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Author: Euan Franklin

You can’t overstate the influence of Ray Harryhausen on Hollywood cinema. His stop-motion animation inspired the most exciting fantasies of Peter Jackson, James Cameron, John Landis, and (most obviously) Nick Park from Aardman Animation. He worked on The 7th Voyage of Sinbad in 1958 and returned to the mythical hero 15 years later (after spending the ‘60s working on Jason and the Argonauts and One Million Years B.C.) with a different cast and crew in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, which marked his first credit as a producer.

In Golden Voyage, Sinbad (John Phillip Law) and his crew intercept a homunculus flying above their ship. It carries a magic tablet, and Sinbad wears it around his neck as a boastful reward. When he visits Marabia, Sinbad meets with the golden-masked Grand Vizier (Douglas Wilmer) who tells him that the tablet is a third of an overall whole. It...

Powell & Pressburger’s big-scale historical epic is perhaps the best show ever about an old-school naval encounter between battleships. The first half depicts the showdown between England and Germany in the South Atlantic, and the second half a tense diplomatic game in the neutral country of Uruguay. Peter Finch, Bernard Lee and Anthony Quayle shine as sea captains.

Panzerschiff Graf Spee (The Battle of the River Plate)

Region B Blu-ray

ITV Studios Home Entertainment (Germany)

1956 / Color / 1:78 widescreen / 119, 106 117 min./ Pursuit of the Graf Spee / Street Date 2010 / Available from Amazon UK £16.90

Starring: Peter Finch, Bernard Lee, Anthony Quayle, John Gregson, Ian Hunter, Jack Gwillim, Lionel Murton, Anthony Bushell, Peter Illing, Michael Goodliffe, Patrick Macnee, Christopher Lee.

Cinematography: Christopher Challis

Production Design: Arthur Lawson

Film Editor: Reginald Mills

Original Music: Brian Easdale

Written, Produced & Directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressberger

The best way so far to see the impressive The Battle of the River Plate...

By Tim Greaves

Numerous actors have occupied the role of Sherlock Holmes over the decades, some more suited to the shoes of author Arthur Conan Doyle's famous consulting detective than others. One of the finest portrayals is that by Ian Richardson. Yet, sadly, his is also one that is often overlooked, not leastways because he played the character just twice (in a pair of 1983 films made for television), but also because his light was to be quickly eclipsed a year later by the arrival on TV screens of Jeremy Brett, whose interpretation of Holmes is considered by many to be the definitive one.

Sy Weintraub – who produced several Tarzan movies throughout the 60s and was executive producer on the popular long-running Ron Ely TV series –teamed up with Otto Plaschkes (whose producer credits include Georgie Girl and The Holcroft Covenant) with the intention of making several Holmes adventures headlining Richardson.

Stage and screen actor Douglas Wilmer, best known for portraying Sherlock Holmes in the 1960s BBC series, died today at Ipswich Hospital in Suffolk, England following a short illness. He was 96. The Sherlock Holmes society made the news public. Born in London in 1920, Wilmer, trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, served in Africa during World War II prior to making his stage debut in 1945. His first major film role came in 1955 as part of the cast of…...

From spoofs to point-and-click adventure games, here are 10 of the most memorable unusual incarnations of Sherlock Holmes...

We don’t know a great deal about the content of the 90-minute Sherlock special set to air later this year, but one thing has emerged from the set photos and tantalising titbits of information we’ve seen so far. Sherlock Holmes and John Watson will be in nineteenth-century garb, pitching them back into the setting of the legendary detective’s original adventures: 1895, to be precise. Why that happens is as yet unclear, but all will be revealed.

For those still craving their Holmes fix in the meantime, the new film Mr. Holmes offers us Ian McKellen’s take on the character, musing upon an old case as he looks back on his long career from the vantage point of retirement. Jonny Lee Miller’s ultra-modern, Us-based Sherlock will be entering his fourth...

Feature Louisa Mellor 20 Jan 2014 - 07:00

An in-depth look at how His Last Vow, Sherlock’s series 3 finale, adapts the Doyle story of Charles Augustus Milverton…

Warning: contains major spoilers for Sherlock series three.

