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Retro-active: The Best From The Cinema Retro Archives

“The Lady Vanishes One More Time”

By Raymond Benson

The Criterion Collection has issued a Blu-ray upgrade to a previous winning DVD release—Carol Reed’s World War II suspense adventure, Night Train to Munich. It’s a terrific example of the fine cinema Britain was managing to produce even while at war. Released there in August of 1940, the country was already in the conflict, although the Blitz had not yet occurred.

What’s more striking is its resemblance to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938) in tone, setting, and even characters. Marketing pushes at the time suggested that Night Train to Munich was a “sequel” to Vanishes, which was an extremely popular movie on both sides of the Atlantic. Night Train is not a sequel, though—it’s more of a remake.

Somebody at the studio must have thought they needed...

As detailed in his brilliant new Harpers essay, Martin Scorsese is not only continuing to make masterpieces along with highlighting and preserving all corners of world cinema—he’s fighting tooth and nail for the art form itself as media conglomerates further infantilize the medium with four-quadrant, homogenized “content.”

While his accurate comments have caused some backlash, our friends at Bright Wall/Dark Room put it succinctly, “Scorsese is a gate *opener* btw. He wants you to see movies, make movies, love movies, live movies. It’s kinda been his whole thing for 50 years.” The latest proof of this life-long mission has arrived courtesy of a list of new film recommendations.

Spurred on by Edgar Wright’s request during quarantine for more films to devour, Scorsese sent the fellow filmmaker nearly 50 recommendations of British films, including many overlooked ones, revealed in 3-hour conversation that Wright had with Quentin Tarantino on the Empire podcast.

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...

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“An Alastair Sim Quartet”

By Raymond Benson

Alastair George Bell Sim, popularly known as Alastair Sim, was one of those great British actors famous for his remarkable facial features, physical presence, and vocal delivery. Primarily a renowned stage performer from the 1930s to the 1970s, Sim also made several films—mostly comedies, because he could do “irony” as well as, say, Alec Guinness. Sim is perhaps best-known for his definitive Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, but his work portraying acerbic and sarcastic characters in other pictures in the late 40s and through the 50s, is outstanding.

The impressive Film Movement label has released this 4-disk package that highlights a quartet of notable Alastair Sim appearances in what are deemed to be among the best post-war “very British” comedies. This was a time when Ealing Studios, for example, was making its mark in the genre.

Staring down his prey with sunken eyes and a sinister smile, Alastair Sim was the fiend Charles Addams never got around to drawing. Sim was a quick-change artist who didn’t need makeup to transform from a grasping monster into your favorite uncle – it’s why he remains the greatest interpreter of Ebenezer Scrooge. Whether playing a cold-blooded assassin in The Green Man or a kindly army chaplain in Folly to be Wise he understood as well as anyone why the masks of tragedy and comedy are intertwined.

Sim is one of those figures who’s been consigned to the history books for decades. But by releasing a Blu ray set of the great man’s comedies in 2020, Film Movement Classics, like Scrooge, hasn’t lost their senses – they’ve come to them.

Alastair Sim’s School for Laughter

Blu ray

Film Movement Classics

1954, ’60, ’51, ’47 / 1.67:1, 1.37:1 / 86, 97, 93, 82 min.

Starring Alastair Sim,...

We have a relatively quiet week of home media releases ahead of us this week, but the titles that are coming out are a rad bunch of films nonetheless. Scream Factory is doing the Dark Lord’s work with both the Collector’s Edition of April Fool’s Day and the HD release of Frankenstein: The True Story. If you missed it in theaters back in January, Nicolas Pesce’s The Grudge (2020) is headed to various platforms this Tuesday, and Arrow Video has put together a stellar Special Edition release of Philip Ridley’s The Passion of Darkly Noon as well.

Other Blu-ray and DVD releases for March 24th include Endless Night, Cabal, Hunter’s Moon, The Zombinator, and The Wizard: Collector’s Edition.

April Fool’s Day: Collector’s Edition

Good friends...with some time to kill. When Muffy St. John invited her college friends up to her parents' secluded...

Why does CineSavant write so many positive reviews, even for films not commonly thought of as even being ‘good?’ Well, I’m about to offend committed fans of this Hayley Mills thriller… it bothered me in such basic ways that I had to watch it twice to make sure I hadn’t missed something important. Hayley Mills loves Hywel Bennett, a poor boy who gets a chance at the good life. But are they going to be victimized by envious relations, murderous gypsies, a deranged architect? The big superduper plus here is the film’s original music score by Bernard Herrman, one of his last.

