The Horse's Mouth is an acting and a writing tour de force for Alec Guinness, who authored the screenplay in addition to starring in the film. Gulley Jimson (Alec Guinness) is an aging artist with a reputation as a genius, though he lives an impoverished life. Jimson has reached the point in his life where he no longer feels any need to moderate ...
Stage Fright toys with our notions of the dividing line between reality and artifice by being set in the London theatre world. On the lam from the police, Richard Todd takes refuge in the home of his former girlfriend, RADA student Jane Wyman. Todd has been spotted fleeing the scene of a murder, but he insists that he's innocent. Wyman believes ...
The second of director David Lean's adaptations of a Charles Dickens novel (Great Expectations (1946) was the first), Oliver Twist expertly boils down an enormous novel to a little less than two hours' screen time. The film begins with baby Oliver left on the doorstep of an orphanage/workhouse by his unwed mother. Proving a difficult charge to the ...
Disney's Greyfriars Bobby is a remake of A Challenge to Lassie; both are based on the same novel by Eleanor Atkinson, and both feature Donald Crisp in a major role. A true story, set in Edinburgh around 1875, the Disney version stars Alex McKenzie as the shepherd Old Jock, the owner of a loyal Skye terrier named Bobby. When Jock dies of "old age, ...
Informed that he has only a short time to live, salesman Alec Guinness decides to enjoy his last months to the fullest. He withdraws all his savings from the bank and heads to a posh hotel. Here he makes more contacts and opens more professional doors than he'd ever done before, thanks to his willingness--at long last--to take risks. He also ...
Dirk Bogarde digressed from his usual lightweight image to portray a smarmy murderer in Cast a Dark Shadow. He kills his first wife (Mona Washbourne), hoping to claim her inheritance. Surprise! The inheritance is a myth. Thus Bogarde sets his sights on barkeeper Margaret Lockwood, whom he knows to be heavily insured. But Lockwood is possessed of a ...
This gentle Ealing Studios comedy features young William Fox as a mischievous English lad. A goodly portion of the film shows Fox and his companions at play, aimlessly but enjoyably wandering about their neighborhood in search of adventure. Eventually the boy finds a discarded magnet, believing it to be a good-luck token; it turns out to be just ...
This film was a pet project of Joan Fontaine, based on a novel by Peter Curtis. It was her last feature film. Fontaine stars as teacher Gwen Mayfield, who is in charge of a missionary school in Africa. A witch doctor puts a curse on her, and she has a nervous breakdown. Returning to England, she takes a job running a small rural school. In the ...
The Marion Osmond-James Corbett stage melodrama The Chinese Bungalow was filmed three times over a thirty-year period. The plot involves a wealthy mandarin named Yuan Sing, who marries a British woman and lives to regret it. The climax is pure melodrama, with Yuan Sing hatching a plot to do away with his wife's paramour. The story was old hat even ...
With This Happy Breed, playwright Noel Coward hoped to glorify the British working class in the same manner that he'd celebrated the "higher orders" in Cavalcade. The film begins just after World War I. Middle-class Londoner Robert Newton hopes to improve his family's lot by moving them into a comparatively posh house in the suburbs. The house is ...
In this actioner, two guards lose their jobs after they start a fight with a lascivious Arab prince who tries to seduce one of their girl friends. Fortunately, the girl friend's father is thankful and gives her love a job managing one of his tobacco warehouses in Turkey. Unfortunately, he meets a beautiful Russian girl there and soon falls in love ...
Toothy, ukelele-plucking British comedian dominates the proceedings in I See Ice. The nonsensical story concerns the misadventures of a prop man (George Formby) for a travelling ice-skating troupe. Inventing a new sort of candid camera in his spare time, our hero gets into a passel of trouble when he photographs what he shouldn't. Though well ...
Adapted by Eric Ambler from his own novel, The October Man centers around Jim Ackland (played by John Mills), who has been involved in a terrible accident that killed a friend's daughter and has given Ackland a brain injury. Despondent after his release from the hospital, Ackland moves into a hotel, where he meets Molly Newman (Kay Walsh). Molly ...
Originally released in England by British Consolidated, Sons of the Sea was the last film to be distributed in America by Grand National Pictures. Generally cast in villainous roles, Leslie Banks plays the film's true-blue hero Captain Hyde. Alas, Hyde's young son Philip (Simon Lack), though a graduate of the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, does ...
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