Alfred Hitchcock once said that there are three key ingredients to make a great film: “The script, the script and the script”. This reflects his notoriously low opinion of the role of actors as agents in the creation of a film, and it is certainly not always the case. But there is something to be said about the importance of the screenplay to the end product of the filmmaking process. To my mind, there is no greater demonstration of this than Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, which, despite the great performances and tight direction, owes its brilliance to Wilder and co-writer I.A.L. Diamond’s razor-sharp screenplay.

The film is essentially a satire on office sexual politics; central character C.C. Baxter works on the 19th floor at insurance firm Consolidated Life, one of 31,259 employees – more people than the population of Natchez, Mississippi as Baxter’s overly-informative opening narration tells us. Accompanying this rather frightening statistic is a wide-angle shot of the office floor, with its seemingly endless rows of desks and clerks, immediately telling us that Baxter is an insignificant cog in the company’s machine. He does, however, have a plan to rise up from his lowly position the 19th floor; he had been letting his colleagues use his uptown apartment to have illicit liasons with women other than their wives, in exchange for favours allowing him to work his way up the metaphorical greasy pole.

The film then immediately presents us with a rather morally questionable central character; he is perfectly happy to accept these promotions and favours from his co-workers, and seems to laugh off any doubts he may have about what he is facilitating. Yet Baxter seems very likeable, affable character, a typically nice Jack Lemmon everyman. He does not appear to be a Machiavellian shark, doing anything he can to rise to the top of the pile; at times he seems stuck in the position he has created for himself, unable to stop for fear of sliding back down the company hierachy. He appears resigned to his fate, reluctant to continue bending over backwards for his colleagues, but still forced to spend cold nights freezing outside on benches while they use his facilities.

Baxter is clearly a loner, emphasised in the film by the times when he does actually get to live in his apartment; TV dinners and TV films appear to be the order of the day. He does have eyes for one lady: one of Consolidated Life’s lift operators, Fran Kubelik, with whom he regularly shares idle chit-chat, but she apparently never reciprocates any flirtation from her many admirers in the building. This is because, as we find out, she is secretly having an affair with Sheldrake, the ‘happily married’ boss of the company, though this has been off the boil for several months now. She, too, is morally ambiguous; we later find out that she has had such affairs before with higher-ups in businesses: is she a gold-digger, or trapped in a destructive cycle just like Baxter?

One of the many joys of The Apartment is the use of dramatic irony; none of the characters know the entirity of what is going on between the others, and frequently they know nothing. Baxter doesn’t know Kubelik is seeing Sheldrake, Kubelik doesn’t know Sheldrake is using Baxter’s apartment, Sheldrake doesn’t know Baxter asked out Kubelik on a date, all until the various pennies drop and they realise how their lives are all intertwined. This seems like a rather artificial construct, but during the course of the film, this all unfolds perfectly naturally, Billy Wilder’s unobtrusive direction allowing the viewer to see the characters’ discoveries.

That almost all of the relationships between the characters are based on some form of lie or deception only adds to the film’s satirical bite; but great satire must not only be funny, but also have an element of danger. Certainly The Apartment is a very funny film, but there is also a great deal of darkness there too. Marital infidelity, while at first shown in a rather comedic light in the earlier scenes, is shown to also be destructive; Sheldrake phones Baxter’s apartment from his home on Christmas Day, a seemingly happy home where his children are playing with their newly-opened presents, but one which he betraying with his continued affair with Kubelik. Suicide is also a recurring motif, somewhat reflective of the despair and loneliness of the characters. The film occurs over the Christmas period, and the contrast between Sheldrake’s festively-decked home and Baxter’s sparse, empty apartment underline his isolation. He does not even appear to have family to be with at this time of year.

Jack Lemmon’s C.C. Baxter is a complex character, certainly not the straighforward everyman role he is usually associated with; it would have been easy for him to rest on his laurels after the success of his previous Wilder collaboration, Some Like it Hot, but The Apartment marked an important career transition for him, a move into darker roles explemplified by his next film Days of Wine and Roses. The film was also a landmark for Shirley MacLaine, her tough-but-fragile performance as Fran Kubelik propelling her to Hollywood superstardom. I had always thought Fred MacMurray was ill cast and too wooden as Jeff Sheldrake, but after several watches I now feel he is perfect: slippery, slimy, ungainly, almost the antithesis of Lemmon’s Baxter, which is important in making us sympathise with the latter.

