Noticias

There are a few good movies that grip you solely based on their plot. One of them is the British drama The Whisperers. Bryan Forbes directed the feature, which stars Edith Evans in a compelling crime drama based on the 1961 novel by Robert Nicolson. The movie is a perfect mix of thrills, grief, and heartbreaking performances. The classic is now available to stream on Prime Video for fans of the film and casual viewers to discover.

Courtesy of Eureka Entertainment

by James Cameron-wilson

Perhaps surprisingly, Juggernaut is being released on Blu-ray for the first time in the United Kingdom, from a high-definition restoration, to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. When Juggernaut was first released in cinemas in 1974, it was at the height of the disaster movie era, following on from The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and, in the same year, Airport 1975, Earthquake and The Towering Inferno, all stories featuring numerous sundry characters trapped together in terrifying circumstances. However, Juggernaut was a very different thing, both in its execution and in its presentation. Loosely inspired by the bomb hoax on board the QE2 luxury liner in 1972, the film was originally to have been directed by Bryan Forbes. However, when Forbes jumped ship, he was replaced by the American TV director Don Medford, who also left the project at the last minute, leaving the production company with the enormous daily...

Courtesy of StudioCanal

by James Cameron-wilson

An Inspector Calls, freshly minted with a pristine print of pin-sharp clarity, was originally written as a play by J.B. Priestley and remains a damning indictment of England’s hypocritical upper middle-classes. Set in 1912 in the north Midlands, the play premiered in 1945 in Moscow of all places, before coming to London a year later and to Broadway a year after that. I can’t tell you who was in the Russian version, but in the West End the titular character was taken by Sir Ralph Richardson, with Margaret Leighton, Harry Andrews and, in the Bryan Forbes part, none other than Alec Guinness. Imagine seeing that bunch on the London stage! I say the Bryan Forbes part, as it was he who had one of his best roles as Eric Birling in the 1954 film, running the gamut from embarrassing drunk to tipsy flirt to indignant...

Sim is superbly insinuating as the detective arriving with a few questions for the complacent residents of a grand Edwardian home

Jb Priestley’s drawing-room melodrama of Edwardian guilt and fear is rereleased for its 70th anniversary; it is an intricate clockwork mechanism ticking inexorably to the final reveal, with beautiful monochrome cinematography and thoroughbred character-actor faces looming out of the screen like a bad dream. It was adapted by Desmond Davis from Priestley’s stage play, directed by Guy Hamilton and unforgettably stars Alastair Sim as the implacable Inspector Poole, with his cool professional insolence, a needling, insinuating manner and sonorously droll voice; it is a performance to put alongside Sim’s Scrooge and his Professor Potter in School for Scoundrels.

It is 1912, and the inspector arrives unexpectedly at the sumptuous home of well-to-do magistrate and captain of industry Arthur Birling (Arthur Young), who is hosting a dinner party...

The story of The Stepford Wives by novelist Ira Levin received a film adaption three years after it was written in 1972. The film starred the iconic Katharine Ross (The Graduate), along with a variety of other renowned actors, like Peter Masterson, Paula Prentiss, Nanette Newman, and Tina Louise. It was directed by English director Bryan Forbes who didn't stray too far from the source material. Levin's story reflected fears about the growing popularity of Second Wave Feminism. Women were becoming more financially independent, marital rape was finally outlawed, and Roe v. Wade was implemented by the Supreme Court. The original Stepford Wives was a dystopian horror story for feminists and a dreamy fantasy for male chauvinists.

On Sunday 18 August 2024, Talking Pictures TV broadcasts The Footage Detectives!

Season 2 Episode 136 Episode Summary

The upcoming episode of “The Footage Detectives” on Talking Pictures TV promises a captivating mix of historical and personal footage. This episode features intriguing clips of the late Peter Rogers, offering a glimpse into the life of the renowned producer.

Viewers will also enjoy an interview with Bryan Forbes, known for his work in film and television. Additionally, the episode includes a fascinating reel showing a day in the life at the Lily laundry, providing a window into everyday activities from the past. Finally, the show takes a nostalgic look back at Granada Mansfield in the 1960s, capturing the essence of the era. This episode is set to deliver a rich blend of personal stories and historical snapshots.

What Time is the Episode On?

The episode of The Footage Detectives will be broadcast on August 18 2024 on...

This Sunday at 5:00 Pm, Talking Pictures TV presents a captivating episode of The Footage Detectives for Season 2, Episode 136. The episode offers a delightful assortment of rare and intriguing footage that fans of classic television will appreciate.

The show kicks off with brilliant clips featuring the late Peter Rogers, a notable figure whose work left a lasting impact on the entertainment industry. Viewers will also enjoy an insightful interview with Bryan Forbes, offering a glimpse into the mind of another influential figure in film and television.

