Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 21/7/2011)

The hand of Hecht is most evident in the subplot involving casino owner George Macready and the cartel dealing in illegal tungsten, as he had already devised a similar storyline involving uranium for Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, which was released later the same year. Indeed, there are many other similarities between the stories, with Glenn Ford sharing Cary Grant's fate in allowing the woman he loves - Rita Hayworth in Ford's case and Ingrid Bergman in Grant's - to marry a man he knows can only bring her trouble (respectively Macready and Claude Rains) and he ends up risking his own neck to save her from hissable Germans still intent on ruling the world from South America despite their defeat in the war.

But so many film noir plots overlapped, as they reflected a nation that was still ill at ease with itself after the Depression and Pearl Harbor and was only just coming to realise the terrifying reality of what would become the Cold War. Moreover, there was a growing suspicion that the Good Neighbours south of the border were nowhere near as reliable as Washington had hoped they would be and the fact that so many Axis war criminals had been given sanctuary by the right-wing dictatorships left many with a disconcerting sense of encirclement. Thus, the colourful musicals that had encouraged Pan-Americanism between 1940-45 were replaced by dark tales of mistrust and duplicity in which the Yank abroad struggled to keep a potentially perilous situation from spiralling out of his control.

Rescued from a mugger in a Buenos Aires backstreet, gambler Glenn Ford repays dapper George Macready's gallantry by becoming the enforcer at his illicit casino. Cop Joseph Calleia is among the regulars at the chic establishment and he offers Ford words of advice as frequently as washroom attendant Steven Geray, who warns him that the tuxedo and air of respectability cannot disguise the fact that he is a peasant out of his depth. And this soon proves to be the case when Macready returns from a trip with a new bride who just happens to be Ford's old flame.

Still nursing a broken heart, Rita Hayworth hopes to make Ford suffer for jilting her. But he is more concerned by the sinister presence of German Ludwig Donath, who has designs on the contents of Macready's safe in the office above the club. However, when Macready is forced to kill during a masked ball to protect his interests, he catches Ford and Hayworth in a passionate embrace and stages his plane crash suicide with revenge uppermost in his mind.

Hayworth never forgave producer Virginia Van Upp for creating this crackling melodrama. Indeed, she held her directly responsible for the fact that the majority of her subsequent lovers went to bed with Gilda and felt disappointment on waking up with her. Yet Parsonnet and Eisinger were equally culpable for objectifying Hayworth as the love goddess whom Macready and Ford want to possess without deigning to cherish.

As director Charles Vidor once said, `the picture was about hate being as exciting an emotion as love' and sparks certainly fly within a ménage whose simmering sado-masochism and latent homosexuality seems to transgress just about every item on the Production Code. Indeed, in awarding a release certificate, it was as though the Breen Office was allowing such resistible characters to commit such despicable sins in order to ward the audience off the temptations of the flesh. Yet, ironically, Gilda became a popular date movie for returning GIs keen to see the flame-haired pin-up who had helped them get through the war.

Alluringly photographed by Rudolph Maté, Hayworth certainly didn't let them down, especially in strutting dance numbers that choreographer Jack Cole claimed had been inspired by the striptease. But off screen, Hayworth was feeling anything but a femme fatale, as her marriage was collapsing across the Columbia lot as Orson Welles conducted an affair on the set of The Stranger, which she had persuaded studio chief Harry Cohn to greenlight. Consequently, she would fall into the arms of her five-time co-star, who developed a crush on her during the shoot. Yet Ford still managed to sustain the intense pessimism and world-weary cruelty (perhaps channelled from his wartime stint in the Marines) that made Johnny Farrell one of the most ambiguous anti-heroes of the 1940s.

In all honesty, like so many noirs, Gilda is a bit of a melodramatic muddle. However, its atmosphere is irresistible and the tension between the leads is tangible. Moreover, it reveals what a fine director the Hungarian-born Charles Vidor could be and how much his visual style resembles that of fellow European exiles Josef von Sternberg, William Wyler, Michael Curtiz and Billy Wilder.

Any other week, Charles Crichton's The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) would be the lead review. Now 60 years old, this classic Ealing comedy tells the story of a timid, but fastidious bank clerk who executes the perfect bullion heist and smuggles the gold out of the country in the form of seemingly worthless tourist trinkets. But when studio boss Michael Balcon hired screenwriter TEB Clarke, he expected him to concoct a gritty crime picture in the mould of The Blue Lamp (1950) and Pool of London (1951). Yet, even though Clarke opted for a comic approach, he still wanted his caper to be as authentic as possible and he consulted the Bank of England about the best way to breach its security and a specially convened committee obligingly came up with the bare bones of Henry `Dutch' Holland's ingenious plan.

Holland was played with deceptively innocuous self-assurance by Alec Guinness, who was returning to Ealing for the first time since his triumph in Robert Hamer's Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). He was joined in the gang by Stanley Holloway as Pendlebury, the proprietor of the souvenir company that would transform the purloined gold ingots into Eiffel Towers, and Sid James and Alfie Bass, as Cockney scamps Lackery Wood and Shorty, who provided the gentlemanly outlaws with a little professional expertise.

