The Squaw Man (Cecil B. DeMille, Oscar Apfel, 1914)

Cast: Dustin Farnum, Monroe Salisbury, Winifred Kingston, Mrs. A.W. Filson, Haidee Fuller, Red Wing, Dick La Reno, Joseph Singleton, William Elmer. Screenplay: Cecil B. DeMille, Oscar Apfel, based on a play by Edwin Milton Royle. Cinematography: Alfred Gandolfi. Art direction: Wilfred Buckland. Film editing: Mamie Wagner.

Apart from its historical interest as the first feature to be filmed in Hollywood, The Squaw Man holds up well enough as drama for Cecil B. DeMille to have remade it twice, in 1918 (a version now lost) and again in 1931. Today it's mostly of archival interest for its rather naïve treatment of Native Americans, but also because its use of outdoor locations shows why Southern California, with its varied landscape and good weather, became the center of American filmmaking. It also helped establish the Western as a major movie genre.

The Wicked Lady (Leslie Arliss, 1945)

Margaret Lockwood in The Wicked Lady

Cast: Margaret Lockwood, James Mason, Patricia Roc, Griffith Jones, Michael Rennie, Felix Aylmer, Enid Stamp-Taylor, Francis Lister, Beatrice Varley, Amy Dalby, Martita Hunt, David Horne, Emrys Jones. Screenplay: Leslie Arliss, Gordon Glennon, Aimée Stuart, based on a novel by Magdalen King-Hall. Cinematography: Jack E. Cox. Art direction: John Bryan. Film editing: Terence Fisher. Music: Hans May. 

Entertaining claptrap about a Restoration beauty (Margaret Lockwood) named Barbara who seduces the wealthy squire Sir Ralph Skelton (Griffith Jones) on the eve of his marriage to the virtuous Caroline (Patricia Roc). But having married Sir Ralph, Barbara quickly becomes bored with life in the country, dresses in men's clothes, sneaks out by a secret passage, and turns highwayman. This puts her in competition with (and the bed of) the notorious Capt. Jerry Jackson (James Mason), the terror of the county's roads. Eventually the wicked are punished and virtue is rewarded, of course. The story needs a little more tongue in cheek than writer-director Leslie Arliss is able to give it, but it moves along nicely. Mason, as usual, gives the standout performance.

The Sword in the Stone (Wolfgang Reitherman, 1963)

Cast: voices of Sebastian Cabot, Karl Swenson, Rickie Sorenson, Junius Matthews, Ginny Tyler, Martha Wentworth, Norman Alden, Alan Napier, Richard Reitherman, Robert Reitherman. Screenplay: Bill Peet, based on a novel by T.H. White. Art direction: Ken Anderson. Film editing: Donald Halliday. Music: George Bruns.

The last animated feature supervised by Walt Disney, The Sword in the Stone is often considered a kind of landmark in the eclipse of Disney animation from which the studio didn't recover until the late 1980s. The first novel in T.H. White's Arthurian tetralogy The Once and Future King, The Sword in the Stone had been a Disney property since 1939. The success of the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot, based on the final two books of White's quartet, may have helped spur the studio to revive the project, but the result is rather unsatisfactory. There are some bright moments, particularly the shape-shifting duel between Merlin and Madam Mim, but the film has nowhere to go after the climax when Wart pulls the sword from the stone and becomes King Arthur, so the plot feels unshaped and unfinished.

Deception (Irving Rapper, 1946)

Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, and Claude Rains in Deception

Cast: Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, John Abbott, Benson Fong. Screenplay: John Collier, Joseph Than, based on a play by Louis Verneuil. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: Alan Crosland Jr. Music: Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

The highlight of Deception is a scene in which Claude Rains, as the imperious composer Alexander Hollenius, invites his ex-mistress Christine (Bette Davis) and her new husband, the cellist Karel Novak (Paul Henreid), to dine with him at a fancy restaurant before Novak is to play Hollenius's new concerto. While Christine and Karel stew, both eager to get the composer's approval so the cellist can make a career break, Hollenius plays the epicure, constantly rethinking the menu and the accompanying wines and keeping the couple from their goal. It's Rains at his best. In fact, he's the chief reason for seeing this somewhat overproduced melodrama, with its sometimes laughable skirting of the Production Code's strictures on sex. Would a worldly European like Novak really be so terribly shocked to find that Christine had been Hollenius's lover? Would Christine really be so determined to conceal the secret that she'd kill for it? Davis pulls out all of her mannerisms -- she disliked the film -- while Henreid struggles to rise above his usual passivity as a leading man overshadowed by his leading lady.