Additionally, the episode features a fascinating reel capturing a day in the life at the Lily laundry, providing a unique look at everyday operations from the past. Finally, the detectives take viewers back to the 1960s at the Granada Mansfield, showcasing a nostalgic look at a bygone era of television and cinema.

With its diverse mix of historical footage and interviews, this episode of...

Courtesy of Studiocanal

by James Cameron-wilson

Hard to believe today, but Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1949 drama was a flop. A glum, perhaps cynical, claustrophobic piece of film noir shot in black-and-white, The Small Back Room was released just four years after the end of the Second World War – and it was not what postwar audiences wanted to see. Indeed, it is hardly one of the most celebrated titles in the Powell/Pressburger catalogue and I, for one, had never seen it before. Even so, having just watched this consummately photographed and magically restored work, I would say without hesitation it is one of my very favourite Powell and Pressburger films.

With the psychological complexity of a good play and replete with telling touches, it blends both the disciplines of Hollywood film noir with the Expressionism of the Weimar cinema of Germany, but with its own ineffable, stiff upper lip Englishness.

Did you know that Alfred Hitchcock made a film starring Shirley MacLaine and John Forsythe? Did you know he made a broad comedy? Did you know he shot an entire film in Craftsbury, Vermont?! Well, I guess the last one isn't so shocking. And "Mr. and Mrs. Smith", Hitchcock's Carole Lombard-starring screwball comedy from 1941, is quite well-known and liked.

But I'm not talking about "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." I'm talking about the other comedy made by the master of suspense. 1955's "The Trouble With Harry" represented several firsts for Hitchcock -- his first dark comedy, the first film he made after obtaining American citizenship (he had been living and working in the country for 16 years by that point), and the first film he made after commencing production on "Alfred Hitchcock Presents." That series quickly became popular with audiences and was cemented in short order as an American institution,...

Die, Die, My Darling: Wilde Makes Utopia a Dirty Word in Sinister Thriller

“There’s beauty in control” affirms a suave Svengali at the center of an experimental desert Arcadia in Olivia Wilde’s sophomore film, Don’t Worry Darling, and indeed, to quote Janet Jackson, ‘this is a story about control,’ though it’s far from beautiful. Essentially, Wilde succeeds in creating a tonally successful remake of The Stepford Wives. Sentiments about the Oz version of this similar material were consensual about how the narrative could be taken out of the 70s, but you couldn’t take the 70’s out of the film.…...

Cinematography retrospectives are the way to go—more than a thorough display of talent, it exposes the vast expanse a Dp will travel, like an education in form and business all the same. Accordingly I’m happy to see the Criterion Channel give a 25-film tribute to James Wong Howe, whose career spanned silent cinema to the ’70s, populated with work by Howard Hawks, Michael Curtz, Samuel Fuller, Alexander Mackendrick, Sydney Pollack, John Frankenheimer, and Raoul Walsh.

Further retrospectives are granted to Romy Schneider (recent repertory sensation La piscine among them), Carlos Saura (finally a chance to see Peppermint frappe!), the British New Wave, and groundbreaking distributor Cinema 5, who brought to U.S. shores everything from The Man Who Fell to Earth and Putney Swope to Pumping Iron and Scenes from a Marriage.

September also yields streaming premieres for the recently restored Bronco Bullfrog, Ang Lee’s Pushing Hands,...

Rarely one finds a friend on the Criterion Channel—discounting the parasitic relationship we form with filmmakers, I mean—but it’s great seeing their March lineup give light to Sophy Romvari, the <bias>exceptionally talented</bias> filmmaker and curator whose work has perhaps earned comparisons to Agnès Varda and Chantal Akerman but charts its own path of history and reflection. It’s a good way to lead into an exceptionally strong month, featuring as it does numerous films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, the great Japanese documentarian Kazuo Hara, newfound cult classic Arrebato, and a number of Criterion editions.

On the last front we have The Age of Innocence, Bull Durham, A Raisin in the Sun, The Celebration, Merrily We Go to Hell, and Design for Living. There’s always something lingering on the watchlist, but it might have to wait a second longer—March is an opened floodgate.

See the full...

Film company boss who was the driving force behind the creation of the trailblazing Screen on the Green in the 1970s

When Romaine Hart transformed the Rex, a 1950s fleapit cinema in Islington, north London, into the Screen on the Green in 1970, she set a standard that would have a profound influence on the ways in which audiences appreciate first-run arthouse films. Described by Quentin Tarantino as “the coolest cinema in London”, the Screen on the Green would inspire generations of future film-makers.

Romaine, who has died aged 88 of a heart attack after a typically fulsome Christmas, rejected the fusty, traditional ways of mainstream cinema management. In a blaze of art nouveau inspired branding, the Screen’s opening night premiere of Downhill Racer, starring Robert Redford, included Laurence Olivier, Richard Attenborough and Bryan Forbes among the audience. The cinema’s luxurious seats were made of purple velvet and the ushers wore hot pants.

