The Masque of the Red Death (1964)
Where’s it on? Talking Pictures TV, Friday, 10pm
Let’s start with probably the ultimate film about getting your kicks indoors while pestilence rages outside. Getting a topical airing on Talking Pictures TV this Friday night, The Masque of the Red Death is the best of the cycle of eight films that producer-director Roger Corman adapted from the writings of Edgar Allan Poe in the early 1960s. Vincent Price plays the silky-voiced medieval satanist Prince Prospero, who holds a costume ball for the local nobility as sanctuary from the approaching plague. The film was shot in England, with the brilliant young future director Nicolas Roeg responsible for the rich colour cinematography. Between Corman, Roeg and Price, they arguably trumped the indigenous Hammer films at their own game, winning favourable comparisons to Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) for its smart interrogation of superstition and diabolism in the middle ages.
Lola Montès (1955)
Where’s it on? Blu-ray
This week sees the long-awaited UK Blu-ray release of the sumptuous final film by Max Ophuls. The German-born director had been on a magical final run of romantic period films, including La Ronde (1950) and Madame de… (1953), when he began work on this magnum opus about the life and loves of the eponymous 19th-century courtesan. Starring Martine Carol as Lola, it’s the grand summation of Ophuls’ work, shot in dazzling Technicolor and across a scope screen, flashing back from scenes in a New Orleans circus – where Lola has washed up as an acrobat – to explore her colourful past, including her affair with King Ludwig I of Bavaria (Anton Walbrook). The film’s had a troubled journey since being drastically cut for initial release but looks everything you could hope for in this magnificent restored version. Even in an era when long takes have become a cliché, Ophuls’ famously complex tracking shots are something to behold.
The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960)
Where’s it on? Blu-ray
Here’s another final film by one of cinema’s greatest directors. 1960’s The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse saw Fritz Lang returning to one of his oldest creations, the criminal mastermind Dr Mabuse, whose nefarious grip on the Weimar-era underworld was explored in Lang’s shadowy silent epic Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922) and its early-sound-era follow-up The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933). Thousand Eyes completes and updates the trilogy just two years before the first James Bond film, whose own adversary, Dr No, borrows much from Mabuse, just as the 007 series has its cinematic roots in Lang’s world of intrigue and supervillains. The film takes place in an early 1960s, Cold War-era Berlin characterised by TV, video surveillance and an all-pervasive paranoia. Mabuse is thought to have died long ago, but a series of unsolved crimes seems to suggest his signature. Great fun, and totally essential.
The Bad Sleep Well (1960)
Where’s it on? BFI Player
The same year that Lang was casting his steely gaze over the modern world of surveillance, Akira Kurosawa delivered a plungingly dark examination of big-business corruption in Japan. A loose, noirish riff on Hamlet, The Bad Sleep Well features Kurosawa regular Toshiro Mifune as the secretary at a dynastic construction company who marries the big boss’s daughter as part of a fiendish bid to avenge his father’s death and expose the company’s dodgy dealings. Gripping from its stunning opening wedding sequence, which Kurosawa stages from the perspective of a gaggle of journalists, this is one of the Japanese master’s most vital contemporary-set films – worthy of mention alongside his extraordinary 1963 kidnap thriller High and Low. Both of these have now been made available on BFI Player as part of a huge tranche of Kurosawa films to kick off the Japan 2020 season.
Trial on the Road (1971)
Where’s it on? kinoklassikafoundation.org
With cinemas closed, the Kino Klassika Foundation is bringing selections from its programme of Russian World War II cinema online, with free streaming of a handful of essential titles accompanied by contextual programme notes on their website. You have till lunchtime on Saturday to watch this rare early film from Aleksei German, who reached wider recognition and acclaim in recent years for his final film, the monolithic medieval mudfest Hard to Be a God (2013), as well as the arrival on Blu-ray of his baroque Kremlin comedy Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998). Trial on the Road revolves around a Red Army sergeant who is captured by Nazis and impelled to fight as a collaborator, in a depiction of Soviet forces that so angered the authorities that German’s film was banned for 15 years and only released after Perestroika. Sergei Loznitsa’s In the Fog (2012) will also stream on the Kino Klassika website this weekend.