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Roger Vadim's 1968 sci-fi freak-out "Barbarella" is one of the zestiest, sexist, strangest, and most amusing pictures the genre has to offer. Set in the 41st century, "Barbarella" follows the merry caprices of the title heroine (Jane Fonda), a freelance adventurer of the cosmos. Barbarella, frequently undressed, is assigned by the President of Earth (Claude Dauphin) to track down a mysterious, missing scientist named Durand-Durand (Milo O'Shea) who has invented an all-powerful weapon called the positronic ray.

During her quest, Barbarella is attacked by killer dolls, befriends a blind angel (John Philip Law), is forced into a deadly orgasm machine (although she can outlast its mechanical manipulations), and faces off against the Black Queen, the tyrant ruler of Sogo.

The film was based on the erotic comics by Jean-Claude Forest, and possesses all the same sexual energy as the aggressively naughty original, even if it's not quite as sexually explicit.

To celebrate the release of Kind Hearts and Coronets released for the first time on Uhd on 22 April – we have a Uhd to give away to one lucky winner!

Kind Hearts and Coronets is the jewel in Ealing Studios’ crown, and arguably one of the finest British films ever made.

Hailing from the Golden-Age of Ealing Comedies and the same year as Passport to Pimlico and Whisky Galore!, Kind Hearts and Coronets stars Dennis Price as the debonair yet impoverished Louis Mazzini, the would-be Duke of Chalfont whose mother was disinherited by her noble family, the D’Ascoynes, for marrying beneath her. When her dying wish to be buried in the family crypt is refused, Louis vows to avenge his mother and work his way up the family tree, by engaging in the gentle art of murder. One by one he attempts to kill off the eight successors that stand...

Two Ealing classics – The Lavender Hill Mob and Kind Hearts & Coronets – are heading to 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray: more here.

Lovely, lovely news for fans of the wonderful Ealing Studios: a pair of its most-loved films have been given a 4K restoration, and are heading to the 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray format.

Charles Crichton’s The Lavender Hill Mob – which is also getting a cinema re-release in the UK this March – is arriving in a special Vintage Classics Collectors Edition set. That set includes a 64-page booklet, artcards, postcards, a Blu-ray and a 4K disc. Included too is an introduction from Martin Scorsese, and new extra features including a London Comedy Film Festival Q&a with Paul Merton.

The film is available for preorder now, and you can find more information – and get a copy – right here.

The release date for The Lavender Hill Mob on 4K disc is 22nd April,...

Nineteen sixty-eight has to be considered the apex of psychedelic sexploitation romps, with the release of Candy, adapted from Mason Hoffenberg and Terry Southern’s satirical reworking of Voltaire’s Candide, and Roger Vadim’s Barbarella, based on Jean-Claude Forest’s comic, and partially scripted by Southern (alongside an armada of other credited writers). Both employ a rambling, shaggy-dog structure as an excuse to flagrantly foreground softcore sexual hijinks tinged with a pungent whiff of social commentary, albeit the latter aspect may be easier to discern in Candy’s perverse daisy chain of events.

Southern’s contributions to the Dino De Laurentiis-produced Barbarella can be detected in some of its wittier lines (“A good many dramatic situations begin with screaming!”) and sly pokes at the persistence of class-consciousness. Aside from Southern, the two films are linked by the presence of Anita Pallenberg, style icon and muse of the Rolling...

To mark the release of Saraband for Dead Lovers on 13th March, we’ve been given Blu-ray copies to give away to 2 winners.

In 1682, the sixteen-year-old Sophie Dorothea (Joan Greenwood) is unhappily married by arrangement to Prince George Louis of Hanover (Peter Bull), an aristocrat destined to inherit the British crown. Despairing of ever experiencing true love, the desolate new Queen finds no solace in her life at court until she falls for a dashing Swedish mercenary, Count Konigsmark (Stewart Granger).

Having hatched a plot to flee England together, the couple’s scheme is discovered by the jealous Countess Platen (Flora Robson), Konigsmark’s previous lover, spelling disaster for the young lovers.

Please note: This competition is open to UK residents only

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Open to UK residents only The competition will close 16th March 2023 at 23.59 GMT The winner will be picked at random from entries...

By Lee Pfeiffer

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's timeless 1902 Sherlock Holmes novel "The Hound of the Baskervilles" is said to be the most often-filmed adaptation of a book. I don't know if that's true but it's quite clear that over the decades, the tale has indeed inspired many adaptations for the cinema and television. The 1939 classic introduced audiences to the teaming of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Holmes and Watson. The 1959 Hammer Films version was the first Holmes movie made in color and starred Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in another highly impressive adaptation. By the1970s, revisionist versions of Holmes stories were all the rage in cinema and on television, as evidenced by films such as "The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter ", "They Might Be Giants", "The Seven-Per-Cent Solution" and "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes". Thus, the famed comic duo of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore opted...

Oh Joy, Oh Rapture! Mario Bava’s comic book thriller makes the jump to Blu-ray in fine shape, with knockout visuals and eye-popping color. John Philip Law, Marisa Mell, Terry-Thomas and the late Michel Piccoli are all irreplaceable in this one-of-a-kind show. Bava’s film translates action comic fantasy into cinematic terms, pictorial appeal and dynamism intact. The disc comes with a pair of excellent commentaries, featuring Nathaniel Thompson, Troy Howarth, Tim Lucas and John Philip Law himself.

