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“Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema 1945-1960” is the theme of this year’s Locarno Film Festival Retrospective, unveiled on Monday. It follows the festival’s 2024 look back at Columbia Pictures at 100.

Described as “a tribute” to British cinema from that period promising to be “painting a rich and diverse picture of life in the postwar years as reflected in British popular cinema,” the retrospective will feature more than 40 films and is produced in partnership with the BFI National Archive and the Cinémathèque Suisse, with the support of StudioCanal and curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht.

“After the end of the Second World War — and as its overseas empire began to crumble — Britain embarked on the rocky road to national reconstruction and revival,” Locarno organizers said. “Featuring everything from beloved classics by legendary filmmakers like David Lean, Carol Reed, and Powell and Pressburger (themselves the subject of a major Locarno retrospective in 1982 and...

Witness one Robert Lippert, an American independent producer who flourished in multiple eras of Hollywood. We discuss his adaptation to changes in the movie biz in conjunction with a double bill DVD of two typical Lippert shows from the very early fifties, one produced in Hollywood and another in England. Robert Lippert is the proof that ‘Life Finds a Way’ in the movies as well, a sentiment reinterpreted as ‘staying in the game.’

I’ll Get You + Fingerprints Don’t Lie

Forgotten Noir Volume 6

DVD

Vci / Kit Parker

1951, 1952 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / Street Date April 24 2007, 2020

Starring: George Raft, Sally Gray, Clifford Evans; Richard Travis, Sheila Ryan, Sid Melton.

I’ve wanted to review the two ‘programmers’ in this double-bill disc for some time, not realizing that I was really more interested in a producer associated with them. The name Robert L. Lippert pops up continually in the history of some of my favorite genre pictures.

Sinister stabbings, women kicked and beaten, perverse hoodlums selling cocaine and murdering street-beat bobbies: what happened to civilized English crime? Cavalcanti’s vicious postwar Brit Noir shocked critics for The Times and was cut to ribbons for American distribution. A disillusioned, bored Raf hero turns to smuggling and skullduggery; this fully restored crime classic gives us Trevor Howard, Sally Gray and Griffith Jones in one of the best — and most brutal — crime pix of its day. Plus attractive Pi extras.

They Made Me a Fugitive

Region-free Blu-ray

Powerhouse Indicator

1947 / B&w / 1:37 flat full frame / 102 78 min. / I Became a Criminal / Street Date September 23, 2019 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £15.99

Starring: Sally Gray, Trevor Howard, Griffith Jones, René Ray, Charles Farrell, Maurice Denham, Vida Hope, Peter Bull, Sebastian Cabot.

Cinematography:Otto Heller

Film Editors: Margery Saunders, Terence Fisher (uncredited)

Original Music: Marius-François Gaillard

Written by Noel Langley from a novel by Jackson Budd...

The Hidden Room (aka Obsession)

Written by Alec Coppel

Directed by Edward Dmytryk

U.S.A., 1949

On a quiet London night British upper class housewife Storm Riodan (Sally Gray) and secret American ex-pat lover Bill Kronin (Phil Brown) return the former’s lavish flat for a night of passion. Unbeknownst to them Storm’s husband, the brilliant if extremely sensitive Dr. Clive Riodan (Robert Newton) lingers behind the curtains, listening to their every word. He eventually makes his presence known, catching both completely off guard in the process. So intense is the doctor’s jealousy that he threatens to murder dear Bill point blank with a firearm. When Storm retires to her quarters out of embarrassment, the doctor forces Bill to accompany him outside when the film cuts to…a scene few days later as Clive Riodan attends to a patient in his private office. His wife is convinced his...

Looking back at the early days of cinema allows us not only the opportunity to see the development of our favourite medium but also discover the hidden gems which may have been forgotten.

Network Releasing are shining their own particular light on some of the lesser-known films from one of the most important studios in British cinema history. The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection Vol. 1 (out on the 8th of April) contains early works from directors such as Carol Reed and Basil Dean and we’ve got a clip and a couple of rare production images from the wonderfully named Cheer Up! for you today.

A struggling playwright hopes to market a musical comedy that he has written in collaboration with another equally penurious composer. Anxious to secure the backing of a millionaire, the two composers only succeed in making him angry — until, following a chain of misunderstandings, they finally emerge triumphant.