BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Fuller’s Big Valley.

SAMUEL FULLER seems to be so ambivalent about everything, that you have no idea how to take some of his films. As a commentator on this website astutely noticed about Pickup on South Street, there appeared to be a lot of male-on-female violence. However, this is also the director who turned similar violence in The Naked Kiss into a searing indictment on the treatment of women. Yet this is also the director whose depiction of Charity Hackett in Park Row was anything but charitable. In Forty Guns, Fuller again has a strong female character, and seems to subject her too, to punishment. But this is Sam Fuller – and you can’t seem to pin down his ideological position on anything really.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: stoolies, whores and thieves.

OH, what a great opening. Samuel Fuller kickstarts what may possibly be one of his best films with an opening of such brilliance, you could be forgiven for ignoring the rest of the film. Told mainly in close-ups, Fuller thrusts the viewer immediately into the narrative, the characters and the relationship. A gorgeous young woman (Jean Peters) is dolled up, standing in a crowded subway, holding her bag closely. She’s watched by two men in suits – are they checking her out or is there something more happening? A gaunt blonde man (played by Richard Widmark, arguably never better) pulls up to her, and carefully using his newspaper as a shield, opens her bag and steals her purse. The two men notice something happening but cannot react in time to stop the blonde man leaving. The woman walks off unawares. It’s an electric opening – it’s Bresson’s close-ups in Pickpocket on steroids – and totally kickstarts the film. It’s only later on that we realise that Widmark’s thief (Skip) has pickpocketed something more than just a few dollars.

Out of India, GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN considers the current Indian and Bollywood Cinema.

OSCAR-WINNING Hollywood classic Casablanca will soon pop out the cans in an Indian avatar, titled Ezham Mudra (The Seventh Seal). Director Rajeev Nath will swap Rick’s Café Américain for Dev’s Inn, a restaurant not in the Moroccan desert, but on the beaches of God’s Own Country, Kerala. If Michael Curtiz used the notes of a piano to evoke romance between Rick and Ilsa in wartime Paris and Vichy-controlled Casablanca, Nath will draw on the bloody Sri Lankan civil strife to create melody and mood for his version of three little people. Dashing Humphrey Bogart will be reborn as Suresh Gopi, a popular Malayalam film star, and ravishing Ingrid Bergman will transform into Bollywood’s sexy siren Mandira Bedi.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: formative film noir.

ORSON WELLES famously threw out the script for Touch Of Evil, and didn’t bother reading the source novel when he made that masterpiece. However, he surely, surely, must have seen Fox B-movie I Wake Up Screaming (aka Hot Spot), made by the forgotten director H Bruce Humberstone. After all, it’s easy to see Welles’ corrupt Quinlan in the corpulent, creeping police detective Ed Cornell of this film. And as Quinlan wasn’t above framing the people he suspected of particular crimes (though to be fair, he was invariably right), Cornell acts mighty suspiciously throughout.

Abroad in China, SAM GASKIN gains fresh insight into a Summer blockbuster, viewed under the conditions of the world’s most populous and rapidly changing nation.

MICHAEL BAY’s Transformers hit cinema screens in China a week after its international release. Why the delay? Well, for one, even sci-fi flicks with all the socio-political ambition of spray-cheese come under the Sauron-esque searching gaze of Chinese censorship.