News

Like Netflix and HBO Max, Amazon’s Prime Video has a film and TV library that is vast and deeper than most of its subscribers may realize. Hidden beneath its most easily accessible recommendations are underrated, oft-forgotten movies that you likely have never seen before. These films run the complete genre gamut, which means that, regardless of whether you are in the mood for a light-hearted Hollywood adventure or a darker thriller, you can always find exactly the kind of movie you’re looking for on the platform.

With all that in mind, here are seven great hidden gem movies that are streaming on Prime Video right now.

“The Third Man” (Selznick Releasing Organization) “The Third Man (1949)

Rightly regarded as one of cinema’s greatest films, director Carol Reed’s “The Third Man” is a jovially constructed noir about betrayal, justice and loss. Written by Graham Greene, it follows an...

Bruce French, the dependable character actor who did lots of work for the theater and portrayed Father Lonigan, the blind priest on the soap opera Passions who somehow could sense that evil was imminent, has died. He was 79.

French died Friday in Los Angeles of complications from Alzheimer’s, his wife of 34 years, longtime Days of Our Lives actress Eileen Barnett, told The Hollywood Reporter.

The Iowa native, who has more than 150 acting credits on IMDb, guest-starred for David E. Kelley on such shows as L.A. Law, Picket Fences, Ally McBeal, The Practice, Boston Public and Boston Legal, and he appeared on three Star Trek series — The Next Generation, Voyager and Enterprise — and in the 1998 film Star Trek: Insurrection.

Plus, he played the wealthy neighbor of Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver’s shifty characters on both seasons of the 2007-08 FX drama The Riches.

French recurred as the kind-hearted...

Joan Plowright, the distinguished actress of the post-war British stage whose considerable skill as a performer was at times eclipsed by her fame as the third and last wife of Laurence Olivier, has died. She was 95.

Plowright died on Jan. 16 surrounded by family in her native U.K. A statement from the family released on Friday to the BBC said: “It is with great sadness that the family of Dame Joan Plowright, the Lady Olivier, inform you that she passed away peacefully on January 16 2025 surrounded by her family at Denville Hall aged 95.”

It added: “She enjoyed a long and illustrious career across theatre, film and TV over seven decades until blindness made her retire. She cherished her last 10 years in Sussex with constant visits from friends and family, filled with much laughter and fond memories. The family are deeply grateful to Jean Wilson and all those involved in her personal care over many years.

Alvin Rakoff, the Canadian-born filmmaker who directed Laurence Olivier in A Voyage Round My Father, has died. He was 97.

His death was confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter by his longtime publicist, Nick Pourgourides. He passed away on Oct. 12 surrounded by family at home in Chiswick, a neighborhood in London.

Rakoff as a writer, director and producer of over 100 TV, film and stage productions, as well as novels, directed Olivier and co-stars Alan Bates and Jane Asher in the 1982 TV drama A Voyage Round My Father, a film written by John Mortimer and which earned the director his second Emmy Award.

Alvin and Olivier also worked together on Mr. Halpern and Mr. Johnson and A Talent for Murder, both shot in 1983. The two-time Emmy Award winner also gave a young Sean Connery his first leading role in the 1957 film Requiem for a Heavyweight, and Alan Rickman as a young actor was...

From Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs to Beatrice Straight in Network, some shockingly brief Oscar-winning performances have proven that there are no small parts. Its already impressive enough for an actor to deliver an Academy Award-worthy performance when they have two-and-a-half hours to chew the scenery in the spotlight. Cillian Murphys Oscar-winning turn in Oppenheimer is incredible, but he had three whole hours full of lengthy IMAX closeups to wow audiences with his work. It takes a special kind of actor to earn an Oscar with less than 20 minutes of screen time.

Usually, the Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress awards go to performers who are given so much screen time that theyre practically a lead, so they have longer to connect with the audience (and with Oscar voters) than a true supporting player. For example, Mahershala Ali won Best Supporting Actor for his piano-playing turn in Green Book,...

Mike Figgis has been shooting a behind-the-scenes documentary for the past 18 months about the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. It’s called Megadoc.

Figgis told me Monday that it’s been edited but there’s allowance for the fact that the film played in competition here at the Cannes Film Festival. He recorded an interview with the cinema titan the other day.

Figgis, who was introduced into the Coppola clan back in the mid 1990s after directing Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, told me that the documentary is “very much a fly-on-the-wall” and also features conversations with various cast members — Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Dustin Hoffman, Shia Labeouf — and Coppola’s wife Eleanor Coppola, who shot the footage and directed her own study of her husband’s work for the acclaimed Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, about the making of 1979s Apocalypse Now.

He will go...