While nowhere near as subversive as Alexander Mackendrick's Whisky Galore! (1949), the film was still scathing in its depiction of the forces of law and order. Having demonstrated the technological and forensic armoury at the police's disposal, Clarke and Crichton delighted in debunking its efficacy. Rather than facilitate the pursuit of villains, in-car radios are shown to be vulnerable to sabotage and capable of causing utter chaos. Similarly, bobbies on the beat are presented as jolly fools, who either phone in with tall stories about top hats or are too preoccupied with singing `Old Macdonald Had a Farm' to realise the suspects are under their very nose.

But it's not just the law that is subject to ridicule. Just as William Rose would later reveal he had lampooned Clement Attlee's government in The Ladykillers (1955), a case can be made for Clarke having taken a pop at them here, too. Like Attlee and his cabinet colleagues, Guinness and Holloway's characters are clearly a couple of rungs up the social ladder from James and Bass's working crooks. Thus, the blind faith that the latter place in their superiors to fence the loot in Paris and still return with their proceeds smacks of the confidence that voters placed in Labour in 1945. But Alfie, Sid and the electorate were all betrayed by their implicitly trusted betters.

Crichton also found room for a dig at Britain's most famous cinematic export. As Guinness and Holloway hurtle down the steps of the Eiffel Tower in pursuit of a lift full of schoolgirls carrying their dodgy golden replicas, it's impossible not to be reminded of one of Alfred Hitchcock's famous landmark set-pieces. Indeed, the action becomes genuinely disquieting as Holloway's hat and coat float like a plunging figure from the twisting staircase, until Crichton deflates the incident by giving both men the giggles.

This enjoyment of their villainy is a key feature of the film's attitude towards morality. It's clear from the bookend sequences in South America that Guinness has been having a high old time (even cavorting with a young Audrey Hepburn). There's a trenchant satirical irony in the fact that his ill-gotten gains have helped him become a pillar of the ex-pat community. It's this willingness to seize on any route away from the all-pervading austerity of victory (vital also to Henry Cornelius's 1949 Clarke-scripted gem Passport to Pimlico) and the disregard for authority that has ensured the Lavender Hill Mob's place in British screen history.

Fleeing the scene of a crime is also the theme of Eric Lartigau's The Big Picture, a bold adaptation of a Douglas Kennedy novel that swaps New York and Montana for Paris and a backwater in Montenegro. Once again demonstrating what a fine screen actor Romain Duris is becoming, this existential drama delves deeply into notions of identity, ambition and responsibility to oneself and others. But it never quite resolves its plausibility issues and, as a consequence, is less engrossing than the Patricia Highsmith Ripley novels that would appear to be its obvious inspiration.

Lawyer Romain Duris should be content with his lot. He runs a successful firm with Catherine Deneuve and adores his two children with trophy wife Marina Foïs. However, soon after learning that Deneuve has only months to live, Duris discovers that Foïs has been sleeping with photographer neighbour Eric Ruf and his perfect world begins to fall apart.

After making a scene at a dinner party, Duris decides to confront Ruf about the affair. However, the discussion gets out of hand and he accidentally kills his rival in a scuffle and is suddenly confronted with the dual prospect of losing everything has and saddling his sons with the ruinous reality of having a killer for a father.

Concluding that the former is the lesser of two evils, Duris hides Ruf's corpse and uses emails and texts to create the impression that Ruf is still alive, but out of easy contact, by announcing that is heading off on a remote travel assignment. Duris then fakes his own death and starts driving east until he finally reaches a sleepy town on the Montenegrin coast, where he rents in a house in the hope that the residents are incurious about the newcomer in their midst.

In order to survive, Duris decides to use Ruf's equipment to set himself up as photographer and, in the process, fulfil the youthful dream he abandoned to study law. However, he soon finds himself more in demand than he envisaged, as drunken ex-pat news editor Niels Arestrup persuades picture editor Branka Katic to hire Duris and his work attracts so many positive notices that he is awarded an exhibition. Torn between enjoying the acclaim and dreading it creating the internet buzz that could expose him, Duris elects to take his chances.

But the sight of his pictures on the wall of the crowded gallery unnerves him and he flees in panic. Distraught at losing his only snapshot of his kids in torching his car, Duris secures a passage on a cargo ship leaving a nearby port. However, noises in the night lead to a fateful discovery.

Despite the best efforts of Lartigau and co-scenarist Laurent de Bartillat to meld Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (1975) and Jacques Audiard's The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), this is a picture with frustrating plotting and pacing problems. Yet, such is the intensity of Duris's performance that it's easy to suspend disbelief as his carefully laid plans threaten to unravel and he starts to succumb to the self-loathing that had alienated Foïs.