Ultimately, the film is a miracle of construction, and deservedly won Wilder and Diamond a screenwriting Oscar in 1960. But aside from this rather technical perfection, the film is a richly comic yet surprisingly dark satire about the deceptions and game-playing involved in the world of big business and office sexual politics. And despite Billy Wilder’s trademark cynicism, it is a reminder that there are more important things in life than money making, and success at work: in the famous advice to Baxter by Jack Kruschen’s Dr. Dreyfuss, “Be a mensch!”.

It is said that Russian-born writer Vladimir Nabokov’s book Lolita had made Lolita famous, and not he. This seem to suggest that, as the phrase began to enter the popular consciousness, the actual artistry and intent behind the book was increasingly ignored, and instead the novel’s object of desire began to take on a life of its own, with its own connotations and meanings. La Dolce Vita is undeniably Federico Fellini’s most famous film, and possibly the most well-known Italian-made film ever, but it seems to me that over the years, like Lolita, its name and the idea of the film have become more well-known than the actual film itself. The word ‘paparazzi’ is used all over the world to signify over-zealous press photographers, but i would hazard that few users of the word know its derivation.

This seems to be a consequence of the reaction to the film when it was first released. This is no better illustrated than in the famous sequence in Pietro Germi’s wonderful Divorzio all’italiana (1961), when a screening of the Fellini film causes both outrage and wonderment in the Sicilian small-town audience. For the Catholic Church, the film was sacrilegeous, and subsequently banned for many years in certain areas. Fellini had had brushes with the Church before: La Strada had been warmly received, but both Il Bidone and Le Notti Di Cabiria had contained sufficiently edgy material to irk some at the Vatican.

Controversy can often lead to legend; the notoriety of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange owes as much to its hasty withdrawal from release after a series of ‘copycat’ killings as it does to the actual content of the film itself. So, with the widespread debate and controversy over La Dolce Vita, its legend was born. It was a massive commercial success, becoming both a domestic and worldwide box-office hit, and making international stars of Marcello Mastroianni, Anouk Aimee and Anita Ekberg, as well as encouraging people to jump into the Fontana di Trevi.

This much seems to be well known; so too, the phrases ‘la dolce vita’ and ‘paparazzi’. But Fellini’s filmmaking roots were in the Italian neo-realist movement; he had worked with Rossellini on the classics Roma, Città Aperta and Paisà, both profoundly moral films about the effect of the Second World War on the Italian people. His earlier films, whilst being distinctively ‘Fellinian’, still betrayed hints of the neorealist ideology and morality, using naturalistic environments, actors and settings. Had he now discarded this in favour of the Roman high life?

The answer, of course, is no. La Dolce Vita is a satire of the so-called ‘sweet life’ enjoyed by the capital’s wealthy and famous. In his earlier film, I Vitelloni, Fellini had looked at a group of young directionless men, unwilling to grow up or leave their sleepy seaside town. In that film, without a doubt autobiographical in nature, we can see the director as part of their milieu, but also unsettled, and to an extent morally detatched from the others. At the end, his character Moraldo leaves the town for the big city, reluctant to leave his comfort zone but feeling it necessary to move on, and grow up.

To an extent, there is similarity in La Dolce Vita; we see the decadent classes partying, dancing, cavorting up and down Rome’s Via Veneto, and engaging in orgies and debauchery. But this is all directionless, unrewarding fodder, not leading to anything except its own perpetuation. At the centre of this is Marcello, a reporter for a sensationalist newspaper, who is apparently meant to be covering these events. His lifestyle certainly appears glamourous; he has liasons with both a beautiful wealthy heiresses Maddalena and an improbably-proportioned film star Sylvia, as well as other encounters in clubs, bars and parties. In an early scene, he flies over the city in a helicopter, under the pretence of following the transit of a statue of Christ, but ends up trying to pick up some more girls.