From Robert Donat’s heart-breaking Mr Chips to the real-life Mr Bachmann, Judi Dench’s venomous schoolmarm to Paul Giamatti’s classics stickler in The Holdovers, cinema loves teachers, whether inspirational or awful

I had a few teachers I adored in my years at school – and one or two, perhaps, who even inspired me in some capacity – but I can’t say a film about my relationship with them would make for particularly thrilling viewing. Teaching is hard graft, and often thankless; even the best in the profession are rarely rewarded with the kind of dewy, triumphant tributes that cap off many a Hollywood classroom drama. Yet the inspirational teacher film remains a mainstay: film-makers never tire of imagining the schooldays they’d like to have had.

Paul Giamatti offers a variation on the type in The Holdovers, out on VOD last week: the curmudgeonly, academically oriented teacher with (surprise!

Mark Shelmerdine, the veteran producer who revived London Films as an indie powerhouse and played a pivotal role in the development of the international TV distribution market, died October 26 in Santa Barbara surrounded by his family. He was 78.

Among his achievements, he was among the first UK indie TV producers to retain rights to a broadcast production and was a founder of the LA branch of BAFTA.

Shelmerdine’s death was confirmed to Deadline by his friend Brian Eastman. The producer had survived a rare and potentially deadly form of bile duct cancer by receiving a life-saving liver transplant in 2018 through a trial in Houston, and was one of the longest living survivors of the MD Anderson Cancer Center and Houston Methodist Hospital program.

Born on March 27, 1945, Shelmerdine spent part of his childhood in Singapore before moving to the UK. He was awarded a place to attend Sidney Sussex College...

From Distant Voices, Still Lives to Benediction, the lyrical work of the late director was suffused with the ‘ecstasy’ of cinema – and his fraught Liverpool childhood

Last month, British cinema lost one of its greatest and most distinctive screen poets. From an astonishing trilogy of early short films (Children; Madonna and Child; Death and Transfiguration – all available on BFI Player) to his final feature, Benediction (2021), Terence Davies seamlessly blended personal recollections with wider universal truths. His subjects ranged from autobiographically inspired portraits of postwar working-class life in Liverpool to sweeping literary adaptations and intimate portraits of real-life authors, most remarkably the American poet Emily Dickinson, brilliantly played by Cynthia Nixon in A Quiet Passion, 2016. Yet each of his films felt deeply, distinctly personal. No wonder Jack Lowden, who played Siegfried Sassoon in Benediction, told me that after immersing himself in his subject’s diaries in preparation for the role, he...

Gillian Anderson paid tribute to Terence Davies, the British filmmaker who directed one of her most acclaimed performances for “The House of Mirth,” crediting him with giving her “my first ‘proper’ film job.” Davies died on Oct. 7 at the age of 77 following a short illness.

“The House of Mirth,” an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel of the same name, saw Anderson portray Lily Bart, a tragic socialite whose quest for love and financial security leads her to ruin. Davies wrote the script, in addition to directing the film.

The role came to Anderson at a time when she was best known for portraying FBI Special Agent Dana Scully in the paranormal series “The X-Files.” The film provided an opportunity for the actor to showcase her range with a meaty role in a period piece. It was also good news for Davies, with “The House of Mirth” representing a significant...

Terence Davies, the critically beloved British writer-director who had his international art-house breakthrough with two deeply autobiographical films set in his native Liverpool, England, Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, has died. He was 77.

Davies’ official Instagram account confirmed the news Saturday morning, noting that the filmmaker died peacefully at home after a short illness.

Much of Davies’ work is infused with personal emotional experience, reflecting in subtle ways on growing up as a gay, Catholic man in Liverpool in the 1950s and ’60s. The filmmaker directly addressed his childhood in his 2008 feature documentary, Of Time and the City.

Premiering to great acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival that year, the doc recalled both Davies’ own family life and that of the city, using archival footage, his own commentary voiceover, classical music tracks, film clips and excerpts from poetry and literature in an assemblage by turns caustically funny and melancholy,...

Terence Davies, the British filmmaker known for “Distant Voices, Still Lives,” “The Deep Blue Sea” and “The Long Day Closes,” has died. He was 77.

The news of Davies’ death was shared on his official Instagram page: “It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of Terence Davies, who died peacefully at home after a short illness, today on 7th October 2023.”

Davies was admired for his period films as well as his early autobiographical trilogy about growing up in Liverpool.

“Being in the past makes me feel safe because I understand that world,” he told the Guardian in 2022.

Though his films were widely recognized for their sensitive depictions of gay life, Catholicism and other frequent themes, they didn’t amass a huge number of awards, which he considered in his typically philosophical way. “It would have been nice to be acknowledged by Bafta. Again, there’s also part of...

Glenda Jackson, the two-time Oscar winner who walked away from a hugely successful acting career to spend nearly a quarter-century in the U.K. parliament, only to make a comeback on the stage, died Thursday. She was 87.

