Now Screening - What Are You Watching Right Now?

[walpurgis]

Dead Of Night, 1945. Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden and Robert Hamer. Stars include Mervyn Johns, Googie Withers, Sally Ann Howes and Michael Redgrave.

Another good one.

[Macca]

okay I agree with you on that one

[struth]

The History Of Mr Polly, 1949. John Mills stars.

Mills daughter played the child too.

[Barry]

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, 1943. ITV Studios remastered Bluray. Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. It stars Roger Livesey, Deborah Kerr and Anton Walbrook.




According to the directors, the idea for the film did not come from the newspaper comic strip by David Low but from a scene cut from their previous film, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, in which an elderly member of the crew tells a younger one, "You don't know what it's like to be old." Powell has stated that the idea was actually suggested by David Lean (then an editor) who, when removing the scene from the film, mentioned that the premise of the conversation was worthy of a film in its own right.




Presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.37:1, encoded with MPEG-4 AVC and granted a 1080p transfer, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp arrives on Blu-ray courtesy of British distributors ITV Studios Home Entertainment.

The restoration of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp was supervised by Michael Pogorzelski and Heather Linville of the Academy Film Archive, with assistance by 20th Century Fox film archivist Schawn Belston. The restoration was done in association with the British Film Institute and ITV Studios Global Entertainment Ltd., the film's rights holders. Funding was provided by Cinema Per Roma Foundation, The Louis B. Mayer Foundation, and the Material World Foundation.

Recently restored in 4K, the film looks spectacular. Definition and clarity are often quite extraordinary (see screencapture #4), while depth is the best I have seen on a Technicolor film released on Blu-ray.

One of the greats....

A good film, but looks very dated now.

[Barry]

Ice Cold in Alex, 1958. Directed by J. Lee Thompson and starring John Mills, Sylvia Syms, Anthony Quayle and Harry Andrews. From my Plex library






The film was based on the 1957 novel Ice Cold in Alex and its serialisation (as Escape in the Desert) in the magazine Saturday Evening Post. The New York Times described the book as "an excellent escape story played out in the best Hitchcock manner."
The screenplay contains multiple key changes from the novel, including making Anson rather than Pugh the protagonist. ABPC bought the rights and assigned TJ Morison to collaborate on a treatment with Landon under the supervision of Walter Mycroft.
The producers had intended to shoot the location work for Ice Cold in Alex in Egypt, but the producers had to switch to Libya because of the Suez conflict.
Filming began 10 September 1957.
Sylvia Syms (Sister Murdoch) said in a 2011 interview about the film that conditions during the desert shoot were so difficult it felt like they were actually in the situation the film portrays. She said: "You may find this hard to believe, but there was very little acting. It was horrible. We became those people ... we were those people". She said that today people would probably call it method acting, but added: 'We didn't know what Method Acting was, we just called it 'getting on with it'." Syms said that during the scene where the ambulance rolls backwards down the hill narrowly avoiding her, the actors assumed there would be a hawser to stop the vehicle if anything went wrong, but there was not. The actress said she was "pretty sure" Mills, Quayle and Andrews angrily upbraided director J Lee Thompson for this risky approach. She added: "He liked to push actors a bit". The quicksand sequence was filmed in an ice cold artificial bog in an English studio (some scenes were shot at Elstree) and was "very tough" on Quayle and Mills. Syms said the producers got a good deal out of her for "£30 a week", adding: "But I made a lot more when they turned it into an advert for Carlsberg". She said there are "no false heroics in it" and that she had been told by desert war veterans it is a good picture of soldiers in that theatre of war, adding: "I am proud of it"

Now that is a good film, and terribly "British". I have it in my collection.

[Barry]

Dead Of Night, 1945. Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden and Robert Hamer. Stars include Mervyn Johns, Googie Withers, Sally Ann Howes and Michael Redgrave.






Film is based around several dreams and was the first horror film in Britain since start of war(they were banned)

The Micheal Redgrave ventriloquist tale is the best of them.

[Barry]

The History Of Mr Polly, 1949. John Mills stars.

Mills daughter played the child too.

Studied the book at school. I've seen the film, but can't remember much about it.

[Blackdog]

Since this pandemic started my wife and I have been into mystery series. Usually British or Australian. Stuff like Midsomer Murders, Shakespeare and Hathaway, Dr. Blake Mysteries, Blue Heelers.
Any others that you can recommend?

[struth]

Since this pandemic started my wife and I have been into mystery series. Usually British or Australian. Stuff like Midsomer Murders, Shakespeare and Hathaway, Dr. Blake Mysteries, Blue Heelers.
Any others that you can recommend?

poirot (david suchet)and sherlock holmes (jeremy brett) spring to mind. Bergerac, inspector morse etc

new tricks, george gently

[struth]

Saturday matinee farce now. Carry On Up the Jungle, 1970. They dont come much more farcical






But there is Jacki Piper