News

To mark the release of the brand new 4K restorations of The Teckman Mystery and We Joined The Navy, out now, we’ve been given a bundle of both films to give away on Blu-ray.

The Teckman Mystery

The Teckman Mystery is a 1954 British crime mystery, directed by Wendy Toye and starring Margaret Leighton, John Justin, Roland Culver and Michael Medwin. Philip Chance is commissioned by his publisher to write the biography of Martin Teckman, a young airman who crashed and died whilst testing a new plane. But from the moment he arrives home, Philip Chance is beset by a series of ‘accidents’ which indicate strongly that there are people who do not want to see Teckman’s past investigated.

We Joined the Navy

We Joined The Navy is a 1962 British naval comedy starring British film icon Kenneth More, Lloyd Nolan, Joan O’Brien and Mischa Auer Directed by award-winning Wendy Toye.

A dancer, choreographer and director who made her stage debut aged three, Toye was a creative powerhouse who left an estimable legacy as a film director. Now two of her films are being released for a new audience

There are few figures in British film history as fascinating as Wendy Toye. Born in east London in 1917, she was a showbiz prodigy who first appeared on stage aged three at the Royal Albert Hall. Later, she was a dancer, choreographer and director working across stage and film, and responsible for some of British cinema’s most beguiling and chilling flights of fantasy – as well as some beloved comedies. All that a time when women were rarely entrusted with the director’s chair. “Then, I liked it to be forgotten that my films were made by a woman,” she said in 1990. “I think nowadays I’d feel quite differently.”

For a remarkably long stretch,...

The rereleases from Wendy Toye, one of only two female directors working in the 1950s UK film industry, include her feature debut and a Dirk Bogarde cameo

This pair of middling rereleases from Britain’s studio era are of significance because of who oversaw them: Wendy Toye, one of only two female directors working in the UK film industry in the 1950s. While her contemporary Muriel Box often chipped away at feminist issues in her films, these two features find Toye – also a child-prodigy dancer and prolific theatre and opera director – working firmly inside the commercial parameters of the period.

The Teckman Mystery (★★★☆☆), from 1954, is in the mould of the upper-class Hitchcockian runaround, starring John Justin as writer Philip Chance, who is commissioned to write a biography of a vanished airman called Martin Teckman. Toye whips up a brisk, intriguing pace in black and white as a series of sinister...

In her new book Rachel Cooke re-examines the 1950s through 10 women who pioneered in their careers. In this extract she tells the stories of sisters-in-law Muriel and Betty Box, two prominent women in the British film industry

Until recently, anyone who wanted to see the film To Dorothy a Son had to lock themselves deep in the bowels of the British Film Institute off Tottenham Court Road, London, and watch it on an old Steenbeck editing machine. A little-known comedy from 1954, To Dorothy is no one's idea of a classic. It has an infuriating star in Shelley Winters, a creaky screenplay by Peter Rogers (later the producer of the Carry On series) and a set that looks as if it is on loan from a local amateur dramatics society.

We are in the home of Tony (John Gregson) and his baby-faced wife, Dorothy (Peggy Cummins). Dorothy is heavily pregnant, and confined to bed.

Musical theatre star known as 'the champagne soprano'

Lizbeth Webb, one of the great forgotten stars of British musical theatre in the 1940s and 1950s, has died aged 86. Known as "the champagne soprano", she was the first to sing one of the BBC's most requested songs of all time, This Is My Lovely Day, written for her by Vivian Ellis and AP Herbert and included in their musical comedy Bless the Bride (1947).

Starting out during the second world war as a teenage singer with dance bands – she worked later with such conductors as Mantovani, Geraldo, Max Jaffa and Vilém Tauský – Webb was discovered by the bandleader Jack Payne and turned into a West End star by the impresario Charles B Cochran in 1946. Over the next 10 years she made her mark as a soprano of great range (often singing in two different registers), vibrancy and vivacity. She was dark, petite and...

Filed under: Features, Cinematical

Criterion Corner is a monthly Cinematical column dedicated to the wide and wonderful world of the Criterion Collection. Criterion Corner runs on the last Wednesday of every month, and it will make you poor. Follow @CriterionCorner & visit the blog for daily updates.

In my younger and more vulnerable years, I was pretty sure that Carol Reed was a woman (he wasn't). Okay, so I may not have been the smartest of kids (the second or third smartest, perhaps), but I wasn't especially familiar with uniquely British first names, and it never occurred to me that Carol Reed simply wouldn't have been a woman. Reed made 'The Third Man' in 1949, and it was virtually unheard of for a British woman to helm a feature until renowned dancer Wendy Toye directed 'All For Mary' in 1951. I was distressed to learn of this inequality, and...

Filed under: Features, Cinematical

Criterion Corner is a monthly Cinematical column dedicated to the wide and wonderful world of the Criterion Collection. Criterion Corner runs on the last Wednesday of every month, and it will make you poor. Follow @CriterionCorner & visit the blog for daily updates.

In my younger and more vulnerable years, I was pretty sure that Carol Reed was a woman (he wasn't). Okay, so I may not have been the smartest of kids (the second or third smartest, perhaps), but I wasn't especially familiar with uniquely British first names, and it never occurred to me that Carol Reed simply wouldn't have been a woman. Reed made 'The Third Man' in 1949, and it was virtually unheard of for a British woman to helm a feature until renowned dancer Wendy Toye directed 'All For Mary' in 1951. I was distressed to learn of this inequality, and...

Dancer who became a choreographer, actor and director for stage and screen

As a dancer, Wendy Toye, who has died aged 92, was a child prodigy. Born in Hackney, east London, the daughter of a bristle merchant, she had made her first public appearance at the Royal Albert Hall by the age of four. Aged nine, she choreographed a ballet at the London Palladium and also won the women's prize, dancing the Charleston, at a ball organised by the theatrical manager Cb Cochran and judged by Fred Astaire and Florenz Ziegfeld among others. The men's prize was won by Lew Grade.

She was always grateful for the advice she received from her tutors, including Ruby Ginner, Ninette de Valois and Anton Dolin, and regretted that when she reached the next stage of her career – choreography and direction – there were no teachers. She had to learn as she went along.

During the 1930s,...

British movie maker Wendy Toye has died at the age of 92.

She passed away at Hillingdon hospital in Middlesex, England on Saturday. No further details of her death were available as WENN went to press.

Toye began her career as a dancer and choreographer, appearing in stage productions both in her native U.K. and on Broadway, before she became involved in the film industry in the 1930s.

She directed her first short film, The Stranger Left No Card, in 1952 and the picture won the Best Fictional Short Film prize at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival.

Toye went on to helm numerous films including The Teckman Mystery, Raising a Riot, and All For Mary, as well as testing out her acting skills onscreen with appearances including a role in 1945's I'll Be Your Sweetheart.

She won an Oscar nomination in 1955 for her Christmas-themed short On the Twelfth Day…

Toye was made a Commander of the British Empire (Cbe) in 1992 after she was previously awarded the Queen's Silver Jubilee medal.