Some horror films have the look of what is thought to be yesteryear. Many employ this for the story, the actors to be a certain style of the time for nostalgia. One of the moments you notice when viewing these is the Directorial choices that often are too modern for the time. The lighting is not for black and white photography that was often done by Europeans fleeing trouble in their countries. Casting your mind back to the days of Dead Of Night (1945), and The Ghost Train (1941) and sprinkling in the crime work of Director Basil Dearden you have the wonderful experience of Sean Hogan’s folk horror short film To Fire You Come at Last (2023)
Evocatively photographed in early Mario Bava ‘Black Sunday’ style in black and white you find a group of men who have been coerced into walking a coffin to the local graveyard for burial. However,...
Evocatively photographed in early Mario Bava ‘Black Sunday’ style in black and white you find a group of men who have been coerced into walking a coffin to the local graveyard for burial. However,...
- 10/17/2023
- by Terry Sherwood
- Horror Asylum
To celebrate the release of The Ship That Died of Shame coming to Blu-Ray, DVD and Digital on September 11th we have 2 Blu-Rays to give away!
The ‘1087’ is a British Royal Navy boat that navigates its crew through the worst that World War II can throw at them. With war over, George Hoskins (Richard Attenborough) convinces former skipper Bill Randall (George Baker) and Birdie (Bill Owen) to buy their old boat and use it for what he persuades them is some ‘harmless’ smuggling to supply the black market.
Soon, however, the crew find themselves mixed up with the corrupt Major Fordyce (Roland Culver) who leads them to transport ever-more sinister cargoes, including counterfeit currency and weapons. As the jobs become more nefarious, the once robust and reliable 1087 begins to protest and frequently breaks down, seemingly mirroring the crew’s descent into the criminal underworld…
Produced by the great Ealing Studios...
The ‘1087’ is a British Royal Navy boat that navigates its crew through the worst that World War II can throw at them. With war over, George Hoskins (Richard Attenborough) convinces former skipper Bill Randall (George Baker) and Birdie (Bill Owen) to buy their old boat and use it for what he persuades them is some ‘harmless’ smuggling to supply the black market.
Soon, however, the crew find themselves mixed up with the corrupt Major Fordyce (Roland Culver) who leads them to transport ever-more sinister cargoes, including counterfeit currency and weapons. As the jobs become more nefarious, the once robust and reliable 1087 begins to protest and frequently breaks down, seemingly mirroring the crew’s descent into the criminal underworld…
Produced by the great Ealing Studios...
- 9/7/2023
- by Competitions
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
It's been a long road, getting from there to here.
One might recall in June of 2023, it was announced that several key executives and programmers at Turner Classic Movies were callously canned by the new management at their parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery. For many, this was tantamount to nixing TCM altogether. CEO David Zaslav made this decision at the end of a string of bad decisions that made him look like the film world's most callous villain. After the weird rebranding of HBO Max to merely Max, it was starting to look like Zaslav didn't give a damn about film history.
It certainly looked that way to Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson, three lovers of vintage film and advocates for the preservation of classics. The trio famously called Zaslav to appeal for the retaining of TCM and the re-hiring of some of their old staff. A...
One might recall in June of 2023, it was announced that several key executives and programmers at Turner Classic Movies were callously canned by the new management at their parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery. For many, this was tantamount to nixing TCM altogether. CEO David Zaslav made this decision at the end of a string of bad decisions that made him look like the film world's most callous villain. After the weird rebranding of HBO Max to merely Max, it was starting to look like Zaslav didn't give a damn about film history.
It certainly looked that way to Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson, three lovers of vintage film and advocates for the preservation of classics. The trio famously called Zaslav to appeal for the retaining of TCM and the re-hiring of some of their old staff. A...
- 9/2/2023
- by Witney Seibold
- Slash Film
I honestly never expected Steven Spielberg in a Criterion Channel series––certainly not one that pairs him with Kogonada, anime, and Johnny Mnemonic––but so’s the power of artificial intelligence. Perhaps his greatest film (at this point I don’t need to tell you the title) plays with After Yang, Ghost in the Shell, and pre-Matrix Keanu in July’s aptly titled “AI” boasting also Spike Jonze’s Her, Carpenter’s Dark Star, and Computer Chess. Much more analog is a British Noir collection obviously carrying the likes of Odd Man Out, Night and the City, and The Small Back Room, further filled by Joseph Losey’s Time Without Pity and Basil Dearden’s It Always Rains on Sunday. (No two ways about it: these movies have great titles.) An Elvis retrospective brings six features, and the consensus best (Don Siegel’s Flaming Star) comes September 1.
While Isabella Rossellini...
While Isabella Rossellini...
- 6/22/2023
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
Zia Mohyeddin, a British-Pakistani actor known for films “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Immaculate Conception” and the stage version of “A Passage to India,” died on Monday in Karachi. He was 91.
Mohyeddin was ill and was on life support in a Karachi hospital, his family said.
Mohyeddin was born in Lylallpur (now Faisalabad), British India, in 1931. He studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London in the early 1950s. After theater roles in “Long Day’s Journey into Night” and “Julius Caesar,” Mohyeddin made his West End debut in “A Passage to India” in 1960, where he originated the role of Dr. Aziz.
The actor featured in David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962), playing the role of Arab guide Tafas. Roles in Alexander Mackendrick’s “Sammy Going South” (1963), Fred Zinnemann’s “Behold a Pale Horse” (1964), Basil Dearden’s “Khartoum” (1966), Ralph Thomas’ “Deadlier Than the Male” (1966), Tony Richardson’s “The Sailor from...
Mohyeddin was ill and was on life support in a Karachi hospital, his family said.
Mohyeddin was born in Lylallpur (now Faisalabad), British India, in 1931. He studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London in the early 1950s. After theater roles in “Long Day’s Journey into Night” and “Julius Caesar,” Mohyeddin made his West End debut in “A Passage to India” in 1960, where he originated the role of Dr. Aziz.
The actor featured in David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962), playing the role of Arab guide Tafas. Roles in Alexander Mackendrick’s “Sammy Going South” (1963), Fred Zinnemann’s “Behold a Pale Horse” (1964), Basil Dearden’s “Khartoum” (1966), Ralph Thomas’ “Deadlier Than the Male” (1966), Tony Richardson’s “The Sailor from...
- 2/13/2023
- by Naman Ramachandran
- Variety Film + TV
Los Angeles, Jan 16 (Ians) Gina Lollobrigida, the 1950s Italian bombshell who starred in films including ‘Fanfan la Tulipe’, ‘Beat the Devil’, ‘Trapeze’ and ‘Buona Sera, Mrs Campbell’, has died. She was 95.
A generation of Indians will remember Lollobrigida from her sensational appearance at the 1978 International Film Festival of India (Iffi), where her flirty exchanges with Kabir Bedi were grist for the gossip magazine mill as well as politically incorrect comparisons between her physical attributes and those of Zeenat Aman.
Kabir Bedi, in his autobiography ‘Stories I Must Tell’, recalls a famous face-off Praveen Babi had with Lollobrigida at a party the Italian actress hosted in his honour for playing Sandokan in the famous Italian television series. The temperamental Indian actress was upset with Lollobrigida because she was apparently getting too comfortable with Bedi.
Lollobrigida also provided fodder for film magazines when it was rumoured that she was being cast by...
A generation of Indians will remember Lollobrigida from her sensational appearance at the 1978 International Film Festival of India (Iffi), where her flirty exchanges with Kabir Bedi were grist for the gossip magazine mill as well as politically incorrect comparisons between her physical attributes and those of Zeenat Aman.
Kabir Bedi, in his autobiography ‘Stories I Must Tell’, recalls a famous face-off Praveen Babi had with Lollobrigida at a party the Italian actress hosted in his honour for playing Sandokan in the famous Italian television series. The temperamental Indian actress was upset with Lollobrigida because she was apparently getting too comfortable with Bedi.
Lollobrigida also provided fodder for film magazines when it was rumoured that she was being cast by...
- 1/16/2023
- by News Bureau
- GlamSham
Gina Lollobrigida, the 1950s Italian bombshell who starred in films including ‘Fanfan la Tulipe’, ‘Beat the Devil’, ‘Trapeze’ and ‘Buona Sera, Mrs Campbell’, has died. She was 95. A generation of Indians will remember Lollobrigida from her sensational appearance at the 1978 International Film Festival of India (Iffi), where her flirty exchanges with Kabir Bedi were grist for the gossip magazine mill as well as politically incorrect comparisons between her physical attributes and those of Zeenat Aman.
Kabir Bedi, in his autobiography ‘Stories I Must Tell’, recalls a famous face-off Praveen Babi had with Lollobrigida at a party the Italian actress hosted in his honour for playing Sandokan in the famous Italian television series. The temperamental Indian actress was upset with Lollobrigida because she was apparently getting too comfortable with Bedi.
Lollobrigida also provided fodder for film magazines when it was rumoured that she was being cast by Krishna Shah in his Indo-American movie,...
Kabir Bedi, in his autobiography ‘Stories I Must Tell’, recalls a famous face-off Praveen Babi had with Lollobrigida at a party the Italian actress hosted in his honour for playing Sandokan in the famous Italian television series. The temperamental Indian actress was upset with Lollobrigida because she was apparently getting too comfortable with Bedi.
Lollobrigida also provided fodder for film magazines when it was rumoured that she was being cast by Krishna Shah in his Indo-American movie,...
- 1/16/2023
- by News Bureau
- GlamSham
Gina Lollobrigida, the 1950s Italian bombshell who starred in films including “Fanfan la Tulipe,” “Beat the Devil,” “Trapeze” and “Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell,” has died. She was 95.