Endless Night

Region B Blu-ray

Powerhouse Indicator

1972 / Color B&w / 1:85 widescreen / 100 min. / / Street Date , 2020 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £15.99

Starring: Hayley Mills, Hywel Bennett, Britt Ekland, Per Oscarsson, George Sanders, Lois Maxwell, Patience Collier, Ann Way, Leo Genn, Shirley Jones (voice).

Cinematography: Harry Waxman...

Mill Creek and Kit Parker have raided the Columbia vault once again in search of Noir Gold from the ‘fifties. Their selection this time around has a couple of prime gems, several straight crime thrillers and domestic jeopardy tales, and also a couple of interesting Brit imports. They aren’t really ‘Noir’ either, but they’re still unexpected and different. The top title is Don Siegel’s incomparable The Lineup, but also on board is a snappy anti-commie epic by André De Toth. Get set for a lineup of impressive leading ladies: Diana Dors, Arlene Dahl, Anita Ekberg — and the great Colleen Dewhurst as a card-carrying Red!

Noir Archive 9-Film Collection Volume 3

The Shadow on the Window, The Long Haul, Pickup Alley, The Tijuana Story, She Played with Fire, The Case Against Brooklyn, The Lineup, The Crimson Kimono, Man on a String

Blu-ray

Mill Creek / Kit Parker

1957 -1960 / B&w...

By Tim Greaves

Not the most beloved entry in Alfred Hitchcock's cinematic oeuvre – by either audiences in general or the director himself – 1939's Jamaica Inn (based on a Daphne du Maurier novel first published three years earlier) is nevertheless a serviceable enough piece of drama, which perhaps finds its most ideal place nowadays as an undemanding rainy Sunday afternoon programmer.

Following the death of her mother, Mary Yellen (Maureen O'Hara) travels from Ireland to England intending to take up residence with her relatives at their Cornish hostelry the Jamaica Inn. After an unexpected detour, which on face value proves beneficial when she makes the acquaintance of local squire and magistrate Sir Humphrey Pengallan (Charles Laughton), Mary arrives at her destination to find her browbeaten Aunt Patience (Maria Ney) living in fear of a tyrannical husband, the brutish Joss Merlyn (Leslie Banks). It also transpires that the Inn is the...

Modern spy movies have nothing on this Brit thriller produced just as war broke out -- Rex Harrison, Margaret Lockwood and Paul Henried clash with Nazi agents, and risk a daring escape to Switzerland. The witty screenplay is by the writers of Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes and the director is Carol Reed, in terrific form. Night Train to Munich Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 523 1940 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 95 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date September, 2016 / Starring Margaret Lockwood, Rex Harrison, Paul von Hernried, Basil Radford, Naunton Wayne, James Harcourt, Felix Aylmer, Roland Culver, Raymond Huntley, Fritz (Frederick) Valk. Cinematography Otto Kanturek Film Editor R. E. Dearing Written by Sidney Gilliat, Frank Launder story by Gordon Wellesley Produced by Edward Black Directed by Carol Reed

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Alfred Hitchcock's successful series of 1930s spy chase thrillers -- The Man Who Knew Too Much; The 39 Steps --...

Every week we dive into the cream of the crop when it comes to home releases, including Blu-ray and DVDs, as well as recommended deals of the week. Check out our rundown below and return every Tuesday for the best (or most interesting) films one can take home. Note that if you’re looking to support the site, every purchase you make through the links below helps us and is greatly appreciated.

A Bigger Splash (Luca Guadagnino)

Despite a loose script that justifies little, Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s follow-up feature to his glorious melodrama I Am Love is a sweaty, kinetic, dangerously unpredictable ride of a film. One is frustrated by the final stroke of genius that never came, but boy was it fun to spend two hours inside such a whirlwind of desires, mind games, delirious sights and sounds. Based on the 1969 French drama La piscine (The Swimming Pool...

Joseph Losey doesn't normally make trendy, lighthearted genre films, and in this SuperSpy epic we find out why -- an impressive production and great music don't compensate for a lack of pace and dynamism, not to mention a narrow sense of humor. Yet it's a lounge classic, and a perverse favorite of spy movie fans. Modesty Blaise Blu-ray Kl Studio Classics 1966 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 119 min. / Street Date August 23, 2016 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95 Starring Monica Vitti, Terence Stamp, Dirk Bogarde, Harry Andrews, Michael Craig, Clive Revill, Alexander Knox, Rossella Falk, Scilla Gabel, Tina Marquand Cinematography Jack Hildyard Production Designer Richard MacDonald, Jack Shampan Film Editor Reginald Beck Original Music John Dankworth Written by Evan Jones from a novel by Peter O'Donnell and a comic strip by Jim Holdaway Produced by Joseph Janni Directed by Joseph Losey

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

When I first reviewed a DVD of Modesty Blaise fourteen years ago,...

