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To mark the Centenary of Peter Sellers on what would have been his 100th birthday (8 September 2025), Studiocanal is celebrating one of Britain’s most legendary comic actors with the release of two early career gems on Blu-ray – and you could Win a copy of both!

We’re giving away copies of the hilariously inventive Two Way Stretch (1960) and the wickedly sharp satire Heavens Above! (1963) – both sparkling new restorations from the Vintage Classics collection, complete with brand-new bonus features.

Two Way Stretch

Peter Sellers stars as Dodger Lane, a jailbird with a genius plan: break out of prison, steal a fortune in diamonds, and sneak back in before anyone notices! Co-starring comedy icons Bernard Cribbins and Lionel Jeffries, and packed with bonus extras including exclusive interviews, audio commentary and rare archival footage.

Heavens Above!

Sellers plays a well-meaning but naive priest whose radical honesty and generosity wreak havoc on a posh English village.

The extras on this disc are in line with those on Heavens Above!, which is also on Vintage Classics release from Studiocanal this week. The audio commentary from husband and wife team Robert and Gemma Ross is broadly similar, again with a lot of describing what is happening onscreen peppered with the occasional titbit about a member of the cast. It's fine but those familiar with the faces here are not likely to learn much they didn't know already.

Paul Joyce's Channel 4 60-minuter Seller's Best has again been filleted for the relevant bits for Two Way Stretch: Sellers On The Inside, with the likes of Roy Boulting and the fabulous Beryl Reid offering their observations on Sellers as a performer. Peter Sellers: Criminally Good is also a decent, if brief, consideration of the production of the film. Again it seems rather a shame that there isn't more on the rest.

Ian Nathan guides viewers through the 1959 comedy I’m All Right Jack, a satirical take on British industrial life. The film, starring Ian Carmichael, Peter Sellers, Richard Attenborough, and Margaret Rutherford, is the focus of this episode. I’m All Right Jack is a 1959 British comedy film directed and produced by John and Roy Boulting, […]

Classic Movies: The Story of… I’m All Right Jack...

It seems only natural that Severin Films would follow up its two Eurocrypt of Christopher Lee box sets with a collection of some of the more offbeat entries in the filmography of Peter Cushing, Lee’s legendary Hammer Films co-star. Cushing Curiosities collects five films and the remaining episodes of a TV series that highlight the diverse aspects of Cushing’s always authoritative on-screen persona. Featuring crisp new 2K restorations sourced from original elements, Severin’s compelling new set comes complete with loads of bonus materials, including some priceless audio interviews with the man himself and commentaries by historians, as well as Peter Cushing: A Portrait in Six Sketches, a 200-page book by film historian Jonathan Rigby.

Cushing appears as a stiff-necked yet urbane airline pilot in 1960’s Cone of Silence, a modestly compelling exposé based on the actual investigation into a 1952 airplane crash. Reprimanded for a crash that killed his copilot,...

Ever since movies began, filmmakers have depicted the end of the world of the world on screen whether it be from floods, asteroids, comets, alien invasion and even Zombies. But cinema went nuclear after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945. The arrival of the nuclear age heralded the introduction of a new sub-genre: destruction by atomic bomb. And with the release July 21 of Christopher Nolan’s lauded “Oppenheimer,” which domestically earned some $70 million in its opening weekend, let’s look at some of the vintage flicks of the genre.

Nuclear destruction of London is stopped at the last moment in the taut 1950 British film “Seven Days to Noon,” directed by John and Roy Boulting and winners of the original story Oscar, stars veteran character actor Barry Jones as a brilliant scientist working at an atomic research center in London who steals an A-bomb that...

Kudos to Powerhouse Indicator for releasing this dramatic propaganda piece based on an actual German churchman imprisoned for refusing to kowtow to the Nazi authorities. It’s a primer on fascist power from early in the war, one of the first features by the Boulting Brothers. Pi’s extras package enlarges our interest ten-fold: the pastor’s objection to the Nazis was grossly misrepresented and the politics of his incarceration were very different. An added bonus are other wartime short subjects by Roy Boulting, from the Imperial War Museum.