Veteran filmmakers Michael Relph and Basil Dearden try a hip ‘n’ flip costume comedy about an 1899 consortium that’s the equivalent of Murder Inc.: Killings for hire done with veddy proper civility and good taste. The charming Oliver Reed and Diana Rigg lead a notable cast — Telly Savalas, Curd Jürgens, Philippe Noiret, Beryl Reid, Clive Revill — through mayhem-filled chases in several European capitals. Tossed off in tongue-in-cheek style, it’s shallow but cute, and if you like the stars it can be a lark. Its saving grace is the spirited Ms. Rigg.

The Assassination Bureau

Region-Free Blu-ray

Viavision [Imprint] 86

1969 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 110 min. / The Assassination Bureau Limited / Street Date October 29, 2021 / Available from [Imprint] or Amazon /

Starring: Oliver Reed, Diana Rigg, Telly Savalas, Curd Jürgens, Philippe Noiret, Warren Mitchell, Beryl Reid, Clive Revill, Kenneth Griffith, Vernon Dobtcheff, Annabella Incontrera, Jess Conrad, George Coulouris.

Cinematography: Geoffrey Unsworth

Art Director: Michael Relph

Film...

Attempting to climb out of director’s jail after the disastrous The Snowman, Tomas Alfredson returned to his native country of Sweden for the comedy Se upp för Jönssonligan, which landed with poor reception and hasn’t seen the light of day here in the United States. However, it looks like the Let the Right One In and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy director will get another crack with a high-profile project.

Deadline reports he’ll direct Rachel Weisz in Seance on a Wet Afternoon, scripted by Jack Thorne and backed by Legendary. Adapted from Mark McShane’s 1961 suspense novel, the thriller follows a self-proclaimed psychic medium who convinces her husband to kidnap a child so she can help the police solve the crime and achieve renown for her abilities. When her true intentions come to light, however, her husband realizes the plan threatens to consume them both.

This won’t...

While the summer movie season will kick off shortly––and we’ll be sharing a comprehensive preview on the arthouse, foreign, indie, and (few) studio films worth checking out––on the streaming side, The Criterion Channel and Mubi have unveiled their May 2021 lineups and there’s a treasure trove of highlights to dive into.

Timed with Satyajit Ray’s centenary, The Criterion Channel will have a retrospective of the Indian master, along with series on Gena Rowlands, Robert Ryan, Mitchell Leisen, Michael Almereyda, Josephine Decker, and more. In terms of recent releases, they’ll also feature Fire Will Come, The Booksellers, and the new restoration of Tom Noonan’s directorial debut What Happened Was….

On Mubi, in anticipation of Undine, they’ll feature two essential early features by Christian Petzold, Jerichow and The State That I Am In, along with his 1990 short documentary Süden. Also amongst the lineup is Sophy Romvari’s Still Processing,...

British director Bryan Forbes is perhaps best remembered for his iconic American horror film The Stepford Wives, which became a genre classic and entered the cultural lexicon as a troubling metaphor for insidious patriarchy. But Forbes has an extensive underrated filmography, including a variety of haunting genre pieces, curious dramas and high-end literary adaptations worthy of wider renown.…...

“Are You There?”

By Raymond Benson

Writer/director/actor Bryan Forbes was a major force in the British film industry for several decades, having started in the 1950s at times as an actor in films and then in other instances as a screenwriter, and then he moved into directing. Forbes made several good pictures, the most famous probably being The Stepford Wives in the 70s.

Forbes also had connections to the world of James Bond. Forbes’ first screenwriting duties were for Albert R. Broccoli’s Warwick Films in the 1950s. When Forbes began writing novels, his literary agent was none other than Peter Janson-Smith, who had been Ian Fleming’s agent. Astute Bond fans will also spot other connections in The Whisperers, such as a John Barry score, and the appearance of Robin Bailey, the actor who, in the pre-credits sequence of You Only Live Twice, plays the Foreign Secretary...

What ought to be appreciated as one of the most prescient of 1950s suspense films holds a place among the best science fiction movies ever — and it formed a style template for a thousand paranoid spy thrillers to follow. Val Guest pares Nigel Kneale’s fantastic storyline down to its essentials, making his scientist-hero the perfect secret agent to confront a sinister techno-political conspiracy… from outer space.

Quatermass 2

Blu-ray

Scream Factory

1957 / B&w / 1:66 widescreen / 85 min. / Street Date July 30, 2019 / 29.95

Starring: Brian Donlevy, John Longdon, Sidney James, Bryan Forbes, William Franklyn, Vera Day, Charles Lloyd Pack, Tom Chatto, John Van Eyssen, Percy Herbert, Michael Ripper, John Rae, Michael Balfour.

