MGM's bold idea to remake George Cukor's Oscar-winning upper-class romantic farce, The Philadelphia Story, into a star-studded technicolor musical with Cole Porter tunes somehow works splendidly and remains an underrated gem. Even the plot and character names-and some bits of dialogue-all remain the same as the original. Crooning Bing Crosby replaces Cary Grant as the wealthy ex-husband trying to win back his soon-to-be-remarried ex-wife, spoiled ice queen Tracy Lord (Grace Kelly, stunning and aloof in her last film role, originated in the earlier comedy by Katherine Hepburn). Unlike Grant, however, Crosby has jazz great Louis Armstrong, playing himself, in his corner for quixotic persuasion. Frank Sinatra (cocky in James Stewart's former role) and Celeste Holm add support as the nosy reporters covering, and subsequently complicating, the upcoming wedding. Sure, High Society lacks the original's witty satire, sarcasm and character complexity; but it's assuredly paced and wonderfully acted, and contains enough romantic chemistry to keep the plot engaging. And then there's the music. Unlike the grandiose production numbers of many 40s and 50s musicals, High Society's musical sequences are considerably low-key and intimate, focusing on Porter's lyrical content and the style in which it's delivered by the charismatic performers. Armstrong kicks the film off in telling style: he sings the title track, a calypso tune outlining the plot like a Greek chorus-not as an elaborately choreographed song-and-dance number, but instead stuffed claustrophobically in the back of a limousine with his jazz band. Other musical standouts include Sinatra and Crosby playfully tossing barbs during "Well, Did You Evah?"; Crosby and Armstrong teaming up for an energetic clash of styles in "Now You Has Jazz"; the two soaring, archetypal ballads by the leads-Crosby's "I Love You, Samantha" and Sinatra's superior "You're Sensational"; and, finally, the satirical Sinatra/Holm duet, "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?", the closest High Society ever comes to social or class-commentary. [+]

Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), an ex-airline steward turned hoodlum, steals a car and heads to Paris. Discovering a gun in the car's glove department, he uses it to shoot and kill a cop who tries to wave him down. He wants to escape to Italy with his American girlfriend Patricia (Jean Seberg), but the police are after him, and he is distracted by all the pleasures Paris has to offer. Story-wise, Jean-Luc Godard's A Bout De Souffle (1960) (aka Breathless) is pretty thin, but as its director always proclaimed, you don't need much in the way of narrative to make a movie. Sometimes a girl and a gun are quite enough. The effortlessly cool and laconic Belmondo mirrors the director's mischief and flamboyance. With his fat cigarette stub perched on his bottom lip, his shades, his felt hat and white socks, he looks like a cross between a left-bank intellectual and an American gumshoe (perhaps his beloved Bogart). With her close-cropped hair and New York Herald Tribune T-shirt, his girlfriend (Jean Seberg) is equally stylish. A Hollywood star (she had appeared in the lead in Otto Preminger's Saint Joan in 1957 when she was still a teenager), the Iowa-born Seberg is turned by Godard into the lithe embodiment of European radical chic. The film has a spontaneity that studio-bound offerings of the time missed by a mile. [+]

Get out your handkerchiefs for this four-star weepie, a 1957 remake of the 1939 Love Affair, directed by Leo McCarey, who also made the original. Grant and Kerr are strangers on an ocean liner, involved with other people, who can't resist each other for a shipboard romance. But they decide to test whether this is the real thing by agreeing to split up, then meeting in six months atop the Empire State Building. Is there anyone who can resist that set-up or the tragic romantic mishap that nearly splits them up? Can you keep dry eyes during the famous finale? Some prefer the original (with Charles Boyer); practically no one liked the underrated 1994 remake with Warren Beatty and Annette Bening. While occasionally a shade slow, this one soars on Grant's charm and Kerr's noble suffering. -Marshall Fine, Amazon. com.

The quintessential swashbuckler. Irsih doctor Peter Blood is wrongly sentenced to deportation and slavery to the Caribbean. There he amuses himself with insults at DE Havilland. He plans an escape and now seeking vengeance forms an alliance with the French buccaneer Rathbone. However during their glorious piracy they capture DE Havilland and Flynn's feelings are betrayed when he challenges Rathbone over her. several language & subtitle options.

An Ingrid Bergman double-bill comes to DVD with the classy pairing of Anastasia (1956) and The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958). In Anastasia Bergman gives one of her memorable, haunting and haunted performances as an amnesiac chosen by a White Russian general (Yul Brynner) in 1928 to play the part of the long-rumoured but missing survivor of the Bolsheviks' murderous attack on the Czar's family. The twist is that Bergman's mystery woman seems to know more about the lost Anastasia than she is told. Based on the play by Marcelle Maurette and Guy Bolton, this film-directed by Anatole Litvak (Out of the Fog)-really does get under one's skin, not least of all because of its intriguing story but more so as a result of the strong chemistry between Bergman and Brynner. -Tom Keogh The Inn of the Sixth Happiness is an epic and extraordinary true story-or, at least, an extraordinary story based on a novel (Alan Burgess's The Small Woman) based on a true story. Gladys Aylward (an improbably mesmerising Ingrid Bergman) is a British would-be missionary with an obsession about China. As she has no experience, the Missionary Society won't let her go, but she goes anyway, alone, to a remote northern province. She is hated, then loved; finally she becomes both a significant political figure and the heroine of a miraculous escape in which she shepherds 100 children to safety across the mountains just ahead of a Japanese invasion. Curt Jurgens is suitably stony as Lin Nan, the half-Dutch, half-Chinese military officer who falls in love with her, and a visibly ailing Robert Donat (who died before this, his final film, was released) is the wily local mandarin who sees and makes use of her extraordinary abilities. Directed by Mark Robson, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness is a sweeping, stirring tear-jerker, a big tale told in a big landscape with acres of orchestrated strings by Malcolm Arnold. [+]