By focusing so relentlessly on Duris's inner turmoil, Lartigau ably conveys the agony of regret. But he also compellingly explores the stress of maintaining the façade of a new identity in the face of internet omniscience and this sense that there is nowhere to hide in a shrinking world is one of the film's most disconcerting aspects. Laurent Dailland's prowling camera and Olivier Radot's claustrophobic production design heighten this aura of unease, which is further reinforced by Evgueni and Sacha Galperine's unsettling score. But, with so many secondary characters seeming to exist solely to exacerbate Duris's difficulties, the focus is cast unremittingly on a deeply flawed anti-hero who isn't entirely worthy of sympathy.

A lack of evident charm also makes it hard to root for the main protagonists of Break My Fall and The Violent Kind.

Some 20 years after she started making shorts (including the BAFTA-nominated Travelling Light, 1999) and a decade after she lost the funding for her first full-length film, Kanchi Wichmann finally managed to make her feature debut with Break My Fall. Capturing the vibrancy of the East End district of Dalston and making spirited use of tracks by such indie bands as The Raincoats, Wet Dog and Scout Niblett, this is an intense drama that touches upon the raw emotions that are exposed in clinging to a waning relationship. Yet it is also a touch self-absorbed and sorely lacking in the sense of humour that might have alleviated its suffocating seriousness.

Kat Redstone and Sophie Anderson have been together since the latter arrived in London from Berlin with girlfriend Angela Last's band. But, while they have now have their own combo with drummer Rob Schwarz and share a cosily cramped flat, the romance has hit a wall and the self-destructive Redstone becomes increasingly insecure after Last sends Anderson a letter and she discovers a secret notebook hidden in a cupboard. Moreover, she comes to suspect that Anderson is more than just friends with rent boy Kai Brandon Ly and dismisses gay pal Collin Clay Chace's consoling conviction that she is simply fretting about her upcoming 25th birthday and that everything will work out for the best.

As Redstone and Anderson bicker, rehearse, fight and make-love, it becomes clear that all is far from well and, after Anderson storms out of a café after Redstone gets into an argument about cutlery, the birthday girl goes home and gets wasted after reading the messages on Anderson's phone. She has to be dragged to a surprise dinner at a nearby Chinese restaurant. But her behaviour becomes even more erratic at an illegal rave and tensions run high in the back seat of a car heading for Liverpool, as Ly and Redstone compete for Anderson's attention while Chace drives new beau David Brice to a funeral.

Unafraid to allow scenes to play themselves out in their own time and explore the extent to which drink and drugs impact upon the couple's moods, Wichmann ably conveys the pain and uncertainty of lost love and there is genuine poignancy in the climactic scene. Dawid Pietkiewicz's photography is also accomplished and if the performances are inconsistent, Redstone and Anderson prove physically and psychologically courageous, as they try to make sense of feelings that are now rooted more in habit than passion.

Audiences will have a harder time identifying with anyone in Mitchell Altieri and Phil Flores's The Violent Kind. Having forged their reputation for mayhem horror with The Hamiltons (2006) and April Fool's Day (2008), the Butcher Brothers have taken their penchant for genre-mashing to new extremes with this gore-spattered hommage to such exploitation staples as bikers, juvenile delinquents, old dark houses and the undead. The only trouble is, they attempt to bolt so many disparate plot threads together that the finished feature feels like the filmic equivalent of Frankenstein's monster.

Despite being fresh out of the slammer, Oakland slacker Cory Knauf is soon kicking lumps out of the customers coming to complain about the quality of the drugs sold them by fellow bikers Bret Roberts and Nick Tagas. The mood is strained between the trio and things are not helped by Knauf's obvious crush on Roberts's girlfriend, Taylor Cole. However, by agreeing to go on a smuggling run across the border, the pals have patched up by the time they head off for Knauf's mom's birthday party somewhere in the California sticks.

The evening goes with a bang, as the various fiftysomethings prove to their offspring that they still have what it takes where wild antics are concerned. However, Knauf has a lousy time watching old flame Tiffany Shepis canoodling with new beau Terry Wayne until her younger sister, Christina Prousalis, sidles up to confess that she always had a crush on him. No sooner have the pair become reacquainted than the other guests vanish into the night and Prousalis realises that Shepis has left without her. But the prospect of bunking down for the night with Knauf, Roberts, Cole and Tagas is not without its attractions.

Typically, however, the evening is ruined when Shepis returns covered in blood and proceeds to take a bite out of Tagas. They manage to restrain the ravenous Shepis and staunch Tagas's wound, but a further invasion occurs soon afterwards, as 50s clad sociopath Joe Egender bursts in with confederates Joseph McKelheer and Samuel Child and grinning groupies Mackenzie Firgens and Ilea Matthews and not only begins to torture Knauf, but also warns that something momentous is going to happen at midnight.

Many will have lost patience with the surfeit of haphazard hokum by this point. But the Butchers have the courage of their conviction to pack the action with as many twists and despicable characters as possible and they are well served by a willing cast. Unfortunately, none of the episodes is particularly interesting in isolation and, despite the odd flash of macabre wit, they don't gel into anything approaching a coherent whole. Thus, the louder and more anarchic this becomes, the attempts to shock seem more laboured and few will be intrigued to know what possessed Shepis and what epiphany has gotten Egender so hepped up.