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Naval war films are a specific genre within the military historical fiction genre of cinema. Within them also reside submarine films and court-marshaling dramas that question the ethics of law, justice, and the chain of command. From enemies creeping in the depths with nuclear weapons to pirates swinging from ship to ship flashing cutlasses at each other to plunder gold, the intrigue of battle and order on the high seas has always captured the attention of audiences.

Many great classics show great naval battles and crew dramas, but not all of them fall under this category. The incredible Ben Hur involves a whole story arc within the galleys of the Roman Fleet, where the titular character is enslaved and is caught in a major sea battle. Unfortunately, the film's connection to naval warfare moves on from there, or else it could certainly thrive among those that zero in on naval...

The film industry could have avoided a lot of tragedy if they just didn’t use so many horses— or invite the wrath of a vengeful God.

14 ‘Ben-Hur’ (1925)

While filming at the actual ancient Roman chariot racing venue Circus Maximus, the wheel of a chariot broke and the stuntman driving it died.

13 ‘Noah's Ark’ (1928)

While trying to play God and recreate “the great flood,” a ton of extras were injured, one guy lost a leg and three people died.

12 An Unknown 1929 Film

A super-famous German shepherd named Strongheart accidentally touched a hot studio light. His burn became infected, and he died a few weeks later.

11 ‘The Viking’ (1931)

Twenty-seven people died for B-roll. After the film was finished, a producer and the real-life adventurer Varick Frissell decided they needed footage of the abandoned, ice-bound ship The Viking. While filming, some dynamite on board spontaneously exploded.

10 ‘Scarface’ (1932)

Director Gaylord Lloyd was blinded...

"How very delightful!" Studiocanal UK & Park Circus have unveiled an official trailer dubbed Once More with Ealing, celebrating classic films made by the UK's iconic vintage production company Ealing Studios. 1949 saw the release of a trio of classic British comedies that really cemented Ealing’s place in history as this country’s finest film studios: Passport to Pimlico, Kind Hearts & Coronets and Whiskey Galore! 75 years later, these films still seem as fresh, innovative and, above all, as funny as ever. To celebrate the 75th Anniversary of these landmark films, and to compliment the theatrical reissue of a new 4K restoration of Ealing's sweetest crime caper film The Lavender Hill Mob (out 29 March), cinemas nationwide will be offering a selection of Ealing classics, both comedy and drama. The trailer below includes clips from a various selection of these classic films, and it's a nice reminder to book tickets and enjoy.

Severin Films is celebrating the late Peter Cushing with an unprecedented box set highlighting the most unexpected gems from the filmography of the legendary horror actor.

Cushing Curiosities, releasing August 29, presents 6-discs of rarely seen feature films and television broadcasts restored and scanned from original vault sources, plus a curated plethora of Special Features that celebrate Cushing’s unique career like never before.

From Hammer Films to Star Wars, he remains one of genre films’ best-loved actors. Now celebrate six of the most unexpected, rarely seen and decidedly curious performances from the legendary career of Peter Cushing: Cushing delivers a rare villain turn in the 1960 aviation thriller Cone Of Silence. That same year, Cushing brought gentle dignity to The Boulting Brothers’ cold-war drama Suspect. In 1962’s The Man Who Finally Died, Cushing co-stars opposite Stanley Baker as a former Nazi hiding a grave post-war secret.

Cushing returns to his...

In or around 1976, I caught a forlorn moment near New York’s Bleecker St. It was early morning. The sun was just up. Two ragged guys were shuffling toward me on the sidewalk, when one offered the other a bottle in a bag.

But the drink was declined.

“I guess I lost my taste for it,” sighed the saddest voice I’d ever heard.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about those guys when I think about the movies. I mean, what if we’ve lost our taste for them? What if we’ve kicked the habit?

Four months into the coronavirus shutdown, this no longer seems impossible. Personally, I haven’t seen a new film since Feb. 25. The movie was Emma., at the Landmark Theatres in West Los Angeles. It was a pleasant enough experience, all those young actors doing their Jane Austen turn,...