Jackson died peacefully after a brief illness at her home in Blackheath, London, and her family was at her side, her agent Lionel Larner said in a statement. “Today we lost one of the world’s greatest actresses, and I have lost a best friend of over 50 years,” he said.

She recently completed filming The Great Escaper opposite Michael Caine, Larner noted.

The British actress collected a slew of honors that included best actress Academy Awards for Women in Love (1969) and A Touch of Class (1973); two Emmys for her performance as Elizabeth I in the BBC miniseries Elizabeth R (a role she also played in the 1971 film Mary, Queen of Scots); and a...

Glenda Jackson, who segued from a successful actress — Oscars for “Women in Love” and “A Touch of Class” and two Emmys for “Elizabeth R” — into a 23-year career as member of the U.K.’s House of Commons, has died. She was 87.

Jackson died after a brief illness at her home in London, her agent Lionel Larner said. “Glenda Jackson, two-time Academy Award-winning actress and politician, died peacefully at her home in Blackheath, London this morning after a brief illness with her family at her side. She recently completed filming ‘The Great Escaper’ in which she co-starred with Michael Caine,” Larner said in a statement.

Aside from her prize-winning roles, Jackson gave terrific performances in such films as 1967’s “Marat/Sade” (as Charlotte Corday), “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and on TV in “The Patricia Neal Story,” a 1981 work about that actress’s stroke and recovery with husband Roald Dahl. A defining role in...

It looks like the play’s the (stranger) thing!

London’s Phoenix Theatre is planning to turn things Upside Down when it debuts “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” a prequel theatrical experience tied to the runaway Netflix hit. The fifth and final season of the series begins production this May, and the new play will be up “later this year.”

The author is Kate Trefry, a staff writer, story editor, and co-executive producer on the series, credited as writer on three teleplays, one from the second, third, and fourth seasons. The prequel play is based on a story from Trefry and “Stranger Things” creators Matt and Ross Duffer, as well as Jack Thorne. Thorne is the writer behind Netflix’s hit “Enola Holmes,” but, more relevant to this endeavor, he is the author of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” the two-part theatrical experience/license to print money with productions in London,...

In multiple interviews over the years, British filmmaker Terence Davies has baldly stated that being gay has ruined his life: “I hate it, I’ll go to my grave hating it … it has killed part of my soul,” he said in 2011, adding that his sexuality is the reason he remains single and celibate. Davies’ professed loneliness and sensitivity has bled through many of his films, wistfully entrenched as they often are in an unattainable past, most recently in a series of female-centered character studies: his swooningly melodramatic, cut-glass adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s “The Deep Blue Sea,” his amber-cast farm drama “Sunset Song” and his mannered, internalized Emily Dickinson portrait “A Quiet Passion.” Yet Davies has never directly addressed homosexuality in his oeuvre, for all its queer undercurrents; that it’s so openly and sensually a part of his intricate, intensely felt new film “Benediction” is the first of its many surprises.

HBO has paused shooting on its “Game of Thrones” prequel “House of the Dragon” because of a positive Covid-19 case on set, Variety has confirmed.

As part of testing implemented for all production employees, a production member on the series tested positive for Covid-19. In compliance with industry guidelines, the production member is in isolation, and close contacts will be required to quarantine. Production will resume on Wednesday after a two-day pause.

This is the third Covid-affected shoot in the U.K. in the last few days. Netflix’s “Bridgerton” paused shooting after a positive case, resumed, and paused again after another case. The streamer’s “Matilda” has also paused for the same reason. London’s Riverside Studios has canceled its revival of Terence Rattigan’s play “The Browning Version,” starring Kenneth Branagh, because of the Covid-enforced absence of cast members during rehearsals.

The news of “House of the Dragon...

Kenneth Branagh has been forced to cancel a significant UK theater production due to an “increasing number of Covid-enforced absences”.

The play was a revival of The Browning Version by Terence Rattigan and was due to be staged at London’s Riverside Studios next month. The venue sent a note to ticket holders explaining that the production was “no longer viable” and that refunds would be issued. Producers said a number of the team had tested positive, some of whom were symptomatic, despite Covid protocols being observed.

This is the latest in a string of Covid-enforced closures. Deadline revealed today that HBO has been forced to shut down the UK shoot of its its Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon due to a positive test, while we also had the scoop that Netflix’s Bridgerton had been shut down twice, and the streamer’s Matilda is also suffering similar disruption.

On Nov. 8, Norman Lloyd will celebrate his 106th birthday, which is just one more accomplishment for a man whose nearly-100-year career is filled with amazing milestones. Lloyd worked as an actor, director and/or producer in theater, the early days of radio, film and TV. He wasn’t a household name, but he has always been well known and respected within the industry — not only for his work, but for the people he worked with. That list includes Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Elia Kazan, Jean Renoir, Robin Williams, Martin Scorsese, Denzel Washington, Mark Harmon, Cameron Diaz, Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer.

