Michael

The seasoned artist and the beautiful young man: it's Oscar and Bosie again, except here the artist, Zoret, is a painter and the 'Bosie' figure - Michael - jilts him for a Russian princess. Zoret's response is a giant canvas entitled 'Suffering' (an old guy wailing on a rock). At last, accepting it's all over, he wills his money to Michael, then takes to his bed and dies of love. Proposed: that on the basis of this horrible film Dreyer be frogmarched out of the Pantheon. True, Zoret looks so much like a Tony Hancock parody of the exquisite aesthete - smoking jackets à la mode and a three-foot long clay pipe - that it's possible guffaws are actually appropriate, the intention having been satirical. But that's unlikely: the self-pity, the adolescent concept of love, the view of women as bloody nuisances are consistent and entirely displeasing.