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When an actor better known for good guys plays against type, I always look for the wink. Not a literal wink, of course, but that little moment that says: "Don't worry, guys! It's me, I'm only acting!"

Henry Fonda never winked when he gunned down a little kid in "Once Upon a Time in the West." Neither did James Stewart when he played a detective twisted into a controlling monster by his obsessions in "Vertigo," nor Denzel Washington as the dirty cop in "Training Day."

Then you have Tom Hanks, a true national treasure and the all-around nicest guy in movies. Just his presence in a darker role is enough to wink at the audience. For all his versatility, I'd argue he has yet to play a fully successful villainous role. He lacked the sinister edge Alec Guinness had as the loquacious criminal mastermind in the disastrous remake of "The Ladykillers,...

BFI Player Classics includes Alexander Mackendrick’s The Ladykillers (1955), Ken Russell’s feature debut French Dressing (1963).

The British Film Institute will launch BFI Player Classics as a stand-alone streaming service in the US featuring a curated roster of classic UK cinema on May 14.

The platform arrives with more than 200 UK or UK co-productions picked by BFI experts, and includes work from as Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Powell, Ken Russell, and Ken Loach.

BFI Player Classics includes titles like Alexander Mackendrick’s The Ladykillers (1955), Russell’s feature debut French Dressing (1963), and Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol (1948).

Films not currently available across...

Curtiss Cook, who has recurred as Douda on Showtime’s The Chi, has been promoted to series regular for Season 4. Additionally, Tabitha Brown (Princess of the Row) and Jason Weaver are set for recurring roles on the Lena Waithe-created drama series. The Chi is currently in production in Chicago and will return to the network later this year.

Cook’s Douda is a successful Southside businessman and hustler who beats the odds to get elected mayor of Chicago. He joined the series as recurring in Season 2 and has appeared 16 episodes.

Created and executive produced by Waithe and executive produced by Common (Selma), The Chi is a timely coming-of-age story revolving around a group of residents on the South Side of Chicago who become linked by coincidence but bonded by the need for connection and redemption.

Brown will play Octavia,a successful interior designer who fortuitously crosses...

Officially a production of the Covid era—the end credits include such novel crew positions as “Covid compliance officer” and “Covid p.a.”—On the Count of Three plays like a despairing, vaguely comedic twist on more than half-century-old race relations films such as The Defiant Ones and In the Heat of the Night, in which circumstances forced white and black characters to collaborate against their wills. In the directorial debut of Jerrod Carmichael, whose stand-up work and TV specials have reliably provided blunt and comic diagnoses of race and class issues, there is a sense of the more things change, the more things remain the same, as this scrappy, hectic, unfunny farce provides the backdrop for a quick, down-and-dirty look at desperation in the under-class.

The opening scene grabs you by the lapels. Black Val (Carmichael) and white Kevin (Christopher Abbott) point guns at each other, profess their mutual love,...

To celebrate the 65th anniversary of Ealing Studios’ flawless The Ladykillers, Studiocanal is releasing the first ever 4k restoration of the 1955 black comedy from the original 3-strip Technicolor negative, showcasing director Alexander Mackendrick’s vision in its full glory.

Featuring all-star line-up of the finest comedy actors of the era: Alec Guinness, Cecil Parker Peter Sellers, Herbert Lom, Danny Green, Frankie Howerd and Katie Johnson, The Ladykillers follows the hilarious capers of a group of small-time crooks, taking on more they can handle in the form of their sweet, but slightly dotty, elderly landlady Mrs Wilberforce. The gang pull off a robbery but none of them could have predicted that their greatest obstacle to escaping with the loot would be their tiny hostess.

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The Ladykillers is released as a 4K Uhd Blu-ray Collector’s Edition, Standard Blu-ray,...

As Disney quietly disappears huge swathes of film history into its vaults, I'm going to spend 2020 celebrating Twentieth Century Fox and the Fox Film Corporation's films, what one might call their output if only someone were putting it out.***"Like watching Shirley Temple pull the wings off a fly," was one critic's evocative summary of A High Wind in Jamaica (1965), Alexander Mackendrick's disturbingly faithful rendition of Richard Hughes' striking novel.The book had been a passion project of Mackendrick for years, and he'd tried unsuccessfully to set it up at Ealing, the little British studio which had launched his career, but the story, in which a crew of anachronistic Victorian pirates find themselves inadvertent abductors of a family of schoolchildren, was much too strange and upsetting for producer Michael Balcon. You see, the children utterly destroy the pirates. It was a variation on the theme of "lethal innocence...

