Weekend Stubble

I generally avoid Best Of lists, but today's Observer of London has a good one: 50 Lost Movie Classics. The American movies will not be too "lost" on anyone from the US, but the foreign titles were certainly new to me.

Check this one out:

32 The Day The Earth Caught Fire
Val Guest, 1961

A brilliant London film, a great journalist movie and a classic example of period sci-fi cinema. Leo McKern is thrilling as the Daily Express writer (it was shot in the paper's old Fleet St HQ) who has discovered global warming - Val Guest's film seems more prescient every year. Also, there's an early cameo from Michael Caine as a policeman ushering crowds out of the city, a scene eerily reflected in Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men this year.

I cannot possibly end this post without also noting the Observer's listing of the Le Petomane, "A forgotten masterpiece short starring Leonard Rossiter as Joseph Pujol in the true story of a man who had an elastic anus."

Wouldn't that describe an entire category of movies?