Cinematography: Gerald Gibbs

Film Editor: James Needs

Makeup: Philip Leakey

Art Direction: Bernard Robinson

Original Music: James Bernard

Written by Val Guest, Nigel Kneale from his teleplay

Produced by Anthony Hinds

Directed by Val Guest

Here’s yet another fine 2019 Blu-ray release...

By Hank Reineke

Basil Dearden’s intriguing The Man Who Haunted Himself is a feature-length remake of a thirty-minute televised episode of Alfred Hitchcock’s Presents. That episode - from the 1955 program’s first season - had the distinction of having been directed by the maestro of suspense himself. It was one of only a handful of dramas in the series that Hitchcock chose to helm. The episode was based on Anthony Armstrong’s short story (later novelized) “The Strange Case of Mr. Pelham” (Methuen & Co. Ltd., UK, 1957). The book was later published that very same year in the U.S. as part of Doubleday & Co.’s fabled “Crime Club” series.

Armstrong’s psychological thriller had been originally published in the November 1940 issue of Esquire magazine. The short story was later re-sold and re-published in June 1955 as part of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine… which is likely where Hitchcock became acquainted with it.

Scream Factory™ Presents Two Highly Anticipated Hammer Film Cult Classics Arrive on Blu-rays™! Quatermass 2 Starring Brian Donlevy With Sidney James, John Longden, Bryan Forbes, Vera Day, and William Franklyn And Quatermass And The Pit Starring Andrew Keir, James Donald, Barbara Shelley, and Julian Glover Available July 30, 2019 From Scream Factory™ Hobbs End, Knightsbridge, …

The post Quatermass 2 and Quatermass And The Pit – Two Highly Anticipated Hammer Film Cult Classics Arrive on Blu-rays appeared first on Hnn | Horrornews.net.

To mark the release of Odette and I Was Monty’S Double on 11th June, we’ve been given 3 of copies of each to give away on Blu-ray.

Odette

A classic tale of bravery and courage during WWII, Odette tells the true story of female war hero Odette Hallowes. After volunteering her services to the Special Operations Executive, Odette is dispatched into Nazi occupied France and thrown into an intense world of espionage. Whilst on a deadly mission working for the French Resistance, her cover is blown and Odette is captured and interrogated by ruthless Gestapo officers. But, even after being brutally tortured and sentenced to death in a concentration camp, Odette still refuses to reveal any information concerning her original mission and her fellow spies.

I Was Monty’s Double

This classic movie directed by John Guillerman has been beautifully restored as part of the Vintage Classics Collection. It...

David Crow Mar 23, 2019

We examine the influences and inspirations for Jordan Peele's Us, including those he hides in plain sight.

This article contains Us spoilers.

An emerging auteur who doesn’t like to play coy about his favorites, Jordan Peele is a director who likes to wear his influences on his sleeve. After all, he’s rebooting The Twilight Zone and did Us junket interviews while dressed as Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance from The Shining. His first feature Get Out was heavily influenced by Roman Polanski’s creeping paranoia in Rosemary’s Baby and the pointed social commentary reveled in by Bryan Forbes and William Goldman’s The Stepford Wives, hence Us choosing to increase the breadth of inspirations to match the picture’s even more ambitious scope.

Below we’ve rounded up all the influences and inspirations we spotted on first viewing of Us—another captivating socially conscious thriller,...

Director Bryan Forbes tries his hand at comedy. His nostalgic Victorian farce features an eclectic choice of Brit stars — established greats John Mills & Ralph Richardson, the freshly-minted Michael Caine, reigning jester Peter Sellers and even a debut for the collegiate pranksters Peter Cook & Dudley Moore. It’s a beaut of a production with a charming John Barry music score… but the result yields more indulgent smiles than out-and-out laughs.

The Wrong Box

Region A+B Blu-ray

Powerhouse Indicator

1966 / Color / 1:75 widescreen / 105 min. / Street Date November 23, 2018 / available from Amazon UK / £14.99

Starring: John Mills, Ralph Richardson, Michael Caine, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Nanette Newman, Tony Hancock, Peter Sellers, Wilfrid Lawson, Thorley Walters, Gerald Sim, Irene Handl, Norman Bird, John Le Mesurier, Norman Rossington, Diane Clare, Tutte Lemkow, Charles Bird, Vanda Godsell, Jeremy Lloyd, James Villiers, Graham Stark, Dick Gregory, Valentine Dyall, Leonard Rossiter, André Morell, Temperance Seven, Andrea Allan, Juliet Mills.

Cinematography:...

French composer Francis Lai, who won an Oscar for “Love Story” and penned the beguiling theme for “A Man and a Woman,” has died at the age of 86, the mayor of Nice announced on Wednesday. No cause of death was reported.