Police Story (Jackie Chan, Chi-Hwa Chen, 1985)

Jackie Chan and Ken Tong in Police Story

Cast: Jackie Chan, Maggie Cheung, Brigitte Lin, Kwok-Hung Lam, Bill Tung, Yuen Chor, Charlie Cho, Chi-Wing Lau, Hark-On Fung, Hing-Yin Kam, Mars, Tai-Bo, Ken Tong. Screenplay: Jackie Chan, Edward Tang. Cinematography: Yiu-Tsou Cheung. Production design: Oliver Wong. Film editing: Peter Cheung. Music: Kevin Bassinson.

Jackie Chan's debt to Buster Keaton has never been more fully displayed, or indeed more fully repaid, than in Police Story, which has a Keatonian moment when he latches onto a passing bus with the crook of an umbrella. Chan plays a cop who goes from hero to goat and back again in this story of an almost one-man crusade against a drug lord. The climax involves the near-total destruction of a shopping mall, with one spectacular set-up after another.

Local Hero (Bill Forsyth, 1983)

Peter Riegert in Local Hero

Cast: Peter Riegert, Peter Capaldi, Denis Lawson, Burt Lancaster, Fulton Mackay, Norman Chancer, Rikki Fulton, Alex Norton, Jenny Seagrove, Jennifer Black, Christopher Rozycki, Gyearbuor Asante. Screenplay: Bill Forsyth. Cinematography: Chris Menges. Production design: Roger Murray-Leach. Film editing: Michael Bradsell. Music: Mark Knopfler.

Local Hero is one of those small charmers that pop up occasionally, get rave reviews, and then sort of fade into the background. It's worth rediscovering, principally for Bill Forsyth's affectionately whimsical take on human beings. Another writer-director would have played the subject -- an American oil company's plans to exploit a small Scottish fishing village -- for more blatant satire and social commentary. But Forsyth is more interested in the people than the issues, so he keeps sending the film off into little eddies of contingency and irrelevance. On the way to the village, for example, the representatives of the oil company, Mac (Peter Riegert) and Oldsen (a startlingly young Peter Capaldi, years away from Doctor Who), accidentally hit a rabbit with their car and decide to bring it with them and nurse it back to health. The rabbit is doomed for the dinner table, but its presence in the story speaks more about the characters than it does to any larger theme the film might be concerned with. Forsyth keeps us cheerfully off guard throughout the film, with features the larger-than-life Burt Lancaster in one of his most humanizing roles.

Burn After Reading (Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, 2008)

George Clooney in Burn After Reading

Cast: George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins, Elizabeth Marvel, David Rasche, J.K. Simmons, Oleg Krupa. Screenplay: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen. Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki. Production design: Jess Gonchor. Film editing: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen. Music: Carter Burwell.

One of the Coen Brothers' goofy dark comedies, and perhaps the darkest if not the goofiest, with a couple of fatalities that tend to take the levity out of the film. Mostly it's a showcase for the comic skills of some usually serious actors, with Brad Pitt the standout as Chad, an addle-brained employee of a gym who happens upon a disc that he thinks is full of government secrets he can sell to its owner for a reward. It doesn't work out well for him or anyone else. This is the Coens at their chilliest, with no one you much want to root for.

