Film Reviews by CH

One might well imagine that, after the midwife slapped Clark Gable into life, he did not cry but had that twinkle in his eye which he so often did in films where a woman takes his charm amiss - as happens in The King and Four Queens (1956). Directed by Raoul Walsh, this Western sticks to one location, Wagon Mound, a compound near a small, remote town, but it has all the pace for Walsh is renowned, as well as his sense of place and subtle cinematography, here realised in beautifully bright colour, whether this be the landscape or an array of dresses.

Fine dresses - and, indeed, tresses - in such a spot? The script is by Margaret Fitts, from her own story, and a far cry from her lumpen adaptation of John Meade Falkner's Moonfleet the previous year. When fetching up in town (the start of so many a Western and a thriller), Gable heads to a bar and, on emerging, encounters a man who is delivering a gravestone to Wagon Mound. It is the latest one for which a widowed mother has saved up, her funds derived from hens and their fitful laying of eggs.

Ma (Jan Van Fleet) had four sons, three of whom died while stealing $100,000. Another survived, and she lives in hopes of his returning to claim the hidden loot. Also on the premises are the men's four wives/widows, all under the thumb of Jan Van Fleet - her thumb beside the trigger to ward off anybody who comes close to this run-down house, and its tower is home to a warning bell.

In the years since the robbery, the widows, among them Eleanor Parker, have become - how can one put this? - frustrated. Their craving for flesh is only kept in check by the thought that chastity could be rewarded with cash when the survivor returns. When you're good to Mama, Mama's good to you...

An inch the other way, and Gable would not have made it to the front door. As it is, he is patched up, a matter of a bare chest for a while, and even the rifle-packin' Mama is not immune to his blandishments. As moonlight works its wonders, Gable switches from a hymn upon the organ - in an opulently run-down sitting-room - to a hoe-down and, as the sultry turns salty, the air is rife with innuendo which could have sprung from the other side of the Hays Code (I shall not quote any of it - this is all the better in context, and sure to bring a smirk even to the po-faced).

A new angle, perhaps, on something which was called a women's picture. They certainly hold the fort, literally and metaphorically.

“Sparkle, Shirley, sparkle!” With those three words, Mrs. Temple successfully encouraged her daughter to do her best in front of the cameras. This is a world away from Coward's Mrs. Worthington who is advised that her offspring has “a loud voice, and though it's not exactly flat, / She'll need a little more than that / To earn a living wage” (in cabaret versions, he sometimes added a final, salty verse). Both come to mind in watching Visconti's Bellissima (1951), which followed Obsessione and La Terra Trema in his early Neo-Realist phase.

It opens, however, in the full-operatic mode with which he is often associated. A radio broadcast is underway of Donizetti when it is interrupted with the announcement that a film studio is seeking a young girl, around the age of seven, to appear in a film. Auditions are being held and some will then have a screen test.

Small surprise that the scene cuts to the outside of these Roman studios, and, as the camera pans across the hordes of children (none of whom look into it), the noise level grows, and does not cease for another couple of hours. Upon the screen for most of the time is Anna Magnani, forever in black, as, ever excitable, she scrimps to provide her daughter (Tina Appicella, in her only film) with a dress, haircut, photograph to boost her chances, all this kept from her husband (Gastone Renzelli) who sits around, Kowalski-fasion, in a gross vest while dreaming of building a house far from this tenement whose balconies echo with the cries and calls of so many frustrated housewives while films are sometimes shown in the garden to the delight of star-fixated Anna (who is smitten with Burt Lancaster).

All moves at a pace, its script by the prolific Suso Cecci D'Amico (she also worked on Bicycle Thieves and The Leopard), with enough detail of film-making not to distract from such things as a spiv (box-office star, Walter Chiari) who fleeces Anna Magnani of savings garnered through her rest-of-the-day job which finds her traversing the city to plunge a hypodermic into male and female buttocks to ease diabetes - a process which finds yelps scarcely muffled by pillows.