According to Italian news agency Lapresse, Lollobrigida died in a clinic in Rome. No cause of death has been cited. In September she had had surgery to repair a thigh bone broken in a fall, but she recovered and competed for a Senate seat in Italy’s elections held last year in September, though she did not win.
After resisting Howard Hughes’ offer to make movies in Hollywood in 1950, Lollobrigida starred with Gerard Philipe in the 1952 French swashbuckler “Fanfan la Tulipe,” a fest winner and popular favorite.
Her first American movie, shot in Italy, was John Huston’s 1953 film noir spoof “Beat the Devil,” in which she starred with Humphrey Bogart and Jennifer Jones. The same year she starred with Vittorio De Sica in Luigi Comencini’s “Bread,...
According to Italian news agency Lapresse, Lollobrigida died in a clinic in Rome. No cause of death has been cited. In September she had had surgery to repair a thigh bone broken in a fall, but she recovered and competed for a Senate seat in Italy’s elections held last year in September, though she did not win.
After resisting Howard Hughes’ offer to make movies in Hollywood in 1950, Lollobrigida starred with Gerard Philipe in the 1952 French swashbuckler “Fanfan la Tulipe,” a fest winner and popular favorite.
Her first American movie, shot in Italy, was John Huston’s 1953 film noir spoof “Beat the Devil,” in which she starred with Humphrey Bogart and Jennifer Jones. The same year she starred with Vittorio De Sica in Luigi Comencini’s “Bread,...
- 1/16/2023
- by Carmel Dagan and Nick Vivarelli
- Variety Film + TV
A marvelous, underrated and intelligently scripted epic, the 1966 production of Cinerama's "Khartoum" seems be more appreciated by movie fans today than it was back in the day. Superb performances and fine direction by the equally underrated Basil Dearden, along with Frank Cordell's magnificent score, make it a marvelous cinematic experience.
The making of the film is covered in detail in Cinema Retro's special issue devoted to epic films of the 1960s and 1970s. It includes transcriptions of rare interviews with Heston and Olivier.
The making of the film is covered in detail in Cinema Retro's special issue devoted to epic films of the 1960s and 1970s. It includes transcriptions of rare interviews with Heston and Olivier.
- 1/31/2022
- by nospam@example.com (Cinema Retro)
- Cinemaretro.com
The Captive Heart
The Captive Heart, 4pm, Talking Pictures TV (Freeview Channel 82), Tuesday, February 1
This drama set against the backdrop of a PoW camp was one of the first of its type, arriving less than a year after Ve Day and speaking to those who were fully aware of the real thing. Like Das Boot, which is also in our selection this week, there's a real sense of the tedium of camp life as well as the trouble. It features nuanced performances by Jack Warner and Mervyn Jons as friends before the war facing this together. The standout, however, is Michael Redgrave, as a man who claims to be a British officer - having stolen the dead man's identity - and who soon falls under suspicion leading him to write to the dead man's wife (played by Redgrave's real life wife Rachel Kempson) with unexpected consequences. Although Basil Dearden occasionally.
The Captive Heart, 4pm, Talking Pictures TV (Freeview Channel 82), Tuesday, February 1
This drama set against the backdrop of a PoW camp was one of the first of its type, arriving less than a year after Ve Day and speaking to those who were fully aware of the real thing. Like Das Boot, which is also in our selection this week, there's a real sense of the tedium of camp life as well as the trouble. It features nuanced performances by Jack Warner and Mervyn Jons as friends before the war facing this together. The standout, however, is Michael Redgrave, as a man who claims to be a British officer - having stolen the dead man's identity - and who soon falls under suspicion leading him to write to the dead man's wife (played by Redgrave's real life wife Rachel Kempson) with unexpected consequences. Although Basil Dearden occasionally.
- 1/31/2022
- by Amber Wilkinson
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Veteran filmmakers Michael Relph and Basil Dearden try a hip ‘n’ flip costume comedy about an 1899 consortium that’s the equivalent of Murder Inc.: Killings for hire done with veddy proper civility and good taste. The charming Oliver Reed and Diana Rigg lead a notable cast — Telly Savalas, Curd Jürgens, Philippe Noiret, Beryl Reid, Clive Revill — through mayhem-filled chases in several European capitals. Tossed off in tongue-in-cheek style, it’s shallow but cute, and if you like the stars it can be a lark. Its saving grace is the spirited Ms. Rigg.
The Assassination Bureau
Region-Free Blu-ray
Viavision [Imprint] 86
1969 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 110 min. / The Assassination Bureau Limited / Street Date October 29, 2021 / Available from [Imprint] or Amazon /
Starring: Oliver Reed, Diana Rigg, Telly Savalas, Curd Jürgens, Philippe Noiret, Warren Mitchell, Beryl Reid, Clive Revill, Kenneth Griffith, Vernon Dobtcheff, Annabella Incontrera, Jess Conrad, George Coulouris.
Cinematography: Geoffrey Unsworth
Art Director: Michael Relph
Film...
The Assassination Bureau
Region-Free Blu-ray
Viavision [Imprint] 86
1969 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 110 min. / The Assassination Bureau Limited / Street Date October 29, 2021 / Available from [Imprint] or Amazon /
Starring: Oliver Reed, Diana Rigg, Telly Savalas, Curd Jürgens, Philippe Noiret, Warren Mitchell, Beryl Reid, Clive Revill, Kenneth Griffith, Vernon Dobtcheff, Annabella Incontrera, Jess Conrad, George Coulouris.
Cinematography: Geoffrey Unsworth
Art Director: Michael Relph
Film...
- 11/21/2021
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
In film history, the anthology genre is the most challenging. Episodic films often have several directors and screenwriters which gives them an inconsistent tone and quality. But the genre’s pitfalls haven’t stopped such filmmakers including Akira Kurosawa (“Dreams”), the Coens (“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”), Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez (“Sin City”); Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese (“New York Stories”); and Joe Dante, John Landis, George Miller and Steven Spielberg (“Twilight Zone: The Movie”).
Wes Anderson joined them with his latest film “The French Dispatch,” which received a nine-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival. The comedy brings to life three stories from an American magazine published in a fictional French city and features his stock company of actors including Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody and Owen Wilson.
If you are a fan of the genre, here are the best anthology movies that...
Wes Anderson joined them with his latest film “The French Dispatch,” which received a nine-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival. The comedy brings to life three stories from an American magazine published in a fictional French city and features his stock company of actors including Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody and Owen Wilson.
If you are a fan of the genre, here are the best anthology movies that...
- 10/30/2021
- by Susan King
- Gold Derby
No, not the 1982 Barbra Streisand movie (which come to think of it might be equally unfamiliar), but Basil Dearden’s sadly obscure 1962 British drama which received a barely noticeable US release a year later from the tiny Colorama Features. A mouth-wateringly rare assembly of jazz greats is on display jamming it up behind the histrionics in this unusual jazzploitation update of Othello.
The post All Night Long appeared first on Trailers From Hell.
The post All Night Long appeared first on Trailers From Hell.
- 9/8/2021
- by TFH Team
- Trailers from Hell
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“Spies With Scruples”
By Raymond Benson
In comparing Masquerade (1965) with a recent review of Arabesque (1966) here at Cinema Retro, this time we have yet another mid-1960s “comedy-spy thriller,” a genre that was crowding the cinemas in those days because of the success of Double-o-You-Know-Who.
In contrast to Arabesque, this one is a British production, directed by the prolific and often brilliant Basil Dearden, and it utilizes London locations as well as spots in Spain. And yet, despite the thoroughly British DNA running through 95% of the movie, it stars American Cliff Robertson as the hero, David Fraser, a sort of CIA type who seems to approach all the danger around him with misplaced naivete and amused detachment.
The script marks the first appearance of the great William Goldman in a screen credit (co-writing with Michael Relph). It’s based on Vincent Canning’s novel,...
“Spies With Scruples”
By Raymond Benson
In comparing Masquerade (1965) with a recent review of Arabesque (1966) here at Cinema Retro, this time we have yet another mid-1960s “comedy-spy thriller,” a genre that was crowding the cinemas in those days because of the success of Double-o-You-Know-Who.
In contrast to Arabesque, this one is a British production, directed by the prolific and often brilliant Basil Dearden, and it utilizes London locations as well as spots in Spain. And yet, despite the thoroughly British DNA running through 95% of the movie, it stars American Cliff Robertson as the hero, David Fraser, a sort of CIA type who seems to approach all the danger around him with misplaced naivete and amused detachment.
The script marks the first appearance of the great William Goldman in a screen credit (co-writing with Michael Relph). It’s based on Vincent Canning’s novel,...
- 9/1/2021
- by nospam@example.com (Cinema Retro)
- Cinemaretro.com
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“A Comedy Of Errors”
By Raymond Benson
Alastair Sim was a national treasure in Great Britain, a comic actor who never failed to make one smile or outright guffaw. His Scrooge proved that he could also take a serious turn as well. This reviewer likens him to an early sort of John Cleese—an irreverent player who could do irony, surrealism, farce, wicked delight, and pure outrageousness within the confines of a somewhat realistic human being of a character.
As the star of The Green Man (1956), Sim plays an assassin named Harry Hawkins. Yes, that’s right, Alastair Sim is a mad bomber who takes it upon himself to get rid of the pompous blowhards in Britain, whether they be boring politicians or unctuous professors. He even has a Peter Lorre-like assistant, McKechnie (John Chandos), who is willing to obey Harry, even...
“A Comedy Of Errors”
By Raymond Benson
Alastair Sim was a national treasure in Great Britain, a comic actor who never failed to make one smile or outright guffaw. His Scrooge proved that he could also take a serious turn as well. This reviewer likens him to an early sort of John Cleese—an irreverent player who could do irony, surrealism, farce, wicked delight, and pure outrageousness within the confines of a somewhat realistic human being of a character.