Pastor Hall

Region Free Blu-ray

Powerhouse Indicator

1940 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 95 min. / Street Date June 27, 2022 / Available from Powerhouse / £15.99

Starring: Wilfrid Lawson, Nova Pilbeam, Seymour Hicks, Marius Goring, Brian Worth, Percy Walsh, Lina Barrie, Eliot Makeham, Hay Petrie, Bernard Miles.

Cinematography: Mutz Greenbaum

Art Director: James Carter

Film Editor: Roy Boulting

Original Music: Charles Brill, Mac Adams

Screen Story and Screenplay by Leslie Arliss,...

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“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:...

In this rereleased comic drama, Hayley Mills and Hywel Bennett play a couple plagued by a wedding-night disaster and the neighbours’ wagging tongues

‘It’s life, lad. It might make you laugh at your age, but one day it’ll make you bloody cry.” After 54 years, this British movie from the Boulting brothers flares like a struck match with broad comedy, fierce sentimentality and a strange dark sense of life’s painfulness – and it’s an amazingly vivid time capsule of Britain in the 1960s. The Family Way, rereleased on digital platforms, is based on a stage play by Bill Naughton, itself developed from his Armchair Playhouse TV script, and directed by Roy Boulting and produced by John Boulting, with a musical score from Paul McCartney, arranged by George Martin.

Hywel Bennett brings his discontented-cherub presence to the role of Arthur Fitton, a young cinema projectionist in Bolton. Arthur is getting married to Jenny Piper,...

British actor Nicky Henson, who starred in Fawlty Towers and There’s A Girl In My Soup, has died at the age of 74.

Henson’s family said in a statement, “Nicky Henson has died after a long disagreement with cancer.”

Best known for playing Mr Johnson in The Psychiatrist episode of classic BBC comedy Fawlty Towers, he starred alongside Goldie Hawn and Peter Sellers in Roy Boulting’s 1970 rom-com There’s A Girl In My Soup.

He also appeared in a number of episodes of ITV period drama Downton Abbey as well as supporting roles in Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake and George Clooney’s Syriana and BBC soap EastEnders.

Last year, he told Pa news agency that he was first diagnosed with cancer on Christmas Day nearly 20 years ago. “For the last 18 years, I’ve regarded myself as being in extra time, which I never expected to have, so I’m very thankful for it.

Is this movie ground zero for Atom-fear science fiction? The Boulting Brothers assemble the very first movie about a nuclear terror plot, without cutting corners or wimping out. The incredibly dry, civilized André Morell must track down a rogue scientist who threatens to nuke London; the entire city must be evacuated. Barry Jones is the meek boffin with a bomb in his satchel. The impressively produced thriller won an Oscar for Best Story; it’s practically a template for the ‘docu-real’ approach of the first Quatermass films. It’s also the link between ordinary postwar thriller intrigues and the high-powered, science fiction- styled terrors to come.

Seven Days to Noon

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1950 / B&w / 1:37 flat Academy / 97 min. / Street Date November 5, 2019 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Barry Jones, Olive Sloane, André Morell, Sheila Manahan, Hugh Cross, Joan Hickson, Ronald Adam, Marie Ney, Wyndham Goldie, Russell Waters, Martin Boddey,...

When it comes to discussing ’60s British horror, most conversations usually begin and end with Hammer’s gothics and their sleazy derivatives. Mind you, it’s not hard to see why—the studio practically revived the genre in the UK during the late ’50s, and competitors would have to be fools to not want to ride their coattails, creating their own bloody (and occasionally brilliant) gothics chock-full of sex and violence. But the ’60s also saw the rise of a different, darker sub-genre—the modern psychological thriller, birthed from Alfred Hitchcock’s visual vocabulary and directors focused less on the supernatural and more on the depths of human cruelty and depravity. These thrillers are violent, sexual, and no stranger to controversy, and on today’s entry of the Crypt of Curiosities, we’ll be looking at three of the best and most noteworthy films.

The first big British thriller of...