Gerard Schurmann, whose 1960s film scores included “The Bedford Incident” and “Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarecrow” but who also composed extensively for the concert hall, died March 24 at his home in the Hollywood Hills. He was 96 and had recently been in declining health.

Schurmann’s death was announced by his music publisher, Novello & Co. Ltd., in London. Said James Rushton, head of Novello’s Wise Music Group: “Gerard will be much missed – a man and musician of the highest caliber, who expressed himself, whether through his music or in conversation, with the firmest conviction. He understood so very well about writing for the orchestra, and for instruments generally, but unusually knew how to employ the orchestra both in the concert hall and also for film. He wrote for both with such facility.”

The composer’s death came just a few months after Chandos released a collection of newly recorded suites from his film work,...

Author: Cai Ross

With more TV channels then there are bacteria on a lab technician’s wellington boot, and with social media weaponising opinions en masse, these days everyone is a critic. But as far as British TV audiences in the 70s, 80s and 90s were concerned, there was only really one film critic, Barry Norman Cbe, who has sadly passed away this weekend at the age of 83.

Between 1971 and 1998, Norman’s was the positive verdict every studio wanted on their film poster. With a sprightly, conversational style that sounded like audible handwriting, and a dependable selection of comfortable jumpers to hand, Barry Norman was the nation’s film critic: our Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert rolled into one package.

Coming up through the ranks the old fashioned way, Norman ended up at the BBC via early work as a jobbing journalist and a film critic for various national newspapers. He...

Author: Competitions

To mark the release of Mandy on 12th June, we’ve been given 3 copies to give away on Blu-ray.

Six-year-old Mandy Garland (Mandy Miller) was born deaf. With concerns for her future, Christine (Phyllis Calvert: Twisted Nerve, Mr Denning Drives North) and Harry Garland (Terence Morgan: Sir Francis Drake) try to work out the best scenario for their daughter’s education, but before long their constant quarreling puts a strain on their relationship. Against Harry’s wishes, Mandy is enrolled in a special school under the guidance of headmaster Dick Searle (Jack Hawkins: The Cruel Sea, The Fallen Idol), whose unconventional teaching methods are questioned by some of the adults. But Christine forms a strong friendship with Mr Searle, who ultimately has the child’s best interests at heart and eventually helps Mandy to find her voice.

Boasting an all star cast and a breakout performance from Mandy Miller,...

There's nothing more earnest than an English national epic, and this is a valiant expedition that becomes a low-key disaster. Told straight and clean, it's a primer on how to behave in the face of doom. Scott of the Antarctic Region B Blu-ray Studiocanal (UK) 1948 / Color / 1:37 Academy / 110 min. / Street Date June 6, 2016 / Available from Amazon UK £ 14.99 Starring John Mills, Derek Bond, Harold Warrender, James Robertson Justice, Kenneth More, Reginald Beckwith. Cinematography Osmond Borradaile, Jack Cardiff, Geoffrey Unsworth Editor Peter Tanner Original Music Vaughan Williams Written by Walter Meade, Ivor Montagu, Mary Hayley Bell Produced by Michael Balcon Directed by Charles Frend

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

English film companies fell on hard times during the postwar austerity period. But the relatively small Ealing Studios maintained its creative underdog brand even after it was taken over by Rank, and is still celebrated for wartime greats like Went the Day Well?, the singular masterpiece Dead of Night,...

Tom Hanks stars in this year's London film festival opening gala – another high-stakes, real-life nail-biter from Paul Greengrass that never sacrifices subtlety for kineticism

• More on Captain Phillips

• More on the London film festival

This unbearably tense hijack thriller is based on the true story from 2009 about a Somali pirate attack on an American container ship, and watching it, I succumbed more or less immediately to an attack of "Greengrass cotton-mouth": the two-hour anxiety attack that only a movie by Paul Greengrass can provoke. With his 9/11 nightmare United 93 (2006) and his Northern Ireland drama Bloody Sunday (2002) I came down with these same symptoms: shallow breathing, heart arrhythmia, a high-pitched keening coming from somewhere behind clenched teeth and a tendency to grab the red plush of the seat in front. Or even the scalp of the unfortunate person sitting in it. Like those earlier movies, this is about a confrontation and a catastrophe — colossal,...