Lai’s plaintive piano melody for “Love Story,” the 1970 tearjerker that made stars of Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw, was his biggest hit, earning him an Oscar and a Golden Globe. His soundtrack recording was all over radio in early 1971, reaching no. 37 as a single and no. 2 as a soundtrack album. When lyrics were added to the melody, Andy Williams sang “Where Do I Begin” to no. 7 on the charts that same year.

The score almost didn’t happen. Lai initially turned down the assignment, he told the Los Angeles Times in 2001. But French actor Alain Delon, who had seen a cut of the film, called Lai and...

Above: UK one sheet for The Shout (Jerzy Skolimowski, UK, 1978)One of the greatest but perhaps less heralded of British actors, Sir Alan Bates (1934-2003) is being deservedly feted over the next week at the Quad Cinema in New York with the retrospective series Alan Bates: The Affable Angry Young Man. The title makes sense: before he had acted on film Bates was in the original West End and Broadway productions of Look Back in Anger, but he played not the disaffected anti-hero Jimmy Porter, made famous on film by Richard Burton, but the amiable Welsh lodger Cliff. Though a performer of great virility, intelligence and passion, he often played second fiddle to his more demonstrative co-stars—whether Anthony Quinn in Zorba the Greek (1964), Lynn Redgrave in Georgy Girl (1966), Julie Christie in Far From the Madding Crowd (1967) and The Go-Between (1971), or Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman (1978). Consequently, he is...

The L-Shaped Room

Blu ray

Twilight Time

1962 / 1:85 / 126 Min. / Street Date December 19, 2017

Starring Leslie Caron, Tom Bell, Brock Peters

Cinematography by Douglas Slocombe

Written by Bryan Forbes

Music by Brahms, John Barry

Edited by Anthony Harvey

Produced by Richard Attenborough

Directed by Bryan Forbes

The winter of 1962 found British films at their most grandiose and self-effacing. Opening at the Odeon was Lawrence of Arabia, using every inch of that cavernous theater’s wide screen. Five minutes up the road Dr. No had just premiered in the smaller but no less lofty London Pavilion.

On the other side of the tracks art houses were bringing starry-eyed Brits back to earth with austere fare like John Schlesinger’s A Kind of Loving and Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

Those sober-minded dramas, shot in low key black and white with ramshackle flats and grey skies as their backdrops,...

The Women’s Liberation Movement, or more commonly known as Women’s Lib, was in full swing by the mid-’70s. The fight for equality raged on from the late ’60s until…well, what time have you got? It was only natural for the arts to comment on the growing and vocal discontent within the feminist community, and so it was that The Stepford Wives (1975) hit the screen (based on the Ira Levin novel) with a resounding thud. Regardless, it plays as a witty indictment of male morals and suburban blandness.

Distributed by Columbia Pictures in mid-February, The Stepford Wives only brought in $4 million, was wildly derided by critics who thought it hit none of its intended targets, and screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) disagreed with many of the changes imposed by British director Bryan Forbes (International Velvet). Disgruntlements aside, it holds up remarkably well and...

Stars: Leslie Caron, Anthony Booth, Avis Bunnage, Patricia Phoenix, Verity Edmett, Tom Bell, Cicely Courtneidge, Emlyn Williams, Jennifer White, Brock Peters, Gerry Duggan, Mark Eden | Written and Directed by Bryan Forbes

When watching a British film from the sixties, the realistic discussion of such things as growing up as a single parent, or considering abortion wasn’t something you’d expect to see in a film set in London. The L-Shaped Room though is one of the few that took a look at society, family, and love and didn’t hide from the awkward truths.

Jane Fosset (Leslie Caron) is an unmarried and pregnant French woman who finds a small seedy London boarding house with a room available. Struggling with the idea of having an abortion, at first the last thing she needs is to make friends with the misfits who live there. Slowly getting to know them though she soon becomes one of them,...

A young cast give brilliantly naturalistic performances in this glorious story

about a bunch of deprived kids living near Walt Disney World

The Florida Project is a song of innocence and of experience: mainly the former. It is a glorious film in which warmth and compassion win out over miserabilism or irony, painted in bright blocks of sunlit colour like a child’s storybook and often happening in those electrically charged magic-hour urban sunsets that the director Sean Baker also gave us in his zero-budget breakthrough Tangerine.

This also has the best child acting I have seen for years; in its humour and its unforced and almost miraculous naturalism it reminded me of British examples like Ken Loach’s Kes or Bryan Forbes’s Whistle Down the Wind. Steven Spielberg once said: “If you over-rehearse kids, you risk a bad case of the cutes.” But these kids don’t look...

