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Showbiz in Soho is artificial, gaudy and vulgar, but Laurence Harvey’s slick promoter-con man thinks he can cheat at the pop music game. Cliff Richard is his new discovery, a teen crooner who digs the bongo drums. Wolf Mankowitz’s portrait of talent, glitz, and double-dealing in music and TV showbiz also stars Sylvia Syms as a Soho stripper and Yolande Donlan as a singing star trying to make a comeback. The disc contains director Val Guest’s uncut original version.

Expresso Bongo

Blu-ray

Cohen / Kino Lorber

1959 / B&w / 2:35 widescreen / 111 106 min. / Street Date January 18, 2022 / Available from Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Laurence Harvey, Sylvia Syms, Yolande Donlan, Cliff Richard, Meier Tzelniker, Ambrosine Phillpotts, Eric Pohlmann, Gilbert Harding, Hermione Baddeley, Reginald Beckwith, Avis Bunnage, Sally Geeson, Kenneth Griffith, Burt Kwouk, Wilfrid Lawson, Patricia Lewis, Barry Lowe, Martin Miller, Susan Hampshire, Peter Myers, Lisa Peake, The Shadows.

Cinematography: John Wilcox

Art Director:...

Remember the classic James Bond theme that Monty Norman composed and John Barry re-arranged for "Dr. No," and which was subsequently used in the 22 other official Bond films, including "Skyfall"? It started as the song "Bad Sign Good Sign," part of a failed musical called "A House For Mr. Biswas."

Norman and Julian More wrote a musical adaptation of V.S. Naipual's best-selling novel, but the expense of the show made it a non-starter. Soon after, Norman used the melody of "Bad Sign Good Sign" for Bond. Wrote Norman when the track was released in 2005:

As time moved on, many people suggested I record the progenitor of the signature theme first heard in Dr No. So, with musical cuts of the middle production area, and with the help of Mehboob Nadim's evocative sitar and Pandit Dimesh's terrific tabla rhythms the embryonic melodies of the James Bond Theme, for the...

Actor who made his name at Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop and appeared in the Beatles films, making firm friends with the Fab Four

Victor Spinetti, who has died of cancer aged 82, was an outrageously talented Welsh actor and raconteur who made his name with Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop and found fame and fortune as a friend and colleague of the Beatles, appearing in three of their five films, and with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Franco Zeffirelli's The Taming of the Shrew (1967).

It was while he was giving his brilliantly articulated and hilarious "turn" as the gobbledegook-shouting drill sergeant in Oh, What a Lovely War! in the West End in 1963 – he won a Tony for the performance when the show went to Broadway – that the Beatles visited him backstage and invited him to appear in A Hard Day's Night (1964).

George Harrison later said that his mother would...

Many unsuspecting cinema-goers who clearly hadn’t read the reviews got quite a shock when they went into Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan expecting a nice movie about ballet. Black Swan is a fully-fledged (pun intended) horror movie full of fantastical elements – or is it? Horror it certainly is – fantasy, it may not be, as it is entirely possible that every uncanny event in the film exists only in the protagonist’s disturbed mind. Black Swan is far from the first film to play with the line between fantasy and reality, and it won’t be the last. What follows is a subjective list of some of my favourite reality-bending fantastical films.*

A Matter of Life and Death (dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946, known as Stairway to Heaven in the Us)

A Matter of Life and Death uses exactly the same method as Black Swan to bend reality, but to the exact opposite effect.