Cairo Road (1950)

Aka El Tariq ela el Qâhirah. They’re alive – but they’re dead. New assistant narcotics agent Lieutenant Morad (Laurence Harvey) gets the jump  on a hashish deal following the murder of a local big shot. The team is led by a rather sceptical Colonel Youssef Bey (Eric Portman) the chief of the Anti-Narcotic Bureau who is forced to indulge the new guy’s enthusiasm. Morad has recently relocated from Paris with his wife Marie Maira Mauban) who has to adjust to the new city and worries her husband is putting himself on the line. The team tries to prevent shipments of drugs crossing the southern Egyptian border. They are constantly on alert as even camel caravans are suspect in smuggling narcotics. The agents are investigating the murder of a rich Arab businessman named Bashiri. Raiding a berthed ship in the harbour of Port Saïd leads them to the trail of heroin smugglers, including Rico Pavlis (Harold Lang) and Lombardi (Grégoire Aslan). One of the police agents, Anna Michelis (Camelia) is targeted by the smugglers on board the ship. Eventually Pavlis turns on his partner, killing Lombardi, but Youssef sets a trap for the Pavlis brothers… You’ve started something today. Surely not corruption in the veddy British Egyptian police force? No, Portman is just tacking his usual dyspeptic swerve through the drama while Harvey is the neophyte whose intentions are good but whose deeds wind up being somewhat misbegotten although he gets to prove his worth at the end. It’s quite something to see Portman bullying a camel-owner pleading for the animal he reared from calfhood. He’s a bad ‘un, though. Poor camel! A wonderful opportunity to see the way that region around Suez is perceived in the post-war era and Oswald Morris’ photography has real depth. There’s also a great international cast with a rare chance to see local film star Camelia (born Lilian Victor Cohen) at work, be it ever so briefly. This was the last film of the socialite turned actress whose life swirled with rumour and gossip (particularly regarding a possible relationship with King Farouk) and whose mysterious death in a TWA flight after this film was made remains the subject of speculation. Watch out for familiar names like John Gregson, Eric Pohlmann, Peter Jones and Walter Gotell has a bit part. An intriguing action movie with car and camel chases and a strong pro-police, anti-drugs message, with the bizarre waiver at the credits’ conclusion, ‘Distributed throughout the world. Except the Middle East.’ Directed by David Macdonald from a screenplay by the estimable Robert Westerby. I trust no one

Manhunter (1986)

You want the scent? Smell yourself! Former FBI Agent Will Graham (William Petersen) is called out of early retirement by his boss Jack Crawford (Denis Farina) to catch a serial killer.  The media have dubbed him The Tooth Fairy (Tom Noonan) because he kills random families in their homes. Will is a profiler whose speciality is psychic empathy, getting inside the minds of his prey. The horror of the murders takes its toll on him. He asks for the help of his imprisoned arch-nemesis, Dr Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox) who gets to him like nobody else and nearly murdered him years earlier yet has insights into the methodology of the killer that could unlock the case… He butchers whole families to pursue trivial fantasies. As an adult, someone should blow the sick fuck out of his socks. The mindbending antics of Thomas Harris’ narcissistic creation Lecktor were first espied here but it’s really Will Graham’s story and what a surprise casting choice the introspective pigeon-toed Petersen seemed.  He carries this oppressively chilling thriller where he is the masochist to his targets’ sadistic mechanisms. The dispassionate style, the modernist interiors, the internal machinations of the protagonist’s obsessive inner voice while he inhabits the minds of his relentlessly morbid prey, lend this a hypnotic mood. As the action increases in intensity the colours and style of cinematographer Dante Spinotti become cooler and more distancing. The diegetic score by bands including Shriekback and The Reds is an immersive trip into the nightmarish vision. An extraordinary spin on terror that is as far from the camp baroque theatrics of The Silence of the Lambs as it is possible to imagine, this masterpiece has yet to be equalled in the genre and feels like a worm has infected your brain and is burrowing through it, out of your control, colouring your dreams, imprinting you with a thought pattern that may never depart. A dazzling exercise in perspective and perception, this is a stunning work of art. Adapted from Red Dragon by director Michael Mann. Does this kind of understanding make you uncomfortable?

Lonely are the Brave (1962)

The more fences there are, the more he hates it. Roaming ranch hand John W. ‘Jack’ Burns (Kirk Douglas) feels out of place in the modern world. He visits his friend Paul Bondi’s loving wife Jerry (Gena Rowlands) and little son. He deliberately gets into a bar room fight with a one-armed Mexican (Paul Raisch) in order to be imprisoned alongside Paul (Michael Kane) who was arrested for helping illegal aliens and is serving a two-year term in the penitentiary. They decide to let him go but he punches one of them to get re-arrested and jailed. Jack tries to convince Paul to flee with him, but, as a family man, Paul has too much at stake and abandons the plan. Jack escapes after a beating from a sadistic Mexican police deputy Gutierrez (George Kennedy) and heads for the hills. An extensive manhunt breaks out, led by sympathetic Sheriff Johnson (Walter Matthau) who watches helpless as the decorated war vet sharpshooter takes on an Air Force helicopter in his attempt to make it over the border to Mexico … Our cowboy’s just shot down the Air Force. With a wonderful feel for landscape and animal life and juxtaposition of the natural world with the restrictive modernity of technocratic praxis, this beautiful looking monochrome production never seemed so resonant or relevant. Douglas’ sense of what’s right is perfectly communicated in this sympathetic Dalton Trumbo adaptation of environmentalist Edward Abbey’s The Brave Cowboy.  Matthau’s is a more complex character than he first appears, making for a wonderfully exposed twist in the tale. Tautly directed by David Miller and told in four principal movements, this makes good bedfellows with The Misfits, another elegiac presentation of man versus nature. You’re worse than a woman

Point Break (1991)

Welcome to Sea World kid! New FBI recruit Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) is paired with veteran agent Angelo Pappas (Gary Busey) who is obsessed with finding a gang of bank robbers who call themselves The Ex-Presidents and has a weird theory that they’re surfers. Johnny infiltrates a group of surfers but things get complicated when he befriends their unofficial leader Bodhi (Patrick Swayze) a kind of Zen master whose friend Tyler (Lori Petty) is the most unusual woman Johnny’s ever encountered… You run, you die. One of the best movies ever made, a dazzling adrenaline rush of a movie and one of my favourites, a crime-adventure epic that once seen on the big widescreen never forgotten. Even hearing the name mentioned gives me a visceral thrill, reminding me of the first time I saw it in a theatre.  It’s a superb movie about surfing, the mystical transformation people experience in water, the lengths people will go to in order to attain freedom, the concept of loyalty versus duty, friendship, sacrifice. And then it soars in a skydiving sequence that literally takes your breath away. This was Reeves’ first brush with Zen – it would be another few years before he became Little Buddha or Neo in The Matrix. Kathryn Bigelow directs from a screenplay by W. Peter Iliff (from a story by him with Rick King) and The deal with remakes is, if it was good in the first place, Don’t. They remade it. How completely unspeakable. This is a stone cold classic. Your life’s not over. You’re surfing