Brian Trenchard-Smith's outrageous futuristic gore-fest imagines an Australian extermination camp run by the sadistic Michael Craig and Roger Ward, where jaded rich folk come to hunt human prey. The leading targets for this week's jaunt are Steve Railsback and Olivia Hussey. It is snarky? Is it subversive? An alternate title was Blood Camp Thatcher! Turkey Shoot Blu-ray Severin Films 1982 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 93 80 min. / Escape 2000, Blood Camp Thatcher / Street Date September 22, 2015 / 24.98 Starring Steve Railsback, Olivia Hussey, Michael Craig, Carmen Duncan, Noel Ferrier, Lynda Stoner, Roger Ward, Michael Petrovitch, Gus Mercurio, John Ley. Cinematography John McLean Film Editor Alan Lake Original Music Brian May Special Effects John Stears Second Unit Director / Executive Producer David Hemmings Written byJon George, Neill Hicks, George Schenck, Robert Williams, David Lawrence Produced by William Fayman, Antony I. Ginnane Directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Who cannot appreciate a movie that carries the alternate title Blood Camp Thatcher?...

November on Horror Channel sees network premieres for a memorable collection of strange cult oddities and forgotten British horror classics, kicking off with the network premiere of Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, starring David Bowie. Joining Bowie in the realm of the weird and wonderful is Roy Boulting’s psychological ground-breaker Twisted Nerve, Michael Powell’s controversial (and classic) Peeping Tom, Robert Fuest’s Hitchcockian And Soon the Darkness and Jimmy Sangster’s Hammer classic Fear in the Night.

Also, there are UK TV premieres for Emmerdale actor Dominic Brunt’s directorial feature film debut Before Dawn, Lulu Jarmen’s disturbing Bad Meat (review) and Padraig Reynold’s festival favourite Rites of Spring (review).

The line up in full:

Fri 1 Nov @ 22:55 – The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976)

Based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Walter Tevis, this cult classic stars David Bowies (in...

Cinematographer on the first Star Wars film who worked with the Boulting Brothers, Hitchcock and Polanski

The British cinematographer Gilbert Taylor, who has died aged 99, was best known for his camerawork on the first Star Wars movie (1977). Though its special effects and set designs somewhat stole his thunder, it was Taylor who set the visual tone of George Lucas's six-part space opera.

"I wanted to give it a unique visual style that would distinguish it from other films in the science-fiction genre," Taylor declared. "I wanted Star Wars to have clarity because I don't think space is out of focus … I thought the look of the film should be absolutely clean … But George [Lucas] saw it differently … For example, he asked to set up one shot on the robots with a 300mm camera lens and the sand and sky of the Tunisian desert just meshed together. I told him it wouldn't work,...

James Mason movies Turner Classic Movies, Saturday, August 11 (Edt) 6:00 Am Lord Jim (1965). After turning coward, a naval officer tries to redeem himself by helping Asian natives stage a revolution. Director: Richard Brooks. Cast: Peter O’Toole, James Mason, Curt Jurgens. Color, 154 minutes. Letterbox. 8:45 Am Thunder Rock (1942). A disillusioned writer moves into a lighthouse where some ghostly visitors restore his faith. Director: Roy Boulting. Cast: Michael Redgrave, Barbara Mullen, James Mason. Black and white, 107 minutes. 11:00 Am The Seventh Veil (1945). A concert pianist with amnesia fights to regain her memory. Director: Compton Bennett. Cast: James Mason, Ann Todd, [...]...

Twi-hards may be losing their minds over Kristen Stewart's admission that she cheated on longtime boyfriend Robert Pattinson with her 41-year-old "Snow White and the Huntsman" director, Rupert Sanders. But the scenario -- young starlet seduced by much older director -- is one Hollywood has seen plenty of times before.

Stewart's on-set scandal actually harkens back to the late '60s. While filming 1966's "The Family Way," then 20-year-old British actress Hayley Mills took more than a little direction from the film's director, 53-year-old Roy Boulting (hat tip, Sarah Weinman), who was still married at the time to Enid Munnik. But unlike Stewart and Sanders' public mea culpas, which infer that their romance began and ended on set, Mills went on to marry Boulting -- after he left his wife, of course -- and had a child together.

And Mills isn't the only one with whom Stewart shares a parallel plot line.

