Pinocchio

An enchanting silent produced by Cines - and perhaps, even, the earliest extant Italian feature - this live-action version of Collodi's story may be saddled with a stationary camera and intertitles announcing what one is about to see, but it never feels turgidly staged or predictable. The costumes, sets, picturesque locations and the performance of comedian Ferdinando Guillaume (then hugely popular for the Tontolini series) all contribute to a warm, lively, tongue-in-cheek sense of fun, while the wayward narrative - expanded a little from the original to include encounters with Redskins and the Canadian army - is so gleefully eccentric as to seem surreal.