New titles breathe life into cinema offerings.

RankFilm (Distributor)Three-day gross (Oct 23-25)Total gross to date Week 1 Honest Thief (Signature Entertainment) £209,383 £253,162 1 2 Two By Two: Overboard! (eOne) £191,966 £329,788 1 3 The Secret Garden (Sky Cinema/Altitude) £153,976 £153,976 1 4 Tenet (Warner Bros) £134,000 £17.1m 9 5 Pixie (Paramount) £111,000 £116,000 1

Gbp to Usd conversion rate: 1.31

Signature Entertainment’s Honest Thief opened top of the UK box office this weekend, ending Tenet’s eight-week run in first position, as the UK box office battled back with four new titles in the top five.

The cumulative total for the top five films this weekend was £800,325 - up 40% on last weekend, an impressive increase given that cinemas in Ireland,...

In this week’s International TV Newswire, Variety recaps Discovery U.K.’s best-ever year, a new Netflix stop motion series from Nexus Studios, Annecy’s growth, Dcd’s pre-sales and Natpe lineup and another plaudit for “Friends” creators David Crane and Marta Kauffman.

2019 Marks Biggest Year Yet for Discovery U.K.

Discovery U.K. enjoyed a banner year in 2019, with total audience growth of 7%, outpacing the TV market at large which declined by 4%. Other benchmarks achieved by the network include male viewership of Quest rising by 13%, the creation of a new Food Network channel, and a 46% growth in women viewers. In digital, Discovery’s portfolio hit 1.9 billion views on YouTube. The company’s portfolio increased by an average share of 4.2% (A16+), an 11% increase over 12 months. Additionally, Discovery hosted its largest-ever one-day share of 5.4% on Aug. 12. The network’s pay TV channels also boasted record numbers of VOD requests, surpassing 60m,...

Each month, the fine folks at FilmStruck and the Criterion Collection spend countless hours crafting their channels to highlight the many different types of films that they have in their streaming library. This March will feature an exciting assortment of films, as noted below.

To sign up for a free two-week trial here.

Friday, March 2

Friday Night Double Feature: The Ladykillers and La poison

Criminal schemes take unlikely targets in these two pitch-dark comedies from the 1950s. In Alexander Mackendrick’s Ealing Studio farce The Ladykillers (1955), a team of thieves (led by Alec Guinness) descends on a boardinghouse run by an elderly widow, who becomes the victim of their misdeeds. In Sacha Guitry’s brisk, witty, and savage La poison (1951), a gardener (Michel Simon) and his wife, fed up after thirty years of marriage, find themselves plotting each other’s murder.

Tuesday, March 6

Tuesday’s Short + Feature: Art* and In...

By Lee Pfeiffer

Few would argue that George C. Scott was one of the greatest actors of stage and screen. His presence in even a mediocre movie elevated its status considerably and his work as the nutty general in "Dr. Strangelove" was described by one critic as "the comic performance of the decade". When Scott won his well-deserved Oscar for Best Actor in "Patton" (which he famously refused), he seemed to be on a roll. His next film, the darkly satirical comedy "The Hospital" predicted the absurdities of America's for-profit health care system in which the rich and the poor were taken care of, with everyone else falling in between. The film earned Scott another Best Actor Oscar nomination despite his snubbing of the Academy the previous year. From that point, however, Scott's choice of film roles was wildly eclectic. There were some gems and plenty of misfires that leads...

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,...