Perhaps only Rocco and His Brothers would come close to the bravura style of this Visconti film, in which he was aided by the young Rosi and Zefferelli (both of whom recollect its making in a half-hour documentary on the DVD, along with Suso Cecci D'Amico, who was to die at close on a hundred). Visconti, with The Damned and Death in Venice, is often described as “painterly” in his use of colour. Here, though, as in his other early films, the black-and-white cinematography catches the diverse locations in a way that feels more accurate than colour would have been. A sign, perhaps, that here is something which draws you in, the pause-button redundant.

“Yes, they are men - and you're not the only woman!”

Juliette Gréco has reason on her side. Aboard a large freight barge - the Clementine - upon the Rhine, she upbraids the Captain's needlessly jealous wife (Muriel Pavlow).

That said, the Captain's wife, did she but know it, has equal reason to be suspicious, for Juliette Gréco is on the run from a criminal, money-laundering lover (William Silvester) who, in the meanwhile, has shot dead another man while trying to find her. A sign of his callous nature is when, along the way, a waitress, says to him, eyelids fluttering, “I am going off at eleven” and he replies, “you've been going off since you were eleven.”

Adept as all the cast might be (including the Captain, Marius Goring whose wild hair has something of the Gene Wilder about it), it is Juliette Gréco who tops the bill (and sings, in English, over the opening credits). One might more readily picture her holding a microphone in a boite than a ship's wheel at the blaze of noon; moreover, her only black clothes are a briefly-glimpsed nightdress; for the rest of the time - though she does hangs a black bra on a washing line, which must have set many a 1959 heart aflutter - her long legs are encased by blue jeans in a film whose shifting river background is filmed in Eastmancolor. And yet it works, she carries a film whose ninety minutes are rarely without her on screen.

The opening moments are the classic stuff of fast-paced shoot-out but, upon the water, the pace slows without one's interest ebbing, and, indeed, gasping at the very end - even after the river has turned briefly red. As for the shoes which herald this review, they are in fact clogs, which are quite possibly the last garment on earth in which one would have imagined Juliette Gréco. How that comes to be – well, see for yourself. And if its director Lewis Allen is not a name on many lips (he worked mostly in television), never forget that he had made one of the paciest thrillers, Suddenly (1954) in which another singer, Frank Sinatra delivered another surprising on-screen appearance.

There have been surprisingly few films about building work. Even if there had been more, it is likely that Moonlighting would still rank highly among them – indeed, as one of the best depictions of life's undertow in the flashy Eighties. Written and directed by Jerzy Skolimowski, who had also, a decade earlier, depicted a rundown London in Deep End, here is a claustrophobic take upon the white stucco of South Kensington.

Led by Jeremy Irons - in a far cry from the previous year's Brideshead Revisited -, a gaggle of Polish workers have arrived to work at a cut-price rate on a flat, that pay set to go much further when they return home.

That is the sum of it. Much of the dusty proceedings - the collapse of lath-and-plaster walls – are accompanied by the voiceover of Irons's internal monologue (he is the only one who can speak English) as the schedule slips and funds go so short that, in order to afford materials, he has to shoplift their food. Many a scene takes place in a small-scale supermarket (tills upon which the price of every item has to be tapped in by a weary cashier), and never does the suspense weaken as one wonders whether he will outwit the polyester-suited manager and his assistant whose very birth probably saw a crease of disdain upon her face.

Here is a film which holds the attention, with Irons - the thinking man's Nigel Havers - as good as he was in Reversal of Fortune. Little recalled is that an early appearance by him was in Simon Gray's play The Rear Column, which has rather fallen from sight but could have the makings of a fine film as intense as this one.

Fitting, all the more so now, to think how much British film has owed to Europeans.

“He's on a bicycle - you've got a Vauxhall Astra!” So a Police inspector (Jim Carter) is told irritably by a superior, several days into a case in which the eponymous The Missing Postman (1997) has pedalled into the sunset - and been sighted in far-flung spots.

A theme of this film, made for television by BBC Scotland, is that everybody is at the mercy of somebody above them, each level of employment as insecure as the others: people are always looking over their shoulders, fearful.