Despite the glamour, the film is not glamourising his lifestyle. We may wish to be him, but he doesn’t seem to wish to be himself. He is constantly trying to find some kind of meaning to life, but ends up spiritually isolated, if not physically isolated. In one scene, we see Marcello in a restaurant attempting to write an article on his typewriter, but finding himself disturbed by a young girl working there, the almost angel-like Paola. She is the only truly beautiful character in the film, and part of Marcello realises this, but he cannot change his ways. In the film’s climactic scene, on a beach as so often Fellini would end his films, Marcello encounters the girl again; a grotesque fish has washed up on the shore, and the girl is trying to shout something to him from further along the beach, but he cannot hear her, in the end giving up and returning to join his partying friends. This should be his moment for redemption; the beauty of the girl and the ugliness of the creature exhibiting the rich variety of life, and living, and reality. But he chooses to ignore this, in favour of the falseness of his chosen existence.

This is the main thrust of the narrative, but the film is so richly dense of symbols and colour that any overly simplistic reading does it no justice. Much has been made of the so-called ‘magic number seven’ that seems to permeate the film: the film contains seven distinct episodes, and occurs over seven nights, supposedly a pointed reference to the seven deadly sins, the seven virtues, the seven days of creation, and so on. This is just one aspect of the heavy religious symbolism present in the film, which can be read any number of ways; Fellini is always rather ambiguous when it comes to his portrayal of religious matters, and this is no exception.

The time of the film’s production is also important. It was released in 1960, and we can see the seeds of the decade to come: at a party, a rock and roll band plays, a sign of the increasing Americanisation of popular culture, at the expense of national identity and tradition. Swinging Rome could still claim to be the centre of European culture, but its importance is lessening; post-Beatlemania, ‘Swinging London’ would soon have hegemony, reflected by Fellini’s contemporary Michelangelo Antonioni’s migration to there to make Blowup. There is also the invisible spectre of the threat of nuclear war, discussed at one point between two intellectuals. Does the hedonistic nihilism of the glitterati stem from the knowledge that the world could end within a few minutes of the nuclear button being pressed?

Ultimately, one’s reading of La Dolce Vita is, like any great work of art, dependent on what the viewer brings to it; those fixated by surface glamour will be entranced by the world Fellini conjures up, and want to be part of Marcello’s lifestyle. Pessimists may see the film as further signalling the death of Western civilization, in favour of a decadent, thrill-seeking throwaway culture. But for me, the film is all of these things, and much more. Fellini famously frequently filmed circuses, clowns, stage acts, and loved combining imagery of the beautiful along with the grotesque. In showing us these artifices, he illustrates the absurdity of living. But, as he showed with the adolescents of I Vitelloni, the strongman Zampanò in La Strada, the crook Augusto in Il Bidone, and our protagonist Marcello in La Dolce Vita, these artifices are no substitute for living itself.

Ikiru is Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece, an intensly moving exploration of one man’s search for meaning in his life when confronted with death, but also a film which makes we the audience question what it means to truly be alive. But it is also much more than this; it is a portrait of a ravaged postwar Japan, an indictment of an increasingly hedonistic, nihilistic society, and an examination of generational conflict and dysfunctional family dynamics.

By 1952 director Akira Kurosawa was already a legend, with a substantial body of work to his name; in ten years he had directed twelve feature films, including bona fide masterpieces such as Stray Dog, Drunken Angel and Rashomon. He had also by this time developed his unmistakable visual style, and assembled his regular cast of collaborators – actors, screenwriters Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni, cinematographer Asakazu Nakai, art director Yoshiro Muraki, scorer Fumio Haysaka – with whom he would continue to work with for another ten years.