Danger: Diabolik

Blu-ray

Shout! Factory

1968 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 99 min. / Street Date May 19, 2020 / Available from Shout! Factory

Starring: John Phillip Law, Marisa Mell, Michel Piccoli,

Adolfo Celi, Terry-Thomas, Mario Donen.

Cinematography: Antonio Rinaldi

Film Editor: Romana Fortini

Art Director: Flavio Mogherini

Original Music: Ennio Morricone

Written by Adriano Baracco, Mario Bava, Brian Degas, Tudor Gates,

Dino Maiuri story by Angela & Luciana Giussani

Produced by Dino De Laurentiis

Directed by Mario Bava

We...

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“Ealing Goes Scottish”

By Raymond Benson

The famous British studio, Ealing, made many kinds of pictures and became a major force in the U.K.’s film industry, especially after producer Michael Balcon took it over. While the studio had already made a few comedies, for some reason in the late 1940s it started producing more of them. The natures of these comedies shifted and became more intelligent, dry, and focused on underdog characters who valiantly attempt to overcome a series of obstacles. Sometimes the protagonists are successful—and sometimes not. Along the way, though, a series of misadventures occur. They range from “amusing” to “riotously funny.” It all worked, and the Ealing Comedies became a sub-genre unto themselves, especially when they starred the likes of Alec Guinness, Alastair Sim, or Stanley Holloway.

The year 1949 is generally considered the beginning of the run,...

Film Movement, a self-described “film service” that traffics in esoteric theatrical and home video product has released two notable examples of post-war British comedy with Whisky Galore! and The Maggie – both are seafaring satires directed by Alexander Mackendrick featuring some of Ealing Studio’s most memorable players.

Whiskey Galore!/The Maggie

Blu ray

Film Movement

1949, 1954 / 1:33:1 / 82 min., 92 min.

Starring Joan Greenwood, Paul Douglas

Cinematography by Gerald Gibbs, Gordon Dines

Directed by Alexander Mackendrick

The men and women of Ealing emerged from the second World War with their cheerful cynicism intact and more than ready to take a bite out of the hand what fed them – from Passport to Pimlico to Kind Hearts and Coronets those artists happily took potshots at the class systems they had fought so hard to defend. Though these satires had teeth (Kind Hearts was especially lethal), romance was never far away – it’s no wonder...

“Testubular Bells”

By Raymond Benson

In 1951, Ealing Studios in Britain were on a roll. The so-called “Ealing Comedies,” which became a sub-genre all their own, had become a sensation, especially when the pictures starred the versatile and charismatic Alec Guinness. Earlier that same year, The Lavender Hill Mob was one of the most popular films ever released in the U.K., and it was proving to be a hit in America as well.

Following hot on the heels of Lavender Hill was The Man in the White Suit, which featured Guinness as Sidney Stratton, a brilliant but over-zealous scientist who will stop at nothing to realize his dream of creating an impervious textile.

As discussed in the supplemental documentary, “Revisiting ‘The Man in the White Suit,’” the picture was made at a time when Britain was on the precipice of “the future” in terms of technological advancements, but there was...

File this great comedy under social science fiction, subheading ‘H’ for hilarious. Alec Guinness’s comic boffin hero is both a bringer of miracles and one of the most dangerous men alive. The story of Sidney Stratton, brilliant chemist and inadvertent industrial terrorist, is a consistent laugh riot. Call the jokes droll, understated, dry, and reserved, but they certainly aren’t stupid — Ealing’s high-class comedy is slapstick heaven, yet hides a lesson about modern economics that most people still haven’t learned. And Guinness’s romantic foil is the woman with the velvet-gravel voice, Joan Greenwood.

The Man in the White Suit

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1951 / B&w / 1:37 flat Academy / 85 min. / Street Date September 3, 2019 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood, Cecil Parker, Michael Gough, Ernest Thesiger, Howard Marion-Crawford, Henry Mollison, Vida Hope.

Cinematography: Douglas Slocombe

Art Direction: Jim Morahan

Film Editor: Bernard Gribble

Original Music:...

Great news for fans of director Fritz Lang. His 1955 western Moonfleet is available on Blu-ray From Warner Archive

Adventure and intrigue await all ye who venture into the small and sinister village of Moonfleet on the windswept moors of Dorsetshire. Particularly as directed by master-of-menace Fritz Lang, this colorful tale of a young boy’s experiences among some really bad companions enthralls in the tradition of Kidnapped and Treasure Island. Here, young John Mohune (Jon Whiteley) arrives at his ancestral estate, now owned by the dashing, and mysterious Jeremy Fox (Stewart Granger). Out of love for the boy’s mother, but against his better judgment, Fox grudgingly allows John to stay. He soon becomes attached to the boy, but his devotion is tested when John discovers a hidden smugglers’ lair beneath the village graveyard and learns a shocking secret that could cost both him and Fox their lives.

Fritz Lang...

