The Bicycle Thieves was given an honorary Oscar in 1949, is routinely voted as one of the greatest films of all time and is exalted as one of the foundation stones of Italian neorealism.

At its heart is a simple, powerful film about a man who needs a job.

Set in the post war years when Italy was paralysed by poverty, Lamberto Maggiorani, not a professional actor, stars as Ricci, a man who each morning joins a hopeless queue looking for work. One day there is a job–for a man with a bicycle. “I have a bicycle!” He cries out, but he does not, for it has been pawned… like almost everything else they own.

His wife Maria strips the sheets from their bed, and he is able to pawn their linen to redeem his bicycle.

The bicycle allows Ricci to go to work as a poster-hanger, slapping paste on walls to stick up cinema advertisements (providing an ironic contrast between the world of Hollywood and the everyday lives of neorealism). This bicycle means everything to the family.

At one moment we watch through our fingers as Ricci leaves it alone and unlocked for a moment. Director Vittorio De Sica is teasing us, since we expect the bike to be gone, but when Ricci returns it is still there!

But then, inevitably, it is stolen- no doubt by another man who needs a job.

Ricci and his small, plucky son Bruno search for the bicycle, an impossible task in the wasteland of Rome with the few police officers around proving utterly unhelpful. Their task is fruitless and then, in the famous closing sequence of the movie, Ricci is tempted to steal a bicycle himself, continuing the cycle of theft and poverty.

This story is so direct it plays more like a parable than a drama. This is a story that magnificently withholds the comic or dramatic palliatives another sort of film might have introduced. The son is the intimate witness of the father’s humiliation, his inadequacy as a provider.

Ricci seems unable to embrace the obvious redemptive moral – that his son is the important possession, not the missing bicycle. But this moral is a luxury that only well-off people can afford.

He ignores his little boy while scanning the horizon for his bicycle. He doesn’t even hold Bruno’s hand! The poor boy is almost run over by a car because his father isn’t looking out for him. At one stage, Ricci hears an uproar from the riverbank about a “drowned boy”. With a guilty start, he looks around. Do they mean Bruno?

But the lesson is not learned. Bruno’s simple physical survival is the movie’s secret miracle, and he is finally to be his father’s saviour, but in such a way as to render Antonio’s humiliation complete. This is poverty’s authentic sting: banal and horrible loss of dignity.

Nineteen Thirty Nine’s The Women, based on a play of the same name, had to be adapted for the screen to make it acceptable for the Production Code and, although uncredited, F.Scott Fitzgerald contributed to the writing of the screenplay.

The film also contains some of the most entertaining verbal duels ever depicted onscreen, between such acting greats as Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, Mary Boland, Joan Fontaine, and Paulette Goddard. AND it is one of the most well-loved comedies of all time, due in no small part to the unique relationships the characters have with each other, and the complex web of competition that occurs between every character… with every other character.

That’s a lot of fighting. A lot of very funny fighting.

Far and away the most vitally important part of the picture is that of the over 130 roles in this film… every single one is played by a woman. Every animal in the film is female and every piece of artwork in the background is representative of the female form. Men might be spoken to over the phone or send a letter to a character but they have no voice.

How wonderfully ‘Girl Power’.

Oh, no, except… the women in the film talk so much about their husbands, it may take a while for the viewer to notice that men are actually missing.

The Bechdel test was devised in Nineteen Eighty Five and had a momentous impact on helping viewers become aware of the dearth of female authentic female relationships on screen. In order to pass the Bechdel test, a film must have (1) at least two named women who (2) have a conversation with each other (3) about something other than a man.

It’s surprisingly hard to find films that fit the criteria. It points out that not only are individual women not accurately represented but the way women interact with each other as friends, mothers, daughters, sisters, lovers is more than just ignored. As we see in this film, their relationships sour and become gratuitously nasty when hinged around men. These women will destroy each others’ lives if their romance with ‘their man’ is threatened.

Pray, don’t mistake me, The Women is still fabulous. The performances are terrific, it’s wonderfully funny… despite being filmed in black and white there is a ten minute fashion parade filmed in Technicolor, featuring costume designer Adrian’s most extraordinary designs- and they are remarkable, truly!

Just be aware that, although The Women is a completely feminine picture, and very progressive in its handling of both divorce and extramarital affairs, it was still very much a picture made under the Hays Code of extreme censorship. I shalln’t ruin the ending for you but, well, no problem is unresolved…

That’s part of the fun though, isn’t it? The network of duels in this film is tightly woven, and the plot comes together through exploration of who is dueling with whom!

Director George Cukor is magnificent in channeling all these feuds into fun, creative scenes. Though there are some serious disputes in the film, the sharpness of the script and slapstick humour keeps the film from getting too mean.

White Zombie is the first feature length zombie film and, whilst we must forgive it many things for being a not-particularly well funded independent film, it is impressive for being a pre cursor.

The story begins in Haiti with a carriage carrying a holidaying couple being stopped by a funeral… which taking place in the middle of the road. The driver explains that the family do not want the body stolen so they are burying it where regular traffic will keep people from trying.

The couple later cross paths with an eerie gentleman and his henchmen. The driver again explains that the henchmen are not just strangely acting people (although they are that too- small budget, not great extras) but zombies. In Haiti the living dead that are made to work in the fields and factories.

The couple, Neil Parker and his fiancé Madeleine, played by old silent film stars John Harron and Madge Bellamy, are staying at the home of Charles Beaumont to be wed.

Unfortunately, Beaumont is rather taken with Madeline and will do anything to have her- including turning her into a zombie! He turns to ‘Murder’ Legendre, zombie master and pretty much a soulless devil. Played by Bela Lugosi he is everything one would want in an old horror film’s villain.

Released in 1932 it is a Pre-Code horror film that allows for much moral ambiguity.

Some presented through old-fashioned costume choices: the thoroughly evil Legendre, the not-entirely-rotten Charles Beaumont, and the good Dr. Bruner are all seen at some point in the film wearing black hats and overcoats, suggesting that evil deeds tempt every one. The moral Dr. Bruner attempts to murder the evil Murder by hiding and then stabbing him from behind–clearly a morally ambiguous act. This is exciting in such an old fashioned film. Old fashioned even when it was released that is… With the use of past-it silent film actors like Bellamy and Harron whose mannerisms and flat line readings are ill-suited to sound film. It also employs a number of Expressionist touches that were certainly falling out of fashion at the time, as beautiful as they may be to us now.

When Neil broods over the loss of Madeline in a nightclub we see no other patrons, just their shadows on the wall behind him. The eerie shadows emphasising how alone and powerless he is. Yet, the film uses sound better than was common at the time, using music to create mood, an uncommon practice in the early years of talking pictures, and often startles the viewer with the use of the piercing cry of a vulture.

And, despite being sometimes stagy, there is more camera movement than in Dracula, and one long scene in Dr. Bruner’s study is done with no cuts, though the camera moves around; Hitchcock would likely have appreciated this experiment in technique.