As the star of The Green Man (1956), Sim plays an assassin named Harry Hawkins. Yes, that’s right, Alastair Sim is a mad bomber who takes it upon himself to get rid of the pompous blowhards in Britain, whether they be boring politicians or unctuous professors. He even has a Peter Lorre-like assistant, McKechnie (John Chandos), who is willing to obey Harry, even...
- 6/25/2021
- by nospam@example.com (Cinema Retro)
- Cinemaretro.com
It’s the granddaddy of British cop dramas of the modern era. The most popular English picture of 1950 introduced PC George Dixon, a warm-hearted constable who would become a staple on BBC TV for 21 years. T.E.B. Clarke’s screenplay of a murder manhunt is stocked with actors American fans know well — Dirk Bogarde, Bernard Lee — and some we should know better — Jack Warner, Robert Flemyng, Dora Bryan. The show was made by the top craftsmen of Ealing Studios, and its fast pace and Brit sensibility will definitely impress. And remember — the Bobbies on the beat don’t even carry guns.
The Blue Lamp
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1950 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 85 min. / Street Date June 1, 2021 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95
Starring: Jack Warner, Jimmy Hanley, Dirk Bogarde, Robert Flemyng, Bernard Lee, Peggy Evans, Patric Doonan, Bruce Seton, Meredith Edwards, Dora Bryan, Gladys Henson, Tessie O’Shea, Betty Ann Davies, Jennifer Jayne, Sam Kydd,...
The Blue Lamp
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1950 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 85 min. / Street Date June 1, 2021 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95
Starring: Jack Warner, Jimmy Hanley, Dirk Bogarde, Robert Flemyng, Bernard Lee, Peggy Evans, Patric Doonan, Bruce Seton, Meredith Edwards, Dora Bryan, Gladys Henson, Tessie O’Shea, Betty Ann Davies, Jennifer Jayne, Sam Kydd,...
- 5/11/2021
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
During a three-hour discussion on a recent episode of “The Empire Film Podcast,” Edgar Wright and Quentin Tarantino revealed the existence of their makeshift quarantine movie club over the last 9 months. As Wright explained, “It’s nice. We’ve kept in touch in a sort of way that cinephiles do. It’s been one of the very few blessings of this [pandemic], the chance to disappear down a rabbit hole with the hours indoors that we have.” Tarantino added, “Edgar is more social than I am. It’s a big deal that I’ve been talking to him these past 9 months.”
A bulk of the film club was curated by none other than Martin Scorsese, who sent Wright a recommendation list of nearly 50 British films that Scorsese considers personal favorites. In the five months Wright spent in lockdown before resuming production on “Last Night in Soho” — and before he received the...
A bulk of the film club was curated by none other than Martin Scorsese, who sent Wright a recommendation list of nearly 50 British films that Scorsese considers personal favorites. In the five months Wright spent in lockdown before resuming production on “Last Night in Soho” — and before he received the...
- 2/8/2021
- by Zack Sharf
- Indiewire
Earl Cameron, one of the first major Black actors in British cinema, died on Friday at his home in England, his representative confirmed to Variety. He was 102.
Cameron was born in Pembroke, Bermuda, on Aug. 8, 1917, and joined the British Merchant Navy before pursuing a career in theater and film.
“Pool of London,” directed by Basil Dearden in 1951, was Cameron’s first film role. He played a sailor named Johnny Lambert who has a relationship with a white woman, played by Susan Shaw. The noir crime film is best known for portraying the first interracial romance in a British film.
Dearden and Cameron teamed up again in 1959 on the crime drama “Sapphire,” which examined racism in London toward immigrants from the West Indies. The film was progressive for its time and won the BAFTA Award for best film.
“Unless it was specified that this was a part for a Black actor,...
Cameron was born in Pembroke, Bermuda, on Aug. 8, 1917, and joined the British Merchant Navy before pursuing a career in theater and film.
“Pool of London,” directed by Basil Dearden in 1951, was Cameron’s first film role. He played a sailor named Johnny Lambert who has a relationship with a white woman, played by Susan Shaw. The noir crime film is best known for portraying the first interracial romance in a British film.
Dearden and Cameron teamed up again in 1959 on the crime drama “Sapphire,” which examined racism in London toward immigrants from the West Indies. The film was progressive for its time and won the BAFTA Award for best film.
“Unless it was specified that this was a part for a Black actor,...
- 7/4/2020
- by Jordan Moreau
- Variety Film + TV
Earl Cameron, the pioneering Black actor from Bermuda who starred in the 1951 British film Pool of London and later appeared in movies from Thunderball to Inception, has died. He was 102.
Cameron died Friday at his home in Kenilworth, England, his agent told The Guardian.
Director Basil Dearden cast Cameron as a sailor who romances a white girl (Susan Shaw) against the backdrop of racism and crime in Pool of London. His was the first major role for a Black actor in a British mainstream film, and the interracial relationship depicted in the movie broke ground as well.
"Certainly, I ...
Cameron died Friday at his home in Kenilworth, England, his agent told The Guardian.
Director Basil Dearden cast Cameron as a sailor who romances a white girl (Susan Shaw) against the backdrop of racism and crime in Pool of London. His was the first major role for a Black actor in a British mainstream film, and the interracial relationship depicted in the movie broke ground as well.
"Certainly, I ...
Earl Cameron, the pioneering Black actor from Bermuda who starred in the 1951 British film Pool of London and later appeared in movies from Thunderball to Inception, has died. He was 102.
Cameron died Friday at his home in Kenilworth, England, his agent told The Guardian.
Director Basil Dearden cast Cameron as a sailor who romances a white girl (Susan Shaw) against the backdrop of racism and crime in Pool of London. His was the first major role for a Black actor in a British mainstream film, and the interracial relationship depicted in the movie broke ground as well.
"Certainly, I ...
Cameron died Friday at his home in Kenilworth, England, his agent told The Guardian.
Director Basil Dearden cast Cameron as a sailor who romances a white girl (Susan Shaw) against the backdrop of racism and crime in Pool of London. His was the first major role for a Black actor in a British mainstream film, and the interracial relationship depicted in the movie broke ground as well.
"Certainly, I ...
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“Shore Leave Shenanigans”
By Raymond Benson
British noir is a slightly different animal than American film noir, which began in the early 1940s in Hollywood and lasted until roughly 1958 (if one is considering “pure” film noir and its singular traits). The British version, as well as the French and Italian editions, usually concentrates on a more “straight” narrative form with less melodrama. It is probably more true-to-life, drawing from the naturalism of Italian Neo-realism, than its counterpart across the Atlantic. It is certainly less histrionic and heightened. Nevertheless, British noir contains hallmarks of noir everywhere—black-and-white, Expressionistic photography; cynical and hard-edged characters; femmes fatale; brutality; and, of course, a crime.
Pool of London is a 1951 Ealing Studios crime drama (the studio was still making other genre pictures other than comedies at this time) that takes place in and around that geographical site. The...
“Shore Leave Shenanigans”
By Raymond Benson
British noir is a slightly different animal than American film noir, which began in the early 1940s in Hollywood and lasted until roughly 1958 (if one is considering “pure” film noir and its singular traits). The British version, as well as the French and Italian editions, usually concentrates on a more “straight” narrative form with less melodrama. It is probably more true-to-life, drawing from the naturalism of Italian Neo-realism, than its counterpart across the Atlantic. It is certainly less histrionic and heightened. Nevertheless, British noir contains hallmarks of noir everywhere—black-and-white, Expressionistic photography; cynical and hard-edged characters; femmes fatale; brutality; and, of course, a crime.
Pool of London is a 1951 Ealing Studios crime drama (the studio was still making other genre pictures other than comedies at this time) that takes place in and around that geographical site. The...
- 5/29/2020
- by nospam@example.com (Cinema Retro)
- Cinemaretro.com
For having the distinction of presenting one of cinema’s first interracial relationships between a black man and a white woman, Basil Dearden’s 1951 socially conscious film noir Pool of London seems woefully neglected. Of course, Dearden himself was a director difficult to classify or tie into a particular movement or period.
Having begun his career as a director through Ealing Studios, his most notable features would bluntly tackle race relations and homosexuality, while his penchant for genre includes his contributions to the 1945 omnibus Dead of Night, the bizarre The Mind Benders (1963) and underrated crime drama Woman of Straw (1964).…...
Having begun his career as a director through Ealing Studios, his most notable features would bluntly tackle race relations and homosexuality, while his penchant for genre includes his contributions to the 1945 omnibus Dead of Night, the bizarre The Mind Benders (1963) and underrated crime drama Woman of Straw (1964).…...
- 5/26/2020
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
Above: Alternative and official UK posters for Parasite. Designers: Andrew Bannister (left) and La Boca (right).It’s been far too long since I last did one of these round-ups: nine months to be exact. A lot has changed in the world over that time of course, the most pertinent to this column being that far fewer new posters have premiered recently, and that the distractions and stresses of our current situation have led to me posting less frequently than I usually do.But, as I’ve been doing for many years, I have tallied up the most popular posters featured on my Movie Poster of the Day Instagram (previously Tumblr) and by a long shot the most popular posts of the past nine months were for the two U.K. Parasite posters above. If it seems I’m giving these astonishing works short shrift by lumping them together here...
- 5/22/2020
- MUBI
I’d never heard of this gem of a British production; now it goes on my list of highly recommended titles. A dock area on the Thames is ‘the pool,’ and the sailors that disembark from the cargo ships are susceptible to the temptations of black market trade. A single eventful weekend traces the fates of a half-dozen young people, the women that like the sailors, and the sailor that gets mixed up in a deadly serious crime. Director Basil Dearden’s excellent cast is mostly unfamiliar to us Yanks, but we get really tied up in their problems. This picture should be much better known. It’s the first English movie to depict an interracial romance, and it does so without sensationalism or special pleading. The best new extra is an interview with actor Earl Cameron, who at 103 years of age has his act (and his memories) totally together.