Amongst his regular acting collaborators was Takashi Shimura, who had appeared in Kurosawa’s first film, Sanshiro Sugata, as well as having taken leading roles in Rashomon, Stray Dog and Drunken Angel. He was a man of 47 years of age when Ikiru was filmed, and would later go on to play the brave leader in Seven Samurai. But in Ikiru he performs one of cinema’s great transformations, if not the greatest: he becomes old man Watanabe, the central character in the story, whose permanently hunched demeanour and world-weary face look more like a man approaching 80, let alone 50 years of age.

Watanabe is an ageing bureaucrat, whose monotonous job appears simply to rubber stamp various official government pieces of paper passing under his nose, a job he has been doing for decades, without fail. He has become a bit of a figure of fun at the office, referred to as “the mummy” by his co-workers for his expressionless but permanent presence there. We find out later that his commitment to this seemingly meaningless role has taken its toll on his family life: his son treats him with scorn and disregard, having been emotionally alienated from him a long time before, much like the son in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries.

However, one day Watanabe is not at his desk, causing consternation amongst his colleagues. He has, in fact, gone to see a doctor, where he discovers that he has that he has stomach cancer, with only months to live. This sends him into a spiral of depression, and also nihilism. “I just can’t die – I don’t know what I’ve been living for all of these years” he confides. He goes to drown his sorrows at a sake bar, where he encounters a young writer who urges him to enjoy the time he has remaining hedonistically, with women, drink and gambling in the wild neon-lit paradise of postwar Tokyo.

These night-time pleasures prove unfulfilling for Watanabe, not part of this new, young Japan. However, he encounters an ex-colleague, a young woman who has quit the office because she found it unfulfilling. He is attracted to her bright, breezy optimism and joi de vivre, and tries to spend more time with her, taking her to pachinko parlours and the movies. But she soon grows weary of his company, finding him a little creepy, and demands to know why he wants to spend so much time with her. He tells her about his illness, and how he is trying to find meaning in his life, and she tells him about her new job: making wind-up toy rabbits for children. This, she says, may be long, hard work, but she enjoys it because she feels like she is playing with every child in Japan.

Children in Kurosawa’s films serve as a motif for an innocence, but also a wisdom that the adult world seems to forget, or ignore. In Ikiru, Watanabe seeks his own spiritual fulfilment by attempting to fight the bureacracy he was so long a part of, and get built a children’s playground which had been campaigned for, but stalled by the powers that be. The final third of the film is centred on Watanabe’s wake, where a series of drunken, rowdy mourners contemplate what happened to him in those final months of his life to change him from humble pen-pusher to campaigning crusader.

Few films, if any, have the kind of emotional resonance that Ikiru has. In Watanabe, we at first see a rather pathetic man, living life unquestioningly, but having little or no connection with other people, or indeed life itself. But the final third of the film seems to suggest something else: the mourners claim to revere his heroic actions, but we know that this is just drunken over-indulgence, and that they will all go back to their routine existences, hungover, in the following morning. In doing this, the film is also fingering us the audience: are we guilty of the same ‘crime’ that Watanabe was, before his transformation? His triumph is his own, his knowledge of the bureacracy he was once a part of helping him to work it for worthwhile ends. Kurosawa is asking us to consider similar in our own lives, in the words of Danish existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, ‘to become ourselves’.

As previously mentioned, the film does not just function on this level of pathos, it is much more a profound look at postwar Japan, like much of Kurosawa’s work at this time. Watanabe’s stomach cancer is emblematic of a country still dealing with the toxic fallout of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, as well as the more general incidence of disease brought on by years of war. It should also be noted that the stomach is an important symbol in Japanese culture, in a way considered the location of the soul, much like the heart is in the West. That this is the location of his illness is as much an indication of his spiritual malaise as much as a physical one.

Interestingly, the film also touches on the class differences which were beginning to emerge at the time; Watanabe’s son is seen as part of a new bourgeoisie, but it is implied that Watanabe himself and his colleagues are urban poor. Their lives are markedly different from those we might find in, say, a Yasujiro Ozu film, who generally are middle-class. In one scene, where Watanabe and his young female friend Toyo meet for the last time, we see in the background a group of wealthy young girls celebrating a birthday; their wealth is a sly juxtaposition to Toyo’s relative poverty, underlining her need to slave away in a factory making children’s toys. She, like Watanabe and many others, is not one of those benefitting from Japan’s postwar prosperity.