As his contemporary Karl Malden summed up in 2007, “He is the history of our industry.”

Lloyd was born Norman Perlmutter Nov. 8, 1914, in Jersey City, N.J. He took singing and dancing lessons and was a paid professional by the age of 9. He performed with...

As Disney quietly disappears huge swathes of film history into its vaults, I'm going to spend 2020 celebrating Twentieth Century Fox and the Fox Film Corporation's films, what one might call their output if only someone were putting it out.And now they've quietly disappeared William Fox's name from the company: guilty by association with Rupert Murdoch, even though he never associated with him.***There are some films where, lacking access to one's own personal cinematheque, one has to speculate. For example, some of Fox's fifties films, shot in CinemaScope as all movies at that studio had to be, have never been made available in widescreen formats. Richard Fleischer was one the directors who adapted zestfully to that format, so it's a crying shame that Crack in the Mirror (1960) seems to exist only in blurry, 4:3 TV recordings. His other Orson Welles film, Compulsion (1959), is a cracker.Anatole Litvak's...

Sadaf Foroughi turns the family drama trope on its head in this superb story of a girl in Iran at war with her mother

There is a moment in this almost forensically severe film when a furious mother jams her fingernails into her rebellious daughter’s cheek. Her hand is transformed for a second into a claw, and the girl’s face clenches into a grimace, not resisting the imminent assault. But after a moment, her mum thinks better of it, removes her hand and storms away, perhaps humiliated by having descended to her daughter’s level of childish spite without even being able to go through with the threat. Not a drop of blood has been spilled, yet it is the most authentic moment of violence imaginable.

This debut feature by the Iranian-Canadian director Sadaf Foroughi takes what might otherwise be a banal family-drama trope – moody teenage girl with...

Normal 0 false false false En-us X-none X-none

“Psycho Scarface”

By Raymond Benson

While we in the United States think of the “gangster film” as something that is perhaps distinctly American, it can be forgotten that other countries have had their fair share of mobsters, too. The U.K. is a typical specimen. There have been some very bad hombres in movies like Sexy Beast and The Long Good Friday, which are classic examples of British gangster cinema.

It was a pleasant surprise to discover Brighton Rock, obviously a beloved crime movie in Britain, but not as well known in the States. In fact, the movie was released in America as Young Scarface. This thriller, made in 1947 and released very early in 1948, is a product by the Boulting Brothers (identical twins!), who were a sort of British Coen Brothers at the time. They produced numerous quality movies from the late 1930s to the 1970s,...

Graham Greene’s tense crime tale is as important as his classic The Third Man but nowhere near as well known. Down Brighton way the race-track boys have sharp ways of solving disputes and terrorizing the common folk — think ‘straight razor.’ Richard Attenborough’s breakthrough film is also a showcase for Hermoine Baddelely and a marvelous newcomer that every horror fan loves even if they don’t know her name, Carol Marsh. Kino’s disc has a Tim Lucas commentary; this review balances thoughts about mercy and damnation, with an extra insight about a piece of ‘stick candy’ unfamiliar to us Yanks.

Brighton Rock

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1948 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 92 min. / Street Date May 5, 2020 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Richard Attenborough, Carol Marsh, Hermione Baddeley, William Hartnell, Harcourt Williams, Wylie Watson, Nigel Stock, Virginia Winter, Reginald Purdell, George Carney, Charles Goldner, Alan Wheatley.

Cinematography: Harry Waxman

Camera operator:...

Why is David Lean’s stirring ode to British aviation so historically and technically bogus? Because at heart it’s a science fiction film! Ralph Richardson drives his test pilots and his own son to die on the altar of aviation R&d, in a tale focused firmly on futurism and the push to the stars. Nigel Patrick and Denholm Elliott struggle to measure up, while Ann Todd hugs her baby and resists. Watching this terrific production, you’d think the Queen had a monopoly on supersonic aviation.

The Sound Barrier

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1952 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 117 109 min. / Breaking the Sound Barrier / Street Date April 28, 2020 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Ralph Richardson, Ann Todd, Nigel Patrick, John Justin, Dinah Sheridan, Joseph Tomelty, Denholm Elliott.

Cinematography: Jack Hildyard

Film Editor: Geoffrey Foot

Original Music: Malcolm Arnold

Aerial and second unit director: Anthony Squire

Written by Terence Rattigan

Produced and...

On August 2, the legendary Peter O’Toole would have turned 86. One of the most esteemed actors of his generation, he also holds the dubious record of earning the most Best Actor Oscar nominations (eight) without a win. O’Toole’s trophy case isn’t exactly bare — he won three Golden Globe Awards from eight nominations and received an honorary Academy Award for his lengthy career.