Brigitte Horney is not much remembered today, despite a long, distinguished career (films for Siodmak, Wegener, Fanck, the Nazi Baron Munchausen). Tarantino's name-checking of her during the pub games of Inglourious Basterds is probably her one star moment. Maybe the porn star name doesn't help: if Emil Jannings had been christened Emil Bigballs, he might not enjoy the status he currently has.Horney did not confine her activities to Germany: Secret Lives is a version of the Mata Hari history/legend produced in Britain with a French director, the versatile, some would say hacky, Edmond T. Gréville, whose most famous British creation was the 1960 camp classic Beat Girl (John Barry score; Gillian Hills; Christopher Lee; Oliver Reed; striptease and juvenile delinquency). But his '30s and '40s work, mostly in France, was generally slick and stylish.As a flagrant roman à clef treatment of the career of a celebrated seductress,...

The Ladykillers is Alexander Mackendrick’s classic Ealing comedy about an elderly lady who unwittingly rents her rooms out to a group of hardened criminals masquerading as a string quintet. In these opening minutes, the gang’s leader, ‘Professor’ Marcus (Alec Guinness) attempts to ingratiate himself with the tenacious Mrs Wilberforce (Katie Johnson). A digital restoration of The Ladykillers, which is 60 years old this year, is available now on DVD & Blu-ray

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(Alexander Mackendrick, 1955; StudioCanal, U, DVD/Blu-ray)

Ealing Studio’s two greatest directors, Robert Hamer and Alexander Mackendrick, both made near flawless black comedies on the state of the nation starring Alec Guinness and involving multiple murders, and there is little to choose between the former’s Kind Hearts and Coronets and the latter’s The Ladykillers, a special edition of which is being released this week to mark its 60th anniversary.

The heist (or caper) movie began with The Great Train Robbery in 1903, and enjoyed its classic decade in America and Europe between John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Basil Dearden’s The League of Gentlemen (1960). The greatest comic example is The Ladykillers.

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Stars: Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Susan Harrison, Martin Milner, Jeff Donnell, Sam Levene, Joe Frisco, Barbara Nichols, Emile Meyer, Edith Atwater | Written by Clifford Odets, Ernest Lehman | Directed by Alexander Mackendrick

When it comes to Arrow and the releases they output I’ll always be a fan of the Arrow Video line because of my love of everything cult and horror. A close second though has to be their Arrow Academy range, whereas the name suggest they give more of an education based on films from the past which deserve our attention just as much as any modern movie does. Sweet Smell of Success is the latest release and gives an insight into one of the more unique Hollywood movies not only of its times in the fifties, but still remains just as good today.

When J.J. Hensecker (Burt Lancaster) a powerful New York newspaper columnist decides to come...

News that two of Peter Sellers' early comedies have been found in a skip reminds us of the thrill of rediscovery. Which other 'movie orphans' out there could plug the gaps in film history?

In the mid-1950s, Peter Sellers was young and ambitious and still largely unseen. He wanted to break out of his radio ghetto and achieve big-screen success, so he played a bumbling crook in The Ladykillers and a bumbling everyman in a series of comedy shorts for an independent production company called Park Lane Films. The Ladykillers endured and is cherished to this day. The shorts came and then went and were quickly forgotten. To all intents and purposes, they never existed at all.

I'm fascinated by the idea of the films that get lost; that vast, teeming netherworld where the obscure and the unloved rub shoulders, in the dark, with the misplaced and the mythic.

Alexa here to wish a Happy Centennial to Alec Guinness. Born 100 years ago today to a single mother in London, Guinness' theatre career began in his 20s. It wasn't until after he served in the Royal Navy in World War II that his film career began in earnest, and soon he was playing eight roles in one movie (Kind Hearts and Coronets).  One of his six famously tempestuous collaborations with David Lean, The Bridge on the River Kwai, got him his Oscar for Best Actor, although he was nominated four other times (even for Best Screenplay) and he received an honorary Oscar in 1980. The geeks know him as Obi-Wan, but for me he will forever be Professor Marcus from The Ladykillers (a little obsession of mine).

Here are some vintage curios to celebrate his career in film...

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...