Having ticked off Moriarty, the Woman and the hell-hound in series two, Sherlock’s third run was in need of a villain. Enter Charles Augustus Magnussen, a Scandi take on Arthur Conan Doyle’s detestable master blackmailer played to grotesque perfection by The Killing’s Lars Mikkelsen.

Though perhaps the most despicable, Mikkelsen wasn’t the first on-screen version of the Doyle character. Barry Jones gave an arch, cruelly playful turn as the blackmailer in the 1965 BBC adaptation with Douglas Wilmer and Nigel Stock as Holmes and Watson. Robert Hardy, recognisable to many as Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge in the Harry Potter series, was an odious, amused Milverton in the 1992 television film with Jeremy Brett...

How to be Sherlock Holmes: The Many Faces of a Master Detective

Sunday 12th January, 10.00Pm, BBC Four- UK Broadcast

Narrated by Peter Wyngarde

For over a hundred years, more than 80 actors have put a varying face to the world’s greatest consulting detective - Sherlock Holmes. And many of them incorporated details - such as the curved pipe and the immortal line ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’ - that never featured in Conan Doyle’s original stories.

In charting the evolution of Sherlock on screen, from early silent films to the latest film and television versions, BBC Four’s Timeshift shows how our notion of Sherlock today is as much a creation of these various screen portrayals as of the stories themselves.

How to be Sherlock Holmes: The Many Faces of a Master Detective includes clips from feature films such as Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes...

News Louisa Mellor 24 Sep 2013 - 06:15

Nicholas Young, who played John in the original series, has joined The Tomorrow People remake on The CW...

Nicholas Young is following up his six-year stint on the original The Tomorrow People (in which he played the group's young leader, John), with a role in The CW's remake of the seventies series.

Young is to appear in episodes eight and nine of the new series, which makes its debut on the 9th of October in the Us and shortly afterwards on E4 in the UK. He'll be playing Aldus Crick, a scientist with information about the disappearance of lead Stephen's father, who attracts the unwelcome attention of Ultra, the organisation that seeks to exterminate homo superior.

This kind of hat-tip to the original series is usually a winner - Conan Doyle fans were delighted, for instance, to see former Sherlock Holmes actor Douglas Wilmer...

Moriarty may be dead (or is he?!), but Sherlock and Watson aren't going to be short of problems to solve in the much-anticipated third series of Sherlock.

Exec producer Sue Vertue announced the first major piece of series three casting news yesterday (July 29), revealing that Dane Lars Mikkelsen would be joining the show as dastardly villain Charles Augustus Magnussen.

But what do we know about Magnussen? And for anyone who doesn't know their Forbrydelsen from their Borgen, who is Mikkelsen? Digital Spy has all the details that every Sherlockology fanatic needs to know.

1. Lars Dittman Mikkelsen was born on May 6, 1964 in Denmark.

He graduated from the National Theatre School of Denmark in 1995 and he is married to actress Anette Støvelbæk.

2. Oh. And did we mention he has quite a famous brother called Mads?

Surely a Benedict Cumberbatch/Hugh Dancy, Sherlock/Hannibal crossover episode beckons. Sherlibal? Hannilock?

3. He is best known...

Anthony Mann jousts fast and loose with the lives of Spain's medieval masters – resulting in seriously sublime cinema

El Cid (1961)

Director: Anthony Mann

Entertainment grade: A

History grade: D

Rodrigo Díaz was an 11th-century nobleman from Vivar in Castile. He is better known as El Cid, from the Arabic sidi or sayyid, meaning "the Lord".

War

In 1080, when this film begins, the territory that is now Spain and Portugal was split between Christian and Muslim kingdoms. Emir Ben Yussuf (Herbert Lom) rouses the Muslim princes of the southern part, known as al-Andalus, to conquer the Christian north, some of which is known as León-Castile. The film's Ben Yussuf is the historical Yusuf ibn Tashufin, commander of the Almoravid Empire.