And as younger generations begin to discover his work, his reputation has only grown over the years, particularly for his big splash on the world’s film stage for his performance in “Lawrence of Arabia,” work that is astonishing in its complexity.

In honor of this great actor’s birthday, let’s take a photo gallery tour of his career and rank his 12 greatest film performances from worst to best.

SEEHonorary Oscars: Full gallery of acting recipients includes Charlie Chaplin, Peter O’Toole, Angela Lansbury...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. David Lean's Breaking the Sound Barrier (1952) is playing October 14 - November 13, 2017 on Mubi in the United States.John (J.R.) Ridgefield is a man possessed. The wealthy and influential aircraft industrialist is consumed by his desire to manufacture a plane capable of penetrating the inscrutable sound barrier. This supersonic obsession is a blessing and a curse for the Ridgefield family, providing their ample fortune and triggering largely latent rifts in their ancestral relations. It’s an opposition at the heart and soul of David Lean’s 1952 film The Sound Barrier, a post-war endorsement of British ingenuity and determination, and an emotional, blazing depiction of sacrifice and scientific achievement. The opening of The Sound Barrier (also known as Sound Barrier and Breaking the Sound Barrier), spotlights Philip Peel (John Justin), one of the film’s principal test pilots. In just under two minutes,...

Twenty years ago, the Shakespeare in Love star had Hollywood at his feet – then he all but disappeared. So what happened?

Joseph Fiennes is currently specialising in second acts. This weekend he is in Cannes to promote his film The Last Race, the unofficial Chinese-made sequel to Chariots of Fire. Fiennes plays Eric Liddell, the Flying Scotsman who in 1924 famously refused to run on an Olympic Sunday because of his religious beliefs. The film is concerned with the little-known years after that in which Liddell gave up on sporting fame to become a Christian missionary in China.

To open that film, Fiennes is taking a couple of days away from rehearsing the comparable afterlife of that other Boy’s Own legend, Lawrence of Arabia. Fiennes takes the lead in Adrian Noble’s Chichester Festival revival of Terence Rattigan’s play Ross, which finds Lawrence home from the desert after something...

Stars: Ralph Richardson, Ann Todd, Nigel Patrick, John Justin, Dinah Sheridan, Joseph Tomelty, Denholm Elliot | Written by Terrence Rattigan | Directed by David Lean

David Lean is well known for his romantic dramas (Brief Encounter) and literary adaptations (Great Expectations, Doctor Zhivago), which is why The Sound Barrier, his 1952 semi-biographical portrait of the British struggle to surpass the speed of sound, seems like something of an oddity.

The story focuses on the relationships between an ambitious Raf pilot Tony (Nigel Patrick), his military bride Susan (Ann Todd) her father, John (Ralph Richardson), a wealthy plane manufacturer who has lofty goals and doesn’t mind risking human lives to reach them. A brief prelude sees Susan’s brother Christopher – a small but welcome appearance from Indiana Jones’ Denholm Elliott – attempt to join the air force, despite both a lack of interest in and aptitude for flying. This ominous complication, paired with the...

A box office hit on release in 1952, David Lean’s The Sound Barrier, which dramatises Britain’s race to break the speed of sound, has since passed everyone by. Written by Terrence Rattigan and starring Ralph Richardson and Ann Todd, it tells the story of the obsessive aviators who took flight supersonic. The Sound Barrier is available on DVD and Blu-Ray for the first time from 11 April

Continue reading...

Terence Davies’s lyrical version of the Scottish classic finds the veteran director at the height of his powers

Back in the dark days when the UK Film Council was merrily throwing money at the shameful Sex Lives of the Potato Men, British film-making legend Terence Davies was finding it impossible to fund a screen adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel, Sunset Song, a hardscrabble tale of a young woman finding her identity – personal, national, spiritual – in rural northeast Scotland beneath the gathering clouds of the Great War. Despite the critical success of The House of Mirth, his 2000 adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel, Davies feared he might never trouble our cinema screens again. It wasn’t until his superb, low-budget love letter to Liverpool, Of Time and the City, became the unexpected toast of Cannes in 2008 that the skies started to brighten for our pre-eminent auteur. Now, with...

Five-time Academy Award nominee Kenneth Branagh will direct for 20th Century Fox a new feature film adaptation of Agatha Christies’ acclaimed mystery Murder on the Orient Express, it was announced today by Tcf president Emma Watts.

Ridley Scott (The Martian), Simon Kinberg (The Martian, X-Men: Days of Future Past), Mark Gordon (Steve Jobs) and Branagh will produce the film. Michael Schaefer and Aditya Sood will also produce in some capacity. Michael Green (Blade Runner 2) is writing the screenplay, with Steve Asbell overseeing the production for Fox.