- 5/16/2020
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
This strange picture goes forth in search of a genre, mainly because its theme — the destruction of the human personality — had previously seen light only in movies about brainwashing and alien possession. The Michael Relph and Basil Dearden team may not be as slick as The Archers, but they do peg this sober Isolation Chamber drama — even if we wonder if Dirk Bogarde will start talking like Paddy Chayefsky, and then shape-shift into an ape man. The real issue here is scientific ethics, of which Bogarde’s associates seem to have zero.
The Mind Benders
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1963 / B&w / 1:66 widescreen / 109 min. / Street Date October 15, 2019 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Dirk Bogarde, Mary Ure, John Clements, Michael Bryant, Wendy Craig, Harold Goldblatt, Geoffrey Keen.
Cinematography: Denys N. Coop
Film Editor: John D. Guthridge
Original Music: Georges Auric
Written by James Kennaway
Produced by Michael Relph
Directed by Basil...
The Mind Benders
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1963 / B&w / 1:66 widescreen / 109 min. / Street Date October 15, 2019 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Dirk Bogarde, Mary Ure, John Clements, Michael Bryant, Wendy Craig, Harold Goldblatt, Geoffrey Keen.
Cinematography: Denys N. Coop
Film Editor: John D. Guthridge
Original Music: Georges Auric
Written by James Kennaway
Produced by Michael Relph
Directed by Basil...
- 9/24/2019
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
By Hank Reineke
Basil Dearden’s intriguing The Man Who Haunted Himself is a feature-length remake of a thirty-minute televised episode of Alfred Hitchcock’s Presents. That episode - from the 1955 program’s first season - had the distinction of having been directed by the maestro of suspense himself. It was one of only a handful of dramas in the series that Hitchcock chose to helm. The episode was based on Anthony Armstrong’s short story (later novelized) “The Strange Case of Mr. Pelham” (Methuen & Co. Ltd., UK, 1957). The book was later published that very same year in the U.S. as part of Doubleday & Co.’s fabled “Crime Club” series.
Armstrong’s psychological thriller had been originally published in the November 1940 issue of Esquire magazine. The short story was later re-sold and re-published in June 1955 as part of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine… which is likely where Hitchcock became acquainted with it.
Basil Dearden’s intriguing The Man Who Haunted Himself is a feature-length remake of a thirty-minute televised episode of Alfred Hitchcock’s Presents. That episode - from the 1955 program’s first season - had the distinction of having been directed by the maestro of suspense himself. It was one of only a handful of dramas in the series that Hitchcock chose to helm. The episode was based on Anthony Armstrong’s short story (later novelized) “The Strange Case of Mr. Pelham” (Methuen & Co. Ltd., UK, 1957). The book was later published that very same year in the U.S. as part of Doubleday & Co.’s fabled “Crime Club” series.
Armstrong’s psychological thriller had been originally published in the November 1940 issue of Esquire magazine. The short story was later re-sold and re-published in June 1955 as part of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine… which is likely where Hitchcock became acquainted with it.
- 7/12/2019
- by nospam@example.com (Cinema Retro)
- Cinemaretro.com
Dead of Night
Blu ray
Kino Lorber
1945 / 1.33 : 1 / 102 Min.
Starring Mervyn Johns, Michael Redgrave, Googie Withers
Cinematography by Douglas Slocombe
Directed by Basil Dearden, Alberto Cavalcant, Charles Chrichton, Robert Hamer
Anthology films have been a reliable Hollywood staple since D.W. Griffith’s time-traveling Intolerance and Paramount’s depression-era dramedy If I Had a Million. The short story format has proved especially popular with horror movie fans who prefer their thrills lean, mean and straight to the point.
That humble subgenre contains multitudes – from Masaki Kobayashi‘s elegant Kwaidan to the comic book stylings of Freddie Francis’s Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors to the state of the art shocker Nightmare Cinema – but the great-granddaddy of them all is surely the 1945 classic from Britain’s Ealing Studios – Dead of Night.
Mervyn Johns, the eternal Everyman, plays Walter Craig, a restoration expert whose newest project – a provincial manor called “Pilgrim’s...
Blu ray
Kino Lorber
1945 / 1.33 : 1 / 102 Min.
Starring Mervyn Johns, Michael Redgrave, Googie Withers
Cinematography by Douglas Slocombe
Directed by Basil Dearden, Alberto Cavalcant, Charles Chrichton, Robert Hamer
Anthology films have been a reliable Hollywood staple since D.W. Griffith’s time-traveling Intolerance and Paramount’s depression-era dramedy If I Had a Million. The short story format has proved especially popular with horror movie fans who prefer their thrills lean, mean and straight to the point.
That humble subgenre contains multitudes – from Masaki Kobayashi‘s elegant Kwaidan to the comic book stylings of Freddie Francis’s Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors to the state of the art shocker Nightmare Cinema – but the great-granddaddy of them all is surely the 1945 classic from Britain’s Ealing Studios – Dead of Night.
Mervyn Johns, the eternal Everyman, plays Walter Craig, a restoration expert whose newest project – a provincial manor called “Pilgrim’s...
- 7/9/2019
- by Charlie Largent
- Trailers from Hell
July 9th is bringing all kinds of horror-rific awesomeness our way with this week’s genre-related Blu-ray and DVD releases. Easily one of my most anticipated discs of this year, the new Silent Hill Collector’s Edition from Scream Factory heads home on Tuesday as well as Mill Creek’s stunning Steelbook for Mothra, which looks to be a must-have for any movie monster aficionados out there. In terms of recent films, both Pet Sematary (2019) and Claire Denis’ High Life are hitting various formats this week, and for you Andy Sidaris fans out there, Savage Beach is hitting Blu-ray as well.
Other releases for July 9th include Dead of Night, Division 19, This Island Earth, and Waterworld in 4K.
Dead of Night
A group of strangers, mysteriously gathered at an isolated country estate, recount chilling tales of the supernatural. First, a racer survives a brush with death only to receive...
Other releases for July 9th include Dead of Night, Division 19, This Island Earth, and Waterworld in 4K.
Dead of Night
A group of strangers, mysteriously gathered at an isolated country estate, recount chilling tales of the supernatural. First, a racer survives a brush with death only to receive...
- 7/8/2019
- by Heather Wixson
- DailyDead
Anthology films are almost by definition a mixed bag, and even when one of their sort garners strong critical acclaim, as the Coen Brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs did last November, most reactions end up settling into a “this story is better than this story” sort of comparison game. Horror anthologies tend to be even more wildly variant in quality within their individual films, and British production company Amicus Films released a string of them in the ‘60s to mid ‘70s– titles like Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, And Now the Screaming Starts, The House That Dripped Blood, Asylum and Tales That Witness Madness were a real hit-or-miss selection, with Amicus scoring highest when they adapted EC Comics stories into their big hits Tales from the Crypt (1972) and the follow-up Vault of Horror (1973).
But probably the best horror anthologies—Dead of Night (1945), an atypically creepy release from Britain’s Ealing Studios,...
But probably the best horror anthologies—Dead of Night (1945), an atypically creepy release from Britain’s Ealing Studios,...
- 3/31/2019
- by Dennis Cozzalio
- Trailers from Hell
William Goldman, the screenwriter best known for penning “All the President’s Men” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” has died at age 87. According to Deadline, Goldman’s health had been failing for sometime and he passed away surrounded by friends and family in his Manhattan home. Goldman started his career as a novelist before making the jump to screenwriter with the script for Basil Dearden’s 1965 comedy-thriller “Masquerade.”
“All The President’s Men” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” are widely considered to be Goldman’s greatest screenwriting achievements. “Butch Cassidy,” featuring the iconic pairing of Robert Redford and Paul Newman, won Goldman the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay at the 42nd Academy Awards. Goldman won over scripts for “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Two for the Road” that year. He earned his second Oscar for “All The President’s Men,” which won Best Adapted Screenplay at the...
“All The President’s Men” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” are widely considered to be Goldman’s greatest screenwriting achievements. “Butch Cassidy,” featuring the iconic pairing of Robert Redford and Paul Newman, won Goldman the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay at the 42nd Academy Awards. Goldman won over scripts for “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Two for the Road” that year. He earned his second Oscar for “All The President’s Men,” which won Best Adapted Screenplay at the...
- 11/16/2018
- by Zack Sharf
- Indiewire
No, not the 1982 Barbra Streisand movie (which come to think of it might be equally unfamiliar), but Basil Dearden’s sadly obscure 1962 British drama which received a barely noticeable Us release a year later from the tiny Colorama Features. A mouth-wateringly rare assembly of jazz greats is on display jamming it up behind the histrionics in this unusual jazzploitation update of Othello.
- 4/11/2018
- by TFH Team
- Trailers from Hell
Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. John Schlesinger's Billy Liar (1963) is playing July 16 - August 15, 2017 in the United States as part of the series John Schlesinger's First Masterpieces.Billy Fisher, a cheerful twenty-something lad from Yorkshire, is going to have a great future. For now, he only has a small office position in his dull small city, but Billy has already landed a job in London writing for a popular TV comedian. He is also working on a novel that soon enough will bring him fame and fortune. He is also engaged to a girl. Actually, two girls. And he doesn’t really want to marry any of them. Also, the TV star doesn’t really know that Billy exists. And he hasn’t started on the novel. Billy just has a vivid imagination and speaks before he thinks—some people prefer to call it compulsive lying.
