volponi, she fails to persuade Garofolo to follow her industrious example and, having dropped out of school, he starts frittering away her hard-earned cash on a motorcycle and scheming single mother Silvana Corsini. Yet, when he finally accepts the need to find employment, Magnani is heartbroken by the prospect of him becoming a labourer and weeps with relief when he is hired as a waiter. However, her efforts to keep Garofolo out of trouble and prevent the blackmailing Citti from telling him about her disreputable past are doomed to failure and she takes up her customary station with a crushing dejection that mirrors the sight of her son laid out on a table in the prison hospital.

Employing symbols as much to display his learning as his visual prowess, Pasolini draws on neo-realist tradition in keeping Tonino Delli Colli's roving camera distant from the action to enhance the sense of authenticity. However, Magnani's performance is so much larger than life that she seems to be in permanent close-up, as her bid for bourgeois respectability is undermined by her own urges and the venality of a son she scarcely knows. Yet Pasolini lamented that she had failed to capture the borgate Madonna he had envisaged and lost faith in a film that required a lengthy legal battle to secure a release after it was denounced for indecency at the Venice Film Festival.

But, while this remains more the work of an aesthete than a cineaste, there is still filmic audacity in the shifts from the jittery fragmentation achieved by editor Nino Baragli and the smoother mise-en-scène sequences in which Magnani discusses her travails with the strangers who briefly march beside her during her nocturnal perambulations before disappearing back into the shadows. Such nouvelle vague touches were rare in Pasolini's early works. But they would come to characterise Bernardo Bertolucci's shift towards Jean-Luc Godard and away from the mentor who had not only made him his assistant on Accatone (1961), but had also contributed the story to his directorial debut, The Grim Reaper.

Shot in docudramatic monochrome by Giovanni Narzisi, the action opens on the pages of a newspaper fluttering on the breeze before alighting on the corpse of battered prostitute Wanda Rocci in the Parco Paolino on the banks of the Tiber. A number of suspects are interrogated by an off-screen policeman and their motives and movements are revealed in a series of flashbacks that are linked together by a rainstorm and images of Rocci waking from a nap and preparing for what she expects to be just another night on the streets.

The key witness turns out to be Silvio Laurenzi, a gay man who had also fallen victim during the previous evening to a petty theft. But, while his testimony seems straightforward, everyone else dissembles from a mixture of guilt and shame as they recall their less than salubrious activities in the hours before the murder.

Francesco Ruiu is a petty thief from the sticks, who seeks to exploit engrossed lovers by snatching their belongings. He insists he was in the park looking for work and crumbles under questioning. But, for all his snivelling protestations, he is a deeply unsympathetic character who is unwilling to take responsibility for his own failures and misdemeanours. Furlough soldier Allen Midgette is no more honourable. Although he claims he was merely sleeping on a park bench after an exhaustive day of sightseeing around the capital, he actually spent his time pestering women on the street. However, he provides useful information about Renato Troiani, the mysterious man in clogs who dashed past him while trying to conceal something under his coat.

His compromised recollections are matched by those of Alfredo Leggi, who asserts that he is trying to remain on the right side of the law after a colourful past. Yet he is acting as a pimp for hooker girlfriend Gabriella Giorgelli, a forceful harridan who seems more than adequately equipped to look after herself. But Leggi is not alone in being led astray by the need to please a demanding woman, as teenagers Alvaro D'Ercole and Romano Labate have to resort to shady dealings to buy the food they hope will impress their would-be older dates.

Bertolucci has always averred that he had never seen Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) when he made this compelling study of recollection, truth and deceit. But even if Pasolini and co-scenarist Sergio Citti had been familiar with that masterpiece's flashbacking structure and bold breach of the maxim that the camera never lies, this would not detract from the 21 year-old debutant's achievement. His use of evocative locations and a largely non-professional cast is exemplary. But the fluidity of the imagery suggests a more intimate identification with those on the margins of society than the majority of neo-realist practitioners, while the repetition of references to the rain and Rocci's routine impose a lyricism that reinforces the fact that, even though he had been making amateur films for six years, Bertolucci was more experienced as a poet than a director at this time (his collection In Search of Mystery has just won a prestigious Italian literary prize).

Some have bemoaned the lack of suspense in what is essentially an arthouse whodunit. But this is primarily a snapshot of the seedy side of a fabled city and the harsh things that happen away from its landmarks. In some ways, it's the flipside of Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960), as it shows that those on the lower rungs are every bit as indolent and unethical as their supposed social superiors. However, it also has a political subtext, as it intimates how evil can occur under the noses of ordinary people and yet they are too preoccupied with their own petty concerns to prevent it and are subsequently too willing to pass the blame on to others after the damaging consequences have been made manifest.