frankie's - 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die List

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Rex Harrison reprises his signature role of Henry Higgins, the supremely assured phoneticist who wagers that under his tutelage, cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle can pass for a duchess at the Embassy Ball. In one of her best-loved roles, Audrey Hepburn plays Eliza.

If ever there were a face that the professor could grow accustomed to, it's hers. In Hartford, Heresford and Hampshire (and elsewhere) no one's fairer than 'My Fair Lady' on of the most irresistible musicals ever.

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When teacher Junpei Niki misses his last bus home after a day out collecting insects on a remote stretch of coast, he is invited by a local villager to take shelter in a young widow's ramshackle hut.

Ignoring the fact that her home is at the bottom of a sandpit accessible only by rope ladder, he accepts this hospitality without realising he is the victim of a cruel trick. Trapped, he is forced into an uneasy life with this woman, sharing with her the Sisyphean task of shoveling the sand that threatens to engulf them.

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Stanley Kubrick's classic black comedy about a group of war-eager military men who plan a nuclear apocalypse is both funny and frightening - and seems as relevant today as ever. Through a series of military and political accidents, two psychotic generals - U.S. Air Force Commander Jack D.

Ripper (Sterling Hayden) and Joint Chief of Staff "Buck" Turgidson (George C. Scott) - trigger an ingenious, irrevocable scheme to attack Russia's strategic targets with nuclear bombs. The brains behind the scheme belong to Dr Strangelove (Peter Sellers), a wheelchair-bound nuclear scientist who has bizarre ideas about man's future. The President (also Sellers) is helpless to stop the bombers, as is Captain Mandrake (Sellers once again). Dr. Sstrangelove is truly a classic film.

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In 1964 the biggest band on the planet made their big screen debut with 'A Hard Day's Night', a groundbreaking film that presented a 'typical' day in the life of The Fab Four as they tried to outrun screaming fans, find Paul's mischievous grandfather, deal with a stressed TV producer and make it to

the show on time. Directed with unrelenting verve by Richard Lester, whose innovative techniques paved the way for generations of music videos, the film's frenetic mix of comic escapades, legendary one-liners and pop perfection captured a moment in time that defined a generation. The most iconic band in music history had arrived.

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Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso) once more combines the considerable talents of director Michelangelo Antonioni and star Monica Vitti. Cast as Giuliana, an unhappy wife, Vitti suffers from an unnamed form of depression and malaise.

Her quicksilver emotional shifts disturb everyone around her, but they, like she, pretend that nothing is truly wrong. British engineer Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris) seems to understand what Giuliana is really after in life, and he acts upon it by entering into an affair with the troubled woman. Giuliana eventually comes to terms with her physical and mental pain, but this hardly means that she's "cured" in the conventional sense.

Set within a Gutsul community in the Ukranian Carpathian mountains, this visually stunning and richly detailed tale of a young man who yearns for a lost love is a beguiling mix of folklore, sorcery and religious symbolism, which brought Paradjanov to prominence and won numerous awards.

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Vincent Price stars as the evil Prospero, a Prince who has sold his soul and who counts on the promises of the Devil for protection.

He hosts incredible, opulent parties for the privileged while toe poor die in hovels, starving victims of the Red Death, a devastating plague that is sweeping his lands. Prospero takes a perverse pleasure in the pain and suffering of his supplicants and his friends alike. When Prospero decides to hold a masked ball all seems ready for a night of unheard of indulgence and decadence, until he notices the entry of a mysterious hooded stranger dressed all in red. Believing toe figure to be his master, Satan, Prospero determines to seek him out...Based on Edgar Allan Poe's short stories,

Young, middle-class and idealistic, Fabrizio struggles to break away from his bourgeois background.

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'Gertrud' is the story of a woman's search for a romantic ideal of total and perfect love. A once famous singer now in her early forties, Gertrud makes the decision to leave her lawyer husband for her lover, a young composer.

Discovering the next day that her lover has betrayed her, and is unable to give her his total love, Gertrud rejects both husband and lover, choosing a life of solitude and study over the compromise of love that is merely half-measure.

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Internationally hailed by critics as his masterpiece, Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St Matthew is a visually stunning, emotionally stirring film version of the life of Christ, based upon the writings of the apostle Matthew.

Pasolini's vision is both deeply religious and determinedly polictical, with the messiah portrayed as a peasant outcast, driven by anger at social injustice. Convincing performances by an entirely non-professional cast, impressive cinematography and an inventive use of music, from Bach to Billie Holiday, combine to great effect in this landmark of world cinema.

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Shot on the Brazilian Sertao, the bleak parched lands of northern Brazil, a poverty striken cowhand called Manuel (Geraldo Del Rey) kills his abusive boss.

Fleeing with his wife, Rosa (Yona Magalhaes) as outlaws, Manuel joins up with a self-proclaimed saint (Joao Gama) who condones violence and preaches disturbing doctrines. The movie then follows Manuel's journey into a life of crime, joining Antonio's gang (Mauricio do Vale) and eventually meeting Corisco (Othon Bastos) a hired assassin who is paid to kill both the priest and Antonio. Folk songs combine with the music of Villa Lobos and Bach to create a stirring backdrop.

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Onibaba is set during a brutal period in history, a Japan ravaged by civil war between rival shogunates.

Weary from combat, samurai are drawn towards the seven-foot-high susuku grass fields to hide and rest themselves, only to be ambushed and murdered by a ruthless team of mother (Nobuko Otowa) and daughter-in-law (Jitsuko Yoshimura). When Hachi (Kei Sato), a neighbour returning from the wars, brings bad news, he threatens the women's partnership.

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Small-town Slovakia 1942. Nazi concentration camp deportations have begun. Tono, a poor carpenter, is appointed 'Aryan controller' of the elderly and frail Jewish widow Rozalia's shop.

Believing Tono is her new assistant, the two develop a friendship in which he maintains that illusion to try and protect her from the encroaching Nazi terror. Wonderfully written and performed, and with an extraordinary Zdenek Liska score, the film becomes a devastating examination of how minor compromises can finally lead to complicity in the horrors of tyranny.

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A peerless filmmaker of substance and scale, David Lean directs Boris Pasternak's tumultuous tale of Russia divided by war and hearts torn by love. Epic images abound: revolution in the streets, an infantry charge into no-man's-land, the train ride to the Urals, an icebound dacha.

Omar Sharif plays the title role, Julie Christie is his haunting, long-time love Lara and both are caught up in the tidal wave of history.

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Few films have caused such controversy as Peter Watkins' The War Game, a drama documentary made for BBC TV in 1965 about a "limited" nuclear attack on Kent, England.

Blending fiction and fact to create a moving and startling vision of the personal as well as the public consequences of such an attack, Watkins exposes the inadequacy of the nation's Civil Defence programme and questions the philosophy of the nuclear deterrent. Conspicuously absent from TV screens until 1985, it was mainly through cinema release in 1966 - and its Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1967 - that it gained a loyal and vociferous following, providing a sharp focus for CND and other peace movements.