- 7/24/2017
- MUBI
Dirk Bogarde’s elegant, sensitive portrayal of a man coming to terms with being gay played a vital role in the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality
Basil Dearden’s icily brilliant mystery thriller Victim from 1961 is now rereleased in cinemas, linked to the Gross Indecency season at BFI Southbank, London. Dirk Bogarde is the barrister Melville Farr, haunted by his (unconsummated) gay desires – this in an era when gay sex was illegal – and threatened by a sinister blackmail ring. The other blackmail victims include a stage star played by Dennis Price, who was himself a gay man in that shabby, hypocritical age. In the bankruptcy court, Price claimed his money worries stemmed from gambling, though paying off blackmailers was another possible explanation.
Related: Peter McEnery on Victim: 'I got a lot of letters from the gay community saying: We all thank you’
Continue reading...
Basil Dearden’s icily brilliant mystery thriller Victim from 1961 is now rereleased in cinemas, linked to the Gross Indecency season at BFI Southbank, London. Dirk Bogarde is the barrister Melville Farr, haunted by his (unconsummated) gay desires – this in an era when gay sex was illegal – and threatened by a sinister blackmail ring. The other blackmail victims include a stage star played by Dennis Price, who was himself a gay man in that shabby, hypocritical age. In the bankruptcy court, Price claimed his money worries stemmed from gambling, though paying off blackmailers was another possible explanation.
Related: Peter McEnery on Victim: 'I got a lot of letters from the gay community saying: We all thank you’
Continue reading...
- 7/20/2017
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Mark Allison Aug 3, 2017
The late, wonderful Roger Moore will always be remembered for Bond, but The Man Who Haunted Himself might just be his best performance...
When Sir Roger Moore sadly passed away earlier this year, accounts of his life and career understandably focused on his seven spectacular outings as James Bond 007. Personally, I rewatched The Spy Who Loved Me for the 75th time, basking once again in his effortless charm and flawlessly tailored leisure suits.
See related Arrow season 5 finale: John Barrowman reacts Arrow exclusive: Kevin Smith talks Onomatopoeia
Of his career outside the Bond franchise, many obituaries focused on his early television work in The Saint and The Persuaders!, in which he played similarly suave, elegantly dressed adventurers. But despite his own self-deprecation, Roger Moore’s acting abilities were more varied than one is often led to believe. His career extended far beyond the eyebrow-raising antics of the Bond films,...
The late, wonderful Roger Moore will always be remembered for Bond, but The Man Who Haunted Himself might just be his best performance...
When Sir Roger Moore sadly passed away earlier this year, accounts of his life and career understandably focused on his seven spectacular outings as James Bond 007. Personally, I rewatched The Spy Who Loved Me for the 75th time, basking once again in his effortless charm and flawlessly tailored leisure suits.
See related Arrow season 5 finale: John Barrowman reacts Arrow exclusive: Kevin Smith talks Onomatopoeia
Of his career outside the Bond franchise, many obituaries focused on his early television work in The Saint and The Persuaders!, in which he played similarly suave, elegantly dressed adventurers. But despite his own self-deprecation, Roger Moore’s acting abilities were more varied than one is often led to believe. His career extended far beyond the eyebrow-raising antics of the Bond films,...
- 7/12/2017
- Den of Geek
On the day a U.S. appeals court lifted an injunction that blocked a Mississippi “religious freedom” law – i.e., giving Christian extremists the right to discriminate against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender people, etc. – not to mention the publication of a Republican-backed health care bill targeting the poor, the sick, the elderly, and those with “pre-existing conditions” – which would include HIV-infected people, a large chunk of whom are gay and bisexual men, so the wealthy in the U.S. can get a massive tax cut, Turner Classic Movies' 2017 Gay Pride or Lgbt Month celebration continues (into tomorrow morning, Thursday & Friday, June 22–23) with the presentation of movies by or featuring an eclectic – though seemingly all male – group: Montgomery Clift, Anthony Perkins, Tab Hunter, Dirk Bogarde, John Schlesinger, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Arthur Laurents, and Jerome Robbins. After all, one assumes that, rumors or no, the presence of Mercedes McCambridge in one...
- 6/23/2017
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Stars: Will Hay, Charles Hawtrey, Peter Croft, Barry Morse, Peter Ustinov, Anne Firth, Frank Pettingell, Leslie Harcourt, Julien Mitchell, Jeremy Hawk, Raymond Lovell | Written by Angus MacPhail, John Dighton | Directed by Basil Dearden, Will Hay
I always enjoy reviewing re-releases of old films, they remind us – and in some cases introduce us to – some classics. One such release is The Goose Steps Out which is getting a special 75th Anniversary release, and is a comedy great from the 1940s…
Will Hay plays William Pots, a bumbling teacher who turns out to be the double of a German general. Sent to Germany to impersonate the general and steal a new bomb the Nazis are working on, he finds himself having to teach a group of students how to spy on the British.
Watching The Goose Steps Out it is easy to see this was a piece of propaganda used to...
I always enjoy reviewing re-releases of old films, they remind us – and in some cases introduce us to – some classics. One such release is The Goose Steps Out which is getting a special 75th Anniversary release, and is a comedy great from the 1940s…
Will Hay plays William Pots, a bumbling teacher who turns out to be the double of a German general. Sent to Germany to impersonate the general and steal a new bomb the Nazis are working on, he finds himself having to teach a group of students how to spy on the British.
Watching The Goose Steps Out it is easy to see this was a piece of propaganda used to...
- 5/19/2017
- by Paul Metcalf
- Nerdly
Author: Paul Risker
While much of the significance of Basil Dearden’s The Blue Lamp derives from its status as the first of the British Police films, in as much as it is entrenched in film history, it is also entrenched within British social history. Its identity is therefore a dual one, its cinematic and social roots that are intertwined reaching deep into the past.
Scripted by ex-Policeman T.E.B Clarke that lends the film a sense of authenticity the film captures a snapshot of the post-war angst of the destabilisation of the family and the rise of the young delinquent that saw an increase in violent crime. Together these two factors conspired to create a film that not only contributed a new genre to British cinema, but also reflected on the woes of post-war London. Sixty-six years on from its release, this social self-reflexivity of the society it...
While much of the significance of Basil Dearden’s The Blue Lamp derives from its status as the first of the British Police films, in as much as it is entrenched in film history, it is also entrenched within British social history. Its identity is therefore a dual one, its cinematic and social roots that are intertwined reaching deep into the past.
Scripted by ex-Policeman T.E.B Clarke that lends the film a sense of authenticity the film captures a snapshot of the post-war angst of the destabilisation of the family and the rise of the young delinquent that saw an increase in violent crime. Together these two factors conspired to create a film that not only contributed a new genre to British cinema, but also reflected on the woes of post-war London. Sixty-six years on from its release, this social self-reflexivity of the society it...
- 12/16/2016
- by Paul Risker
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
UK film industry veteran was the founding CEO of British Screen and chairman of BAFTA; his credits included Comrades [pictured].
Respected UK producer and film industry figure Simon Relph has died at age 76.
The British Academy of Film & Television Arts (BAFTA), of which Relph was a former chairman, announced it was saddened to hear of his death.
We are deeply saddened to learn that filmmaker and former Chair of BAFTA Simon Relph has passed away pic.twitter.com/jNkg2XuUku
— BAFTA (@BAFTA) October 31, 2016
Relph was born into cinema. He was the son of the prolific art designer, producer and writer Michael Relph, best known for his long-time collaboration with UK director Basil Dearden, and grandson of the celebrated English actor George Relph, a star of the stage and big screen.
At the time of his birth in 1940, his father was an art director at Ealing Studios, an activity which would eventually expand into producing and some 30 credits including...
Respected UK producer and film industry figure Simon Relph has died at age 76.
The British Academy of Film & Television Arts (BAFTA), of which Relph was a former chairman, announced it was saddened to hear of his death.
We are deeply saddened to learn that filmmaker and former Chair of BAFTA Simon Relph has passed away pic.twitter.com/jNkg2XuUku
— BAFTA (@BAFTA) October 31, 2016
Relph was born into cinema. He was the son of the prolific art designer, producer and writer Michael Relph, best known for his long-time collaboration with UK director Basil Dearden, and grandson of the celebrated English actor George Relph, a star of the stage and big screen.
At the time of his birth in 1940, his father was an art director at Ealing Studios, an activity which would eventually expand into producing and some 30 credits including...
- 10/31/2016
- ScreenDaily
By Adrian Smith
William Blood (Kenneth More) is a man with an incredible immune system and without worries. He spends most of his time working as a human guinea pig for government departments such as the Common Cold and Flu Research Agency. There he frustrates the men in white coats by stubbornly refusing to catch a cold. He never gets ill, and his secret is that he has no emotional attachments. “The minute you get into a relationship with a woman, your guard is down and the coughing will start!” News of this remarkable constitution gets to the scientists at N.A.A.R.S.T.I., the National Atomic Research Station and Technological Institute, who are preparing to send the first maned rocket to the moon. They have previously sent up dogs and monkeys, but owing to public complaints about cruelty to animals, they have decided it would be...
William Blood (Kenneth More) is a man with an incredible immune system and without worries. He spends most of his time working as a human guinea pig for government departments such as the Common Cold and Flu Research Agency. There he frustrates the men in white coats by stubbornly refusing to catch a cold. He never gets ill, and his secret is that he has no emotional attachments. “The minute you get into a relationship with a woman, your guard is down and the coughing will start!” News of this remarkable constitution gets to the scientists at N.A.A.R.S.T.I., the National Atomic Research Station and Technological Institute, who are preparing to send the first maned rocket to the moon. They have previously sent up dogs and monkeys, but owing to public complaints about cruelty to animals, they have decided it would be...