Alec Guinness: Before Obi-Wan Kenobi, there were the eight D’Ascoyne family members (photo: Alec Guiness, Dennis Price in ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’) (See previous post: “Alec Guinness Movies: Pre-Star Wars Career.”) TCM won’t be showing The Bridge on the River Kwai on Alec Guinness day, though obviously not because the cable network programmers believe that one four-hour David Lean epic per day should be enough. After all, prior to Lawrence of Arabia TCM will be presenting the three-and-a-half-hour-long Doctor Zhivago (1965), a great-looking but never-ending romantic drama in which Guinness — quite poorly — plays a Kgb official. He’s slightly less miscast as a mere Englishman — one much too young for the then 32-year-old actor — in Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), a movie that fully belongs to boy-loving (in a chaste, fatherly manner) fugitive Finlay Currie. And finally, make sure to watch Robert Hamer’s dark comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets...

The 2013 TCM Classic Film Festival (April 25-28) continues to add more stars and screenings to its slate, including Mel Brooks in conversation following "The Twelve Chairs," Mickey Rooney and Jonathan Winters appearing with epic nutty ensemble comedy "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World" and the already announced Max von Sydow tribute has added a new screening of Sydney Pollack's "Three Days of the Condor." Meanwhile, actress Coleen Gray will appear in person with Stanley Kubrick's "The Killing," and actor Theodore Bikel will be on hand for John Huston's "The African Queen." Susan Ray, widow to Nicholas Ray, will present a screening of the director's proto-"Bonnie and Clyde" noir "They Live By Night"; "Saturday Night Live" comedian Bill Hader will intro George Stevens' classic Western "Shane" and 1955's "The Ladykillers," by Alexander Mackendrick. More details on the new and ongoing additions to the fest are here.

Sir Alec Guinness's personal diaries and letters are to be made available to the public in 2014.

The British Library has obtained the personal archive of the late Oscar-winning actor, known for his roles in Star Wars and the Ealing comedies.

The archive will include over 100 volumes of diaries and letters charting his long career as an actor from the late 1930s up to his death in 2000.

It also chronicles his experience at war and the death of Sir Laurence Olivier.

An extract from his diary on July 12, 1989, the day after Sir Laurence's death, reads: "His 'I defy you, stars' in Romeo was memorable. And so was his Poor naked wretches etc in Lear. But his famous howl in Oedipus I thought just tiresome.

"He knew every trick of the trade and used every one, including, when he made his first entrance the lights coming up a few points and...

Nowhere to Go (1958) starts well, with an almost nine-minute prison break sequence that's highly unusual because it shows someone breaking into a prison. In this case it's Bernard Lee (M in James Bond) who's the one scaling the wall. Bold? Perhaps...but it certainly sets the tone for what is surely an eventful film...

George Nader plays suave conman Paul Gregory, who latches onto wealthy widow Harriet Johnson because she has a rare coin collection. Posing as a playwright stuck on 'the second act' he arranges the sale of her coins, insisting that he be paid on her behalf in cash for the £50,000. At this point, I could delve further into the plot but...well...I think you can guess the rest.

Jazz fans will enjoy the jazz score by British star Dizzy Reece. Non-jazz fans like me might find it grating at times. Do not watch this movie if you've got a headache.

(Alexander Mackendrick, 1951, Studiocanal, U)

Last September marked the centenary of the birth of Alexander Mackendrick (1912-93). Born in the States, raised in Scotland, he was, with Richard Hamer, one of the two truly great products of Ealing Studios. Their output was small (each made made five movies under Michael Balcon's aegis), but distinguished and distinctive and always digging beneath Ealing's cosy Little England ethos. Oscar-nominated for its screenplay (by Mackendrick, his brother-in-law the playwright Roger MacDougall and John Dighton, Hamer's collaborator on Kind Hearts and Coronets), The Man in the White Suit is arguably Mackendrick's most trenchant comedy.

It stars Alec Guinness as Sidney Stratton, a dreamily eccentric inventor who develops an artificial fibre that's indestructible and resistant to dirt. Apparently a boon to humanity, this fabric spreads alarm in a Lancashire mill town whose prosperity the invention threatens. Management and workers unite against the starry-eyed idealist Stratton, who...

Jimmy's End | Alexander Mackendrick | Princefest | Barbican Cinemas 2 & 3

Jimmy's End, Nationwide

Alan Moore has been notoriously dismissive about movie adaptations of his comic-book masterpieces, often with good reason. V For Vendetta, Watchmen, From Hell, The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: none of them have approached the power of their source material. So now Moore's gone and had a go himself. The prelude, Act Of Faith, and the half-hour Jimmy's End, are the first in what's promised to be a series of films, directed by his regular collaborator Mitch Jenkins and set in the same dreamy, non-linear world. They've generously put it online so you can try and work it out for yourself.