The actor and frontman of Kula Shaker on how they came to make the comedy-horror film A Fantastic Fear of Everything

In an ideal world, Simon Pegg would physically assault his audience. "People need to be poked in the face," he announces, gripped suddenly by a passion so intense it causes him to surface from the fog of jetlag and shove aside his walnut and avocado salad. (He only recently returned to the UK from shooting Star Trek 2 in Los Angeles, and admits to needing help with key nouns and adjectives.) "Maybe not a poke in the face," he continues after a second's thought. "But the ribs, at least. I like the idea of confounding audiences to a degree, challenging their expectations. We are given what we expect so much now. There's this desperate fear of upsetting anyone. All we get in the cinema are 3D fireworks displays. But...

By Allen Gardner

Harold And Maude (Criterion) Hal Ashby’s masterpiece of black humor centers on a wealthy young man (Bud Cort) who’s obsessed with death and the septuagenarian (Ruth Gordon) with whom he finds true love. As unabashedly romantic as it is quirky, with Cat Stevens supplying one of the great film scores of all-time. Fine support from Vivian Pickles, Cyril Cusack, Charles Tyner, and Ellen Geer. Fine screenplay by Colin Higgins. Also available on Blu-ray disc. Bonuses: Commentary by Hal Ashby biographer Nick Dawson, producer Charles Mulvehill; Illustrated audio excerpts from seminars by Ashby and Higgins; Interview with Cat Stevens. Widescreen. Dolby 2.0 stereo.

In Darkness (Sony) Agnieszka Holland’s Ww II epic tells the true story of a sewer worker and petty thief in Nazi-occupied Poland who single-handedly helped hide a group of Jews in the city’s labyrinthine sewer system for the duration of the war.

With Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol hitting DVD and Blu-ray this week courtesy of Paramount, we sat down with some of the cast to talk about their experiences on the film, working with Tom Cruise, and just what it takes to be an Imf agent. We’ve already brought you an interview with Paula Patton, and now it’s the turn of Simon Pegg – who plays Imf agent Benji Dunn…

Tell me about the story…

I think there’s a reason why it’s called Ghost Protocol and not Mission: Impossible IV because it felt to me almost like the beginning of a new chapter in the story of Ethan Hunt. When we first met him it was like his formative years, he was a young agent and he went through three very trying experiences and at the end of the last one appeared to be settling down and becoming a family man.

We’ve just been sent over the following press release alerting us to the fact that the legendary Simon Pegg will be starring in new movie, A Fantastic Fear of Everything which started shooting 6th July in London and at Shepperton Studios.

This is the first project for Pinewood Studio Group in their new ‘Pinewood Films’ venture which we reported on a while back. It’s all very exciting for them and we’re so pleased to see their first film is now fully on the road. Pegg is joined by Alan Drake, Amara Khan, Clare Higgins and Sheridan Smith and the film is the debut feature of former Kula Shaker frontman Crispian Mills, the son of director Roy Boulting and actress Hayley Mills, and whose grandfather was the late Sir John Mills.

Jack (Simon Pegg) is a children’s author turned crime novelist whose detailed research into the lives...

Jane Greer, Out of the Past Today is neither Jane Greer's birth nor death anniversary. Even so, Turner Classic Movies is devoting Saturday evening/night to the dangerously seductive star of a number of (mostly) Rko productions of the late '40s and early '50s. And who's complaining? Unfortunately, Out of the Past, perhaps Greer's best-known film and performance, is already in the past. It was shown earlier this evening. Right now, TCM is showing Don Siegel's Mexico-set crime drama The Big Steal, featuring Greer, her Out of the Past co-star Robert Mitchum, William Bendix, Patrick Knowles, and silent-film veterans Ramon Novarro and Don Alvarado. Next comes my favorite Jane Greer performance, as the good girl gone bad — or bad girl attempting to go good — in John Cromwell's The Company She Keeps. This all-but-forgotten little melodramatic gem is a must for another reason as well: Lizabeth Scott,...

Netflix has revolutionized the home movie experience for fans of film with its instant streaming technology. Netflix Nuggets is my way of spreading the word about independent, classic and foreign films made available by Netflix for instant streaming.

