By Gerald Peary

As we wait for our vaccine shots, here are some superior films that will make standing by more pleasurable.

Danny Kaye in The Court Jester.

The Court Jester (1956) — Ever spry and athletic, comedian Danny Kaye became a master swordsman in order to perform an array of awesome swashbuckler tricks. Armed with five dynamite songs written his wife, Sylvia Fine, Kaye doubles up as a daydreaming medieval peasant who is forced to impersonate a singing, dancing, skirt-chasing jester. The parody echoes of the Errol Flynn-starring The Adventures of Robin Hood are priceless, from the “Never Outfox the Fox” number in a Sherwood Forest setting — Kaye and a bevy of little people in Batman-like masks and capes — to the climactic sword fight with Basil Rathbone, a send-up of the Flynn/Rathbone duel to the death in the 1938 Warners’ classic. https://www.amazon.com/Court-Jester-Danny-Kaye/dp/B083ZRSK1T

White Heat (1949) — Raoul Walsh’s film is the paradigm of gangster noir, sporting its baroque monster of a racketeer, Cody Jarrett (James Cagney), an epileptic psychopath, a middle-aged mama’s boy with a propensity for homicide. Watch him eat a piece of chicken while pumping bullets into the human-occupied trunk of a car. Classic scenes: “Ma’s dead” in prison, and Jarrett’s truly bananas parting: “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” Cagney is semi-divine here, but let’s also plug Edmond O’Brien as a sweaty FBI fink and Virginia Mayo as Cody’s slip-falling-off-her-shoulders duplicitous wife. $3.99. https://www.amazon.com/White-Heat-James-Cagney/dp/B00332MY6K

One-Eyed Jacks (1961) — Marlon Brando’s only directorial effort, a western, deserves a new look. Brando borrowed actors from John Ford (Ben Johnson, Hank Worden) and a directing style from Elia Kazan, but he made this primal Oedipal tale his own, influenced by his long periods of psychoanalysis. Rio (Brando) is betrayed by “Dad” Longworth (Karl Malden) and gets revenge by seducing Longworth’s daughter. One-Eyed Jacks is tight, well-plotted, and suspenseful. Brando is cool, and Ben Johnson is grand as a grubby bank robber, but Malden steals the day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONTdUUl1SaY

Walter Matthau and Tatum O’Neal in The Bad News Bears.

The Bad News Bears (1976) — In this high-spirited comedy, the spirit of child-hating W.C. Fields lives on healthily in Walter Matthau’s bilious Little League coach, with his Bud, cigarillo, and his body as saggy, dusty, and out of shape as third base. Matthau loathes his pathetic team of nerds, wimps, and peewee-sized players at every position, and an obnoxious fat boy behind the plate. Of course, all changes when he recruits fastballer Tatum O’Neal for the mound, and this girl turns his mediocrities into a terror of a team. $3.99. https://www.amazon.com/Bad-News-Bears-Michael-Ritchie/dp/B001D0DR88

Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996) —  Elia Suleiman, a filmmaker from Nazareth, spent 12 years in New York studying world cinema. Credit Godard for the politically minded master shots, Jacques Tati for the dry, deadpan, terrific sight gags. The first section is devoted to random observations of the everyday life of his Palestinian mother, father, and aunt in their middle-class home. In part two, Suleiman (who is on camera) goes into Jerusalem, where, an almost-invisible man (the plight of the Arab intellectual?), he peeks in on PLO-type terrorists preparing bombs. The final shots are of his Palestinian family at home in Nazareth watching TV sign off with the playing of “Hatikva,” Israel’s national anthem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-sv8-hxZlY

Gerald Peary is a Professor Emeritus at Suffolk University, Boston, curator of the Boston University Cinematheque, and the general editor of the “Conversations with Filmmakers” series from the University Press of Mississippi. A critic for the late Boston Phoenix, he is the author of nine books on cinema, writer-director of the documentaries For the Love of Movies: the Story of American Film Criticism and Archie’s Betty, and a featured actor in the 2013 independent narrative Computer Chess. His new feature documentary, The Rabbi Goes West, co-directed by Amy Geller, is playing at film festivals around the world.