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It seems only natural that Severin Films would follow up its two Eurocrypt of Christopher Lee box sets with a collection of some of the more offbeat entries in the filmography of Peter Cushing, Lee’s legendary Hammer Films co-star. Cushing Curiosities collects five films and the remaining episodes of a TV series that highlight the diverse aspects of Cushing’s always authoritative on-screen persona. Featuring crisp new 2K restorations sourced from original elements, Severin’s compelling new set comes complete with loads of bonus materials, including some priceless audio interviews with the man himself and commentaries by historians, as well as Peter Cushing: A Portrait in Six Sketches, a 200-page book by film historian Jonathan Rigby.

Cushing appears as a stiff-necked yet urbane airline pilot in 1960’s Cone of Silence, a modestly compelling exposé based on the actual investigation into a 1952 airplane crash. Reprimanded for a crash that killed his copilot,...

To mark the release of The Mummy on 29th August on Limited Edition Blu-ray, we’ve been given copy to give away to 1 winner.

In 1890s Egypt, a team of British archaeologists, John Banning (Peter Cushing), his father Stephen Banning (Felix Aylmer), and Uncle Joseph Whemple (Raymond Huntley) discover the untouched tomb of Princess Ananka (Yvonne Furneaux). Inside the tomb, Peter discovers The Scroll of Life and, when he reads it aloud, he unknowingly brings the mummified body of the high priest Kharis (Lee) back to life…

Three years later and the group have returned to England, unawares of the nefarious consequences of their actions. A follower off the same Egyptian religion unleashes The Mummy to exact grisly revenge on the despoilers of the sacred past. As it edges nearer to exact its revenge, can anything save them from its relentlessly vicious and vengeful mission?

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“A Comedy Of Errors”

By Raymond Benson

Alastair Sim was a national treasure in Great Britain, a comic actor who never failed to make one smile or outright guffaw. His Scrooge proved that he could also take a serious turn as well. This reviewer likens him to an early sort of John Cleese—an irreverent player who could do irony, surrealism, farce, wicked delight, and pure outrageousness within the confines of a somewhat realistic human being of a character.

As the star of The Green Man (1956), Sim plays an assassin named Harry Hawkins. Yes, that’s right, Alastair Sim is a mad bomber who takes it upon himself to get rid of the pompous blowhards in Britain, whether they be boring politicians or unctuous professors. He even has a Peter Lorre-like assistant, McKechnie (John Chandos), who is willing to obey Harry, even...

To mark the release of The Green Man on 18th May, we’ve been given 2 copies to give on Blu-ray.

Alastair Sim plays Hawkins, a timid watchmaker with a part time job – he is also a professional assassin who bumps off the people we love to hate. But when the philandering MP Sir Gregory Upshott (Raymond Huntley) is the intended target, vacuum cleaner salesman William Blake (George Cole) and Hawkins’ new neighbour Ann Vincent (Jill Adams) repeatedly get in the way. As the time of the assassination draws ever closer and Hawkins tracks his victim to a dilapidated seaside hotel called the Green Man, the laughs and the tension steadily rise to a brilliant climax.

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Open to UK residents only The competition will close 18th May 2020 at 23.59 GMT The winner will be picked at...

One of the first ‘kitchen sink realist’ films of the British New Wave is also one of the best English films ever — believable, absorbing, and emotionally moving. The adaptation of John Braine’s novel launched Laurence Harvey as a major star, and English films were suddenly touted as being just as adult as their continental counterparts. It attracted a bushel of awards, especially for the luminous Simone Signoret. Unlike the average Angry Young Man, Joe Lampton’s struggle feels universal — bad things happen when ambition seeks a way through the class ceiling, ‘to get to the money,’ as says Donald Wolfit’s character.

Room at the Top

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1959 / B&W / 1:66 widescreen / 115 min. / Street Date January 14, 2020 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Laurence Harvey, Simone Signoret, Heather Sears, Ambrosine Phillpotts, Donald Wolfit, Donald Houston, Hermione Baddeley, Allan Cuthbertson, Raymond Huntley, John Westbrook, Richard Pasco, Ian Hendry, April Olrich,...

Much of Ealing Studios’ core appeal begins right here, with T.E.B. Clarke’s astute look at the character of pragmatic, energetic Londoners, who in this fantasy face an outrageous situation with spirit, pluck, and a determination not to be cheated. What happens when a few square blocks of London discover that they’re no longer even part of the British Empire? A classic of wartime ‘adjustments,’ the ensemble comedy even begins with a Tex Avery- like ode to rationing.

Passport to Pimlico

Blu-ray

Film Movement Classics

1949 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 84 min. / Street Date December 20, 2019 / 29.95

Starring: Stanley Holloway, Hermione Baddeley, Margaret Rutherford, Sydney Tafler, Betty Warren, Barbara Murray, Paul Dupuis, John Slater, Jane Hylton, Raymond Huntley, Philip Stainton, Roy Carr, Nancy Gabrielle, Malcolm Knight, Roy Gladdish, Frederick Piper, Charles Hawtrey, Stuart Lindsell, Naunton Wayne, Basil Radford, Gilbert Davis, Michael Hordern, Arthur Howard, Bill Shine, Harry Locke, Sam Kydd.

Cinematography: Lionel...

Alec Guinness transfers an acting challenge from the stage to the screen, in this account of a Cardinal forced to knuckle under to a Communist regime — instead of extracting a confession with torture, Jack Hawkins’ Inquisitor uses psychology to find his prisoner’s weakness. The picture is uneven but its key performances are choice, with a special assist from Wilfrid Lawson as a jailer.