Matters come to a head for the postman, wonderfully played by James Bolam (who looks rather different in spectacles). He learns from a man in a middle-management suit that he is not being fired but should take early retirement: OCR scanning is being installed for sorting, despite its inability to cope with enclosed paperclips while, surreally, lights flash as the machinery stops when encountering anything addressed to Peterborough (to sort this out requires a visit by a specialist from Swindon).

Bicycling postman are no longer wanted either.

At news of this, his wife (Alison Steadman), seen from behind, leaps forward in the bath as she wonders how they will cope. She is a nurse, but is first glimpsed as her legs straddle the eaves of their house while busy with a re-tiling job, enviably undaunted by the scaffolding at her side.

This is rich stuff, no scene lasting long, a world so much encapsulated in eighty minutes that one might take it for Alan Bennett in an Ealing mode. In fact, it was adapted by Mark Wallington from his novel, and it has something in common with his popular accounts of travelling through England with his dog. The postman, on his last day, finds that - by some fluke of new technology - his bag contains letters destined for other parts of the country. Perhaps inspired by borrowing a book about the Pony Express from the local branch library, he decides not to return to the sorting office but to hand them over in person.

And so it comes to pass that he misses out on the formal farewell (a strippergram, Nicola Burbridge announces that he if he is not back in the next five minutes, she is off as she has to collect a child from school: that is contemporary England in a sentence). As it is, he discovers a bucolic England when truck-dominated roundabouts give way to Gloucestershire's country lanes - all of it gaining from Debbie Wiseman's music which is redolent of Meoran and Vaughan Williams, with sojourns in pubs bringing new meaning to a postman's round.

Farce is balanced by the poignant, with a wild turn as the Daily Mail takes an interest in the fugitive (just as it later did in those two Tamworth pigs who made a bolt for it). And one hoots with joy as a young girl informs the police inspector in no uncertain terms that his crass arrival has ruined her open-air birthday party.

In these uncertain times, here is something to restore faith in the human spirit; it is as fresh as it was almost a quarter of a century ago, when cellphones were distinctly larger.

How I wish that I had seen it before now, and so could have told James Bolam how much I enjoyed it when I met him during a gathering at Petworth House about climate change. A good man, much more than a likely lad.

Apples were harmed in the making of this film. Such a note could have been included in the credits of Orchard at Murder End (1981). That might sound a frivolous comment to make of something which turns around murder by strangulation but this fifty-minute drama - mostly set in 1966, as summer ends, in the vicinity of a cricket match in an idyllic Kent - was intendedly lightly.

Written and directed by Christian Marnham, who had shunned his family's farming life for one as film editor who turned to commercials, it was made on a minimal budget and found continuing life as the second feature when various all-out gory films worked their way round the circuits. Its title means that one is not giving anything away: Tracey Hyde (best known for Melody), in a Louise Brooks hairstyle and a splendid black-and-white dress, agrees to go with a fellow in a sports car to the village where he is in the cricket team. Their only previous meeting was to neck in a car park. She is keen for more, and is chagrined when a romp in a field is broken off so that he meet his destiny on the pitch.

Taking the hump instead of a hump, she wanders about, and chances upon the cottage of a stationmaster (Bill Wallis) whose garden gnomes so attract her attention that she accepts an invitation to tea by a man whose oddness is outdone by that of his handsome lodger: Clive Mantle in a first appearance which heralded a prolific television career.

Suffice to say that while strolling in the orchard she succumbs to a deep kiss but shies from more, the price for which is death upon a huge heap of surplus fruit.

To adapt the Song of Songs, this is discomfort me with apples. It is simultaneously grim and yet unreal (the murder was filmed at eighteen frames a second to bring out the jerkiness of such a death). Within this short film there is much going on, it is as absorbing as it is unsettling: a glowing England with autumn imminent.

The British Film Institute's DVD comes with droll interviews, including one in which Tracey Hyde makes light of long submersion, her naked body pressed against the apples with, out of shot, a drainpipe attached to her face for air. Such was life before computer-generated imagery.

A decade separates Anthony Asquith's A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929) from his wartime thriller Cottage to Let. With the latter he had become what is known as a dependable director, faint praise incarnate, a polite term for stagebound (we still await a good film version of The Importance of Being Earnest: his attempt handbagged Wilde's play).