It’s Fritz Lang versus CinemaScope, for the first and last time. The format suited to snakes and funerals effectively hamstrings the great filmmaker’s expressive camera direction, yet the movie is one of the best of MGM’s last-gasp ’50s costume dramas. Corrupt smuggler Stewart Granger is redeemed by the faith of a young boy who believes in him; in this story the words “He’s my friend” take on a big significance. Come see director Lang struggle to adapt the wide-wide screen to accommodate his brand of real cinema.

Moonfleet

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1955 / Color / 2:55 widescreen / 87 min. / Street Date August 13, 2019 / available through the WBshop / 21.99

Starring: Stewart Granger, Jon Whiteley, George Sanders, Joan Greenwood, Viveca Lindfors, Liliane Montevecchi, Melville Cooper, Sean McClory, Alan Napier, John Hoyt, Donna Corcoran, Jack Elam, Dan Seymour, Ian Wolfe.

Cinematography: Robert H. Planck

Film Editor: Albert Akst

Original Music: Miklos Rozsa

Written by Jan Lustig,...

Released in 1949, Kind Hearts and Coronets remains one of the all time classics of British cinema. As a 4k restoration is released for its 70th anniversary, we see actors Dennis Price, Alec Guinness and Joan Greenwood and director Robert Hamer at work

•Kind Hearts & Coronets is in UK cinemas on 7 June, and on DVD and Blu-Ray on 24 June...

Full disclosure: I’m not a cat guy. Sorry! Nothing against them, but I’ve always preferred the company of dogs. However, I’ve always admired a cat’s sense of self, and their stubborn refusal to do anything at all unless it’s on their own terms. According to The Uncanny (1977), that would also include murder, as these kitties claw and bite their way to vengeance, and leave it to Severin Films to give them a brand spanking new Blu-ray litter box to play in.

A co-production between Canada’s Cinévidéo and the UK’s The Rank Organisation, The Uncanny was shot in Quebec and England for less than a million dollars. One may presume that a solid portion of the film was spent on acquiring Donald Pleasence, Peter Cushing, Ray Milland, John Vernon, and Samantha Eggar for the wraparound and the three individual segments. It certainly wasn’t...

Kind Hearts & Coronets, the jewel in the crown of the legendary Ealing Studios and arguably one of the finest British films ever made, has been gloriously restored in 4K to celebrate the film’s 70th anniversary since its original release. The film returns to cinemas on June 7th and will be available in a stunning Collector’s Edition from June 24th.

To celebrate the film’s cinema release, we are offering one lucky winner the chance to take home the ultimate comedy bundle, consisting of three British comedy classics from Studiocanal’s Vintage Classics range: The Ladykillers, The Man In The White Suit, and The Happiest Days Of Your Life. The winner will also take home a brand-new Kind Hearts & Coronets poster (by illustrator Ignatius Fitzpatrick).

Kind Hearts & Coronets is a wonderfully entertaining combination of biting class satire, hilarious farce and pitch-black comedy. The film stars Dennis Price, Joan Greenwood,...

"It's clear that you are insane." Studiocanal UK has debuted a trailer for the 70th anniversary re-release of classic British film Kind Hearts and Coronets, which originally premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1949. The film comes from the "Golden-Age of Ealing comedies", and is one of those amusing British crime comedies about Dukes and Duchesses and other royalty. A distant poor relative of the Duke of D'Ascoyne, named Louis Mazzini, plots to inherit the title by murdering the eight other heirs – all famously played by Alec Guinness – who stand ahead of him in the line of succession. Louis employs a variety of imaginative murder techniques in order to achieve his aim, and gradually his goal seems to be moving towards his grasp. The cast includes Dennis Price, Joan Greenwood, Valerie Hobson, and Audrey Fildes. The film has been restored in pristine 4K, and will be re-released to UK cinemas...

Indicator follows up The Wonderful Worlds of Ray Harryhausen, Volume One: 1955-1960 with, wait for it, Volume 2: 1961-1964, featuring three of Harryhausen’s most ambitious productions. Good news for fans, the UK company delivers another robust box set with beautiful transfers and an abundance of extras including newly produced interviews, a small treasure trove of promotional ephemera and a limited edition 80-page book with essays from Kim Newman and Tim Lucas. The set is region free, playable on Blu-ray devices worldwide.

The Wonderful Worlds of Ray Harryhausen, Volume 2: 1961-1964

Blu-ray – Region Free

Indicator/Powerhouse

Street Date November 13, 2017

Starring Herbert Lom, Joan Greenwood, Niall MacGinnis, Nigel Green, Lionel Jeffries, Edward Judd

Cinematography by Wilkie Cooper

Produced by Charles Schneer, Ray Harryhausen

Directed by Cy Endfield, Don Chaffey, Nathan Juran

Raging thunderstorms and a tempestuous score from Bernard Herrmann kick off 1961’s Mysterious Island as a water-logged crew of Union...