Much has been made of the formal and structural innovations of Kurosawa’s other films of the period, in particular Rashomon and Seven Samurai. But Ikiru is no less daring. Consider the last third of the film, with the main character absent except in flashback. Some of the visual tricks are still astonishing; one breathtaking crane shot, as Watanabe and his young writer companion ascend into the Tokyo nightlife is still a miracle of construction, as is the astounding montage of flashbacks when Watanabe is remembering his relationship with his son over the years. There are also some quite extraordinarily emotional scenes: Watanabe crying himself to sleep, with the camera slowly juxtaposing his certificate of commendation mounted on the wall; the casual disregard his son and daughter-in-law shows for him. But the one iconic scene, that of Watanabe’s final moments, is truly astonishing, the most joyous yet melancholy film moment I think I will ever see.

Ikiru translates into English roughly as “To Live”, and yet it is a film about death. I have always quipped that it should be called ‘It’s a Wonderful Death’ – a Nabokovian mirror-image of the Capra classic, but instead of a man who thinks he wants to die finding a reason to keep on living, we have here a man who thinks he wants to live but finds a reason to die, in Camus’ words, ‘A Happy Death’. Another parallel film is Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, in which an ageing professor contemplates the emotional failures in his life, but finds reconciliation, and a kind of rebirth, in the end. Both films seek to avoid melodrama, or unrealistically overcooked happy endings, but are more satisfying and moving for that. Kurosawa’s timeless masterpiece shows us that it is when confronted with death that we actually discover what it means to live.

It is easy now to underestimate both the impact and influence of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby these days, but it must be remembered that it is still both one of cinema’s seminal thrillers, and a cast-iron landmark in the development of the horror genre. It is also, though the movement would like to deny Polanski this, an important early cinematic feminist text, perhaps the finest examination of the idea of the female experience of childbirth.

At the centre of the film is our epnoymous protagonist, Rosemary Woodhouse, played by Mia Farrow. After the opening languorous aerial shot of New York City, slowly converging on a shot of a rather gothic-looking apartment building, we are introduced to her and her actor husband Guy, a strugging actor. They appear to lead a seemingly ordinary vaguely-bohemian urban existence, and their relationship may not be Hollywood-perfect, but is homely and realistic – they occasionally fight, but more often than not are happy in each other’s company. The couple are newly moved into the aforementioned tenement block, where they encounter their new neighbours the Castavets, an elderly couple who seem personable, if a little nosey. Rosemary, whilst doing her laundry, also encounters Terry, a girl who has been taken in by the Castavets, who elucidates that the elderly couple had taken her in from off the streets; she soon meets an untimely death, a defenestration onto the sidewalk below.

From this point onwards, we escape the “Doris Day film” aesthetic that the film had thusfar adopted, and enter our slow descent into a Dante-like Inferno. A stroke of luck befalls Rosemary’s husband – the actor he was understudying for in a theatre production is blinded in a freak accident, leaving Guy in the lead role of a major play. At the same time, the couple agree to have a baby together, but during the proposed night of conception Rosemary passes out, and dreams that a horrifying beast rapes her. She later discovers she has fallen pregnant, but begins to suspect that all is not right with the pregnancy, and that she may be the centre of a macabre plot involving the Castavets, her new obstetrician, and perhaps even her husband. Was his ‘lucky break’ a result of something more sinister?

Thrillers, particularly in the Hitchcock mould, tend to teasingly throw the viewer occasional scraps of useful information, and the first act of the film offers much exposition, seemingly too much, in a series of quickly-cut scenes. We get the sense that something is afoot very early on, but perhaps initially share our protagonist’s optimism that all is well, and that there is no consipiracy against her and her unborn child. However, as the narrative unfolds, there is a strange dichotomy between this and the increasingly concrete sense that yes, actually our worst fears are being realised. Our expectations are being toyed with here; Polanski consistently gives us proof of a sinister plot, but even as the tension gradually rises and rises and rises, there is perhaps still the nagging doubt that it could all be the wild imagination of the pregnant and vulnerable Rosemary.