To go back to A Cottage on Dartmoor is something else. The title is misleading. More of it in fact takes place in a barber's chair, a blade silently swishing - so much that one almost suspects that there is a pie shop next door. Murder is indeed likely to be on the menu, for sinister obsessive Uno Henning is smitten with Norah Baring, a manicurist on the premises who prefers the attentions shown by a burly customer, farmer Hans Schlettow.

That is the essence of the plot, a variant on one which has done service down the ages: the love triangle - there should have been a Greek playwright called Isosceles. What makes all this so absorbing is Asquith's continual use of light and shadow, camera angles which owe much to Expressionism, that look in the eye which, without sound, denotes terror itself. A set piece is a visit to the “talkies”. Ironically, the sound section of this film is lost, but it is is fascinating to watch the close-ups of a pit-band orchestra: the strings are as taut as the emotions shown by those three adults who have shown up in the audience while two schoolboys' affectation of bravery in the face of on-screen horror serves them ill.

Strange to think that it was a decade in which prose and poetry had taken new forms while film was still in its early stages, and yet silent images remain far more a part of Modernism than the early talkies.

Would that a version of The Waste Land had been filmed in the London and Europe of the Twenties. Perhaps it could yet be done.

All too often writing about film is a matter of statistics (opening-weekend grosses, Asian sales). To compound that offence, it is none the less worth noting that Transsiberian (2008) - written and directed by Brad Anderson - had a brief cinema release at the time. Since then - as, one might say, a sleeper - it has accrued a wide audience on disc, although one can imagine that the scenes inside and without the eponymous railway carriages would look all the more remarkable on a large screen.

Not that this belongs to the picture-postcard school of film making, for it is driven by a strong sense of character from the opening scenes. Somewhere in Russia, at the water's edge, a dead body is found, the evidence of departure: a knife in the back of the head. What's more heart rending to those around is that a cupboard no longer contains what was evidently a great wad of money.

Ben Kingsley, in a grim turn as a police inspector, is set to take up that case. All of which one might soon forget as the scene cuts to the refulgent air of a happy-clappy religious school in Bejing where Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer have been volunteering as part of a worldwide journey.

Such is Harrelson's geekish penchant for railway engines that they are taking the train to Moscow as part of a return to suburban life in America (all of which contrasts with Emily Mortimer's highly-charged, freewheelin' past). Anybody familiar with British commuter lines can only marvel at the well-appointed and affordable dining cars to which passengers make their way along corridors which, naturally, will become perilous.

Here is homage to many a film set upon a railway, something which mixes mobility with the narrow locales in which, perforce, strangers meet and reveal more of themselves than they are aware. The heavy wood panelling brings to mind rash pub confidences as the couple talk with Kate Mara and the alluringly rough Eduardo Noriega (who prompts Emily Mortimer to recall earlier dalliances) .

Something is underfoot - one might say, underrail. This is no charabanc ride. Enigma multiplies. A week is a long time in crime. Just when you thought it safe to go back in the carriage, with a freight of a suitcase of those dolls whose heads come away to reveal another within.

Human heads are also likely to come adrift (this is not Rome Express and The Lady Vanishes), but it keeps above the cartoonish, a fit depiction of the Slavonic criminal world and the unexpected limits to which others can have recourse when stumbling into it).

Is one moved by it? Perhaps not, and yet it is something more than bland entertainment. Needless to say, here is another bravura performance by Ben Kingsley, but it is a film with many a twist to an actor's face: bespectacled, every mother's son, Woody Harrelson duly drops his guard (and spectacles) when needs must.

With an ever-moving camera (including the one used by Emily Mortimer), here is a film - continually switching points of view - which stays with you even longer with you than a points failure outside Etchingham Junction.

Pause, and one realises that anybody who worked on, say, Casablanca or The Third Man could screen in their minds a film different from the one familiar to us. That is, they saw the colours of sets and clothing. Not that this is to crave “colorising” (the vogue for which appears to have passed). Such films were designed with their splendid black-and-white imagery to the fore.

