The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of

Put-upon grocer Harold Bissonette (Biss-on-ay) buys an orange grove. A series of set pieces where Fields has to endure nagging, annoyance and small-scale mayhem. Simple stuff, trying to shave, silly names, but funny, a sotto voce deadpan delight.

Various lives revolve around a Parisian hotel; a suicidal couple, prostitutes, gangsters, adulteress wives. An outsider world charged with proto-noir fatalism, sweet despondency of poetic realism, yearning for something better even if that's death.

Actress goes silent, retreats to a remote island with a young nurse. Silence as psychic defence, weapon of seduction. Sublime gauzy twilight cinematography. Acting as vampiric transference. A horror film really, hushed, horny and endlessly suggestive.

Various characters converge on a Memphis hotel. Japanese pilgrims, women in transit, shooters on the lam. The romance of rundown vernacular Americana, Robby Muller neon, Elvis ghosts. Lives connected by a song on the radio in the dead of night.

Fashion designer Petra falls for younger woman Karin. Single set hothouse melodrama inspired by Sirk, compositionally stunning, a camera prowling fiesta of passionate love, casual cruelty and gin guzzling pathos.

Man misses last bus ends up captive in a sand trap with a widow. Brilliant existential parable of belonging & identity. You can feel the sand in pores, physicality becoming carnal. Modernist composition, folkloric logic. No escape.

Pretty sailor Billy clashes with sadistic Master in Arms Claggart. Powerful version of Melville's novel about innocence being sacrificed for duty. Stamp seductively naive on his debut, Ustinov sombre, nuanced, Ryan superb as a repressed monster.

Film director arrives in Seoul to meet a friend, gets involved with various people. Shifting identity, desire, coincidence. Scenes repeat with variations, creating a temporal slipperiness, a sociable trap. Lots of drinking. Quantum Rohmer.

Under the weather default to comfort zone - noir. A lesser Raymond Chandler but pretty good. Gothic Pasadena mansions. Santa Ana winds. Skidrow Bunker Hill. Montgomery's no ideal Marlowe but liked him. Restorative.

52 Pick-Up, 1986, John Frankenheimer

Terse, sleazy neo-noir with a trio of archetypal Elmore Leonard crooks attempting to blackmail a cheating businessman. Porn theatres, dive bars, snuff movies, cheap motels. It's coldly efficient, defiantly nasty. Liked it.

Somewhere in the Night, 1946, Joseph L. Mankiewicz

George Taylor returns from war an amnesiac, searching for the mysterious Larry Cravat. Terrific psychological noir, full of vivid characters, twisty plotting and fine location shooting. Crazy underrated.