5 things to watch this weekend – 17 to 19 February

Where’s it on? BBC Two, Sunday, 2.05pm

This Sunday afternoon swashbuckler is among the earliest of all full-colour films, but the ‘paint’ still looks wet. The vivid bright greens of Sherwood Forest (all filmed on a Hollywood backlot) and Robin Hood’s dashing garb make as much of an impression as Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s rousing orchestral score and the duelling, back-and-forth banter between Errol Flynn’s outlaw and Basil Rathbone’s dastardly Guy of Gisbourne. Co-directed by Michael Curtiz and William Keighley (the latter doing the action), it’s an adventure film of irrepressible verve and spirit, its picture-book recreation of Merrie Olde England as enchanting as ever.

Where’s it on? Klassiki

Blue Mountains, or Unbelievable Story is perhaps the best known film by Georgian auteur Eldar Shengelaia, who turned 90 in January and is being celebrated on the streaming service Klassiki. It’s a very funny satire on Soviet-era bureaucracy in which a writer attempting to get his new manuscript read at a publishing house gets passed from one uninterested or procrastinating employee to the next. There’s a strong dash of Kafkaesque absurdism to it all, but also some of Luis Buñuel’s relish in perpetually frustrating his protagonist’s desires. The music is by Georgian composer Giya Kancheli, a label-mate of Arvo Pärt’s on the esteemed ECM Records.

Where’s it on? BFI Player

Following only nine years after publication of William Golding’s classic novel, this British adaptation finds theatre director Peter Brook coming relatively fresh to the story of a class of schoolboys who turn to barbarism after becoming marooned on a desert island. Filmed in black and white on an island off the coast of Puerto Rico, the production threw together a cast of non-professional child actors, most of whom hadn’t read the book and who were fed their lines scene by scene. As a meditation on savagery and British schooling, and with similarly haunting use of liturgical music, Brook’s film now looks in many ways like an intriguing forerunner of Lindsay Anderson’s boarding school drama If…. (1968).

Where’s it on? Blu-ray and 4K UHD

The Italian director of The Conformist (1970) and Last Tango in Paris (1972), Bernardo Bertolucci had the greatest success of his career with this epic biopic on Puyi, the 11th and final emperor of Qing dynasty China before the sweeping reforms of the communist era. Gaining unprecedented access to film in Beijing’s Forbidden City, it won an impressive nine Oscars, including best picture and best director. The presence of Peter O’Toole playing Puyi’s English tutor Reginald Johnston links back to another multi-Oscar winning epic, with The Last Emperor finding Bertolucci tackling an individual’s place within the turbulence of history with David Lean-like confidence and grace. 

Where’s it on? Blu-ray

In the same year he was the ‘bad’ part of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’s titular trio, Lee Van Cleef took his first starring role, as bounty hunter Jonathan Corbett, in this less famous but barely less remarkable spaghetti western. Corbett’s services are called upon by a railroad tycoon wanting the man who raped and killed a 12-year-old girl tracked into Mexico – the rocky, sun-bleached landscapes of which are here played, as so often in Italian westerns, by Almería, Spain. Brutality and back-stabbing lie ahead, whipped along by Ennio Morricone’s galloping, chanting score and a screenplay laced with political cynicism by writers including Sergio Donati (Once upon a Time in the West) and Franco Solinas (The Battle of Algiers).