What is a picture of  Joseph Roth, chronicler of the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire doing beneath this heading? Did Roth have a shotgun? Was he a hobo? In a way, the answer is yes to both questions, indirectly.

Last night I went to see this film simply on the strength of its title. Mrs Blanco chose not to accompany me after inspecting the trailer, so I went with Robin, who had dropped by with a copy of Patrick McGuinness’s excellent The Last Hundred Days, this week longlisted for the Man Booker prize, which I am reviewing for a newspaper and which will no doubt appear on this blog at a later date, and which I urge you all to read.

I do not however urge you to go and see Hobo with a Shotgun, not unless you have a very strong stomach. If you feel tempted to press play, and can endure the trailer, please be assured that it really does not do justice to the gratuitous nastiness of the film. There was a time, in London in the late 1970s when I enjoyed watching low budget exploitation or grindhouse movies: Death Weekend and Shivers are two that come to mind. But I don’t seem to have it in me now.

I’m not going to review this schlock, but I can reveal that apart from the early decapitation, there is also a graphic decocking, or involuntary penectomy. The script is pretty dire, although there is at least one memorable line: when the hobo, having saved his lady friend from a brutal encounter with a corrupt cop and, concealed by her beneath the corpse of the newly exploded policeman, they return to her apartment to prepare for their getaway, he comes out with: “I just gotta wipe this guy’s asshole off my face.” But for all the film’s many shortcomings – can we speak of shortcomings in a film from which we have such low expectations? – Rutger Hauer is craggily splendid.

And that brings me to the point: Rutger Hauer has played a vagrant before, in the film version of The Legend of the Holy Drinker, a little known gem, directed by Ermanno Olmi and released in 1988. The movie is based on the novella by Roth, himself a writer in the time-honoured tradition of the poet-vagabond. In the story, which is a kind of parable or fairy tale emanating, it seems to me, from the deep core of an alcoholic’s delirious wish-fulfilment, the beggar Andreas is presented with two hundred francs, which he promises to return, but in which task he repeatedly fails. However his humility and humanity constitute redemptive qualities amid the dissolution of his life, and the effect is oddly uplifting. In stark contrast to Hobo with a Shotgun, it is a powerfully atmospheric and exquisitely tender film, beautifully shot in Paris, notable also for being the last performance of the excellent Anthony Quayle. The extract below shows their first meeting near the bridge where Andreas sleeps.

If you cannot get hold of the film, try reading the novella: The Legend of the Holy Drinker was republished by Granta in 2001. Its author himself ended his days as an alcoholic in Paris, the city he loved, and to which he fled after Hitler’s rise to power. He was waiting, like other Jewish exiles, to be ‘wiped out’ once the Nazis showed up, as he knew they would. He lived in a cheap hotel and literally drank himself to death, passing away in hospital following days of delirium tremens in May 1939.