There's nothing more earnest than an English national epic, and this is a valiant expedition that becomes a low-key disaster. Told straight and clean, it's a primer on how to behave in the face of doom. Scott of the Antarctic Region B Blu-ray Studiocanal (UK) 1948 / Color / 1:37 Academy / 110 min. / Street Date June 6, 2016 / Available from Amazon UK £ 14.99 Starring John Mills, Derek Bond, Harold Warrender, James Robertson Justice, Kenneth More, Reginald Beckwith. Cinematography Osmond Borradaile, Jack Cardiff, Geoffrey Unsworth Editor Peter Tanner Original Music Vaughan Williams Written by Walter Meade, Ivor Montagu, Mary Hayley Bell Produced by Michael Balcon Directed by Charles Frend

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

English film companies fell on hard times during the postwar austerity period. But the relatively small Ealing Studios maintained its creative underdog brand even after it was taken over by Rank, and is still celebrated for wartime greats like Went the Day Well?, the singular masterpiece Dead of Night,...

Article by Jim Batts, Dana Jung, Sam Moffitt, and Tom Stockman

Special effects legend Ray Harryhausen, whose dazzling and innovative visual effects work on fantasy adventure films such as Jason And The Argonauts and The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad passed away in 2013 at age 92. In 1933, the then-13-year-old Ray Harryhausen saw King Kong at a Hollywood theater and was inspired – not only by Kong, who was clearly not just a man in a gorilla suit, but also by the dinosaurs. He came out of the theatre “stunned and haunted. They looked absolutely lifelike … I wanted to know how it was done.” It was done by using stop-motion animation: jointed models filmed one frame at a time to simulate movement. Harryhausen was to become the prime exponent of the technique and its combination with live action. The influence of Harryhausen on film luminaries like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Peter Jackson, and...

Fans of special effects icon Ray Harryhausen should rejoice at the remastering of 1961’s Mysterious Island, a sequel of sorts to Jules Verne’s more celebrated 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which had been memorably adapted by Richard Fleischer in 1954. Director Cy Endfield takes the reigns on this big budget spectacle which tends to suffer from a bout of sequel-itis as regards the bombastic fervor of gigantic, menacing creatures taking precedence over characterization or narrative energy. Still, the production quality does display the same sense of movie magic specific to a certain period of cinema where Harryhausen’s signature Dynamation would influence generations of future filmmakers.

During the 1865 siege of Richmond, Virginia, a handful of soldiers, both Union and Confederate, escape the stockade via a hot air balloon, ending up somewhere on a strange island in the Pacific Ocean. Captain Cyrus Harding (Michael Craig) more or less resumes control of the men,...

Fans that missed Twilight Time's initial Blu-ray release of Ray Harryhausen's Jules Verne spectacle get a second chance with this Encore Edition reissue. It includes an improved transfer and new extras, including an excellent audio commentary with Steven C. Smith, C. Courtney Joyner and Randall William Cook. The show still sends us, and Bernard Herrmann's powerful music score shakes the rafters. Mysterious Island Blu-ray Twilight Time 1961 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 101 min. / Encoire Limited Edition / available at the Screen Archives Entertainment website; Street Date December 8, 2015 / 29.95 Starring Michael Craig, Michael Callan, Beth Rogan, Gary Merrill, Herbert Lom, Joan Greenwood, Percy Herbert. Cinematography Wilkie Cooper Special visual effects Ray Harryhausen Art Direction Bill Andrews Film Editor Frederick Wilson Original Music Bernard Herrmann Written by John Prebble, Daniel B. Ullman and Crane Wilbur from the novel by Jules Verne Produced by Charles H. Schneer Directed by Cy Endfield

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson...

Constance Cummings: Stage and film actress ca. early 1940s. Constance Cummings on stage: From Sacha Guitry to Clifford Odets (See previous post: “Constance Cummings: Flawless 'Blithe Spirit,' Supporter of Political Refugees.”) In the post-World War II years, Constance Cummings' stage reputation continued to grow on the English stage, in plays as diverse as: Stephen Powys (pseudonym for P.G. Wodehouse) and Guy Bolton's English-language adaptation of Sacha Guitry's Don't Listen, Ladies! (1948), with Cummings as one of shop clerk Denholm Elliott's mistresses (the other one was Betty Marsden). “Miss Cummings and Miss Marsden act as fetchingly as they look,” commented The Spectator. Rodney Ackland's Before the Party (1949), delivering “a superb performance of controlled hysteria” according to theater director and Michael Redgrave biographer Alan Strachan, writing for The Independent at the time of Cummings' death. Clifford Odets' Winter Journey / The Country Girl (1952), as...

This time on the podcast, Scott is joined by David Blakeslee and Sean Hutchinson to discuss Anthony Asquith’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

About the film:

Oscar Wilde’s comic jewel sparkles in Anthony Asquith’s film adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest. Featuring brilliantly polished performances by Michael Redgrave, Joan Greenwood, and Dame Edith Evans, the enduringly hilarious story of two young women who think themselves engaged to the same nonexistent man is given the grand Technicolor treatment. Seldom has a classic stage comedy been so engagingly transferred to the screen.

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Episode Links:

The Importance of Being Earnest (1952) – The Criterion Collection The Importance of Being Earnest – From the Current The Importance of Being Earnest (1952) – IMDb The Importance of Being Earnest (1952 film) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Importance of Being Earnest...

