We preview the six classic underworld flicks in the Arts Centre series' July programme, Glorious Gangster.

Gods of the Plague
Dir Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1970
Screens on July 16 & 31
Remade (in more impressive form) as The American Soldier later the same year, Fassbinder’s early gangster movie is slow, absurd, and quite mesmerising. Harry Baer is the pretty criminal ‘hero’ who gradually sinks back into his underworld ways by hanging around with the wrong types: card-playing crooks and layabouts with trenchcoats and ever-present cigarettes, fickle molls hanging languorously on the sidelines. Any social comment is implicit rather than explicit, the world depicted is related more closely to classic American noir than any contemporary reality, and there is very little plot indeed. But it’s a witty, stylish meditation on the genre, filtered through the decidedly dark and morbid sensibility of its director. Geoff Andrew

Accattone
Dir Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1961
Screens on July 17 & 30
The seamy side of the sub-proletariat of Rome, a world of prostitutes, layabouts and petty thieves in which Franco Citti’s Accattone, not quite making the grade as a pimp, finds himself trapped between the alternatives of working for starvation wages, or trying – with the police already on his tail – for easy pickings as a thief. Treating a social milieu Pasolini knew at firsthand, his first film as a director was misunderstood by many critics when it was first released as a return to the canons of Italian neo-realism of the 1940s and 50s. In fact, its editing style, use of close-ups, dialogue in the Romanesco vernacular – not to mention the Bach score – all betray an originality much more of a piece with Pasolini’s later work than with neo-realism. And the character of Accattone himself, self-destructive and conscious of his situation within a class from which he cannot escape, embodies many of the contradictions in Pasolini’s lifetime of coming to terms with Marxism and Catholicism. Rod McShane 

Pale Flower
Dir Masahiro Shinoda, 1964
Screens on July 17 & 24 Screenings cancelled
Fresh out of prison for a murder of questionable motive, veteran gangster Muraki (Ryo Ikebe) falls under the spell of an enigmatic beauty (Mariko Kaga), whose very own existence seems to hinge on her acts of extreme thrill-seeking. A yakuza film made amid the suffocating ennui of the Cold War era, Masahiro Shinoda’s existential gangster noir is cryptic and progressively oneiric (with Muraki’s desires eventually manifesting into a dream sequence). As the night deepens, the duo find solace through late-night highway racing and monotonous visits to illegal gambling houses. Pale Flower plunges its characters into the darkness of the Tokyo underworld and, by extension, their very corrupted souls. Edmund Lee

Rififi
Dir Jules Dassin, 1955
Screens on July 23 & 24
Archetypal heist thriller, with a group of thieves banding together for a daring jewel robbery and falling out afterwards. Highly acclaimed for the 35-minute robbery sequence, conducted without a word being spoken, and for the generally downbeat atmosphere, it’s actually rather overrated, lacking the tension, profundity, and vivid characterisation of similar films by, say, Jacques Becker and Jean-Pierre Melville. Like even the best of Dassin’s work, in fact, Rififi never penetrates beneath its fashionable, self-conscious surface. GA

Tokyo Drifter
Dir Seijun Suzuki, 1966
Screens on July 23 & 31
Deliriously playful yakuza pic, in which Suzuki lets logic hang. Basically just another tale of gang warfare, it's kitted out with plot ellipses, bizarre sets and colour effects, inappropriate songs, absurd irrelevancies (nice hair-drier gags!), action scenes that verge on the abstract, and some visual jokes tottering precariously between slapstick and surrealism. Somehow, it still just about works as a thriller, with (very, very faint) echoes of Melville and Leone. Inspired lunacy. GA

Band of Outsiders
Dir Jean-Luc Godard, 1964
Screens on July 24 & 31
Godard at his most off-the-cuff takes a ‘Série Noire’ thriller (Fool’s Gold by Dolores Hitchens) and spins a fast and loose tale that continues his love affairs with Hollywood and with actress Anna Karina. Karina at her most naive is taken up by two self-conscious toughs (“The little suburban cousins of Belmondo in A Bout de Souffle”, is how Godard described them), and they try to learn English, do extravagant mimes of the death of Billy the Kid, execute some neat dance steps, run around the Louvre at high speed, and rob Karina’s aunt with disastrous consequences. One of Godard’s most open and enjoyable films. Chris Petit

Tickets: 2734 9009; www.urbtix.hk.