n Envy, the "Va-poo-rizer" is a liquid that, when sprayed on animal fecal matter, causes the offending substance to disappear. Would that such an invention existed to use on this motion picture… It's remarkably appropriate that Envy is about turds, because that's what the movie is.

If he's not at the top of the list, then Barry Levinson is one of the contenders for the title of "Most Inconsistent Working Director." It boggles the mind that the man responsible for such wonderful cinematic fare as Tin Men, Avalon, and Wag the Dog is also on the hook for Toys, Sphere, and Envy. This movie has languished on its distributor's shelves for a long time. Now, having experienced this 99-minute endurance trial, it's not hard to understand Dreamworks' reluctance to release it. The unanswered question is how something this awful could be greenlighted in the first place.

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The Bank Dick (1940) is an all-time classic comedy starring the great W. C. Fields. Directed by Edward F. Cline, the film is only a little over an hour long. It is one of his very best and funniest films (tied with Paramount's It's A Gift (1934)), his next-to-last major film role (he last appeared in Cline's Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941)), and his first solo starring role in a Universal Pictures film. Fields wrote the original screenplay, but credits himself with the nom de plume of Mahatma Kane Jeeves (a play on the phrase often heard in English drawing-room comedies: 'My hat, my cane, Jeeves'). He was given considerable creative control over this film's script, direction and editing by Universal Pictures, unlike what would happen to him a year later.

The ramshackle film, originally titled The Great Man, is filled with Fields' brand of silliness and buffoonery. It satirizes and skewers film-making, family life and marriage, banking practices, and small-town behavior, in a series of short sketches. W. C. Fields plays the lead comic role, a penultimate characterization of a bullied, unemployed drunk who despises the members of his aggravating family and is talented only at telling (and believing) tall tales and imbibing alcohol at the Black Pussy Cat Cafe. [The name of the cafe, originally the Black Pussy Cafe and Snack Bar, offended Hollywood's censorship agency - the Breen Office. Even the film's title can be interpreted with two meanings, although 'dick' means detective. The film was released as The Bank Detective in the UK.] Inadvertently, the elbow-bending, gin-soaked lush trundles into 'directing' a film for a brief time, and is credited with capturing a bank robber and being a hero.

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The iconoclastic, not-politically-correct Blazing Saddles (1974) is one of Mel Brooks' funniest, most successful and most popular films. It is an unsubtle spoof or parody of all the cliches from the time-honored genre of westerns, similar to the comic attitude of numerous Marx Brothers films. Brooks' third feature film tagline blurb advertised: "Blazing Saddles...or never give a saga an even break!" Notice in the film's poster, the gold coin is inscribed: "HI, I'M MEL. TRUST ME."

The crude, racist and sexist film with toilet humor and foul language includes the main elements of any western - a dance-hall girl, a gunslinger, a sheriff, a town full of pure folk, and more, but it twists them around. So they become a black sheriff, a racist town, a sex-obsessed Governor, and so forth. In addition, there are other anachronistic elements - Hedley Lamarr (a misnaming of actress Hedy Lamarr), hints of the seductive character Frenchy (played by Marlene Dietrich) in Destry Rides Again (1939), a medieval executioner, a Cole Porter song, redneck bigotry of all flavors, and a 'film-within-a-film' concept, exemplified by Lamarr exclaiming: "Drive me off this picture."

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The gentlemanly, artistocratic, independently-wealthy New Yorker, amateur detective Philo Vance was introduced in the works of Willard Huntington Wright (S.S. Van Dine), first in his 1926 novel The Benson Murder Mystery. Thin Man star William Powell and others portrayed Philo Vance from 1929 to 1947:

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Creative director Rouben Mamoulian stylishly remade the Fairbanks' 1920 Zorro tale almost two decades later as the historical swashbuckler The Mark of Zorro (1940) with Tyrone Power as the dashing, masked and foppish hero Don Diego Vega in old California, who duels with a villainous oppressor (Basil Rathbone) to the death in the film's climax. The 1940 version also featured glowing and gorgeous Linda Darnell and Gale Sondergaard as the good and bad female characters respectively.

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Adventure films that offered tales of British colonialism and imperial campaigns of worldwide conquest included these examples:

* Henry Hathaway's definitive, on-location action-adventure The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935) - about three British Lancers (Gary Cooper, Franchot Tone, and Richard Cromwell) in the 41st Bengal Lancers regiment in NW India that fought against revolutionary/rebel forces goaded by villainous Mohammed Khan (Douglas Dumbrille)

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Although the film traces the career of a fictional newspaper tycoon (patterned after William Randolph Hearst), Citizen Kane (1941) can be considered a life-story 'biopic.' Artists and literary authors have also inspired biographical film epics, such as two films from Vincente Minnelli. His film Madame Bovary (1949) starred James Mason as Gustave Flaubert on whose classic novel the film was based, and another film, Lust for Life (1956) featured Kirk Douglas as tormented Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh.

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Charlie Chaplin, a silent actor and pantomimist, was recruited to Keystone from an English variety act, and became Sennett's most important discovery. Chaplin made 35 short Keystone films for Mack Sennett in 1914. In Chaplin's second picture, the 11-minute Kid Auto Races in Venice (1914), he invented his immortal, trademark Little Tramp character as he attends a 'baby-cart' race in Venice, California. His first masterpiece, The Tramp (1915), produced by the Essanay Company in Chicago, showed the early development of the character, known for his baggy pants, bowler hat, walking cane, funny stride, and oversized shoes. Chaplin had appeared in Sennett's feature-length Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914) and produced two dozen two-reelers for Mutual, including such classics as The Rink (1916), The Floorwalker (1916), The Pawnshop (1916), The Cure (1917), The Immigrant (1917) and Easy Street (1917).

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Director Brian De Palma's earliest, heavily-stylistic films (often with reconstructed scenes from other films) are particularly reminiscent of Hitchcock's tense horror thrillers, with themes of guilt, voyeurism, paranoia and obsession. Similar plot elements include killing off a main character early on, switching points of view, and dream-like sequences, in the following:

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FilmNation Entertainment announced today that V for Vendetta and Ninja Assassin director James McTeigue signed on to helm their upcoming thriller Message from the King, the story of Jacob King, a stranger to Los Angeles who scours the city in order to find out what happened to his missing sister.

McTeigue previously worked with FilmNation Entertainment on the period drama The Raven starring John Cusack as Edgar Allan Poe.

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