- 10/30/2016
- by nospam@example.com (Cinema Retro)
- Cinemaretro.com
To celebrate a brand new restoration of the 1951 Ealing classic Pool Of London on Blu-Ray, DVD & Est, Studiocanal are supplying 3 copies of the Blu-Ray to give away to some lucky winners. Directed by Basil Dearden (The Blue Lamp; Dead of Night) and starring Bonar Colleano (Dance Hall; The Man Inside) and legendary Earl Cameron Cbe (Sapphire; Thunderball), […]
The post Win Pool of London on Blu-ray appeared first on HeyUGuys.
The post Win Pool of London on Blu-ray appeared first on HeyUGuys.
- 10/25/2016
- by Competitions
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
The delightful British comedy The Smallest Show on Earth headlines a great Saturday matinee offering from the UCLA Film and Television Archive on June 25 as their excellent series “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing” wraps up. So it seemed like a perfect time to resurrect my review of the movie, which celebrates the collective experience of seeing cinema in a darkened, and in this case dilapidated old auditorium, alongside my appreciation of my own hometown movie house, the Alger, which opened in 1940 and closed last year, one more victim of economics and the move toward digital distribution and exhibition.
*******************************
“You mean to tell me my uncle actually charged people to go in there? And people actually paid?” –Matt Spenser (Bill Travers) upon first seeing the condition of the Bijou Kinema, in The Smallest Show on Earth
In Basil Dearden’s charming and wistful 1957 British comedy The Smallest Show on Earth (also...
*******************************
“You mean to tell me my uncle actually charged people to go in there? And people actually paid?” –Matt Spenser (Bill Travers) upon first seeing the condition of the Bijou Kinema, in The Smallest Show on Earth
In Basil Dearden’s charming and wistful 1957 British comedy The Smallest Show on Earth (also...
- 6/18/2016
- by Dennis Cozzalio
- Trailers from Hell
“We used to go to the movies. Now we want the movies to come to us, on our televisions, tablets and phones, as streams running into an increasingly unnavigable ocean of media. The dispersal of movie watching across technologies and contexts follows the multiplexing of movie theaters, itself a fragmenting of the single screen theater where movie love was first concentrated and consecrated. (But even in the “good old days,” movies were often only part of an evening’s entertainment that came complete with vaudeville acts and bank nights). For all this, moviegoing still means what it always meant, joining a community, forming an audience and participating in a collective dream.” –
From the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s programming notes for its current series, “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing”
Currently under way at the Billy Wilder Theater inside the Armand Hammer Museum in Westwood, the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s far-reaching and fascinating series “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing” takes sharp aim at an overview of how the movies themselves have portrayed the act of going out to see movies during these years of seismic change in the way we see them. What’s best about the collection of films curated for the series is its scope, which sweeps along from the anything-goes exhibition of the silent era, on through an examination of the opulent era of grandiose movie palaces and post-war audience predilection for exploitation pictures, and straight into an era—ours—of a certain nostalgia for the ways we used to exclusively gather in dark places to watch visions jump out at us from the big screen. (That nostalgia, as it turns out, is often colored by a rear-view perspective on the times which contextualizes it and sometimes gives it a bitter tinge.) As the program notes for the Marquee Movies series puts it, whether you’re an American moviegoer or one from France, Italy, Argentina or Taiwan, “the current sense of loss at the passing of an exhibition era takes its place in the ongoing history of cultural and industrial transformation reflected in these films.”
The series took its inaugural bow last Friday night with a rare 35mm screening of Matinee (1993), director Joe Dante and screenwriter Charlie Haas’s vividly imagined tribute to movie love during a time in Us history which lazy writers frequently like to describe as “the point when America lost its innocence” or some other such silliness. For Americans, and for a whole lot of other people the world over, those days in 1962 during what would come to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis felt more like days when something a whole lot more tangible than “innocence” was about to be lost, what with the Us and Russia being on the brink of nuclear confrontation and all. The movie lays down this undercurrent of fear and uncertainty as the foundation which tints its main action, that of the arrival of exploitation movie impresario Laurence Woolsey (John Goodman, channeling producer and gimmick maestro William Castle) to Key West, Florida, to promote his latest shock show, Mant!, on the very weekend that American troops set to sea, ready to fire on Russian missile installments a mere 90 miles away in Cuba.
Woolsey’s hardly worried that his potential audience will be distracted the specter of annihilation; in fact, he’s energized by it, convinced that the free-floating anxiety will translate into box office dollars contributed by nervous kids and adults looking for a safe and scary good time, a disposal cinematic depository for all their worst fears. And it certainly doesn’t matter that Woolsey’s movie is a corny sci-fi absurdity-- all the better for his particular brand of enhancements. Mant!, a lovingly sculpted mash-up of 1950s hits like The Fly and Them!, benefits from “Atomo-vision,” which incorporates variants of Castle innovations like Emergo and Percepto, as well as “Rumble-rama,” a very crude precursor to Universal’s Oscar-winning Sensurround system. The movie’s Saturday afternoon screening is where Dante and Haas really let loose their tickled and twisted imaginations, with the help of Woolsey’s theatrical enhancements.
Leading up to the fearful and farcical unleashing of Mant!, Dante stages a beautifully understated sequence that moved me to tears when I saw it with my daughters last Friday night at the Billy Wilder Theater. Matinee is seen primarily through the eyes of young Gene Loomis (Simon Fenton), a military kid whose dad is among those waiting it out on nuclear-armed boats pointed in the direction of Cuba. Gene is a monster-movie nerd (and a clear stand-in for Dante, Haas and just about anybody—like me—whose primary biblical text was provided not by that fella in the burning bush but instead by Forrest J. Ackerman within the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland), and he manages to worm his way into Woolsey’s good graces as the producer prepares the local theater to show his picture. At one point he walks down the street in the company of the larger-than-life producer, who starts talking about his inspirations and why he makes the sort of movies he does:
“A zillion years ago, a guy’s living in a cave,” Woolsey expounds. “He goes out one day—Bam! He gets chased by a mammoth. Now, he’s scared to death, but he gets away. And when it’s all over with, he feels great.”
Gene, eager to believe but also to understand, responds quizzically-- “Well, yeah, ‘cause he’s still living.”
“Yeah, but he knows he is, and he feels it,” Woolsey counters. “So he goes home, back to the cave. First thing he does, he does a drawing of a mammoth.” (At this point the brick wall which the two of them are passing becomes a blank screen onto which Woolsey conjures an animated behemoth that entrances Gene and us.) Woolsey continues:
“He thinks, ‘People are coming to see this. Let’s make it good. Let’s make the teeth real long and the eyes real mean.’ Boom! The first monster movie. That’s probably why I still do it. You make the teeth as big as you want, then you kill it off, everything’s okay, the lights come up,” Woolsey concludes, ending his illustrative fantasy with a sigh.
But that’s not all, folks. At this point, Dante cuts to a Steadicam shot as it moves into the lobby hall of that Key West theater, past posters of Hatari!, Lonely are the Brave, Six Black Horses and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. The tracking shot continues up the stairs, letting us get a really close look at the worn, perhaps pungent carpet, most likely the same rug that was laid down when the theater opened 30 or so years earlier, into the snack bar area, then glides over to the closed swinging doors leading into the auditorium, while Woolsey continues:
“You see, the people come into your cave with the 200-year-old carpet, the guy tears your ticket in half—it’s too late to turn back now. The water fountain’s all booby-trapped and ready, the stuff laid out on the candy counter. Then you come over here to where it’s dark-- there could be anything in there—and you say, ‘Here I am. What have you got for me?’”
Forget nostalgia for a style of moviegoing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more compact, evocative and heartfelt tribute to the space in which we used to see movies than those couple of minutes in Matinee. The shot and the narration work so vividly together that I swear I could whiff the must underlying that carpet, papered over lovingly with the smell of popcorn wafting through the confined space of that tiny snack bar, just as if I was a kid again myself, wandering into the friendly confines of the Alger Theater in Lakeview, Oregon (More on that place next week.)
Dante’s movie is a romp, no doubt, but its nostalgia is a heartier variety than what we usually get, and it leaves us with an undercurrent of uneasiness that is unusual for a genre most enough content to look back through amber. Woolsey’s words resonate for every youngster who has searched for reasons to explain their attraction to the scary side of cinema and memories of the places where those images were first encountered, but in Matinee there’s another terror with which to contend, one not so easily held at bay.
Of course the real world monster of the movie— the bomb— was also, during that weekend in 1962 and in Matinee’s representation of the missile crisis, “killed off,” making “everything okay.” But Dante makes us understand that while calm has been momentarily restored, something deeper has been forever disturbed. The movie acknowledges the societal disarray which was already under way in Vietnam, and the American South, and only months away from spilling out from Dallas and onto the greater American landscape in a way so much less containable than even the radiative effects of a single cataclysmic event. That awareness leaves Matinee with a sorrowful aftertaste that is hard to shake. The movie’s last image, of our two main characters gathered on the beach, greeting helicopters that are flying home from having hovered at the precipice of nuclear destruction, is one of relief for familial unity restored—Gene is, after all, getting his dad back. But it’s also one of foreboding. Dante leaves us with an extreme close-up of a copter looming into frame, absent even the context of the sky, bearing down on us like a real-life mutant creature, an eerie bellwether of political and societal chaos yet to come as a stout companion to the movie’s general air of celebratory remembrance.
***************************************
The “Marquee Movies” series has already seen Matinee (last Friday night), Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) paired with Polish director Wojciech Marczewski’s 1990 Escape from Liberty Island (last Saturday night), and Ettore Scola’s masterful Splendor (1989), which screened last Sunday night.
But there’s plenty more to come. Sunday, June 12, the archive series unveils a double bill of Lloyd Bacon’s Footlight Parade (1933) with the less well-known This Way, Please (1937), a terrific tale of a star-struck movie theater usherette with dreams of singing and dancing just like the stars she idolizes, starring Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers, Betty Grable, Jim Jordan, Marian Jordan and the brilliantly grizzled Ned Sparks.