It was only recently that I saw, for the very first time, Bryan Forbes’ adaptation of Mark McShane’s novel Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), and as it was designed to do, it chilled me to the bone. The movie descends like a shroud upon the lives of Myra (Kim Stanley), a would-be psychic who seems at the beginning of the film to be what one might describe as dotty and demanding, and her cowed husband Bill (Richard Attenborough), a milquetoast of a man who seems far too acquiescent to her insistent personality. But Myra is more than just a bit dotty, she’s borderline demented, and she has emotionally pummeled her husband into participating in a bizarre kidnapping plan— they’ll “borrow” the daughter of a wealthy businessman and then achieve fame and riches by helping police to discover her whereabouts. As the crime progresses, Séance reveals itself to be a disturbing,...

A generic spy story becomes an inspired light comedy with the application of great talent led by the star-power of Walter Matthau. Matthau’s CIA spook hooks up with old flame Glenda Jackson to retaliate against his insufferable CIA boss (Ned Beatty) with a humiliating tell-all book about the agency’s dirty tricks history. Matthau’s sloppy, slouchy master agent is a comic delight; Ronald Neame’s stylishly assured direction makes a deadly spy chase into a wholly pleasant romp.

Hopscotch

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 163

1980 / Color / 2:39 widescreen / 105 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date August 15, 2017 / 39.95

Starring: Walter Matthau, Glenda Jackson, Sam Waterston, Ned Beatty, Herbert Lom, David Matthau, George Baker, Ivor Roberts, Lucy Saroyan, Severn Darden, George Pravda.

Cinematography: Arthur Ibbetson, Brian W. Roy

Production Designer: William J. Creber

Film Editor: Carl Kress

Original Music: Ian Fraser

Written by Bryan Forbes from a novel by Brian Garfield

Produced...

Kirsten Howard Aug 8, 2017

Producer Jonathan Sothcott talks about running an independent film company in the UK, finding the right project and a post-Brexit industry.

Jonathan Sothcott has had a hand in producing a whole lot of independent films here in the UK over the last decade. You may have even seen a fair few of them yourself, especially if you’re a Danny Dyer completest.

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He’s the man behind Hereford Films, the production and financing company he runs with partner Damien Morley. If that name rings a bell, it might well be because Morley owns a modelling agency that takes care of most of the Page 3 girls, and the entrepreneur has even recently launched a bid to buy the Page 3 brand off The Sun himself.

Seth Holt is an odd figure. An editor at first, his career spans classic Ealing comedies (The Lavender Hill Mob, 1951) and gritty kitchen sink drama (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1960), while his overlapping career as producer saw him preside over the classic The Ladykillers (1955). On becoming a director, he worked mainly at Hammer, which made radically different content from Ealing but perhaps shared the same cozy atmosphere.Taste of Fear (a.k.a. Scream of Fear, 1961) is a zestful Diabolique knock-off, while The Nanny (1965) continued Bette Davis' career in horror. It's incredibly strong, beautifully made and quite ruthless: Bette referred to Holt as "a mountain of evil" and found him the most demanding director she'd encountered since William Wyler. During the daft but enjoyably peculiar Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (1971), Holt developed a persistent case of hiccups that turned the screening of rushes into hilarious occasions. Then he dropped dead of a heart attack,...

Writer-director Jordan Peele masterfully combines incisive social commentary with genuine, seat-edge suspense in film exploring evils of American suburbia

There’s a great, often under-appreciated, history of social commentary within the horror genre. From John Carpenter’s politically charged They Live to Bryan Forbes’ haunting adaptation of The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin’s icy take on the male fear of second-wave feminism, scares and satire used to arrive simultaneously. But somewhere along the way, that tradition has been jump-shocked out of its seat, popcorn flying, and replaced with vapidity, an impatient teenage audience force-fed predictable thrills over a story that might provoke or inspire debate.

Related: Get Out: the horror film that shows it's scary to be a black man in America

Continue reading...

By Adrian Smith

William Blood (Kenneth More) is a man with an incredible immune system and without worries. He spends most of his time working as a human guinea pig for government departments such as the Common Cold and Flu Research Agency. There he frustrates the men in white coats by stubbornly refusing to catch a cold. He never gets ill, and his secret is that he has no emotional attachments. “The minute you get into a relationship with a woman, your guard is down and the coughing will start!” News of this remarkable constitution gets to the scientists at N.A.A.R.S.T.I., the National Atomic Research Station and Technological Institute, who are preparing to send the first maned rocket to the moon. They have previously sent up dogs and monkeys, but owing to public complaints about cruelty to animals, they have decided it would be...

By Todd Garbarini

The Royale Laemmle Theater in Los Angeles will be presenting a 50th anniversary screening of Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? based upon Edward Albee’s play. The 131-minute film, which stars Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, George Segal and Sandy Dennis, will be screened on Tuesday, February 23, 2016 at 7:00 pm.