Agatha Christie’s novel, published in 1934, is considered one of the most ingenious stories ever devised. It revolves around a murder onboard the famous train, and Belgian detective Hercule Poirot must solve the case – but there are a number of passengers who could potentially be the murderer. In addition to directing the film, Branagh will star as detective Poirot.

Branagh’s directing credits include the Oscar®-nominated Henry V,...

Billy Wilder directed Sunset Blvd. with Gloria Swanson and William Holden. Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett movies Below is a list of movies on which Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder worked together as screenwriters, including efforts for which they did not receive screen credit. The Wilder-Brackett screenwriting partnership lasted from 1938 to 1949. During that time, they shared two Academy Awards for their work on The Lost Weekend (1945) and, with D.M. Marshman Jr., Sunset Blvd. (1950). More detailed information further below. Post-split years Billy Wilder would later join forces with screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond in movies such as the classic comedy Some Like It Hot (1959), the Best Picture Oscar winner The Apartment (1960), and One Two Three (1961), notable as James Cagney's last film (until a brief comeback in Milos Forman's Ragtime two decades later). Although some of these movies were quite well received, Wilder's later efforts – which also included The Seven Year Itch...

I. The Rattigan Version

After his first dramatic success, The Winslow Boy, Terence Rattigan conceived a double bill of one-act plays in 1946. Producers dismissed the project, even Rattigan’s collaborator Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont. Actor John Gielgud agreed. “They’ve seen me in so much first rate stuff,” Gielgud asked Rattigan; “Do you really think they will like me in anything second rate?” Rattigan insisted he wasn’t “content writing a play to please an audience today, but to write a play that will be remembered in fifty years’ time.”

Ultimately, Rattigan paired a brooding character study, The Browning Version, with a light farce, Harlequinade. Entitled Playbill, the show was finally produced by Stephen Mitchell in September 1948, starring Eric Portman, and became a runaway hit. While Harlequinade faded into a footnote, the first half proved an instant classic. Harold Hobson wrote that “Mr. Portman’s playing and Mr. Rattigan’s writing...

I. The Landmine

In August 1955, George Devine, director of London’s Royal Court Theatre, ventured to meet a promising writer, living on a Thames houseboat. “I had to borrow a dinghy… wade out to it and row myself to my new playwright,” he recalled. Thus began a partnership between Devine, who sought to rescue the English stage from stale commercialism, and the 26 year old tyro, John Osborne. Together, they’d revolutionize modern theater.

Born in London but raised in Stoneleigh, Surrey, Osborne lost his father at age 12, resented his low-born mother and was expelled from school for striking a headmaster. While acting for Anthony Creighton’s repertory company, his mercurial temper and violent language appeared. In 1951 he wed actress Pamela Lane, only to divorce six years later. Osborne soon immortalized their marriage: their cramped apartment, with invasive friends and intruding in-laws, John and Pamela’s pet names and verbal abuse,...

Part I: The Lawrence Bureau

T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935) ranks among the 20th Century’s oddest heroes. This short, smart, and mischievous British soldier helped organize the Arab Revolt against Turkey, a secondary front of the First World War. He became Emir Feisal’s trusted ally, painfully conscious that the Allies wouldn’t honor promises of independence. After the Paris Peace Conference, Lawrence retreated into the Royal Air Force and Tank Corps as a private soldier, T.E. Shaw.

Lawrence lived a curious double life, befriending both private soldiers and notables like Winston Churchill and George Bernard Shaw. He wrote memoirs and translated Homer while repairing boats and seaplanes. His intellect, warmth, and puckish humor masked internal torment – guilt for failing to secure Arab freedom, regret for two brothers killed in the war, shame over an incident where Turkish soldiers sexually assaulted him.

In his autobiography Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence...

'Henry V' Movie Actress Renée Asherson dead at 99: Laurence Olivier leading lady in acclaimed 1944 film (image: Renée Asherson and Laurence Olivier in 'Henry V') Renée Asherson, a British stage actress featured in London productions of A Streetcar Named Desire and Three Sisters, but best known internationally as Laurence Olivier's leading lady in the 1944 film version of Henry V, died on October 30, 2014. Asherson was 99 years old. The exact cause of death hasn't been specified. She was born Dorothy Renée Ascherson (she would drop the "c" some time after becoming an actress) on May 19, 1915, in Kensington, London, to Jewish parents: businessman Charles Ascherson and his second wife, Dorothy Wiseman -- both of whom narrowly escaped spending their honeymoon aboard the Titanic. (Ascherson cancelled the voyage after suffering an attack of appendicitis.) According to Michael Coveney's The Guardian obit for the actress, Renée Asherson was "scantly...