Wednesday, June 15, you can see Uruguay’s A Useful Life (2010), in which a movie theater manager in Montevideo faces up the fact that the days of his beloved movie theater are numbered, paired up with Luc Moullet’s droll account of the feud between the French film journals Cahiers du Cinema and Positif, entitled The Seats of the Alcazar (1989).
One of my favorites, Tsai Ming-liang’s haunting Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) gets a rare projection at the Wilder on Sunday, June 19, along with Lisandsro Alonzo’s Fantasma (2006), described by the archive as “a hypnotic commentary on cinematic rituals and presence.”
Friday, June 24, you can see, if you dare, Lamberto Bava’s gory meta-horror film Demons (1985) and then stay for Bigas Luna’s similarly twisted treatise on the movies and voyeurism, 1987’s Anguish.
Saturday afternoon, June 25, “Marquee Movies” presents a rare screening of Gregory La Cava’s hilarious slapstick spoof of rural moviegoing, His Nibs (1921), paired up with what I consider, alongside Matinee and Goodbye, Dragon Inn, one of the real jewels of the series, Basil Dearden’s marvelously funny The Smallest Show on Earth (1957), all about what happens when a newlywed couple inherits a rundown cinema populated by a staff of eccentrics that include Margaret Rutherford and Peter Sellers. (More on that one next week.)
And the series concludes on Sunday, June 26, with a screening of the original 174-minute director’s cut of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988).
(Each program also features a variety of moviegoing-oriented shorts, trailers and other surprises. Click the individual links for details and show times.)
******************************************
(Next week: My review of The Smallest Show on Earth and a remembrance of my own hometown movie theater, which closed in 2015.)
*******************************************
Later this year Matinee will be released by Universal in the U.S. (details to come) and by Arrow Films in the UK (with a nifty assortment of extras).
From the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s programming notes for its current series, “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing”
Currently under way at the Billy Wilder Theater inside the Armand Hammer Museum in Westwood, the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s far-reaching and fascinating series “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing” takes sharp aim at an overview of how the movies themselves have portrayed the act of going out to see movies during these years of seismic change in the way we see them. What’s best about the collection of films curated for the series is its scope, which sweeps along from the anything-goes exhibition of the silent era, on through an examination of the opulent era of grandiose movie palaces and post-war audience predilection for exploitation pictures, and straight into an era—ours—of a certain nostalgia for the ways we used to exclusively gather in dark places to watch visions jump out at us from the big screen. (That nostalgia, as it turns out, is often colored by a rear-view perspective on the times which contextualizes it and sometimes gives it a bitter tinge.) As the program notes for the Marquee Movies series puts it, whether you’re an American moviegoer or one from France, Italy, Argentina or Taiwan, “the current sense of loss at the passing of an exhibition era takes its place in the ongoing history of cultural and industrial transformation reflected in these films.”
The series took its inaugural bow last Friday night with a rare 35mm screening of Matinee (1993), director Joe Dante and screenwriter Charlie Haas’s vividly imagined tribute to movie love during a time in Us history which lazy writers frequently like to describe as “the point when America lost its innocence” or some other such silliness. For Americans, and for a whole lot of other people the world over, those days in 1962 during what would come to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis felt more like days when something a whole lot more tangible than “innocence” was about to be lost, what with the Us and Russia being on the brink of nuclear confrontation and all. The movie lays down this undercurrent of fear and uncertainty as the foundation which tints its main action, that of the arrival of exploitation movie impresario Laurence Woolsey (John Goodman, channeling producer and gimmick maestro William Castle) to Key West, Florida, to promote his latest shock show, Mant!, on the very weekend that American troops set to sea, ready to fire on Russian missile installments a mere 90 miles away in Cuba.
Woolsey’s hardly worried that his potential audience will be distracted the specter of annihilation; in fact, he’s energized by it, convinced that the free-floating anxiety will translate into box office dollars contributed by nervous kids and adults looking for a safe and scary good time, a disposal cinematic depository for all their worst fears. And it certainly doesn’t matter that Woolsey’s movie is a corny sci-fi absurdity-- all the better for his particular brand of enhancements. Mant!, a lovingly sculpted mash-up of 1950s hits like The Fly and Them!, benefits from “Atomo-vision,” which incorporates variants of Castle innovations like Emergo and Percepto, as well as “Rumble-rama,” a very crude precursor to Universal’s Oscar-winning Sensurround system. The movie’s Saturday afternoon screening is where Dante and Haas really let loose their tickled and twisted imaginations, with the help of Woolsey’s theatrical enhancements.
Leading up to the fearful and farcical unleashing of Mant!, Dante stages a beautifully understated sequence that moved me to tears when I saw it with my daughters last Friday night at the Billy Wilder Theater. Matinee is seen primarily through the eyes of young Gene Loomis (Simon Fenton), a military kid whose dad is among those waiting it out on nuclear-armed boats pointed in the direction of Cuba. Gene is a monster-movie nerd (and a clear stand-in for Dante, Haas and just about anybody—like me—whose primary biblical text was provided not by that fella in the burning bush but instead by Forrest J. Ackerman within the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland), and he manages to worm his way into Woolsey’s good graces as the producer prepares the local theater to show his picture. At one point he walks down the street in the company of the larger-than-life producer, who starts talking about his inspirations and why he makes the sort of movies he does:
“A zillion years ago, a guy’s living in a cave,” Woolsey expounds. “He goes out one day—Bam! He gets chased by a mammoth. Now, he’s scared to death, but he gets away. And when it’s all over with, he feels great.”
Gene, eager to believe but also to understand, responds quizzically-- “Well, yeah, ‘cause he’s still living.”
“Yeah, but he knows he is, and he feels it,” Woolsey counters. “So he goes home, back to the cave. First thing he does, he does a drawing of a mammoth.” (At this point the brick wall which the two of them are passing becomes a blank screen onto which Woolsey conjures an animated behemoth that entrances Gene and us.) Woolsey continues:
“He thinks, ‘People are coming to see this. Let’s make it good. Let’s make the teeth real long and the eyes real mean.’ Boom! The first monster movie. That’s probably why I still do it. You make the teeth as big as you want, then you kill it off, everything’s okay, the lights come up,” Woolsey concludes, ending his illustrative fantasy with a sigh.
But that’s not all, folks. At this point, Dante cuts to a Steadicam shot as it moves into the lobby hall of that Key West theater, past posters of Hatari!, Lonely are the Brave, Six Black Horses and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. The tracking shot continues up the stairs, letting us get a really close look at the worn, perhaps pungent carpet, most likely the same rug that was laid down when the theater opened 30 or so years earlier, into the snack bar area, then glides over to the closed swinging doors leading into the auditorium, while Woolsey continues:
“You see, the people come into your cave with the 200-year-old carpet, the guy tears your ticket in half—it’s too late to turn back now. The water fountain’s all booby-trapped and ready, the stuff laid out on the candy counter. Then you come over here to where it’s dark-- there could be anything in there—and you say, ‘Here I am. What have you got for me?’”
Forget nostalgia for a style of moviegoing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more compact, evocative and heartfelt tribute to the space in which we used to see movies than those couple of minutes in Matinee. The shot and the narration work so vividly together that I swear I could whiff the must underlying that carpet, papered over lovingly with the smell of popcorn wafting through the confined space of that tiny snack bar, just as if I was a kid again myself, wandering into the friendly confines of the Alger Theater in Lakeview, Oregon (More on that place next week.)
Dante’s movie is a romp, no doubt, but its nostalgia is a heartier variety than what we usually get, and it leaves us with an undercurrent of uneasiness that is unusual for a genre most enough content to look back through amber. Woolsey’s words resonate for every youngster who has searched for reasons to explain their attraction to the scary side of cinema and memories of the places where those images were first encountered, but in Matinee there’s another terror with which to contend, one not so easily held at bay.
Of course the real world monster of the movie— the bomb— was also, during that weekend in 1962 and in Matinee’s representation of the missile crisis, “killed off,” making “everything okay.” But Dante makes us understand that while calm has been momentarily restored, something deeper has been forever disturbed. The movie acknowledges the societal disarray which was already under way in Vietnam, and the American South, and only months away from spilling out from Dallas and onto the greater American landscape in a way so much less containable than even the radiative effects of a single cataclysmic event. That awareness leaves Matinee with a sorrowful aftertaste that is hard to shake. The movie’s last image, of our two main characters gathered on the beach, greeting helicopters that are flying home from having hovered at the precipice of nuclear destruction, is one of relief for familial unity restored—Gene is, after all, getting his dad back. But it’s also one of foreboding. Dante leaves us with an extreme close-up of a copter looming into frame, absent even the context of the sky, bearing down on us like a real-life mutant creature, an eerie bellwether of political and societal chaos yet to come as a stout companion to the movie’s general air of celebratory remembrance.
***************************************
The “Marquee Movies” series has already seen Matinee (last Friday night), Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) paired with Polish director Wojciech Marczewski’s 1990 Escape from Liberty Island (last Saturday night), and Ettore Scola’s masterful Splendor (1989), which screened last Sunday night.
But there’s plenty more to come. Sunday, June 12, the archive series unveils a double bill of Lloyd Bacon’s Footlight Parade (1933) with the less well-known This Way, Please (1937), a terrific tale of a star-struck movie theater usherette with dreams of singing and dancing just like the stars she idolizes, starring Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers, Betty Grable, Jim Jordan, Marian Jordan and the brilliantly grizzled Ned Sparks.
Wednesday, June 15, you can see Uruguay’s A Useful Life (2010), in which a movie theater manager in Montevideo faces up the fact that the days of his beloved movie theater are numbered, paired up with Luc Moullet’s droll account of the feud between the French film journals Cahiers du Cinema and Positif, entitled The Seats of the Alcazar (1989).