Actor George Segal, who appears in the film as Nick (Honey’s Husband), is scheduled to appear at a Q&A session after the film to discuss his role and career.

From the press release:

Who’S Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? (1966) 50th Anniversary Screening

Tribute to Oscar-winning Cinematographer Haskell Wexler

Oscar Nominee George Segal In Person for post-screening Q&A with Lafca President Stephen Farber

Tuesday, February 23, at 7:00 Pm at the Royal Theatre

Skeptics said Edward Albee’s scathing dissection of marriage could never be turned into a movie. But when the Production...

Brad Bird’s non-digital animation of the 1968 children’s story has an irresistible simplicity and charm

A warm welcome back for Brad Bird’s sweet-natured animation from 1999, an adaptation of Ted Hughes’s 1968 children’s story The Iron Man. Bird transplanted the story from England to 1950s smalltown America: a metal-eating iron giant from outer-space crashlands in rural Maine, biting lumps out of automobiles and power stations; he looks like every red-scare Twilight Zone fantasy come true. But the Iron Giant is scared and lonely and a little kid called Hogarth becomes his only friend. Watching this again 17 years after its original release, I savoured again the resemblances to Spielberg, Wilde and Brian Forbes’s Whistle Down the Wind. The Iron Giant predates Bird’s 2003 gem The Incredibles and its non-digital animated style has simplicity and charm; in 2016, it looks closer to the Japanese tradition. A lovely film to revisit.

To mark the release of The Angry Silence on 4th January, we’ve been given 3 copies to give away on DVD. The first film to be produced under Richard Attenborough and Bryan Forbes’s newly formed production company, Beaver Films, The Angry Silence is a politically charged drama and an early example of the British New Wave of cinema that was just

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It’s time to talk about remakes again and this week we’ve got one that makes you wish Hollywood would stop filming remakes. This is an example of a recurring problem in the film industry where they turn good, serious movies into bad comedies. This week, Cinelinx looks at the Stepford Wives. (2004)

The story was based on a novel by Ira Levin, who also wrote the chilling “Rosemary’s Baby”. When Levin’s novel “the Stepford Wives” came out in 1972, it was a best-seller because it touched upon the timely issue of women’s liberation and female empowerment that was such a hot-button subject of that era. The book took the idea of male resistance and nervousness about female equality and turned it into a fine horror story. The tale follows a family who moves to the town of Stepford. The wife, Joanna, makes friends with the other wives...

To mark the release of The Raging Moon on 23rd November, we’ve been given 3 copies to give away on DVD. Adapted from Peter Marshall’s 1964 novel by Bryan Forbes (The Stepford Wives, Whistle Down the Wind), the film was considered unusual in its time owing to the sexual nature of the relationship between McDowell

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The 59Th BFI London Film Festival Announces Full 2015 Programme

You can peruse the programme at your leisure here.

The programme for the 59th BFI London Film Festival in partnership launched today, with Festival Director Clare Stewart presenting this year’s rich and diverse selection of films and events. BFI London Film Festival is Britain’s leading film event and one of the world’s oldest film festivals. It introduces the finest new British and international films to an expanding London and UK-wide audience. The Festival provides an essential platform for films seeking global success; and promotes the careers of British and international filmmakers through its industry and awards programmes. With this year’s industry programme stronger than ever, offering international filmmakers and leaders a programme of insightful events covering every area of the film industry‎ Lff positions London as the world’s leading creative city.

The Festival will screen a...

'Father of the Bride': Steve Martin and Kimberly Williams. Top Five Father's Day Movies? From giant Gregory Peck to tyrant John Gielgud What would be the Top Five Father's Day movies ever made? Well, there have been countless films about fathers and/or featuring fathers of various sizes, shapes, and inclinations. In terms of quality, these range from the amusing – e.g., the 1950 version of Cheaper by the Dozen; the Oscar-nominated The Grandfather – to the nauseating – e.g., the 1950 version of Father of the Bride; its atrocious sequel, Father's Little Dividend. Although I'm unable to come up with the absolute Top Five Father's Day Movies – or rather, just plain Father Movies – ever made, below are the first five (actually six, including a remake) "quality" patriarch-centered films that come to mind. Now, the fathers portrayed in these films aren't all heroic, loving, and/or saintly paternal figures. Several are...

Step back in time 46 years with us to 1969. Alfred Hitchcock, fresh off “Topaz,” was entering the very tail end of his career. He had two more films in his future — “Frenzy" and "Family Plot” — but his best work was well behind him. Nevertheless, he was (and still is) a legendary director, one of the best of the best to have graced cinema, and his mind was as much (if not more) a treasure trove of movie history, information, and advice than ever. One afternoon those many years ago, Hitch sat down with actor-writer-director Bryan Forbes (“The Stepford Wives,” screenplay for “Chaplin”) in the National Film Theatre in London to discuss movies and answer questions from an audience of cinephiles. Fortunately, for those of us too young or otherwise unable to have attended, Eyes on Cinema has uploaded an 18-minute recording of interview. Forbes kicked off the interview — after a quick...