Central to this is the very idea of pregnancy; a new, unseen life existing within a woman’s body, both dependent and independent on its host. The film is keen to stress the effect on the mothers physiology; the pains, the initial loss of weight followed by the later gains. But more importantly we experience the psychological toll of the process; the sense of expectation, coupled with the fears and anxieties associated with it. David Cronenberg once said of his seminal body-horror Dead Ringers that the idea of a film about twin gynecologists held more of a sense of horror to the male viewer than the female viewer. It seems to me the same can be said of Rosemary’s Baby, and laterly in Ridley Scott’s Alien; the idea of childbirth being a mystery, a thing of fascination, but also an intimidating subject of fear for the male psyche.

Mia Farrow’s central performance is astonishing. Her Rosemary begins the film as a self-confident, bubbly and bright boho, but ends an emotional and neurological wreck. One astounding scene in a phone-booth, and later in a doctor’s office, shows her ability and range as an actor. I loved her in her Woody Allen collaborations (Alice, Zelig, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, to name but a few), but here she gives her most rounded, attention-grabbing performance. John Cassavetes has always been too theatrical for me, particularly in his self-directed films, and here is no exception, though i guess Guy is supposed to be a little over-the-top. The filmis perhaps stolen, though, by Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer as the ageing Castavet couple, whose mixture of nosiness and enigmaticness provide a great deal of the suspense of the film.

Rosemary’s Baby is in many ways a landmark film. It was Polanski’s first Hollywood film, and certainly his best until Chinatown (1974), demonstrating his distinctive style, and his complete mastery of mise en scene. But, like The Exorcist, it is most important for giving a new respectability to the horror genre, which had been much maligned previously. It’s influence on this area of cinema history, whether in direct reference, such as Dario Argento’s Suspiria or Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator, or in indirect tribute such as most of David Cronenberg’s oeuvre, that may prove to be its greatest legacy. It’s a bloody great film too.

One of the great Martin Scorsese films, and featuring a career-best performance by Robert De Niro, yet strangely not generally well-known or well-loved, The King of Comedy is perhaps too difficult a film to attract widespread mainstream appeal. But for those who know and love it, it is one of the greatest character studies in cinema, and a savage swipe at the culture of celebrity.

Scorsese’s best films, from Mean Streets onwards, have focused on individuals with conflicting ideas about their own identities, and how these fit in with the expectations of their friends, followers and peers. Mean Streets confronted us with Charlie Cappa’s self-doubt, and feelings of responsibility for his wild friend Jonny Boy, even when this becomes self-destructive. Taxi Driver focused on Travis Bickle, lonely and alienated from society but wanting to make a difference, to have some reason for existence. Raging Bull was an exploration of how boxer Jake La Motta’s enforced repression of his confused sexuality resulted in violent self-destruction.

Taxi Driver and Raging Bull present us with odd, rather pathetic and dislikable protagonists; but in The King of Comedy we see Scorsese’s greatest anti-hero: Rupert Pupkin. At first he appears harmless, even an object for our sympathy: his gaudy clothing, awful sense of humour, terrible chat-up lines, the way that everyone pronounces his name wrong. His general pitifulness seem to suggest that this is a born-loser, a man who in many a film we would like to see ultimately triumph and find his redemption.

This is where The King of Comedy is difficult; as the film progresses we see more and more that Pupkin is not a sympathetic character at all. He is a vain egotist, utterly convinced of his own self importance, with seemingly no regard for anyone: not his mother, not his friends, not his colleagues, not even Jerry Langford, the talk-show host he apparently reveres. Also, through a series of slightly unreal sequences, we can see that he is a Walter Mitty-like fantasist who sees himself as a famous talk-show host and comedian. What is wrong with this, you may ask? The film makes it abundantly clear that this fantasy world is what is feeding into his deluded self-regard, turning him into more and more of a sociopathic monster. With this, this pathetic character, far from being a harmless geek, becomes more and more appalling. His permanent false smile and kindly tone scarcely hide his contempt for everyone and everything standing in his way from stardom.

