There are movies that make it onto all the ‘Top 100 Films of The (Last) Century’ lists. And there are films that lodge in your brain like little memories of happiness. They’re not necessarily ‘great’ films in the accepted sense - not films about which there is any great critical consensus, nor even necessarily films that did well, let alone busted blocks, at the box office. Giant - George Stevens´ epic saga of the Texas oil business with Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean - is one of mine. Another is The Hitcher, that 1986 road movie-cum-nightmare thriller in which a vengeful Rutger Hauer pursues poor little C Thomas Howell all across the desert and apparently terminates Jennifer Jason Leigh in one of the most spectacularly unpleasant ways ever not to be quite shown on screen.

“Not without interest,” concedes Leonard Maltin rather grandly in his doorstep of a Movie Guide. But I know I´m not alone in rating The Hitcher: there are little pockets of us who recognise as something special among others, the moment when Hauer materialises almost magically in front of Howell across the table of an out-of-the-way diner. “Welcome to Shitsville, kid,” is how he introduces himself.

Well finally, after 14 years, some other kid is going to be welcomed back to Shitsville, ´cos Hauer and Robert Harmon, who directed the original, have teamed up for a sequel. Harmon is working on a rewrite of an original script by Gerald DiPego, who wrote Phenomenon. The script had been previously reworked by DiPego´s two sons, Zachary and Matt. The screenplay for the original was by Eric Red, who was last heard of scripting a cable TV movie called Undertow, which was to be directed by Kathryn Bigelow and filmed in Lithuania - possibly not proof of a burgeoning career.

Hauer, on the other hand, has been pretty constantly in work, if not always at the top end of the budget spectrum, and is currently working on a movie called Slow Burn with Pam Grier. Production on the new Hitcher will reportedly start this summer.

Bigelow, incidentally, who was originally slated to direct the epic version of the Joan of Arc story which Luc Besson was going to produce, is showing no signs of dropping her court case against the French director. Besson, as I´m sure you know, went on to direct the film himself under the title of The Messenger, after Bigelow refused to cast his then wife, Milla Jovovich, in the title role. The film opened in the US in November and made limited impact, although it is a mid-range hit in France.

Bigelow´s claim, of which I was first told in Cannes nearly two years ago, when the Besson film had not even been finally cast, was that it was her idea in the first place; that she had done the original research; that she approached Besson to become executive producer and help her raise the money; and that he owes her $2 million. The case is not due to be heard until August 16, which gives you some idea of the complexity of the legal issues involved.

Nor is she the only one to have been having a go at Besson recently. American writer/director Ronald Maxwell (Gettysburg), who has been working on a version of the story which was close to casting at Cannes 1998 but doesn´t seem to have progressed much since then, recently fired off a furious letter to Variety in which he described the French director´s Joan as “a fictitious marionette” and the film as “a mockery of history”.

Bigelow, meanwhile, recently wrapped The Weight of Water, starring Sean Penn, Catherine McCormack and Elizabeth Hurley, which was featured on the ‘Film File´ page of our last issue.

And, to complete the chain that has led from Hauer by way of Red and Bigelow to Penn, the latter is finally to direct another film, five years after the highly rated but little-seen The Crossing Guard. The new film, fully funded by the prolific Franchise Pictures (whose recent projects include Bruce Willis-starrer The Whole Nine Yards and the remake of Get Carter with Sylvester Stallone) is entitled The Pledge.

Like The Crossing Guard, it will star Jack Nicholson in the story of a small-town police chief who promises the mother of a murdered girl that he will find her killer - a pledge which starts out as a promise, then becomes a challenge and finally an obsession, leaving room for little else in his life. Production on the movie is due to start this month (January).