In a novel effort to stress that film noir wasn’t a film movement specifically an output solely produced for American audiences, Kino Lorber releases a five disc set of obscure noir examples released in the UK. Spanning a near ten year period from 1943 to 1952, the titles displayed here do seem to chart a progression in tone, at least resulting in parallels with American counterparts. Though a couple of the selections here aren’t very noteworthy, either as artifacts of British noir or items worthy of reappraisal, it does contain items of considerable interest, including rare titles from forgotten or underrated auteurs like Ronald Neame, Roy Ward Baker, and Ralph Thomas.

They Met in the Dark

The earliest title in this collection is a 1943 title from Karel Lamac, They Met in the Dark, a pseudo-comedy noir that barely meets the criteria. Based on a novel by Anthony Gilbert (whose novel...

The October Man

Written by Eric Ambler

Directed by Roy Ward Baker

U.K., 1947

Jim Ackland (John Mills) is riding the bus with his niece one dark and stormy night. The vehicle is filled to the brim with passengers, some fast asleep, others enjoying time with their loved ones. Fate sees that Jim’s life is turned upside down however, as a mechanical failure sends the bus off track, crashing into a wall. The last thing Jim recalls before blacking out is the harrowing horn of an oncoming train. Months later, Jim is finally relieved from his hospital stay, although warned by the doctor that his recovery from the fracture in his skull will require time, and that he may even experience difficult episodes of relapse. Confident that things are on the mend, Jim rents a hotel room as his new living quarters and finds employment at a nearby chemical lab.

'Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl': Johnny Depp as Capt. Jack Sparrow. 'Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl' review: Mostly an enjoyable romp (Oscar Movie Series) Pirate movies were a Hollywood staple for about three decades, from the mid-'20s (The Sea Hawk, The Black Pirate) to the mid-to-late '50s (Moonfleet, The Buccaneer), when the genre, by then mostly relegated to B films, began to die down. Sporadic resurrections in the '80s and '90s turned out to be critical and commercial bombs (Pirates, Cutthroat Island), something that didn't bode well for the Walt Disney Company's $140 million-budgeted film "adaptation" of one of their theme-park rides. But Neptune's mood has apparently improved with the arrival of the new century. He smiled – grinned would be a more appropriate word – on the Gore Verbinski-directed Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl,...

Best British movies of all time? (Image: a young Michael Caine in 'Get Carter') Ten years ago, Get Carter, starring Michael Caine as a dangerous-looking London gangster (see photo above), was selected as the United Kingdom's very best movie of all time according to 25 British film critics polled by Total Film magazine. To say that Mike Hodges' 1971 thriller was a surprising choice would be an understatement. I mean, not a David Lean epic or an early Alfred Hitchcock thriller? What a difference ten years make. On Total Film's 2014 list, published last May, Get Carter was no. 44 among the magazine's Top 50 best British movies of all time. How could that be? Well, first of all, people would be very naive if they took such lists seriously, whether we're talking Total Film, the British Film Institute, or, to keep things British, Sight & Sound magazine. Second, whereas Total Film's 2004 list was the result of a 25-critic consensus,...

Honorary Award: Gloria Swanson, Rita Hayworth among dozens of women bypassed by the Academy (photo: Honorary Award non-winner Gloria Swanson in 'Sunset Blvd.') (See previous post: "Honorary Oscars: Doris Day, Danielle Darrieux Snubbed.") Part three of this four-part article about the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Honorary Award bypassing women basically consists of a long, long — and for the most part quite prestigious — list of deceased women who, some way or other, left their mark on the film world. Some of the names found below are still well known; others were huge in their day, but are now all but forgotten. Yet, just because most people (and the media) suffer from long-term — and even medium-term — memory loss, that doesn't mean these women were any less deserving of an Honorary Oscar. So, among the distinguished female film professionals in Hollywood and elsewhere who have passed away without...

Oldest person in movies? (Photo: Manoel de Oliveira) Following the recent passing of 1931 Dracula actress Carla Laemmle at age 104, there is one less movie centenarian still around. So, in mid-June 2014, who is the oldest person in movies? Manoel de Oliveira Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira will turn 106 next December 11; he’s surely the oldest person — at least the oldest well-known person — in movies today. De Oliveira’s film credits include the autobiographical docudrama Memories and Confessions / Visita ou Memórias e Confissões (1982), with de Oliveira as himself, and reportedly to be screened publicly only after his death; The Cannibals / Os Canibais (1988); The Convent / O Convento (1995); Porto of My Childhood / Porto da Minha Infância (2001); The Fifth Empire / O Quinto Império - Ontem Como Hoje (2004); and, currently in production, O Velho do Restelo ("The Old Man of Restelo"). Among the international stars who have been directed by de Oliveira are Catherine Deneuve, Pilar López de Ayala,...

Alec Guinness: Before Obi-Wan Kenobi, there were the eight D’Ascoyne family members (photo: Alec Guiness, Dennis Price in ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’) (See previous post: “Alec Guinness Movies: Pre-Star Wars Career.”) TCM won’t be showing The Bridge on the River Kwai on Alec Guinness day, though obviously not because the cable network programmers believe that one four-hour David Lean epic per day should be enough. After all, prior to Lawrence of Arabia TCM will be presenting the three-and-a-half-hour-long Doctor Zhivago (1965), a great-looking but never-ending romantic drama in which Guinness — quite poorly — plays a Kgb official. He’s slightly less miscast as a mere Englishman — one much too young for the then 32-year-old actor — in Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), a movie that fully belongs to boy-loving (in a chaste, fatherly manner) fugitive Finlay Currie. And finally, make sure to watch Robert Hamer’s dark comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets...