Director best known for his Bond films, The Colditz Story and An Inspector Calls

With four James Bond movies – Goldfinger (1964), Diamonds Are Forever (1971), Live and Let Die (1973) and The Man With the Golden Gun (1974) – among his credits, the director Guy Hamilton, who has died aged 93, was one of Britain’s most bankable film-makers. But his latter-day fame, for these and other commercial blockbusters, detracted in the eyes of many critics from his earlier achievements.

Hamilton’s long career began as an assistant director, a job that most usually led to work in production. He, however, was determined to direct and decided that “the trick was not to be an assistant director, but to become the director’s assistant”, thus gaining valuable experience by tackling those tasks that preoccupied bosses chose to delegate. During a six-year period he became recognised as the best in the business, working for Alberto Cavalcanti, Sidney Gilliat,...

Originally titled The Man Who Changed His Mind, this nimble and witty British film about a scientist specializing in mind transferals deserves a much bigger audience. Robert Stevenson directs in an energetic style that belies the occasionally stage bound work found in his later studio blockbusters and a premium band of screenwriters, including John Balderston (Bride of Frankenstein) and Sidney Gilliat (The Lady Vanishes) serve up an ingenious script that explores the unexpected pitfalls of mind-swapping. Boris Karloff, happy to be on home turf with such talented colleagues, gives a typically committed and entertainingly ominous performance as the beetle-browed brain swapper. Co-star Anna Lee was the director’s wife at the time.

'Saint Joan': Constance Cummings as the George Bernard Shaw heroine. Constance Cummings on stage: From sex-change farce and Emma Bovary to Juliet and 'Saint Joan' (See previous post: “Constance Cummings: Frank Capra, Mae West and Columbia Lawsuit.”) In the mid-1930s, Constance Cummings landed the title roles in two of husband Benn W. Levy's stage adaptations: Levy and Hubert Griffith's Young Madame Conti (1936), starring Cummings as a demimondaine who falls in love with a villainous character. She ends up killing him – or does she? Adapted from Bruno Frank's German-language original, Young Madame Conti was presented on both sides of the Atlantic; on Broadway, it had a brief run in spring 1937 at the Music Box Theatre. Based on the Gustave Flaubert novel, the Theatre Guild-produced Madame Bovary (1937) was staged in late fall at Broadway's Broadhurst Theatre. Referring to the London production of Young Madame Conti, The...

Jamaica Inn

Written by Sidney Gilliat and Joan Harrison

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

UK, 1939

With 23 feature films to his credit, by 1939, Alfred Hitchcock was the most famous director in England. And with his celebrity and his reputation for quality motion pictures, he had attained a degree of creative control unmatched in the British film industry at the time. When it comes to Jamaica Inn, for more than three decades the last film he would fully shoot in his native land, this reputation and this independence would be thoroughly tested. Available now on a stunning new Blu-ray from Cohen Film Collection, which greatly improves the murky visuals and distorted sound marring all previous home video versions, Jamaica Inn had the renowned Charles Laughton as supervising star and producer. Predictably, he and Hitchcock did not always see eye to eye as they jockeyed for authority on set. The result is a contentious...

Jean Kent: British film star and ‘Last of the Gainsborough Girls’ dead at 92 (photo: actress Jean Kent in ‘Madonna of the Seven Moons’) News outlets and tabloids — little difference these days — have been milking every little drop from the unexpected and violent death of The Fast and the Furious franchise actor Paul Walker, and his friend and business partner Roger Rodas this past Saturday, November 30, 2013. Unfortunately — and unsurprisingly — apart from a handful of British publications, the death of another film performer on that same day went mostly underreported. If you’re not "in" at this very moment, you may as well have never existed. Jean Kent, best known for her roles as scheming villainesses in British films of the 1940s and Gainsborough Pictures’ last surviving top star, died on November 30 at West Suffolk Hospital in Bury St Edmunds, England. The previous day, she had suffered a fall at her...

Network Distributing is pleased to announce the next batch of titles within “The British Film” range which will be available in the UK later this year. Each feature once again benefits from a new transfer, an instant play facility and will be presented in special slim-line space-saving packaging. Some of the highlights from October are a documentary about the body narrated by Vanessa Redgrave with music from Roger Waters, more gems from the vaults from Ealing Studios, classic horror, British musicals and a courtroom drama starring Richard Attenborough.

