Mike Sragow’s unabashed movie ecstasies

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It's an enthralling colonial adventure story and a thrilling tribute to the star-power of Gary Cooper. As a Scots-Canadian major upholding the honor of the Raj, Cooper proves that the greatest virtue for a movie man of action isn't bucko elegance or stylistic spareness. It's the ability, like an acting version of Hemingway, to communicate between the lines. In "Lancer," Franchot Tone is amusing as a foppish subaltern, but it's Cooper who holds the show together in a part constructed of cocksure actions and fumbling explanations. The actor's rugged, lanky swagger and his stubborn, accusing, sometimes wounded eyes express what Otis Ferguson rightly saw as the heart of the movie: "men living together and getting in each other's hair, tied together by the strange bond of work and discipline, by the common pride of doing the job." Thanks to Cooper, the movie's final showpiece is man's-man tearjerking at its soul-stirring peak. Pictured: Gary Cooper in a 1930 photo by Edward Steichen

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When he directed this amazingly effective low-budget thriller in black and white with a TV-tested crew, Alfred Hitchcock went after the youthful horror-film audience with a vengeance. Everything from the titillating opening of Janet Leigh (pictured) and John Gavin getting dressed after making love during her lunch hour to the slashing shocks and reversals brought box-office success and immediate legendary status. Written by Joseph Stefano from a novel by Robert Bloch, the movie is a nightmare crystallization of the petit-bourgeois side of Hitchcock's sensibility. All the characters are trapped in stifling circumstances -- especially poor Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), the manager of a motel stranded beside a no-longer-travelled road. No wonder the movie became a teen sensation. In its own tawdry fashion, it told incipient middle-class rebels that they were right not to share their parents' sense of security -- even in the shower.

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For his audacious adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's novel, Stanley Kubrick chose Peter Sellers to play what could have been a subordinate role -- not Humbert Humbert, the French-lit professor obsessed by the title nymphet (Sue Lyon), but Quilty, the television playwright and minor celebrity who lures her away. With Kubrick in control, Quilty also steals the movie, and the emphasis is prescient: if this were a contemporary story, Quilty would be the guy tying up the reality-TV rights. As Quilty, Sellers is quicksilver-changeable -- a portrait of the artist as a phony. He's ostentatiously high style. At a summer dance in a high-school gym, he manages to look good even though he bops only from the chest up. As he haunts Humbert, he takes on diverse flaky disguises; at one point, he impersonates a suspiciously ingratiating state cop -- the kind of weirdo turn Norman Mailer used to specialize in. When Quilty poses as a German psychologist, the dagger-glint in his eyes lets Humbert know that the pseudo shrink has his number. Sellers' Quilty sees through the weakness and hypocrisy in Humbert. In the film's daring narrative frame, you feel that the ultra-civilized Humbert is able to kill Quilty because the victim starts his death scene under a sheet and finishes it hiding behind a painting. In the end, Humbert doesn't have to look at him. Pictured: Cover art from the 50th anniversary edition of Vladimir Nabokov's novel "Lolita."