Article by Jim Batts, Dana Jung, Sam Moffitt, and Tom Stockman

Special effects legend Ray Harryhausen, whose dazzling and innovative visual effects work on fantasy adventure films such as Jason And The Argonauts and The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad passed away last month at age 92. In 1933, the then-13-year-old Ray Harryhausen saw King Kong at a Hollywood theater and was inspired – not only by Kong, who was clearly not just a man in a gorilla suit, but also by the dinosaurs. He came out of the theatre “stunned and haunted. They looked absolutely lifelike … I wanted to know how it was done.” It was done by using stop-motion animation: jointed models filmed one frame at a time to simulate movement. Harryhausen was to become the prime exponent of the technique and its combination with live action. The influence of Harryhausen on film luminaries like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Peter Jackson,...

Ray Harryhausen dies at 92: Jason and the Argonauts, One Million Years B.C. special-effects ‘titan’ Long before the computer-generated imagery of Jurassic Park, Avatar, The Avengers, and Iron Man 3, there were special-effects wizard Ray Harryhausen’s painstakingly created stop-motion models, which graced dozens of movies from the late ’40s to the early ’80s. Earlier today, Ray Harryhausen died at age 92 in London, where he had been living since the early ’60s. Among his movie credits are Jason and the Argonauts, One Million Years BC, and the original Clash of the Titans. Born in Los Angeles on June 29, 1920, Harryhausen became interested in cinema’s visual effects after watching Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s 1933 blockbuster King Kong, featuring stop-motion effects by Willis H. O’Brien. "I came out of the theater awestruck," Harryhausen would reminisce to the Chicago Tribune in 1999. "It was such a totally different, unusual film.

(Alexander Mackendrick, 1951, Studiocanal, U)

Last September marked the centenary of the birth of Alexander Mackendrick (1912-93). Born in the States, raised in Scotland, he was, with Richard Hamer, one of the two truly great products of Ealing Studios. Their output was small (each made made five movies under Michael Balcon's aegis), but distinguished and distinctive and always digging beneath Ealing's cosy Little England ethos. Oscar-nominated for its screenplay (by Mackendrick, his brother-in-law the playwright Roger MacDougall and John Dighton, Hamer's collaborator on Kind Hearts and Coronets), The Man in the White Suit is arguably Mackendrick's most trenchant comedy.

It stars Alec Guinness as Sidney Stratton, a dreamily eccentric inventor who develops an artificial fibre that's indestructible and resistant to dirt. Apparently a boon to humanity, this fabric spreads alarm in a Lancashire mill town whose prosperity the invention threatens. Management and workers unite against the starry-eyed idealist Stratton, who...

Director of British comedy films in the tradition of saucy seaside postcards

During the 1970s, British cinema produced dozens of sex comedies, of which the director Bob Kellett, who has died aged 84, was something of a master. Kellett's films superseded the Carry On series, whose innuendo had become smuttier and less funny, and predated the more vulgar Confessions movies. They were in the tradition of Donald McGill's saucy seaside postcards, which George Orwell had extolled as being "symptomatically important as a sort of saturnalia, a harmless rebellion against virtue".

Kellett, who was born in Lancaster, went to Bedford school, where he was captain of the rowing team. After school, he had various jobs, including growing and selling orchids, selling encyclopedias, and writing for an advertising agency, before entering the film industry in the early 50s. After working on several features as script editor for the producer Ian Dalrymple at Pinewood Studios,...

Sidney Stratton (Alec Guinness) bounces from job to job at a series of textile factories, where he tries to develop a new synthetic fabric that will never wear out or stain. He believes it will change the world for the better, but when he finally succeeds he finds the factory owners against him because they will no longer need to produce or sell clothes and the work force up in arms because they will become redundant, once everyone has bought the last set of clothes they will ever need.

*****

Ealing comedies are a very particular species of film. On the one hand they have a seemingly cosy, inoffensive familiarity about them – very British, very undemanding. Yet virtually to a film we find on closer inspection that they have real bite to them. The Lavender Hill Mob, Passport to Pimlico, The Ladykillers and Kind Hearts & Coronets – all feature dark, subversive elements and this film,...

★★★★☆ In 1951, Ealing Studios headed north with The Man in the White Suit, the story of a scientist, Sidney Stratton (played by Ealing stalwart Alec Guinness), who invents a super-resistant fibre that could revolutionise the textile industry and clothe the world for eternity. We meet our young hero as he slopes around the lab of Corland's textile mill, an anonymous figure working on a seemingly madcap experiment at the vast expense of the mill owner, Michael Corland (Michael Gough). Corland is courting Daphne Birnley (a husky-voiced Joan Greenwood), daughter of neighbouring mill mogul Alan Birnley (Cecil Parker), whose money Corland is also after.