7 October

The Body £9.99

Vanessa Redgrave and Frank Finlay narrate an intimate and innovative documentary from the seventies about the human body cut to music from Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters. Commentary by poet and playwright Adrian Mitchell.

The Final Programme £9.99

Cult director Robert Fuest’s dystopian sci-fi thriller. Robert Finch stars as Jerry Cornelius, a Nobel Prize winning physicist and playboy who...

Above: Spectacular full-scale derailment from the 1931 version of The Ghost Train (and also the 1941 version).

Arnold Ridley is fondly remembered in the UK as one of the stars of seventies sitcom Dad’s Army, about an incompetent and mainly superannuated group of volunteer soldiers in the WWII home guard, a show which made Ridley a national star at age 72 (it continued until he was 81). His sweetly doddering persona made a brilliant foil to the petulant Arthur Lowe, the dithering John Le Mesurier and gloomy Scot John Laurie.

One day, shooting on location in a graveyard, one of Ridley’s younger co-stars mused, “Hardly worth your leaving, is it, Arnold?” A rather harsh bit of humor: if you find it too mean, take comfort in the fact that the young thesp predeceased Ridley by some years, owing to liver failure. What larks!

But looong before Dad’s Army, Arnold Ridley found...

Rex Harrison hat on TCM: ‘My Fair Lady,’ ‘Anna and the King of Siam’ Rex Harrison is Turner Classic Movies’ final "Summer Under the Stars" star today, August 31, 2013. TCM is currently showing George Cukor’s lavish My Fair Lady (1964), an Academy Award-winning musical that has (in my humble opinion) unfairly lost quite a bit of its prestige in the last several decades. Rex Harrison, invariably a major ham whether playing Saladin, the King of Siam, Julius Caesar, the ghost of a dead sea captain, or Richard Burton’s lover, is for once flawlessly cast as Professor Henry Higgins, who on stage transformed Julie Andrews from cockney duckling to diction-master swan and who in the movie version does the same for Audrey Hepburn. Harrison, by the way, was the year’s Best Actor Oscar winner. (See also: "Audrey Hepburn vs. Julie Andrews: Biggest Oscar Snubs.") Following My Fair Lady, Rex Harrison...

Gary Oldman on why his character Bex from the 1989 movie The Firm says everything about the Thatcher years

Maggie at the movies

There isn't a section of society or the media that hasn't reflected on what Margaret Thatcher meant. Film, football, sport, cookery – they've all weighed in with their Thatcher memories when, it seems to me, all we're really doing is basically remembering the 1980s. The nation has become a nostalgia radio station, like a giant Capital Gold, over the past week. Still, I'm not going to let that stop Trash going off on one. Maggie, we know, cared little for the arts — why should she, when every play, film or standup comedian was basically slagging her off? Hate figure she may have been, but it didn't half make for a lively antagonism for writers and directors. Don't we miss having such a big target these days? The only equivalent...

James Marsh's gripping thriller takes us deep into the bitterly divided world of 90s Northern Ireland

The director of the gripping Belfast-set thriller Shadow Dancer, James Marsh, and its screenwriter, Tom Bradby, both have one foot in fact and the other in fiction. Marsh is best known for his imaginative feature-length documentaries, Man on Wire, which won an Oscar in 2009, and Project Nim, as well as his TV film Red Riding: 1980. The TV journalist and novelist Bradby reported from Northern Ireland for ITN in the 1990s, the setting of Shadow Dancer, the first of his six thrillers. Their film centres on the perennially interesting relationship between the spy or informer or undercover agent and the person in authority who controls them. The characters are trapped between the complicated moral realities around them and the fictions that fate imposes on them, and the situation goes back at least as far...

James Marsh's gripping thriller takes us deep into the bitterly divided world of 90s Northern Ireland

The director of the gripping Belfast-set thriller Shadow Dancer, James Marsh, and its screenwriter, Tom Bradby, both have one foot in fact and the other in fiction. Marsh is best known for his imaginative feature-length documentaries, Man on Wire, which won an Oscar in 2009, and Project Nim, as well as his TV film Red Riding: 1980. The TV journalist and novelist Bradby reported from Northern Ireland for ITN in the 1990s, the setting of Shadow Dancer, the first of his six thrillers. Their film centres on the perennially interesting relationship between the spy or informer or undercover agent and the person in authority who controls them. The characters are trapped between the complicated moral realities around them and the fictions that fate imposes on them, and the situation goes back at least as far...