‘Caper’ movies are a sub-genre of the crime film that in the past 50 years has created some highly entertaining, memorable pieces of cinema. Each of the classics of the sub-genre seems to follow a simple set of just three rules:

The ensemble cast, led by a strong leading actor, play a group of down-on-their-luck men (they are either criminals, ex-cons, reluctant soldiers, or unemployed) who band together to carry out a clever and audacious heist. The audience throughout cheers for the ‘criminals’ because we know they are not Really ‘bad guys’ and, until the very final moments, we hope that they will get away with the crime (any maybe afterwards). The script is as clever as the cinematic crime itself and has a strong element of black – and usually quite socially subversive – humor.

****

The top five are probably The League of Gentlemen (1960), Ocean’s Eleven (1960), The Italian Job (1969), Three Kings...

Cast your mind back to the pre-internet age (admittedly, a tough task) where film-related content was sparse, and finding out about the latest releases and industry news was an altogether frugal and challenging task. Luckily, there was one perennial TV figure who provided a regular means of getting your cinematic fix (providing your parents remembered to hit record on the video, or you caught the repeats on a Saturday morning).

For the better part of three decades, cinema lovers tuned in to watch Barry Norman report on forthcoming features, chat with the Hollywood elite and cast his critical eye over the weekly big-screen releases via the BBC’s revered Film programme. Norman was popular enough to spawn a famous, oft-quoted catchphrase (“and why not?”) and his reviews informed a whole generation of film fans.

We had the enviable opportunity to chat to the legendary figure recently over the phone and...

There's a foretaste of the Somme and a whole social order being upended in Roy Ward Baker's film

Ah, the many Proustian pleasures to be derived from a renewed acquaintance with Roy Ward Baker's 1958 Titanic melodrama A Night To Remember ... Last seen by me on some wintry Sunday afternoon in the prepubescent early 1970s, probably in the same post-prandial time-slot where I first encountered The Cockleshell Heroes, Carve Her Name With Pride and The Colditz Story – the dull roar of British postwar self-congratulation on film. It has lingered clearly in my head in a way none of those others ever did, and come back fresh as ever.

Certain pleasures derive from familiarity: any waterborne or storm-tossed movie made in Britain in those years fetched up sooner or later in what I've always thought of as "the Ealing tank", although here it's the equally ripple-free Pinewood tank, abetted, pricelessly,...

Director of eerily atmospheric Hammer horror films including The Kiss of the Vampire

In 1962, Don Sharp was a minor ex-actor, hack writer and jobbing director of British B-films, when he was offered the chance to make a gothic horror movie for Hammer, "the studio that dripped blood". In the event, The Kiss of the Vampire (1963) rescued both Sharp, who has died aged 90, and Hammer from the doldrums.

The studio, which had suffered several expensive flops, turned to Sharp due to his experience in low-budget film-making. Sharp, who claimed to have never watched a horror movie, let alone directed one, quickly steeped himself in the Hammer style by spending a week or so watching past successes, principally those directed by Terence Fisher and Freddie Francis. The Kiss of the Vampire, made with a smaller budget and an unstarry cast, recruited mostly from television, scored at the box office, and Sharp became associated with horror movies thereafter.

The director Don Sharp, whose long career included a string of Hammer classics, has died aged 89.Born in Tasmania, Sharp headed for England after the Second World War, embarking on a film and television career that spanned four decades. He started out with acting roles in the likes of The Cruel Sea and the famous BBC radio sci-fi series Journey Into Space, but soon turned to writing and directing.Following some domestic dramas, crime thrillers and teen rock'n'roll movies in the fifties, he scored his first job with Hammer on 1963's Kiss Of The Vampire, the studio's second attempt at a Dracula follow-up without Christopher Lee (or indeed Dracula). He did however get to work with Lee on the subsequent The Devil Ship Pirates and Rasputin The Mad Monk, and away from Hammer, the pair also collaborated on the first two films in the Fu Manchu series, before the reins slipped to Jesus Franco.