Teresa Wright: Later years (See preceding post: "Teresa Wright: From Marlon Brando to Matt Damon.") Teresa Wright and Robert Anderson were divorced in 1978. They would remain friends in the ensuing years.[1] Wright spent most of the last decade of her life in Connecticut, making only sporadic public appearances. In 1998, she could be seen with her grandson, film producer Jonah Smith, at New York's Yankee Stadium, where she threw the ceremonial first pitch.[2] Wright also became involved in the Greater New York chapter of the Als Association. (The Pride of the Yankees subject, Lou Gehrig, died of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis in 1941.) The week she turned 82 in October 2000, Wright attended the 20th anniversary celebration of Somewhere in Time, where she posed for pictures with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. In March 2003, she was a guest at the 75th Academy Awards, in the segment showcasing Oscar-winning actors of the past. Two years later,...

Polly Bergen dead at 84: ‘First woman president of the U.S.A.,’ former mistress of Tony Soprano’s father Emmy Award-winning actress Polly Bergen — whose roles ranged from the first U.S.A. woman president in Kisses for My President to the former mistress of both Tony Soprano’s father and John F. Kennedy in the television hit series The Sopranos — died from "natural causes" on September 20, 2014, at her home in Southbury, Connecticut. The 84-year-old Bergen, a heavy smoker for five decades, had been suffering from emphysema and other ailments since the 1990s. "Most people think I was born in a rich Long Island family," she told The Washington Post in 1988, but Polly Bergen was actually born Nellie Paulina Burgin on July 14, 1930, to an impoverished family in Knoxville, Tennessee. Her father was an illiterate construction worker while her mother got only as far as the third grade. The family...

When city couple Walter and Joanna move to a peaceful New England backwater, they discover that the women cater to their husbands' every need without question. It's almost like they're made to order or something... Butch and Sundance writer William Goldman delivers a strong adaptation of Ira Levin's chilling bestseller, with Katharine Ross and Paula Prentiss starring alongside director Bryan Forbes' own wife, former washing-up icon Nanette Newman.

★★★★☆Watching Guy Hamilton's An Inspector Calls (1954), which stars Alastair Sim, Arthur Young and Bryan Forbes, one is presented with a masterclass in tension and unease. This screen version of J.B. Priestly's classic play, released by StudioCanal to mark the film's 60th anniversary, focuses on the hidden secrets between the members of an upper-class Edwardian family and how they are laid bare during the course of one fateful evening. The Birlings are a rich and powerful family, of high standing in the local community. Unfortunately their carefully constructed façade of genteel breeding and moral superiority, begins to crumble under the relentless questioning of a mysterious inspector.

Feature Aliya Whiteley 3 Apr 2014 - 07:22

Tend to think of Richard Attenborough as a kindly old man? Aliya digs into his early career to find some far nastier roles...

British cinema has always liked its angry young men: Richard Burton, Albert Finney, Laurence Harvey and others all played the 1950s and 60s social animal, raging against the class system and the staid attitudes of post-war Britain.

But they weren’t the first angry young man on the screen. Maybe that crown could be claimed by an unlikely actor – Richard Attenborough. Attenborough is best known now as a director and producer, for films such as Gandhi, Chaplin and Shadowlands. When he gets thought of as an actor, it’s often as a kindly old man with a white beard. Misguided, sometimes, as when he played John Hammond, the owner of Jurassic Park, but not downright nasty. A lot of his earlier...

James Gandolfini, Paul Walker and Philip Seymour Hoffman were among the late stars who were honoured at last night's Oscars 2014 ceremony (March 2).

The Academy paid tribute to Hollywood actors, writers, directors, producers, crew members and others associated with cinema who have passed away over the last 12 months.

Oscars 2014: Gravity takes 7 awards as 12 Years a Slave named Best Picture

Oscars 2014: Pink sings 'Over the Rainbow' for The Wizard of Oz tribute

Ghostbusters star Harold Ramis, Shirley Temple Black, Peter O'Toole, Richard Griffiths and film critic Roger Ebert were also recognised.

Among those not mentioned in the on-air tribute were Glee actor Cory Monteith, Stepford Wives director Bryan Forbes, actress Jean Stapleton and author Tom Clancy, whose numerous bestselling novels inspired a number of blockbuster movies.

Bette Midler performed her Beaches classic 'Wind Beneath My Wings' following the tribute.

Gravity was the big winner at the 2014 Oscars, while 12 Years a Slave,...