Childrenchr(39)s tale of a poor tailor and a jealous cat.

This wonderfully eerie film is based on three mysteries by Somerset Maugham, Roderick Wilkinson, and Brett Halliday. In the first tale, a doomed museum guard is magically transported into his favorite painting. In the second, two friends fall in love with the same woman, who is suddenly killed. The dramatic finale stars Orson Welles as a statesman driven mad by guilt after he destroys his political rival.

Director Michael Winner (The Nightcomers, Death Wish) casts a jaded eye on the beach movie and comes up with a surprisingly frank look at beachside beatniks in this drama of a seaside Don Juan who realizes he's becoming too old to keep up his love-'em-and-leave-'em lifestyle. Oliver Reed stars as Tinker, a seaside photographer who has turned his business of snapping holiday portraits of tourists into a system for spotting comely young birds. With their names and addresses in hand, he puts them into a pool and he and his friends go on the make. But Tinker, a cheeky character with an unhealthy disdain for the middle class crowds, finds himself on the other end of the holiday romance when he falls for a sophisticated model, Nicola (Jane Merrow), a smart, confident woman who proves every inch his match. "Are you hoping I'd go to bed with you?" she asks on a visit to his hovel of a studio. In this film shot by future director Nicolas Roeg and edited in a style that at times recalls the giddy energy of A Hard Day's Night, Winner transforms the fun-in-the-sun antics of his romantic mercenaries into an introspective character study set in the dying days of summer. Reed creates a melancholy figure in his underachieving, flip-talking cad who keeps his façade intact to the end in an empty gesture of blasé indifference. Music is provided by the Searchers, who make a rare film appearance in a club scene. -Sean Axmaker.