Never before, by the way, had the hero been the one to shoot first. And we know that the Ringo Kid has still to settle scores with the side-winding Plummer Brothers. They're blowing the charge!'), and then turns into reality as what looks like an entire regiment comes riding to the rescue with guidons flying and sabres drawn. The great moment in John Ford's Stagecoach comes when Geronimo's Apaches attack and a cavalry bugle sounding the charge is first of all heard in Mrs Mallory's imaginings ('Do you hear it? Do you hear it? It's the bugle.

It stays its course, but where did Bernard Miles, as Joe Gargery, the Kentish blacksmith, get that piratical Cornish accent?

Both were excellent players of the second rank, but a Dickens ingenue was ever a swooning excrescence, and the pair of them made Expectations the better book and on that account the better film. All are perfect, except Pawle, who is a wonder as the gentle lunatic, Mr Dick.Д¬opperfield fizzles out once David grows up and Madge Evans and Maureen O'Sullivan appear. Edna May Oliver (as Betsey Trotwood), Basil Rathbone and Violet Kemble-Cooper (as the Murdstones), WC Fields (as stunning as he is unlikely, as Mr Micawber) and, best of all, Lennox Pawle (who? you may ask). I love the first half of the 1934 David Copperfield, which exactly matches Dickens's wonderful vulgarity with that of Hollywood. British movies of the Forties were teddibly well-bred and under-cast, and this is no exception, but Hay Petrie - who, alas, was soon afterwards to die of drink - was a remarkable Uncle Pumblechook, and there has never been the likes of OB Clarence as the Aged Parent. Nothing matches up to the opening scene with the boy Pip on the marshes running into the grip of the fearful Magwitch. Perhaps my favourite Dickens adaptation is David Lean's Great Expectations. It brings out the lip-smacking worst in us. The camera follows the screaming bowsie all the way down, and it is as reinvigorating as a day in the country. He even has a pram bumping its way down a flight of steps as the bullets fly.ДЄs Eliot Ness, Kevin Costner could win a gold at the Boredom Olympics, but at least we sit up and all but cheer when this model of probity loses his patience and shoves a sneering criminal off a high roof. Brian De Palma usually tries to out-Hitchcock Hitchcock, but in The Untouchables he commits larceny on a grand scale by re-staging the Odessa Steps sequence - a 'massacre' that is wholly fictional, by the way - from Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. If you are a writer and steal from someone else, it's called plagiarism if you are a film director, then the 'in' word is hommage. Here are a few of my favourites, all showing over the next week. At Christmastime, rarities - not many of them, alas - tend to be hidden away, as if for insomniacs. It is also shriekingly funny, but today it is all but forgotten. In Kenneth Tynan's diaries, one finds: 'I can't think why Midnight (1938) isn't regarded as a classic.' And it is a classic. And I have long waited for a season of comedies from the Thirties. I saw The Life of Emile Zola the other day, and it was as gripping as when it won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1937.

Like a squirrel in winter, I looked for an Ernst Lubitsch season which gave new life to The Merry Widow, Trouble in Paradise, Ninotchka and To Be or Not to Be, or such John Ford jewels of Americana as Young Mr Lincoln or The Sun Shines Bright. Myself, I began to tape and hoard movies, not because they were sure-fire up-to-the-minute hits, but because of their rarity value. We devised all kind of ingenuities to have films taped in our absence, and these became fewer, for, if a film was worth its salt, we had seen it months, or even a few years, before it became the 'big' BBC picture of Christmastime. For several years we - my family and I - were in the habit of going abroad over the holiday. The kids grew older, and video recordings became a fact of life. There was a time when an entire family would come to our house on the day itself, and so many children were squeezed on to our living room sofa that another visitor, the late Brendan Smith, liked to say that it was years before he and his wife knew what colour it was. IT COULD be argued that television has destroyed Christmas.

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