Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, which is due out next year, looks as if it might have one of the all-time great casts. The Oscar-nominated Timothée Chalamet is its star; the supporting actors include Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Oscar Isaac, Rebecca Ferguson, Charlotte Rampling, and Jason Momoa. But Villeneuve, the French-Canadian director of Sicario, Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, will need all the help he can get if his film is to compete with an earlier adaptation of the same novel. I don’t mean the David Lynch version from 1984, which should be lodged near the top of any sensible list of the worst films in history. Nor do I refer to the mini-series that was on the US cable channel Sci-Fi (now called Syfy) in 2000. The most significant and impressive screen version of Frank Herbert’s science-fiction bestseller is one that was never actually made.

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The film’s writer-director was Alejandro Jodorowsky, a Chilean-born avant-garde theatre veteran who made two of the most gloriously surreal films of the 1970s - or, indeed, any other decade. El Topo (1970) was roughly what you would get if Clint Eastwood remade Alice in Wonderland as a western, and Monty Python remade it as a satirical farce, and then scenes from both films were cut together, with extra whipping and nudity. The Holy Mountain (1973), partly funded by John Lennon, was even weirder. Kanye West borrowed its psychedelic religious imagery when staging his Yeezus tour in 2013, and, back in the 1970s, both films helped to establish the ‘midnight movie’ circuit of films that were best watched late at night, preferably after ingesting a mood-altering substance or two.