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By Lee Pfeiffer

Twilight Time has released the 1961 film adaptation of Jules Verne's classic adventure Mysterious Island as a limited edition (3,000 units) Blu-ray. The story was Verne's sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, although the only recurring character is the reclusive genius Captain Nemo (played in this version with great dignity and charisma by Herbert Lom). Nemo doesn't appear until late in the movie and to say too much about how he fits in with the story would spoil the film's many delights. The movie starts with a daring escape by Union POWs from a Confederate prison during the final days of the Civil War. The escapees utilize a hot air balloon, that they successfully launch under gun fire in the midst of a hurricane. The newly-freed men are Capt. Harding (Michael Craig), fellow soldiers Herbert Brown (Michael Callan) and Neb Nugent (Dan Jackson), as well as a war correspondent,...

One of the pleasures of digging around for movie posters is coming across great designs for films that have otherwise been forgotten, that have not become part of the pantheon—or even any of its foothills—but which nevertheless are fascinating reminders of areas of cinema history that are usually ignored. The other day I posted a lovely Russian poster on Movie Poster of the Day for an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s White Nights that I wasn’t familiar with but which, I then discovered, was directed by a man described as “the high priest of Stalinist Cinema.” You can read more about that here.

When this terrific poster for Le passe-muraille caught my eye I knew absolutely nothing about the film, and, with the exception of English actress Joan Greenwood (Kind Hearts and Coronets), nearly every name on the poster, from star Bourvil to director Jean Boyer to author Marcel Aymé,...

In the latest addition to our ongoing writers' favourite film series, Liese Spencer shares her love for the dark, whip-smart Ealing comedy that blew away her teenage funk

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Sat in front of the gas fire one Sunday afternoon during my neverending adolescence, I didn't pay much attention to the black and white film starting on BBC2. As its lace-trimmed credits rolled I knew exactly what was coming: a comfortably dull period drama. A couple of hours later, as its neat ending was undercut by a final, fiendishly clever twist, my 14-year-old funk of know-it-all boredom had been blown away. How exhilarating to see a bunch of well-dressed, well-spoken grown-ups behaving despicably – and getting away with it. For a cosy Ealing comedy it was incredibly black. Unlikely as it seemed, apparently there were adults...

While it's true that Ozzy Osbourne may well be the Prince of Darkness, there is only one undisputed King, a man who has rocked and shocked audiences all over the world with his outrageous, and outrageously entertaining live shows for over four decades, and who shows no sign of letting up any time soon. I speak, of course, of the one and only Mr Alice Cooper, a man who has forgotten more about horror movies than most people know to start with (with the possible exception of the encyclopaedic Kim Newman), and in whose company I was privileged to spend an hour and a half on the Friday before Halloween at the British Film Institute in London as he discussed his favourite Nightmare Movies with an audience of just 400 or so people.

As Alice took to the stage, along with Fright Fest founder Alan Jones, who was hosting the talk,...

Has there ever been a more charming psychopath than Louis Mazzini? He is intelligent, diplomatic and witty, and able to ingratiate himself into almost any of Edwardian London’s social circles. He also, to his shame, is poor. His mother was cast out by her wealthy family – the D’Ascoynes, dukedom and all – when she married an Italian opera singer; he dies upon first seeing the infant Louis. That could be just a coincidence, or just a gag. Or it could be something to do with the fact that Louis is – if anyone were to describe him in such vulgar terms – evil.

One of the remarkable things about Kind Hearts and Coronets, the classic 1949 black comedy from Ealing Studios, is how easily the audience finds itself on Louis’s side; despite being made in post-war Britain and set in the early 20th century, its own lack of sentiment has preserved...

Arguably the two most perfect British movies were made in the same year, 1949 – Carol Reed's The Third Man and Robert Hamer's Kind Hearts and Coronets. In Hamer's movie, Dennis Price, the gay, Oxford-educated son of a brigadier-general, gives his greatest performance as the aggrieved Edwardian shop assistant revenging himself on the establishment for his mother's humiliation, and he's certainly not overshadowed by Alec Guinness's protean virtuosity.

His sequence with Guinness as his senile, snobbish clerical victim is exquisitely funny and most beautifully lit by Douglas Slocombe. Equally good are Valerie Hobson and Joan Greenwood as the two women waiting for Price when he's released from the condemned cell.

Hamer had a particular liking for the late-Victorian/Edwardian world and was a great Francophile. Both passions are reflected by two classic black comedies that influenced the film: Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, which Oscar Wilde wrote just after reading Crime and Punishment,...

The Ealing genre reached utter perfection with this superb black comedy of manners about the most elegant serial killer in history

The Ealing genre reached utter perfection with this superb black comedy of manners, made in 1949, directed by Robert Hamer and adapted by Hamer with accomplished farceur John Dighton from the 1907 novel Israel Rank, by Roy Horniman. Dennis Price gave a performance which he was, sadly, never again to equal as Louis Mazzini, the suburban draper's assistant who becomes the most elegant serial killer in history. Finding himself by a quirk of fate distantly in line to a dukedom, and infuriated by this aristocratic family's cruel treatment of his mother, he sets out to murder everyone ahead of him in line to the ermine. Alec Guinness gives a miraculously subtle and differentiated multi-performance as all eight members of the noble clan. Joan Greenwood is in her element as the honey-voiced siren Sibella,...