This Week’s New Instant Releases…

Promised Lands (1974)

Streaming Available: 04/19/2011

Cast: Documentary

Director: Susan Sontag

Synopsis: Set in Israel during the final days of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, this powerful documentary — initially barred by Israel authorities — from writer-director Susan Sontag examines divergent perceptions of the enduring Arab-Israeli clash. Weighing in on matters related to socialism, anti-Semitism, nation sovereignty and American materialism are The Last Jew writer Yoram Kaniuk and military physicist Yuval Ne’eman.

Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen (2009)

Streaming Available: 04/19/2011

Cast: Barbara Sukowa, Heino Ferch, Hannah Herzsprung, Gerald Alexander Held, Lena Stolze, Sunnyi Melles

Synopsis: Directed by longtime star of independent German cinema Margarethe von Trotta, this reverent...

Turner Classic Movies (North America) presents two gems over this weekend that have never been available on home video in America. Tonight at 12:15 Am (Est)(actually Sunday morning), TCM presents the acclaimed 1966 comedy drama The Family Way, starring Hayley Mills and Hywel Bennett as teenage newlyweds who find that fate keeps preventing them from consummating their marriage. Roy Boulting directs and Paul McCartney provides the musical score. On Sunday October 10 at 6:15 Pm (Est), TCM presents a real rarity as part of its tribute to Tony Curtis: the rarely-seen 1970 adventure You Can't Win 'Em All starring Curtis and Charles Bronson as mercenaries in Turkey. The film was directed by Peter Collinson, who helmed the original classic The Italian Job.

RopeOfSilicon have posted the first three images from the British crime-thriller, Brighton Rock.

Rowan Joffe’s film is an adaptation of the acclaimed novel of the same name, written by Graham Greene, which was first published in 1938.

It is the second adaptation to have been made. The first, directed by John and Roy Boulting, was released back in 1947. Joffe’s Brighton Rock, however, will be more attuned to the original source material.

Brighton Rock stars Helen Mirren (The Last Station), Sam Riley (Control), John Hurt (44 Inch Chest), Andrea Riseborough (Made In Dagenham), Pete Postlethwaite (Inception) and Nonso Anozie (Atonement).

Synopsis: Charts the headlong fall of Pinkie (Riley), a razor-wielding disadvantaged teenager with a religious death wish.

I’ve embedded one image below, but you can head over to RopeOfSilicon to see the other two:

Brighton Rock will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, which runs from September 9 – 19, 2010.

Actor who brought sympathetic dimensions to the comic twerp Bertie Wooster and the shrewd detective Lord Peter Wimsey

Actor known for his roles as the archetypal blithering Englishman

Playing the archetypal silly ass was the sometimes reluctant business of the stage, film and television actor Ian Carmichael, who has died aged 89. In the public mind he became the best-known postwar example of a characteristic British type - the personally appealing blithering idiot who somehow survives, and sometimes even gets the girl. One of his most characteristic and memorable sorties in this field was his portrayal of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim – the anti-hero James Dixon, who savaged the pretensions of academia, as Amis had himself sometimes clashed with academia when he was a lecturer at Swansea. Appearing in John and Roy Boulting's 1957 film, he was able to suggest an unruly but amiable spirit at the end of its tether,...

In honor of Quentin Tarantino week here at Wamg, this column will tackle the 1968 British psycho-thriller Twisted Nerve. A music highlight of Tarantino’s first Kill Bill film in 2003 occurs during the scene when Darryl Hannah’s eye-patched Elle Driver is walking down the hospital corridors intending to dispatch Uma Thurman and she’s whistling this haunting tune that is at the same time both childlike and threatening. Curious, I read the closing credits and the strange song was identified as the theme from the movie Twisted Nerve composed by Bernard Herrmann. That title was familiar as I had its cool psychedelic U.S. one-sheet in my collection but I’d never seen the film and immediately became determined to track it down. I was able to secure a British Pal import of the film and was pleased to find Twisted Nerve an excellent, nasty little forgotten thriller about a warped young psychopath.