Clip joint: swimming pools

There's more to the screen pool, however, than being a symbol of status and success. It can signify something far beyond the banal – after all, what is a swimming pool but mere water? In a great film, the pool is a theatre for the most primal of dramas in which the meaning becomes purely elemental: birth, rebirth, sex and death.

1) The American dream sours as Burt Lancaster goes on a hallucinatory odyssey through suburbia in The Swimmer.

2) David Hockney was the inspiration in Sexy Beast; the boulder hurtling into paradise is a portent of what's to come.

3) The scene for the single-take climax of Let the Right One In is a bleak communal pool.

4) Esther Williams's nickname was the "million dollar mermaid"; she waggles her tail in Bathing Beauty.

5) In Francois Ozon's erotically-charged Hitchcockian thriller, the Swimming Pool is virtually a character in itself.

Last week on Clip joint, Alexandra Coghlan acted the dummy with the best film clips featuring ventriloquists. Here are her top choices from your suggestions:

1) Turning the whole notion of ventriloquism on its head Chewtoy opted for Tod Browning and Lon Chaney's The Unholy Three. Hear, marvel, wonder at the "velvet-voiced" ventriloquist The Great Echo. Oh wait, you can't – it's a silent movie.

2) "Are you eating a tomato, or is that just your nose?" Cheekiest of dummies Charlie McCarthy also gets Chewtoy's vote. This wooden star of WC Fields' 1939 film You Can't Cheat an Honest Man has a wit almost as dry as his skin.

3) For ExFi, no cabinet of curiosities would be complete without a contribution from Hitchcock. See the ever-disturbing Claude Rains take his shot at ventriloquism in And So Died Riabouchinska. Rarely has the "other woman" been quite so wooden in her affections.

4) Not for the easily offended, 2007 film The Ten was millmossy's pick. This jolly cinematic romp through the ten commandments sees Winona Ryder committing theft when she runs off with a ventriloquist's dummy. Judging by these clips, however, theft was by far the most innocent of her sins.

5) Chewtoy rounded out a hat-trick of choices with 2002's charming Dummy. Adrien Brody's put-upon social outcast find his inner man (or should that be outer man?) in the form of a ventriloquist's dummy.