Director John Cromwell’s primitive but interesting 1930 early talkie Western film The Texan stars Gary Cooper as a bandit called the Llano Kid who meets con man Thacker (Oscar Apfel), who persuades him to pretend that he is the long-lost son of a rich old Mexican noblewoman, Señora Doña Marguerita Ibarra (Emma Dunn), for a $1,000 reward.

But it turns out that the Llano Kid (Cooper) has killed the son in self-defence while the lad was cheating at a poker game, and that the Bible-quoting Texas town lawman, Sheriff John Brown (James A Marcus), is after him for murder, with a $500 dead or alive reward on his head.

Young Cooper is fresh and appealing, even if the plot, based on O Henry’s short story The Double-Dyed Deceiver, is not...

Maltese tenor Oreste Kirkop is tuneful and dashing in the 1956 operetta film The Vagabond King. Kathryn Grayson warbles ably as Catherine de Vaucelles and Walter Hampden is outstanding as a wily King Louis XI.

Rudolf Friml wrote some new tunes to add to his 1925 score for director Michael Curtiz’s 1956 remake of the operetta about the 15th-century Paris rabble and their poet-champion, François Villon, leader of the Vagabonds, a Robin Hood-style band that robs the rich to help the poor. In 1461, King Louis XI of France drafts Villon as Provost Marshal to battle usurper Charles of Burgundy and the traitorous nobles who want to overthrow the King.

On the performing front, bright Maltese tenor Oreste Kirkop is tuneful and dashing in the star role, Kathryn Grayson warbles ably as Catherine...

‘They seek him here. They seek him there. Those Frenchies seek him here everywhere. Is he in heaven or is he in hell? That damned elusive Pimpernel.’

Director Harold Young’s high-spirited 1935 British adventure movie is an ingratiatingly genial, highly entertaining adventure from producer Alexander Korda’s film empire, full of brio and bottle.

An ideally cast Leslie Howard enjoys himself enormously in the double role Sir Percy Blakeney, the lorgnette-waving English fop who’s also The Scarlet Pimpernel, the brave scourge of the French Revolution, a vigilante making repeated daring trips to France to save aristocrats from the guillotine...