The Souvenir (Joanna Hogg, 2019)

Honor Swinton Byrne and Tom Burke in The Souvenir

Cast: Honor Swinton Byrne, Tom Burke, Tilda Swinton, Richard Ayoade, Jaygann Ayeh, Jack McMullen, Hannah Ashby Ward, Frankie Wilson, Barbara Peirson, James Dodds, Ariane Labed. Screenplay: Joanna Hogg. Cinematography: David Raedeker. Production design: Stéphane Collonge. Film editing: Helle le Fevre. 

From the moment we hear the George Sanders purr of Tom Burke's voice, we know that the character he's playing is a bit of a cad and that the slightly awkward and slightly androgynous Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) should be on her guard. But as it turns out, Julie gets the best of a relationship in which he's mostly in it for her (or her family's) money. She gets the experience she will need to become a filmmaker. The Souvenir ends with the promise of a "Part II," which is not what we usually expect of our arty, thoughtful movies these days, but which is probably something of a necessity to complete the thoughts that Joanna Hogg implants with this semi-autobiographical story, drawn from her own early days as a film student. The callow Julie has a big idea: make a serious drama about an impoverished working-class  boy growing up with a sick mother in a blighted British industrial city. Considering that she's from a family that's anything but impoverished and working-class, she's advised that she should stick to what she knows. But since she doesn't know much of anything about life, that's a problem. Hogg was a late bloomer as a filmmaker: She made her first feature film, Unrelated, in 2007, when she was 47. The Souvenir is a reflection on coming of age in Thatcherite Britain, and it forms part of a slowly growing corpus of films about British artists and intellectuals that demonstrate Hogg's mature and melancholy vision of the state of the world. 

The Lodger (John Brahm, 1944)

Merle Oberon and Laird Cregar in The Lodger

Cast: Laird Cregar, Merle Oberon, George Sanders, Cedric Hardwicke, Sara Allgood, Aubrey Mather, Queenie Leonard, Doris Lloyd, David Clyde, Helena Pickard. Screenplay: Barré Lyndon, based on a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes. Cinematography: Lucien Ballard. Art direction: James Basevi, John Ewing. Film editing: J. Watson Webb Jr. Music: Hugo Friedhofer.

Laird Cregar's great gift as the heaviest of heavies was to elicit a kind of sympathy for the bad guys he played. Which is no easy task when you're playing the most infamous of serial killers, Jack the Ripper. Marie Belloc Lowndes's novel was only "based on" the notorious murderer of ladies of the night -- it wasn't explicit that the character was Jack (whoever that was) -- and the earlier filmings, particularly Alfred Hitchcock's 1927 silent version, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, followed her lead, perhaps because Hitchcock's lodger was played by matinee idol Ivor Novello, which led to a twist in which the character turned out not to be the killer after all. But screenwriter Barré Lyndon and director John Brahm were perfectly happy to capitalize on the Ripper's perennial notoriety. This is a good, atmospheric version of the story, with effective shadowy, expressionistic camerawork by Lucien Ballard, and a solid cast.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1943)

Anton Walbrook, Roger Livesey, and Deborah Kerr in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

Cast: Roger Livesey, Anton Walbrook, Deborah Kerr, James McKechnie, Roland Culver, Ursula Jeans, Valentine Dyall. Screenplay: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger. Cinematography: Georges Périnal. Production design: Alfred Junge. Film editing: John Seabourne Sr. Music: Allan Gray. 

This time around, I had to ask myself: Why does Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1943) feel timeless when The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, a film from the same year, seems so dated? Is this just the American in me, forced to dredge up knowledge of British history that might be more ingrained in a Brit? (Though I really doubt that most Brits today are familiar with David Low's political cartoons from the 1930s and '40s that featured Colonel Blimp, a corpulent old walrus of a Tory, who satirized British complacency and jingoism.) Or is it that the Powell-Pressburger film is more detailed and searching, more engaged with what it means for a country to go to war, than the Warner Bros. romance, which is "still the same old story," cast in a wartime mode, so that we respond more immediately and viscerally to it? This is a handsome movie, with beautiful Technicolor and some engaging performances, but it takes work to appreciate its story, whereas you can just let Casablanca wash over you.