At his summons, Emir Yusuf al-Mutamin of Zaragoza (Douglas Wilmer) has a go at conquering part of León-Castile, but is captured by Rodrigo Díaz (Charlton Heston). When Díaz offers him freedom rather than death,...

“My name is Bond - James Bond". That classic introduction to the cinema’s greatest secret agent is as famous as “I am Dracula, I bid you welcome.” When the box office success of Dr No (1962) turned the unknown Sean Connery into a movie legend, Hammer was never far away from the franchise. With their own films running parallel to the Bond series, Hammer and Eon Productions often made use of the same talent.

Dr No also marked the debuts of Bernard Lee (the first of 11 films as M) and Lois Maxwell (the first of 14 as Miss Moneypenny). Lee had a brief turn as Tarmut in Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1973) and despite never starring in a Hammer horror, Maxwell turned up in their early fifties thrillers Lady in the Fog (1953) and Mantrap (1954).

As doomed double-agent Professor Dent, Anthony Dawson is best known as the vile Marquis in Curse...

With Robert Downey Junior's inspired reinventing of the role in Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Homes (2010) and the BBC effectively bringing Holmes to the 21st Century in the popular TV series Sherlock (2010) starring Benedict Cumberbatch, the crime-solving antics of the Great Detective and his loyal colleague Dr Watson seem in good hands, and remain as popular as ever. Among the screen actors who have effectively brought Holmes to life include Arthur Wontner, Basil Rathbone, Peter Cushing, Douglas Wilmer, Ian Richardson and Jeremy Brett. As an amazing and complex role to play, the right actor can add great depth to it.

But then there are others who turned out to be Not-So-Great-Detectives, either through miscasting or just being plain bad. One does not need the power of deductive reasoning to see why the following ten actors fell way off the mark...

Roger Moore - Sherlock Homes in New York (1976)

"My name is Holmes,...

Sherlock Holmes purists who were not enamored with Robert Downey Jr.'s recent take on the Great Detective may want to thank A&E for cashing in on Hollywood's Christmas blockbuster. In The Sherlock Holmes Collection on DVD the American cable and satellite network has resurrected a bygone Holmes in the form of Peter Cushing. The great British actor, who played Van Helsing in Hammer's horror films in the 1970s and Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars Episode IV, played Holmes in a 1960s BBC television series. Not much of that show survives but what does is a welcome addition to the detective's DVD canon.

Want to know more? The BBC aired the Cushing series in 1968 under the title Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. The show was a continuation of sorts of another series of adaptations the network had aired three years earlier. That starred Douglas Wilmer as...

It.s elementary that Peter Cushing would take on the role of Sherlock Holmes. It.s also elementary that when a big budget re-imagining of the world.s first consulting detective is about to hit theaters that every studio would dig into its vaults to bring out similarly themed products. I.m still lukewarm on the big movie, but I.m happy to finally see Cushing in a deerstalker once again. The BBC produced a television version of the adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle.s Sherlock Holmes from 1964-1965 starring Douglas Wilmer as the great detective. Wilmer decided to leave the production and a new actor was needed to don the deerstalker. Wilmer cited budget issues and a tight shooting schedule as his...

 

Former James Bond girls and Hammer stars Caroline Munro and Martine Beswicke reunited at Bray Studios

 

 

If you couldn't be at Bray Studios' historic Hammer Horror reunion last weekend, Cinema Retro's man on the scene Adrian Smith gives you the low-down:

On August 4, over 150 fans and many Hammer stars and personnel gathered at Bray Studios on the banks of the River Thames to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the release of The Curse of Frankenstein. Amongst the guests were writer-director Jimmy Sangster, director John Hough, Margaret Robinson, the widow of art director Bernard Robinson, and actors Virginia Wetherell, Madeline Smith, Ingrid Pitt, Janina Faye, Vera Day, Caroline Munro, Martine Beswicke, Carol Marsh, Yvonne Monlaur, Valerie Leon, Douglas Wilmer, Damien Thomas, John Cater and Edward de Souza. It was the first time for many of the fans in attendance that they had been able to visit Bray, the spiritual home of Hammer films.