9/9. Need any more reasons?

You can watch it here www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzHW...

8/9. The bloody shoot-out in a butchery full of severed animal carcasses.

7/9. Best pre-Seven Samurai rain and mud sequence I can think of, with extraordinary shifts in mood and dynamic filming.

6/9. The relationships between and solidarity of women.

5/9. The scenes of the women rice workers - where the film feels at its most neorealist.

4/9. Raf Vallone’s chest hair that I can only assume had its own agent given the exposure it receives.

3/9. Top-notch early performance from Vittorio Gassman. Effortlessly cool and handsome in almost every shot - but unspeakably repugnant throughout. And the camera loves him no less than Mangano.

2/9. Silvana Mangano in her first starring role. One of those ‘a star is born’ performances - you can’t keep your eyes off her. This is a film that’s very much about sex.

4/4. It's time to forgive the fact that he made an infamous promotional film for the Conservative Party (hard, I know), and revisit what made Schlesinger great rather than just good.

3/4. And try Schlesinger's Terminus (1961), a 30 min day-in-the-life of Waterloo Station. www.youtube.com/watch?v=fx_l...

Aside from his Alan Bennett collaborations, An Englishman Abroad (1983) and A Question of Attribution (1991), the latter part of his career lacked the brilliance of its start.

2/4. The film (like Schlesinger's career) is underrated. But there's a richness of emotion and characterisation (despite its Swinging Sixties Goes to Dorset vibe) and extraordinary epic sweep that was missing from Vinterberg's 2015 remake.

2/2. They're part of the Schlemmer Frame Collection preserved by the Austrian Film Archive www.filmmuseum.at/en/collectio...

7/7. Following the war, the Ahwaris' way of life was almost destroyed by Hussein who drained the marshes to deny its use by insurgents (seeking refuge in the Ahwar to escape persecution by the Ba'athist regime) and to punish the Ahwaris. Fortunately, the Ahwar is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

6/7. For some reason, I binge-read a series of books about the Ahwaris when I was a teenager. Thesiger’s book is particularly recommended (at least from my distant memory of it).

5/7. Rewardingly, the film has the authenticity of an ethnographic film, filmed on location among the Marsh Arabs/Ahwaris, capturing life led on and around the wetlands.

4/7. Although the film is not focussed on the war, it is always the backdrop. Moreover, it is about the omnipresence of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship.

3/7. But I preferred this. It sits in a very political context. At the start of the film there’s an extraordinary shot of 2 fighter jets flying across the southern Iraq marshes/Ahwar, announcing the film’s setting during the first Gulf War. Before the jets arrive the image is almost timeless.

2/7. On one level, it’s not unlike those gentle Iranian films from the 80s and 90s where kids go on journeys to buy goldfish, bags of rice or to return their schoolfriend’s exercise books.