What are we looking at?
Sofia Coppola’s very first film.

Go lecture.
Young women trapped in gilded cages: that’s the theme that comes to mind when thinking about the films of Sofia Coppola. The Virgin Suicides starred five suburban sisters under ever-tightening parental lockdown. Lost in Translation found a rock photographer’s wife free yet adrift in a swank Tokyo hotel. Marie Antoinette made a subject of, well, Marie Antoinette, and Somewhere left its eleven-year-old daughter of a disaffected movie star with no choice but turn up on on her dad’s Chateau Marmont doorstep. Even now, the filmmaker completes work on The Bling Ring, whose titular clutch of teenagers find themselves driven to burgle the homes of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and other such luminaries, surely out of sheer ennui. But the most vicious expression of the signature Sofia Coppola setup came in her very first film, the 1998 short Lick the Star.

Why is this good news?
You’ve never seen this piece of film history before.

What’s the storie?
Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator, Prometheus, the Apple Macintosh 1984 Super Bowl ad, the upcoming Biblically-based (and Biblically-sized) Exodus: if you want a thoroughly through-and-through vision, executed at full scale and tinted with more than a touch of dystopian grimness, you go to Ridley Scott. This comparatively tiny project, with its rich 16-millimeter images, adept camera movement, and utterly hopeless setting, shows signs of what sort of filmmaker the twentysomething Scott would become a decade or two later.   

Source?
OPENCULTURE.

Whatsky?
Brother and sister, Tom (Fred Astaire) and Ellen Bowen (Jane Powell), have a dance act in New York until the show closes. Their agent books them some shows in London that coincide with the dates for the royal wedding…

Movie buff stuff?
The story is set in London in 1947 at the time of the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten, Duke of Edinburgh. Astaire and Powell are siblings in a song and dance duo, echoing the real-life theatrical relationship of Fred and Adele Astaire.

Whatsky?
A film actress is murdered by her estranged husband who is jealous of all her young boyfriends. The next day, writer Robert Tisdall (who happens to be one such boyfriend) discovers her body on the beach. He runs to call the police, however, two witnesses think that he is the escaping murderer. Robert is arrested, but owing to a mix up at the courthouse, he escapes and goes on the run with a police constable’s daughter Erica, determined to prove his innocence.

Movie buff stuff?
The actual villain, whose identity is never in doubt (Hitchcock made thrillers, not mysteries) is played by George Curzon, who suffers from a twitching eye. Curzon’s revelation during an elaborate nightclub sequence is a Hitchcockian tour de force, the sort of virtuoso sequence taken for granted in these days of flexible cameras and computer enhancement, but which in 1937 took a great deal of time, patience and talent to pull off. Released in the US as The Girl Was Young, Young and Innocent was based on a novel by Josephine Tey.

Whatsky?
A cult classic directed by Harvey Berman and starring Jack Nicholson as a rebellious punk named Johnny, of the Beat generation, who spends his days as an amateur dirt track driver in between partying and troublemaking.

Film buff stuff?
If you dig fast cars, crazy chicks, and cool hipster slang, this flick is for you. The dialogue is priceless, and while there’s not much of a plot, the whole thing’s over in less than an hour.

Whatsky?
In flashback, New York nightclub pianist Al Roberts hitchhikes to Hollywood to join his girl Sue. On a rainy night, the sleazy gambler he’s riding with mysteriously dies; afraid of the police, Roberts takes the man’s identity. But thanks to a blackmailing dame, Roberts’ every move plunges him deeper into trouble…

Movie buff stuff?
Although made on a small budget with bare sets and straightforward camera work, Detour has gathered much praise through the years and is held in high regard. In 1992, Detour was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

Whatsky?
The very first Tarzan film ever made, based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ original novel Tarzan of the Apes of only 4 years earlier. The film is directed by Scott Sidney and stars Elmo Lincoln, Enid Markey, George B. French and Gordon Griffith. It is considered the most faithful to the novel of all the film adaptations, though only tells the first part of the novel, the remainder becoming the basis for the sequel, The Romance of Tarzan (also from 1918 but directed by Wilfred Lucas). 

Curated by Emm, editor of The List.

Whatsky?
Late one night, young David MacLean is awakened by a thunderstorm. From his bedroom window he sees a large flying saucer descend and disappear into the sandpit area behind his home. After rushing to tell his parents, his scientist father goes to investigate David’s claim. When his father returns much later in the morning, David notices an unusual red puncture along the hairline on the back of his father’s neck…

Stuff for the movie buff?
An 1953 American science fiction film directed by William Cameron Menzies that was developed from a scenario by Richard Blake and based on a story treatment by John Tucker Battle, who was inspired by a dream recounted by his wife.