According to various online sources, Tasmanian-born director Don Sharp has died. He was 89.

A former small-time actor (The Planter's Wife, The Cruel Sea), Sharp (born April 19, 1922, in Hobart) is best remembered for several low-budget thrillers he directed in the 1960s, such as Hammer's The Kiss of the Vampire (1963), the sci-fier Curse of the Fly (1965), and the The Brides of Fu Manchu (1966), starring Christopher Lee as the East Asian fiend.

Sharp's other notable efforts include The Death Wheelers / Psychomania (1973), about a youth gang terrorizing a small town; the Ira drama Hennessy (1975), with A-listers Rod Steiger and Lee Remick; The Thirty Nine Steps, an underrated remake of Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 classic starring Robert Powell in Robert Donat's old man-on-the-run role; and the slow-moving adventure drama Bear Island, featuring Vanessa Redgrave and Donald Sutherland.

Sharp also worked on British television, directing several episodes from The Avengers. Other notable television efforts were a...

Based upon Nicholas Monserrat's 1951 novel of the same name, The Cruel Sea (1953), reissued now for the first time on Blu-ray, follows the officers of a British naval ship during the Second World War. A production of Michael Balcon's Ealing Studios, the 1953 film is rarely included in the pantheon of that studio's great works these days, taking a back seat to those famously raucous comedies of the 1940s and '50s.

Read more »...

“This is a story of the battle of the Atlantic. The story of an ocean, two ships and a handful of men. The men are the heroes. The heroines are the ships. The only villain is the sea, the cruel sea that man has made more cruel.”

So begins Charles Frend’s film of the best selling novel of the same name by Nicholas Monsarrat. This opening statement, delivered in voiceover, tells us so much about the film we are about to watch and the film lives up to what promises are inherent in this opening so well.

The Cruel Sea is not a simple good vs. evil gung-ho war film featuring ‘our boys’ taking out Nazis in the middle of the Atlantic but a rich character piece made only eight years after the war it depicts and all the more powerful and reflective because of it. Interestingly, for instance,...

To celebrate the digitally remastered release of The Cruel Sea on 13th June, Optimum Home Entertainment have given us three copies of the film to give away on Blu-ray. The movie is directed by Charles Frend and stars Jack Hawkins, Donald Sinden and John Stratton.

The novel The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monserrat was an unflinching portrayal of life at sea during WWII on a boat tasked with protecting convoys and seeking and destroying U-boats. A runaway success, the novel had already sold over 4 million copies in just 2 years when Ealing decided to make the film version. Filmed aboard an actual Royal Navy corvette, The Cruel Sea tells the story of the sailors aboard the Hms Compass Rose: the bonds that form between them, the daily pressures they face and their epic struggle to overcome the enemy. Nominated for a BAFTA for Best British Film, The Cruel Sea stars Jack Hawkins,...

Father’s day is on the horizon and a whole bunch of cool Blu-ray’s are being released to celebrate that fact, a few films of which are particularly some of my Dad’s favourites.

Sam Peckinpah’s bloody anti-war movie Cross of Iron (out June 3rd), the British Wwi classic The Cruel Sea (June 13th) and the excellent Ice Cold Alex (June 13th), all digitally restored and available on the first time in Blu-ray. Excitedly if you are in London on father’s day weekend, the Odeon Panton St are showing Cross of Iron and Ice Cold in Alex from June 17th!

Owf have three copies of all three films to give away…

6 June: Cross Of Iron – Only On Bluray – Digitally Restored

Heralded as the most anti-war war film ever made, Cross Of Iron is a bloody and thought-provoking depiction of the horrors of war featuring an epic battle...