The Prisoner

Blu-ray

Arrow Academy

1955 / B&W / 1:85 widescreen / 95 min. / Street Date March 12, 2019 / 39.95

Starring: Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins, Wilfrid Lawson, Kenneth Griffith, Jeanette Sterke, Ronald Lewis, Raymond Huntley, Percy Herbert.

Cinematography: Reginald Wyer

Film Editor: Frederick Wilson

Original Music: Benjamin Frankel

Written by Bridget Boland from her play

Produced by Vivian Cox

Directed by Peter Glenville

Is this an anti-Communist piece, or simply a story about human convictions and human weakness? Believe it or not, some interpreted it as anti-Catholic in 1955. European film festivals may have...

Stars: Richard Todd, Michael Redgrave, Ursula Jeans, Basil Sydney, Patrick Barr, Ernest Clark, Derek Farr, Charles Carson, Stanley Van Beers, Colin Tapley, Raymond Huntley, Hugh Manning | Written by R.C. Sherriff | Directed by Michael Anderson

Many of the classic World War 2 movies are based on real-life battles and events that led to the victory by the allied forces. The Dam Busters is one of the most famous of these, and now with a collector’s edition release to celebrate the 75th Anniversary of the raid itself, we can look back and see how the film still holds up.

Focusing on Dr. Barnes N. Wallis (Michael Redgrave) and the men who flew the raid, The Dam Busters provides a dramatized version of just what it took to destroy the Ruhr Dams. A raid that although it seemed impossible, was managed through the creation of the bouncing bomb.

When looking at the style of Michael Anderson’s 1955 classic,...

How could England have won the war without him? Horatio Smith sneaks about in Nazi Germany, liberating concentration camp inmates right under the noses of the Gestapo. Leslie Howard directed and stars in this wartime escapist spy thriller, as a witty professor too passive to be suspected as the mystery spy.

‘Pimpernel’ Smith

Blu-ray

Olive Films

1941 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 121 min. / Street Date November 15, 2016 / available through the Olive Films website / 29.98

Starring Leslie Howard, Francis L. Sullivan, Mary Morris, Allan Jeayes, Peter Gawthorne, Hugh McDermott, David Tomlinson, Raymond Huntley, Sebastian Cabot, Irene Handl, Ronald Howard, Michael Rennie.

Cinematography Mutz Greenbaum

Camera Operators Guy Green, Jack Hildyard

Film Editor Douglas Myers

Original Music John Greenwood

Written by Anatole de Grunwald, Roland Pertwee, A.G. Macdonell, Wolfgang Wilhelm based on a character by Baroness Emmuska Orczy

Produced by Leslie Howard, Harold Huth

Directed by Leslie Howard

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

I like movies...

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

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

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

★★★☆☆ "He who robs the graves of Egypt...dies." It's sage advice oft proffered to enthusiastic archaeologists and rarely taken heed of. Unsurprisingly, it proves as valuable as the wise words from a stranger that discourage visiting that ominous Transylvanian castle, or investigating the abandoned cabin in the woods. It's the laughing-off of such a recommendation by an affable, well-dressed Englishman in rich Technicolor that assures audiences that they're about to enjoy the recognisable comforts of Hammer Horror's The Mummy (1959). No sooner has he dismissed the warning he's scared into a coma.

The tomb of Princess Ananka, a high priestess of Karnak, seems a haunted place to John Banning (Peter Cushing), son of the fabled and now committed treasure hunter (Felix Aylmer). After his father's collapse, he and his uncle (Raymond Huntley) seal off the tomb, but the mysterious Mehemet Bey (George Pastell) seems hell-bent on wreaking a terrible revenge on...

(Terence Fisher, 1959, Icon/Hammer, 12)

The Mummy

After nearly 20 years of unmemorable programme fillers, Hammer Films found sudden international success with horror movies, first the black-and-white The Quatermass Xperiment, then Technicolor versions of the 1930s Universal classics, The Curse of Frankenstein, Horror of Dracula and The Mummy. Made in a sprawling country mansion on the Thames at Bray, near Windsor, all three films featured the same stars (Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee) and the same crew, headed by director Terence Fisher, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster, designer Bernard Robinson and cinematographer Jack Asher. A distinctive style was born, and Hammer became synonymous with horror. The Mummy drew on four Universal movies for its tale of an Egyptologist (Peter Cushing) being pursued back to Britain by the ancient, vengeful mummy of an Egyptian priest (Christopher Lee) that he has roused from his tomb in Karnak in 1896.

Alternately corny and magical, scary and comic, naive and perverse,...

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

After World War Two, just as the Us was getting hot under the collar about imaginary left-wing plots to seduce the nation via hidden messages in the movies, by a remarkable coincidence British cinema was infiltrated by a genuine socialist conspiracy.

Late in the war, as victory began to seem graspable, people started thinking about what kind of United Kingdom they wanted to live in: Winston Churchill may have led the nation through the conflict, but now something different was required. Sir Michael Balcon, head of Ealing Studios, was part of a group of filmmakers and creative types working behind the scenes to prepare the ground for a Labour government and the introduction of socialist programmes like the National Health Service.

Humphrey Jennings' eloquently understated propaganda short A Diary for Timothy looks at a new-born baby and wonders what kind of world he'll grow up in: as critic Raymond Durgnat observed,...