One fantasy scene sums all of this up. Pupkin’s old school headmaster, who clearly used to dislike him, appears on a nationwide television show to perform a marriage ceremony between Pupkin and Rita, the popular girl he wanted to ask out at school. During the ‘ceremony’, the teacher asks for Rupert’s forgiveness for the way everyone treated him when he was younger, and to thank him for the “meaning you’ve given to our lives”. What Pupkin is dreaming is not some idle boyish fantasy; he is creating a completely fabricated redemption for himself and his failures in life, and motivated not out of despair, but from a desire for revenge.

The strange tone of the film is an intriguing one. Unlike other Scorsese films, there is no real sense of physical menace; instead we see a something different, and perhaps more menacing: celebrity. It inhabits the film, from both sides of the fame divide: Pupkin’s delusions of grandeur and bizarre fantasy world, and Jerry Langford’s interactions with the general New York public in the street – sometimes pleasant, sometimes abusive. Pupkin wants to enter this apparently glamourous, mysterious world, while at times Langford seems to want to escape it. As is so often Scorsese’s trademark, New York is at the centre of this; Langford at the top of inpenetrable ivory towers, Pupkin and his co-conspirator Masha down at street level with the ‘street scum’.

What was Scorsese’s intent in making the film? I see it as a direct companion piece to Taxi Driver, but as that film’s evil alter-ego. Both films’ protagonists are loners, wanting to find meaning in their lives. But while Travis Bickle is confused and not sure how to go about finding his raison d’etre, eventually comitting a violent act which leads to his ‘redemption’, Rupert Pupkin is motivated by hate and revenge, but achieves his success by other means. It is commonly thought that the film’s creation was inspired by the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981, by John Hinckley, Jr. He was said to have been obsessed by Jodie Foster, and ‘inspired’ to into his act by Taxi Driver. His fascination for fame and celebrity may well have provoked Scorsese into making a sarcastic comment about the increasingly volatile nature of this culture.

The film’s lead and support performances are superb. Jerry Lewis is great as the ageing, weary talkshow host Jerry Langford. Sandra Bernhard is wonderfully unhinged as the obsessive Masha; one memorable scene where the two have a dinner ‘date’, after the latter has kidnapped and tied up the former, is simultaneously hilarious and disturbing (two words which often apply to Bernhard). There are excellent supports from Shelley Hack and Diahnne Abbott, and numerous cameos including Tony Randall, Joyce Brothers, Scorsese himself and various members of his family, as well as a cardboard Liza Minelli. Pay close attention and you can also spot members of The Clash in the background to one scene.

But the film belongs to Robert De Niro. His transformation into the pathetic, creepy Rupert Pupkin is simply breathtaking. Consider his previous roles: Jake La Motta, Vito Corleone, Johnny Boy, Travis Bickle; none bear any resemblance to what is on show here. In one early, brief shot we see Pupkin push at a ‘pull’ door, before realising his error and pulling it. Amazingly, in what is a seemingly simple gesture, we see De Niro invest in his character a lifetime of pain – watch carefully how he reacts physically, his body exhibiting a depressed but predictable resignation. Easily missed, but simply amazing. Later in the film, there is an extended one-take scene where he performs a long stand-up comedy routine, in character; ever the Method actor, there is the rumour that he researched the role by closely studying other stand-up comedians, and eventually performing his own routines onstage himself. The brilliance of his performance, though, is not that he is a fantastic comedian; it is that he is terrible. The old adage goes that a great actor can play a bad actor well. By the same logic, it takes a great performer to play a bad one. De Niro does this.

The King of Comedy was a flop on its release, grossing only $2.5million on a budget of $20million. It simply did not find an audience, probably arising from the problem that it was a film with ‘comedy’ in the title, yet it wasn’t actually that funny. However, it is slowly beginning to be recognised as a true classic, and more and more viewers are seeing it for what it actually is: a sharp, savage satire on fame and the dislikable misfits who seek to gain it at any cost. It is more relevant than ever given today’s obsession with the culture of celebrity.