20 WILLARD
Director: Daniel Mann
Starring: Bruce Davison, Elsa Lanchester, Ernest Borgnine (US, 1971)
“Where your nightmares end… Willard begins!” This enjoyable, preposterously plotted cult horror has flirted with availability – you might be able to track down a deleted Region 1 DVD, at a pinch – but is currently out of print. It provided a breakthrough for Davison, who delivered a touching performance as Willard, a snivelling dweeb, pushed around at work by his horrendous boss (Borgnine). With no real friends, Willard makes pals with two superintelligent rats in his garden, Ben and Socrates – and soon discovers he can communicate with them, and through them train their telepathic, rapidly breeding rat army. Director Mann (Our Man Flint, Butterfield 8) handles the vengeance with relentless, gory effectiveness. The film proved popular enough to lead to a (pitiful) sequel, Ben (1972), best known for the Michael Jackson theme song.
Expect to pay: A second VHS is around £20; much more for that DVD. Don’t confuse it with the 2003 remake

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19 CALIFORNIA SPLIT
Director: Robert Altman
Starring: Elliott Gould, George Segal (USA, 1974)
A forgotten Robert Altman classic, and the greatest gambling movie ever? Its star might take that bet… “By the time we got to California Split,” says Elliott Gould of his third collaboration with Altman, “I knew exactly how to work with him. Then again, he didn’t even intend to cast me. It was going to be Steve McQueen first…”

For so celebrated a director, a surprising number of Altman’s movies remain relatively unknown: few recall his bleak 1979 sci-fi, Quintet; or his brilliant musical companion to Kansas City, Jazz ’34, or Brewster McCloud [see p72], which has never had a DVD release. California Split’s obscurity is all the more perplexing, however, because it’s no side project or experimental excursion into unfamiliar territory. It’s a full-on Robert Altman movie, in the freewheeling mould of Nashville (indeed, his experiments here with using the new eight-track system to record overlapping dialogue led directly to the Nashville sound), starring the actor he’s perhaps most associated with.

Little known as it is, though, it’s also the Altman film with the most devoted cult: gamblers will tell you this hazy masterpiece is the greatest gambling movie ever made. No plot, all character, it feels shaggy, but is actually a penetrating study of the jumpy minds and empty, driven lives of compulsive gamblers. Gould and George Segal are strangers who stick together for luck, drifting LA’s casinos and racetracks, forever looking for the next bet.

Writer-producer, Joseph Walsh (who plays a creepy bookie), knew this world well, and based the script on his own gambling addiction, originally working on it with Steven Spielberg. Altman was a recovering gambler himself and when, after considering Peter Falk and Robert De Niro, Walsh convinced him his long-term friend Gould was the perfect fit, the art-imitating-life lineup was complete: Gould was another gambling obsessive. “Elliott lived his gambling,” Walsh has commented. “He was that character.”

Gould’s performance decisively altered the movie. The memorably ambiguous ending, as the central pair split, burned out in Reno, was actually the result of a line he improvised on-camera: “I gotta go home,” Segal mutters. “Yeah?” Gould spits back. “Where do you live?” Walsh had written an entire scene after this, but after seeing what Gould came up with, Altman never bothered to film it.

“What I get from Altman’s work is that he shows a life taking its course,” Gould says. “He gave me the opportunity to experience as well as to exhibit – and I was able to give him perhaps more than he bargained for. And we worked great together, didn’t we?” Damien Love
Expect to pay: Some online sellers are charging nearly £70 for the 2004 Region 1 DVD, but you should find it for less…

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18 RENALDO & CLARA
Director: Bob Dylan
Starring: Bob Dylan, Sara Dylan, Joan Baez (USA, 1977)
Savaged upon release, Dylan has largely kept his kept his bewildering, four-hour mongrel movie out of circulation ever since. It’s tempting to speculate, though, that his suppression of the film has less to do with the critical mauling it received – Down In The Groove is on CD, after all – than a desire to draw a veil over the glimpse into his private world it afforded, fractured and kaleidoscopic though the view was. His co-star, after all, was his soon to be ex-wife.

A by-product of Dylan’s surging mid-’70s renaissance, the film was shot on the roads taken by The Rolling Thunder Revue, the travelling circus of musicians and artists Dylan assembled to roll around the States in the Bicentennial winter of 1975. A sprawling, cubist-surrealist self-portrait, it’s essentially three movies in one. Most successfully, it’s a concert film, featuring some of the finest, hungriest performance footage of Dylan ever shot.

Meanwhile, it’s a documentary of the tour and the people along for the ride: here are Ginsberg and Dylan cross-legged at Jack Kerouac’s grave; here’s Dylan meeting with his record company; here’s folksinger David Blue, telling stories about old days in Greenwich Village.

Then again, it’s an improvised, experimental drama, an obscure fiction, free of narrative, chronology or even fixed characters – Dylan’s attempt at a filmic equivalent to the shifting perspectives of his Blood On The Tracks-era songwriting. Faces such as Sam Shepard, Roger McGuinn, Bob Neuwirth, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, and Harry Dean Stanton appear and disappear. Ronnie Hawkins plays “Bob Dylan”. Most of all, there’s Sara, the dark-eyed Clara to Dylan’s Renaldo in scenes picking over his relationship with women, with Joan Baez completing a bizarre, psychodramatic love triangle as “The Woman In White”. (“What do you think it would have been like if we’d gotten married?”)

Heroically pretentious, sometimes embarrassing, and shot through with flashes of brilliance, Dylan spent a year editing it, but reviewers were unprepared to engage with it as anything but a mammoth vanity project. “He has given himself more tight close-ups than any actor can have had in the whole history of movies,” wrote The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, setting the pace. In the UK, it was last seen on late-night TV in the early ’80s. But in 2002, two performances from the movie were included on a DVD accompanying the limited edition of The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: The Rolling Thunder Revue. And it looked suspiciously like someone has recently restored the film… Damien Love

Expect to pay: You’ll only find the excerpts. That bonus-disc version of Bootleg Series 5 will cost you £30, maybe, secondhand