One of my favorites, Tsai Ming-liang’s haunting Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) gets a rare projection at the Wilder on Sunday, June 19, along with Lisandsro Alonzo’s Fantasma (2006), described by the archive as “a hypnotic commentary on cinematic rituals and presence.”
Friday, June 24, you can see, if you dare, Lamberto Bava’s gory meta-horror film Demons (1985) and then stay for Bigas Luna’s similarly twisted treatise on the movies and voyeurism, 1987’s Anguish.
Saturday afternoon, June 25, “Marquee Movies” presents a rare screening of Gregory La Cava’s hilarious slapstick spoof of rural moviegoing, His Nibs (1921), paired up with what I consider, alongside Matinee and Goodbye, Dragon Inn, one of the real jewels of the series, Basil Dearden’s marvelously funny The Smallest Show on Earth (1957), all about what happens when a newlywed couple inherits a rundown cinema populated by a staff of eccentrics that include Margaret Rutherford and Peter Sellers. (More on that one next week.)
And the series concludes on Sunday, June 26, with a screening of the original 174-minute director’s cut of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988).
(Each program also features a variety of moviegoing-oriented shorts, trailers and other surprises. Click the individual links for details and show times.)
******************************************
(Next week: My review of The Smallest Show on Earth and a remembrance of my own hometown movie theater, which closed in 2015.)
*******************************************
Later this year Matinee will be released by Universal in the U.S. (details to come) and by Arrow Films in the UK (with a nifty assortment of extras).
- 6/11/2016
- by Dennis Cozzalio
- Trailers from Hell
“Todd Haynes‘ filmography is often overwhelming in its intellectual acumen and emotional devastation,” we noted upon the release of his latest film this past fall. “This is true of Carol, which is at once a return to the deconstruction of femininity, social mores, and mild anarchy of privilege, as well as an honest and heartbreaking story about falling in love and the trepidation therein.” Over 100 film experts, ranging from critics to writers to programmers, agree on the emotional power of the drama, as they’ve voted it the best Lgbt film of all-time.
Conducted by BFI ahead of the 30th BFI Flare: London Lgbt Film Festival, they note this is the “first major critical survey of Lgbt films.” Speaking about leading the poll, Haynes said, “I’m so proud to have Carol voted as the top Lgbt film of all time in this poll launched for the Fest’s 30th edition.
Conducted by BFI ahead of the 30th BFI Flare: London Lgbt Film Festival, they note this is the “first major critical survey of Lgbt films.” Speaking about leading the poll, Haynes said, “I’m so proud to have Carol voted as the top Lgbt film of all time in this poll launched for the Fest’s 30th edition.
- 3/15/2016
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
To mark the release of The Captive Heart on 4th January, we’ve been given 3 copies to give away on DVD. Produced by Ealing Studios, starring Michael Redgrave and his wife Rachel Kempson and directed by Basil Dearden mere months after the end of the war, The Captive Heart is one of the first films
The post Win The Captive Heart on DVD appeared first on HeyUGuys.
The post Win The Captive Heart on DVD appeared first on HeyUGuys.
- 1/4/2016
- by Competitions
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
Each week, the fine folks at Fandor add a number of films to their Criterion Picks area, which will then be available to subscribers for the following twelve days. This week, the Criterion Picks focus on 8 mystery films.
Secrets, lies, clues and questionable motives: follow these films as they insist on (or resist) throwing light on the dark corners of human nature.
Don’t have a Fandor subscription? They offer a free trial membership.
Confidentially Yours, the French Crime film by François Truffaut
When a real estate agent is framed for the murders of his wife and her lover, it is up to his faithful secretary to solve the mystery.
The Element of Crime, the Danish Crime film by Lars von Trier
Lars von Trier’s stunning debut film is the story of Fisher, an exiled ex-cop who returns to his old beat to catch a serial killer with a taste for young girls.
Secrets, lies, clues and questionable motives: follow these films as they insist on (or resist) throwing light on the dark corners of human nature.
Don’t have a Fandor subscription? They offer a free trial membership.
Confidentially Yours, the French Crime film by François Truffaut
When a real estate agent is framed for the murders of his wife and her lover, it is up to his faithful secretary to solve the mystery.
The Element of Crime, the Danish Crime film by Lars von Trier
Lars von Trier’s stunning debut film is the story of Fisher, an exiled ex-cop who returns to his old beat to catch a serial killer with a taste for young girls.
- 12/8/2015
- by Ryan Gallagher
- CriterionCast
(Alexander Mackendrick, 1955; StudioCanal, U, DVD/Blu-ray)
Ealing Studio’s two greatest directors, Robert Hamer and Alexander Mackendrick, both made near flawless black comedies on the state of the nation starring Alec Guinness and involving multiple murders, and there is little to choose between the former’s Kind Hearts and Coronets and the latter’s The Ladykillers, a special edition of which is being released this week to mark its 60th anniversary.
The heist (or caper) movie began with The Great Train Robbery in 1903, and enjoyed its classic decade in America and Europe between John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Basil Dearden’s The League of Gentlemen (1960). The greatest comic example is The Ladykillers.
Continue reading...
Ealing Studio’s two greatest directors, Robert Hamer and Alexander Mackendrick, both made near flawless black comedies on the state of the nation starring Alec Guinness and involving multiple murders, and there is little to choose between the former’s Kind Hearts and Coronets and the latter’s The Ladykillers, a special edition of which is being released this week to mark its 60th anniversary.
The heist (or caper) movie began with The Great Train Robbery in 1903, and enjoyed its classic decade in America and Europe between John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Basil Dearden’s The League of Gentlemen (1960). The greatest comic example is The Ladykillers.
Continue reading...
- 10/25/2015
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Special Mention: Misery
Directed by Rob Reiner
Screenplay by William Goldman
1990, USA
Genre: Thriller
Elevated by standout performances from James Caan and Kathy Bates, Misery remains one of the best Stephen King adaptations to date. Director Rob Reiner is clearly more interested in the dark humour and humanity than the gory detail in King’s novel, but make no mistake about it, Misery is a tough watch soaked in sharp dialogue, a brooding atmosphere, and disturbing bodily harm inflicted on James Caan by sweet old Kathy Bates. I can still feel his pain.
129. Black Sabbath (Three Faces of Fear)
Mario Bava and Salvatore Billitteri
Written by Ennio De Concini and Mario Serandrei
Italy 1960 / Italy 1963
Genre: Horror Anthology
Not to be confused with Black Sunday, Black Sabbath is a horror anthology composed of three atmospheric tales. “The Drop of Water” concerns a nurse who steals a ring off a corpse, only...
Directed by Rob Reiner
Screenplay by William Goldman
1990, USA
Genre: Thriller
Elevated by standout performances from James Caan and Kathy Bates, Misery remains one of the best Stephen King adaptations to date. Director Rob Reiner is clearly more interested in the dark humour and humanity than the gory detail in King’s novel, but make no mistake about it, Misery is a tough watch soaked in sharp dialogue, a brooding atmosphere, and disturbing bodily harm inflicted on James Caan by sweet old Kathy Bates. I can still feel his pain.
129. Black Sabbath (Three Faces of Fear)
Mario Bava and Salvatore Billitteri
Written by Ennio De Concini and Mario Serandrei
Italy 1960 / Italy 1963
Genre: Horror Anthology
Not to be confused with Black Sunday, Black Sabbath is a horror anthology composed of three atmospheric tales. “The Drop of Water” concerns a nurse who steals a ring off a corpse, only...
- 10/17/2015
- by Ricky Fernandes
- SoundOnSight
It's a 3-day holiday weekend (starting tomorrow, Good Friday) for some of you, ending on Easter Sunday. Typically, my Netflix picks are newer films; but, this time, if only to jazz things up a bit, here are a few oldies (some much older than others) but goodies to keep you entertained and even enlightened, if you find yourself in the mood to watch a movie on Netflix, but are overwhelmed with what the streaming platform has to offer. Each is followed by a trailer. 1. "All Night Long" (1962) - a compelling jazz-infused psychodrama from British filmmaker Basil Dearden. It's basically a retelling of Shakespeare's "Othello," set in a 1960's London jazz club,...
- 4/3/2015
- by Tambay A. Obenson
- ShadowAndAct
'Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation' star Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt 'Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation' trailer: Movie stunt combo "Desperate times. Desperate measures," says Tom Cruise aka Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation trailer aka the Mission: Impossible 5 and/or MI5 trailer. Whatever you call it, that particular line could be read in a number of ways: Tom Cruise's superstardom is in the doldrums – at least that's what we hear from those who see reality only through U.S.-focused lenses – and he needs all the box-office help he can get. Hence, MI5. Hollywood is in dire need of a mammoth domestic blockbuster following a year of mediocre-performing tentpoles at the U.S. box office. Hence, MI5. The world's socioeconomic fabric is about to unravel. Hence, MI5 – so humankind can go with a bang. Not only with a bang, but with mirth as well.
- 3/25/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Best British movies of all time? (Image: a young Michael Caine in 'Get Carter') Ten years ago, Get Carter, starring Michael Caine as a dangerous-looking London gangster (see photo above), was selected as the United Kingdom's very best movie of all time according to 25 British film critics polled by Total Film magazine. To say that Mike Hodges' 1971 thriller was a surprising choice would be an understatement. I mean, not a David Lean epic or an early Alfred Hitchcock thriller? What a difference ten years make. On Total Film's 2014 list, published last May, Get Carter was no. 44 among the magazine's Top 50 best British movies of all time. How could that be? Well, first of all, people would be very naive if they took such lists seriously, whether we're talking Total Film, the British Film Institute, or, to keep things British, Sight & Sound magazine. Second, whereas Total Film's 2004 list was the result of a 25-critic consensus,...
- 10/12/2014
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
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