Britain should celebrate the actress, director, singer, and screen-writer Ida Lupino

A few years ago, I was slumped on the sofa watching an old film noir on television - Roadhouse (1948), starring the rather charmless Richard Widmark as a nightclub owner, the rather wooden Cornel Wilde as his bar manager, and Ida Lupino - an actress who had barely impinged on my consciousness until that point - playing a cabaret singer. I wasn't sure whether to stick with it - until this scene, in which Lupino delivers a mesmerisingly strange performance of "One for My Baby":

I'm not a big fan of...

Cool Cat Wild! goes all "friend of Dorothy" - we've been watching That's Entertainment III. Again.

In 1976, I landed two tickets to the London premier of That's Entertainment! Part II, a second compilation film featuring clips from the heyday of MGM musicals, with linking material provided by toupée-wearing old stars, many of whom looked as if they'd been embalmed. I can't now remember why I was given a ticket - something to do with my job as a publicist for the publisher, New English Library - but, thinking about somebody else for once, I had the cheek to request a second ticket, was promptly given one, and asked my mother to accompany me. Like me, she wasn't a great fan of musicals, but she'd been raised on a diet of Hollywood movies in pre-War Glasgow. Oddly - considering she was a former fashion model - she became flustered as we walked up the red-carpeted stairs towards the entrance and press photographers started snapping us. At the end of the screening...

The film "Whiplash" has divided the House of Grønmark - but I think it's a masterpiece

"Not quite my tempo - but, hey, it'll do."

On one side there's my son and me - we loved it (he's already seen it three times). On the other, there's my wife, who found it distinctly unsettling. She interpreted it as a young man making a Faustian pact with the devil to renounce his humanity in return for the gift of musical genius, and found it unsettling because, as she put it, the devil wins either way. If the student throws in the sponge (or, in this case, his drumsticks) he will have proved the devil was right to have doubted his talent - and if he becomes a great drummer, the devil's horrendous methods will have been vindicated.

 Is it, I wonder, a bloke's film?

Ennio Morricone, The Yardbirds and Brad Paisley - how Spaghetti Western Music conquered the world

In a way, it all started in 1961, with Italian composer Ennio Morricone's arrangement for this version of a Woody Guthrie song by American folk-singer Peter Tevis (which I heard for the first time this morning):