On top of a mesmerising plot, perfect casting and the greatest comic duo in British cinema, this comedy thriller derives special urgency from the troubled times in which it was made

Hitchcock and railways go together like a locomotive and tender. He loved them, they figure significantly in his work and never more so than in The Lady Vanishes. Much of what happens could only take place on a railway line – passengers delayed together by an avalanche; classes compartmentalised; strangers trapped together as they're transported across a continent; an engine driver killed in crossfire; a carriage disconnected and shunted on to a branch line; an intrepid hero struggling from one carriage to another outside a fast-moving train as other locomotives rush by; clues in the form of a name traced in the steam on a window, and the label on a tea packet briefly adhering to another window; and above...

Box-office takings can soar when it rains … so what happened this year?

The story goes that when Kirk Douglas was filming To Catch A Spy in 1970 on the west coast of Scotland, he grew increasingly exasperated by the relentless bad weather. One day, suffering cabin fever in his dismal hotel, he put on his mac and went out for a walk, taking shelter at a bus stop where his only companion was a young boy. "Tell me, son, does it rain here all the time?" he asked. After a long pause, the boy answered: "I wouldn't know. I'm only 11 years old."

Douglas's experience underlines something Brits have long known: our weather is notoriously unsettled. Drought warnings are no guarantee it won't soon be raining long and hard.

Our film industry remains dangerously dependent on the weather. On an independent film, it is estimated that up to 40% of the potential opening...

The novelist relishes Hitch's prewar comedy adapted by Gilliat and Launder because it both satirises and celebrates the English stiff upper lip

It might not be his best film, but Hitchcock never made anything warmer or more lovable than this. I must have seen it 20 or 30 times and can't imagine ever growing tired of it.

Kudos to his collaborators, first of all. Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat's screenplay is sharper than anything written for Hitchcock's other British films (or his American films, come to that – except possibly for North by Northwest) and you could make a strong case for regarding it as a Launder and Gilliat film rather than a Hitchcock one, if authorship has to be decided. That sometimes endearing indifference to nuances of dialogue and characterisation that marks even some of Hitchcock's best films is nowhere to be found here: the edgy banter between Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood really sparkles.

Chicago – Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes” isn’t one of his most heralded films. You don’t hear it mentioned on most lists of the best works of arguably the most influential director who ever lived. And yet it was the third film chosen for The Criterion Collection and has now been given the upgrade and joined the esteemed Blu-ray ranks of the most important collection in the history of home entertainment. If you’re unfamiliar with this witty, delightful gem of a thriller, there’s no other way to experience it for the first time. And if you’re a fan of Hitchcock’s more famous films, do yourself a favor by checking out one of his earliest.

Blu-Ray Rating: 5.0/5.0

“The Lady Vanishes” had actually been in production with a different director when Alfred Hitchcock came on board mostly to satisfy his British contract before heading to the States.

Night Train to Munich

Directed by Carol Reed

United Kingdom, 1940

The title of Carol Reed’s 1940 wartime comedic thriller hardly tells the whole story. Perhaps hoping to capitalize off of the success of the two-years prior The Lady Vanishes, Night Train to Munich would have you believe that it’s an equally contained picture. That famous writers Frank Laudner and Sidney Gilliat wrote both is perhaps then, of no coincidence.

While there is an immensely successful third act that does take place primarily aboard a train, the film is far more sprawling and unfairly overlooked at the expense of its supposed successor.

Scientist Dr. Bomasch (James Harcourt) is forced to free Prague at the invasion of the Nazis. His daughter Anna (Margaret Lockwood) escapes from a concentration camp with the help of fellow internee Karl Marsen (Paul von Hernried) and meets her father in England, where father and daughter take...

In an old Lester Bangs piece (not that there have been any new Lester Bangs pieces since the early 80s, but you get my drift) that I can't find in either of the late critics' anthologies, Bangs recounts, with considerable bemusement, an observation made by Deep Purple organist Jon Lord during an early-70s interview with the future rock dinosaurs. "What's wrong with being a journeyman?" asked Lord, without any apparent irony. That Lord posed this question after the fizzling of such ambitious experiments as In Rock and guitarist Ritchie Blackmore's subsequent riff-monster redefinition of the group of course speaks to Lord's own personal disappointments but suggests a certain nobility involved with the concept of soldiering on. Of course, to Bangs, settling for being a journeyman was capitulating to mediocrity. Bangs was an all-or-nothing, go-for-broke character. During his own struggles with alcoholism, he marveled as what he saw as...