Similar has been done with Ozon's Frantz (2016), most of which is set in 1919 and appears to us in black and white. It appears in keeping with a small German town where much of the events turn around a graveyard, apparently the last spot for a soldier killed in the war. The plot is simple - and complex. To say more would spoil it, as would any discussion of the graveyard in The Third Man.

In grief for the soldier, her fiancé, Paula Beer visits the grave as usual and is surprised to find flowers on it. They have been put there by a visiting Frenchman (Pierre Niney). Discussion ensues, and is welcome - not least because it distracts from a tedious man who is pursing her with an eye on marriage.

The film is a marvel to watch, its rhythm finely paced to bring out all the conflicts within and between the characters (including her parents), so much so that the small town smoulders.

Only one thing is missing. Lubitsch's 1932 film Broken Lullaby, from a play by Maurice Rostand. It is currently unavailable. Whoever has the rights in it would surely do well, for those who enjoy Frantz will want to seek out its inspiration.

Dead at sixty, Peter Finch had appeared in many films. If not enough of them are memorable, such high points as No Love for Johnnie and Sunday, Bloody Sunday make one look at others with some expectations. So it is with Make Me an Offer (1955), and here is, at most, a curiosity.

Directed with scant flair in variable, sometimes strangely bleached Eastmancolor by Cyril Frankel, who died recently at 95 after working mostly in television, it sprang from a play by Wolf Mankowitz whose film A Kid for Two Farthings appeared the same year. In his time, Mankowitz was well known for depictions of East-End life - and must always be esteemed for his work on The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) with Val Guest.

Here, though, is something whimsical - partly realistic, partly broad comedy – with forty-year-old Finch who spurned the chance to follow his father into life as a market trader but struggles to make a go of life in the perhaps more exalted calling of an antiques dealer. Turnover is never sufficient to buy his wife the fur coat she craves. All this was brought about by a childhood visit to the British Museum where he was transfixed by certain objects - and haunted by a newspaper report of some sculptures stolen and never recovered. Events now take him to a country-house auction. In a cottage on the land lives Sir John (Ernest Thesiger) who is visited in turn by various relations, such as the giggling gamine, Adrienne Corri. The plot is of the slightest (and involves a crucial dog), with the main interest being some ten minutes of the auction itself. That is, apart from Thesiger who never rises from the armchair in which he mostly slumbers noisily - and when he does awake, he is never able to utter articulate words. This is a brilliant performance, with a radiant moment when he smiles. It more than compensates for the implausible sight of Finch in an apron while wielding a feather duster.

“Two turbot!” Steam crosses the screen, a frying pan sizzles, plates are piled precariously by a sink, a kitchen hand chain-smokes over the side of meat he is slicing into pieces. Doors swing to and fro in what must be an enormous restaurant, such is the number of black-dressed waitresses who scurry about, again uttering an impatient cry of “two turbot!”

Such - but for a brief walk which goes in a bound from Oxford Street to Trafalgar Square - is the setting of The Kitchen (1961) that it risks that deadly tag of “filmed play” (written by Arnold Wesker). That static format has dogged many a Zoomed play in these times. These seventy minutes, though, come to life; under the direction of James Hill, the camera movements match the bustle and sweat which exacerbate a torrid world riven by pregnancy, flashing knives, bruising and a brush with murder fomented by one of the staff being unable to forget the war. Even an array of fuse boxes appear about to snap.

Small wonder that le patron (Eric Pohlmann, a German playing a Frenchman is a nice touch) goes around the place, muttering to himself “sabotage!” as he ponders his life's destiny being swept away by so unruly a crowd. Against all this there is a fine music score by James Lee - and a single by Adam Faith which, whatever its shortcomings, has the staff breaking out into a dance which finds James Bolam reduced to partnering an upside-down broom. Some of the cast had appeared in the stage version, many of them not to become screen fixtures (one regrets that Mary Yeomans appeared in little else). And, in a neat twist of fate, James Hill was to make another notable film of a play which focusses upon midday London: John Mortimer's Lunch Hour.

How widely is Wesker, who died four years ago, now known? This film makes one suggest that it should be more so.