Playwright and screenwriter Terence Rattigan was an indubitable influence on mid-century British cinema. He authored several of the era’s most notable titles, including The Browning Version (1951), Lean’s The Sound Barrier (1952) Olivier’s troubled The Prince and the Showgirl (1957) and Anatole Litvak’s The Deep Blue Sea (1952), which was recently remade by Terrence Davies in 2011. But it would be a 1958 American adaptation of his play, Separate Tables, from director Delbert Mann that would prove to be his most critically lauded work, nominated for seven Academy Awards, and snagging two (Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress). By today’s standards, it’s a film that feels painstakingly melodramatic. Reconsidered within the framework of Rattigan’s own impressive oeuvre, the material hasn’t aged well, and as time has gone on, its cramped exploration of sexual dysfunction now plays like a euthanized product crippled by censorship of the author’s own...

Feature Aliya Whiteley 3 Apr 2014 - 07:22

Tend to think of Richard Attenborough as a kindly old man? Aliya digs into his early career to find some far nastier roles...

British cinema has always liked its angry young men: Richard Burton, Albert Finney, Laurence Harvey and others all played the 1950s and 60s social animal, raging against the class system and the staid attitudes of post-war Britain.

But they weren’t the first angry young man on the screen. Maybe that crown could be claimed by an unlikely actor – Richard Attenborough. Attenborough is best known now as a director and producer, for films such as Gandhi, Chaplin and Shadowlands. When he gets thought of as an actor, it’s often as a kindly old man with a white beard. Misguided, sometimes, as when he played John Hammond, the owner of Jurassic Park, but not downright nasty. A lot of his earlier...

He found stardom on screen in Lawrence of Arabia, but O'Toole was a legendary and often mesmerising presence in the theatre

• Obituary: Peter O'Toole, 1932-2013

• Peter O'Toole: a life in pictures

• Peter O'Toole: a career in clips

Today's papers all carry big pictures of Peter O'Toole as Lawrence of Arabia. Although that role made him an international star and launched a long film career, it shouldn't be forgotten that he was a formidable stage actor. What made him unusual was that he was something of a throwback to an earlier era: I'd describe him as a charismatic romantic with the glamour found in actor-managers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. And, if he returned to the stage only spasmodically after his film career took off, it may have been because he didn't fit easily into the new director-driven theatre.

I first heard of O'Toole when stories spread about...

In Lawrence of Arabia he was insouciant, elegant and outrageously sexy. It was one of the most brilliant debuts in Hollywood history

• Obituary: Peter O'Toole, 1932-2013

• Peter O'Toole: last of the 60s hellraisers

• Peter O'Toole: a career in clips

Perhaps there were other actors as beautiful as Peter O'Toole in his 60s pomp but surely no one had such mesmeric eyes – the eyes of a seducer, a visionary or an anchorite, a sinner or a saint. That long, handsome face compellingly suggested something intelligent and romantic. But there was also something tortured there, sexually wayward and dysfunctional, something that no O'Toole character would ever entirely own up to.

In 1962, aged 30, the unknown Peter O'Toole made one of the most brilliant debuts in Hollywood history, playing the mercurial Arabist and aesthete Te Lawrence in David Lean's monumental Lawrence Of Arabia. He made a sensational splash – as big...

Jean Kent: ‘The Browning Version’ 1951, Gainsborough folds (photo: Jean Kent in ‘The Browning Version,’ with Michael Redgrave) (See previous post: “Jean Kent: Gainsborough Pictures Film Star Dead at 92.”) Seemingly stuck in Britain, Jean Kent’s other important leads of the period came out in 1948: John Paddy Carstairs’ Alfred Hitchcock-esque thriller Sleeping Car to Trieste (1948), with spies on board the Orient Express, and Gordon Parry’s ensemble piece Bond Street. Following two minor 1950 comedies, Her Favorite Husband / The Taming of Dorothy and The Reluctant Widow / The Inheritance, Kent’s movie stardom was virtually over, though she would still have one major film role in store. In what is probably her best remembered and most prestigious effort, Jean Kent played Millie Crocker-Harris, the unsympathetic, adulterous wife of unfulfilled teacher Michael Redgrave, in Anthony Asquith’s 1951 film version of Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version — a Javelin Films production...

Popular stalwart of film classics such as The Browning Version and Fanny By Gaslight

Jean Kent, the fiery, sexy, red-haired bad girl of British movies in the 1940s, who has died aged 92, was a fine actor, and clearly enjoyed life, her work and – while it lasted – her cinema fame. While never a top star, she gained a considerable following, and from the 1960s appeared regularly on television. Her film breakthrough came as a result of stage work: after the revue Apple Sauce, starring Vera Lynn and Max Miller, reached the London Palladium in 1941, she was offered a long-term contract, and the first of her Gainsborough Pictures appearances came in It's That Man Again (1943), with another wartime entertainer, the radio comic Tommy Handley.