Kind Hearts and Coronets will be released on DVD and Blu-ray on 5th September 2011 and we have 3 copies of the Blu-ray to give away!

Perhaps the most perfect of all the Golden-Age Ealing comedies, Kind Hearts and Coronets famously featured Alec Guinness in eight different roles as the unsuspecting members of the aristocratic D’Ascoyne family – bumped off one by one by the scheming, outcast cousin of the family: Louis Mazzini. Mazzini’s mother was a D’Ascoyne by birth, but she ran away with an opera singer and was ostracized by her family as a result. When her dying wish to be buried in the family crypt is refused, Louis vows to get his revenge. As he ascends the social ranks, he is torn between his love for now-married childhood sweetheart, and equally devilish Sibella (Joan Greenwood), and the saintly wife of one of his victims, Edith D’Ascoyne...

Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)

Directed by Robert Hamer

Written by Robert Hamer

UK – 1949

If you’ve never seen Kind Hearts and Coronets, I feel a little envious. I’m not so resentful that, like the film’s antihero Louis Mazzini, I’d actually go out and commit multiple murders. But first-time viewers are definitely in for a treat this year, with the UK cinematic re-release on 19 August and a new DVD and Blu-ray edition from Optimum to follow on 5 September.

The phrase “blackly comic” has been done to death by unimaginative critics. Too often these days it seems to be synonymous with bad taste, a fistful of “F” words and a total lack of restraint. But Robert Hamer’s film, originally released by Ealing Studios in 1949, is a reminder that dastardly behaviour can take place in the most genteel of surroundings, without so much as a hint of blood.

Set in Edwardian London,...

Kind Hearts And Coronets gets a very welcome re-release into UK cinemas on the 22nd of August and will then be released on DVD and Blu-ray on 5th September 2011 and we have three shiny Blu-rays to give away.

Perhaps the most perfect of all the Golden-Age Ealing comedies, Kind Hearts and Coronets famously featured Alec Guinness in eight different roles as the unsuspecting members of the aristocratic D’Ascoyne family – bumped off one by one by the scheming, outcast cousin of the family: Louis Mazzini. Mazzini’s mother was a D’Ascoyne by birth, but she ran away with an opera singer and was ostracized by her family as a result. When her dying wish to be buried in the family crypt is refused, Louis vows to get his revenge. As he ascends the social ranks, he is torn between his love for now-married childhood sweetheart, and equally devilish Sibella...

Throughout the classic comedies produced by Ealing Studios in the ’40s and ’50s run both a lightness of touch and a subtly unsentimental look at human character. Their classics all involve crime and greed: for money and the freedom that comes with it in The Ladykillers and The Lavender Hill Mob, for money and social standing in Kinds Hearts and Coronets. But the (amateur) criminals in the latter two are gentlemen; very English and very charming. In The Ladykillers, the gentility is merely a disguise for professional criminals. Often, the apparent civility of polite society helps their characters veil their repressed, anarchic sides.

The first of Ealing’s run of classic comedies – which also includes The Man in the White Suit and Passport to Pimlico – was Whisky Galore!, the first movie directed by Boston-born Scotsman Alexander Mackendrick. It was produced by Ealing’s legendary Michael Balcon and co-edited by Charles Crichton,...

Captain America: The First Avenger (12)

(Joe Johnston, 2011, Us) Chris Evans, Tommy Lee Jones, Hayley Atwell, Hugo Weaving, Sebastian Stan. 124 mins

Unsurprisingly, this is the most patriotic of the summer's superhero movies, but there are few surprises all round. The story is largely what you'd imagine from the trailer: wimpy 1940s do-gooder undergoes a fast-track Charles Atlas course, then socks it to the evil über-Nazis. It's like Inglourious Basterds meets Indiana Jones, although the wholesome tone and white-bread heroism diminish the effects-driven spectacle, and the real second world war is reduced to mere set dressing.

Our Day Will Come (18)

(Romain Gavras, 2010, Fra) Vincent Cassel, Olivier Barthelemy, Justine Lerooy. 83 mins

Edgy provocateur alert! Expanding on the redhead persecution theme he developed in his Mia video, Gavras's debut follows ginger alienation to its conclusion, as Cassel and Barthelemy head out on the highway to oblivion, without a map or a ferry timetable.

Arrietty (U)

(Hiromasa Yonebayashi,...

"To the west, there is nothing, except America."

Revived at Edinburgh Internbational Film Festival, Alexander Mackendrick's first film, Whisky Galore! (released in the USA as Tight Little Island) is regarded as a perennial classic in Britain but not so well-known elsewhere. Inspired by a real-life incident, the wrecking of a ship carrying a cargo of whisky off the coast of a Scottish island where that vital social lubricant had been cut off by wartime shortages, it's an easy-going comedy and in some ways the ur-text behind Bill Forsyth's Local Hero (1983). 

Even in his modest first film, Mackendrick's indebtedness to German expressionism leads to some rousing sequences, kinetic montages of conspiratorial islanders, who have to circumvent the English home guard official who is determined that the shipwrecked cases of scotch should sink to the sea bed rather than be illicitly salvaged. As with all the great Ealing comedies, the...