At a time of year when angle-grinders now echo across once-peaceful gardens, one might fight shy from Le Trou (1960). Its soundtrack eschews music for a series of vociferous hand-driven, improvised tools which a group of prisoners use to break through a series of subterranean obstacles in a bid to break free from a crowded cell and, via the sewers, savour the dawn of the Paris outskirts.

Viewers often marvel at the long, safe-breaking opening sequence of Riffifi. With Le Trou, we are in even more extraordinary territory,. These two hours depict the monotony of such labour. By a miracle of script, cinematography and characterisation, it becomes all the more suspenseful with every blow of a chisel into concrete and its feebler cousin: cement.

What's more, this is based on the true story of a 1947 break-out attempt (the year that Burt Lancaster appeared to such effect in the marvellous Brute Force). In turning to this case, director Jacques Becker (who was dying while at work on it) collaborated with José Giovanni who had written a novel inspired by it. What's more, Becker not only built a replica of the gaol's cells and corridors, but used mostly non-professional actors, including one who had been the diligent brains and brawn of the original escape attempt.

An exception to this was Marc Michel who plays somebody added to the four-man cell while his own was being renovated (Becker's son, who worked with him on the film, recalls how prisons were noisy with such work, an inadvertent cover for the escapees' efforts). Michel's character - young, good looking - is charged with the attempted murder of his wife after yanking from her the gun which she had aimed at him, such was her fury at his embroilment with an even younger woman. Meanwhile, Michel becomes in thrall to the men among whom he finds himself. Here, or so it seems, is new world, more secure than the outside one in which he had been buffeted by his emotions.

Becker's son has recalled that he did not want to reveal too much about the way in which the film was made (as if a magician would give away secrets). And he was right. One accepts the way in which a myriad devices - a small mirror in the cell door's spyhole - contribute to this relentless narrative, static equalled by surge; in which, though the great work of cinematographer Ghislon Cloquet, close-ups of these faces are matched by long shots of corridors and sewers.

As such, it is a ready match for underground terrain of The Third Man. What's more, Becker's film could have been called The Fifth Man, such are the quandaries created by that newcomer to the cell. This is not to place to say more on that front, but to lament its first release (as it were) being greeted with far less than the celebration it has since received.

This is a great film. One can happily watch it in solitary confinement. Watch it with somebody else, though, and you find yourselves discussing it for many more hours afterwards.

And a point raised therein is that, despite the gruel put through the door by guards at 6am, the prisoners are amazingly, ripplingly fit. Could it be that, sixty years after this timeless film, prisoners are fed stodge lest a high-protein diet spurs them to bound over the wall?

By way of Alice and Oedipus Wrecks, matters magical recur in Woody Allen's films. With The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001), they returned to prove a close run with The Purple Rose of Cairo and would remain way ahead of Midnight in Paris's repetitive hackney vehicle.

The proportion of Allen's period settings increases steadily against those in the here and now - though, come to think of it, Annie Hall is now closer in time to the 1940 of The Curse of the Jade Scorpion than it is to 2020. Temporal concerns soon vanish as the camera lights upon the office in which Allen himself is one of the staff of an insurance firm's claims investigators. This is as brown-hued as much of the film, a place promptly lit up by Helen Hunt who has been sent to impose efficiency measures upon an outfit which has given free rein to Allen's handy way with instinct and lowlife contacts (his jacket, though, is well cut).

A path is set for conflict and badinage, with Helen Hunt displaying - whether by command or subconscious - some of the mannerisms and facial expressions which were once Diane Keaton's. A nice touch is that she is an hour late for a meeting in a bar. It does not give away too much to say that when both are prevailed upon to join a works' outing (if one can call a gathering at the Rainbow Room such a thing), events take a different turn as a hypnotist sets to work upon them. While they speak, so many inner thoughts emerge that they would have Freud wishing he'd taken shorthand lessons (a phrase which just occurred to me - perhaps I could offer it to Allen, a small offering for all that he has provided).

Crime ensues. And with it there appears, well-nigh shimmeringly, Charlize Theron in a long white dress, with her hair and cigarette so well poised that she is more than a tribute to Veronica Lake (who could not have away with some of the salty lines uttered here).