It took another four films for her to make her first real mark as Lucy, the friend of Phyllis Calvert in the title role of the melodrama Fanny By Gaslight,...

This week's Theater Talk focuses on British dramatist Sir Terence Rattigan 1911-1977 and his popular drama, The Winslow Boy, currently being revived on Broadway by The Roundabout Theatre Company. First the show welcomes actors Roger Rees, Charlotte Parry and Alessandro Nivola, now starring in this acclaimed production, followed by a conversation about its playwright with critics John Simon, John Heilpern and actor Edward Hibbert.

This week's Theater Talk focuses on British dramatist Sir Terence Rattigan 1911-1977 and his popular drama, The Winslow Boy, currently being revived on Broadway by The Roundabout Theatre Company. First the show welcomes actors Roger Rees, Charlotte Parry and Alessandro Nivola, now starring in this acclaimed production, followed by a conversation about its playwright with critics John Simon, John Heilpern and actor Edward Hibbert.

Vivien Leigh biography, movies, and photo exhibit among centenary celebrations (photo: Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier as Emma Hamilton and Lord Nelson in ‘That Hamilton Woman’) [See previous post: "Vivien Leigh Turns 100: Centenary of One of the Greatest Movie Stars."] From November 30, 2013, to July 20, 2014, London’s National Portrait Gallery will be hosting a Vivien Leigh photo exhibit, tracing her life and career. The exhibit will be a joint celebration of both Leigh’s centenary and the 75th anniversary of Gone with the Wind. (Scroll down to check out a classy Vivien Leigh video homage. See also: “‘Gone with the Wind’ article.”) Additionally, the British Film Institute is hosting a lengthy Vivien Leigh and Gone with the Wind celebration, screening all of Leigh’s post-1936 movies, from Fire Over England to Ship of Fools — and including The Deep Blue Sea ("a digital copy of the only surviving 35mm print we were able to locate; the condition is variable"). I should add that Terence Davies recently...

Vivien Leigh: Legendary ‘Gone with the Wind’ and ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ star would have turned 100 today Vivien Leigh was perhaps the greatest film star that hardly ever was. What I mean is that following her starring role in the 1939 Civil War blockbuster Gone with the Wind, Leigh was featured in a mere eight* movies over the course of the next 25 years. The theater world’s gain — she was kept busy on the London stage — was the film world’s loss. But even if Leigh had starred in only two movies — Gone with the Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire — that would have been enough to make her a screen legend; one who would have turned 100 years old today, November 5, 2013. (Photo: Vivien Leigh ca. 1940.) Vivien Leigh (born Vivian Mary Hartley to British parents in Darjeeling, India) began her film career in the mid-’30s, playing bit roles in British...

The captivating new production of Terence Rattigan's classic The Winslow Boy comes to Roundabout directly from The Old Vic Theatre in London. The Winslow Boy, starring Michael Cumpsty, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio,Alessandro Nivola and Roger Rees, directed by Lindsay Posner, opened last night, October 17, 2013 at American Airlines Theatre. Below you can check out photos of the cast in the BroadwayWorld.com series 'In The Spotlight' by acclaimed photographer Walter McBride...

More Bard, more Chekhov, and some choice revivals pepper this week’s lineup of new plays on the boards, with some notable stars getting their feet wet in classics (Alison Pill, Elizabeth Olsen, Alessandro Nivola, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), and expect more of the same this spring: Toni Collette, Michael C. Hall, and Oscar winner Marisa Tomei will join recent Best Actor Tony recipient (and acclaimed scribe) Tracy Letts in a new play by Will Eno on Broadway. Moreover, buzz has restarted that James Franco may finally make his long-awaited Main Stem debut in a revival of Of Mice and Men...

More Bard, more Chekhov, and some choice revivals pepper this week’s lineup of new plays on the boards, with some notable stars getting their feet wet in classics (Alison Pill, Elizabeth Olsen, Alessandro Nivola, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), and expect more of the same this spring: Toni Collette, Michael C. Hall, and Oscar winner Marisa Tomei will join recent Best Actor Tony recipient (and acclaimed scribe) Tracy Letts in a new play by Will Eno on Broadway. Moreover, buzz has restarted that James Franco may finally make his long-awaited Main Stem debut in a revival of Of Mice and Men...

The captivating new production of Terence Rattigan's classic The Winslow Boy comes to Roundabout directly from The Old Vic Theatre in London. The Winslow Boy, starring Michael Cumpsty, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio,Alessandro Nivola and Roger Rees, directed by Lindsay Posner, opened last night, October 17, 2013 at American Airlines Theatre. BroadwayWorld's Richard Ridge was at the opening night party to chat with the cast and creative team. Click below to see what they had to say...