To give prominence to the women present here should not overshadow the effective turns by seen-it-all guys Dan Aykroyd and Wallace Shawn on the staff (“you look like my Uncle Jerry right after the United Parcels truck hit him”).

Allen's roots have always been is night-club sketches. He is not one of nature's plotters. The same can be said of some novelists. Their skill is in finding ways around a little local difficulty (think how short are the chapters in War and Peace). With The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Allen has a more cohesive plot than he did in another period number Bullets Over Broadway, which was no match for the front- and back-stage about-turns of Michael Frayn's play Noises Off.

Well, one should not pre-empt too much of what is on offer here, all of which can be summarised in Allen's retort when caught by surprise: “I wasn't spying - I was rummaging.”

Time was, before the Disneyfication of Times Square and 42nd Street, when New York was grime incarnate. A reminder of this comes with The Seven-Ups (1973), directed by Philip D'Antoni, who had produced Bullitt and The French Connection. Despite intermittent sunshine, a bleak, wintry city is made all the more so for a crack team of Police, led by Roy Schneider, on the trail of various, often corpulent gangs who are pulling off large crimes. Any who are caught face a minimum of seven years in gaol - hence the Police team's nickname of the Seven-Ups.

A reminder of what they are up against is painted upon a blind in their weatherbeaten office: keep the blind down, there may be snipers. This is a world in which a fast mumble is the favoured method of discourse, all of it obscuring who might be working for which side.

As a narrative, it is not the best paced, but it does turn around a number of set pieces, high among them two visits to an automatic car wash (small wonder sensible people now prefer “valet cleaning”), a less-than-holy funeral - and, of course, what has a fair claim to be cinema's greatest car chase (the children who jump out of the way could still be having nightmares about their day as extras). This chase, which must have taken longer to film than all of the rest of it, makes it worthwhile.

A French film must be among the cheapest to make. With a good deal in large tables, some product placement by way of wine supplies, a competent chef - and the rest can be spent upon a script whose dialogue echoes across the country air. Such is Julie Delpy's Skylab (2011). So prolific is she - both sides of the camera, and even writing the music sometimes - that one can miss a new work by her, which brings the additional pleasure of catching up.

Such is the case with Skylab. Had history turned out differently, this film would have required computerised imagery but, then again, Julie Delpy might not have been here to make any films. The strange title is redolent of dark solar journeys, accompanied by that electronic music always deemed the thing for inter-galactic endeavour (perhaps, come the discovery of alien life, such expectations will be confounded, when it turns out that the creatures have a bootlegged copy of Matt Monro's greatest hits on repeat-play). Meanwhile, in Brittany during the summer of 1979, the fear under which (literally) Delpy - playing her own young mother - lives is that the eponymous orbiting craft is due to return to earth and quite possibly land upon that corner of France to the most deleterious effect since that endured by the dinosaurs.

Why go there, then? Well, it is her mother's 67th birthday (a great turn by Emmanuelle Riva). The large clan, when making plans and a cake, had not reckoned on such a metal intruder. Tension - with Julie Delpy and her husband (Eric Elmosnino) playing a couple who have abandoned fiscal safety for radical theatre - was always going to be high, what with two of the gathering being at the opposite but equally radical end of human experience: the inability to return to peaceful life after the horrors of war. What's more, Delpy's own father (Albert Delpy) appears again, his incipient senility springing several surprises.

So much Eric Rohmer, a suggestion of Altman, a dash of Woody Allen, but Julie Delpy is always herself. Doubly so here, for the eleven-year-old girl - played by Lou Alvarez - is at the centre of things as she sits on the cusp of adolescence. One very funny scene (her eyes unable to resist dropping low) is as if Rohmer had made Pauline at the Nudist Beach.

Beneath these refulgent skies, the viewer, too, reaches for a good red - and, after a second glass, has a brief image crossing the mind of the fish who look wonderingly at Skylab in their midst. It landed somewhere off Australia, and the wonder is that it has not yet inspired a film of a different nature from this. Who knows what strange creature is biding its time to emerge and to what effect?