Alexander Mackendrick, Edinburgh

Born in the Us and raised in Scotland, Mackendrick flitted between both during his stilted but eventful career, and the best of his work combines the two national sensibilities. He's best known for his three first-class Ealing comedies: Whisky Galore!

Sidney Stratton (Alec Guinness) bounces from job to job at a series of textile factories, where he tries to develop a new synthetic fabric that will never wear out or stain. He believes it will change the world for the better, but when he finally succeeds he finds the factory owners against him because they will no longer need to produce or sell clothes and the work force up in arms because they will become redundant, once everyone has bought the last set of clothes they will ever need.

*****

Ealing comedies are a very particular species of film. On the one hand they have a seemingly cosy, inoffensive familiarity about them – very British, very undemanding. Yet virtually to a film we find on closer inspection that they have real bite to them. The Lavender Hill Mob, Passport to Pimlico, The Ladykillers and Kind Hearts & Coronets – all feature dark, subversive elements and this film,...

We love crime movies. We may go on and on about Scorsese’s ability to incorporate Italian neo-realism techniques into Mean Streets (1973), the place of John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) in the canon of postwar noir, The Godfather (1972) as a socio-cultural commentary on the distortion of the ideals of the American dream blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda…but that ain’t it.

We love crime movies because we love watching a guy who doesn’t have to behave, who doesn’t have to – nor care to – put a choker on his id and can let his darkest, most visceral impulses run wild. Some smart-mouth gopher tells hood Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci), “Go fuck yourself,” in Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), and does Tommy roll with it? Does he spit back, “Fuck me? Nah, fuck you!” Does he go home and tell his mother?

Nope.

He pulls a .45 cannon out from...

Hollywood has lost another legend in the business as we are truly saddened to hear of the death of the great Herbert Lom. Read on to reflect upon the man's legacy and celebrate his long and storied career!

According to The Huffington Post Lom, fondly remembered for his roles in the Pink Panther films during his half-century of film appearances, has died at the age of 95. He died peacefully in his sleep this morning, his family said.

The Czech-born, London-based star appeared in more than 100 films including classics such as Spartacus, El Cid, The Ladykillers, and the horror classics The Phantom of the Opera, Mark of the Devil, Asylum, Murders in the Rue Morgue, and The Dead Zone.

We here at Dread Central would like to take this time to offer our sincerest of condolences to Lom's friends, family and constituents. Thanks for the class you brought to every project you were involved with,...

Czech-born actor Herbert Lom has passed away in London at the age of 95 reports The New York Times.

Over five decades he appeared in more than 100 movies and television shows playing suave leading men, interesting character parts and villains alike.

He'll most be remembered for his role as Chief Inspector Dreyfus, Inspector Clouseau's twitchy and long-suffering superior, in the "Pink Panther" film series. First appearing in "A Shot in the Dark", the character is driven insane on more than one occasion by Clouseau's bungling.

The varied roles in his career included a gangster in the original "The Ladykillers", a pirate in "Spartacus", a psychiatrist in "The Seventh Veil", a harbor master in "Fire Down Below", a neurologist in Cronenberg's "The Dead Zone", a doctor in 1979's "The Lady Vanishes", a German colonel in the 1985 take on "King Solomon’s Mines", a Muslim leader in "El Cid", and a witch...

The great character actor Herbert Lom has died at age 95. He was born in Czechoslovakia and emigrated to England just before the outbreak of WWII. (His beloved girlfriend was not allowed to stay in England and was deported back to Europe, where she ultimately died in a Nazi death camp.) With his imposing looks, Lom quickly became a mainstay in British films, often playing the heavy. A rare exception was his performance in the 1955 comedy classic The Ladykillers. Lom often appeared in B movies, as well as epic films such as Spartacus and El Cid. His poignant performance in the 1962 Hammer Films remake of Phantom of the Opera was largely overlooked at the time of the movie's release, but is now considered to be among his finest achievements. Lom is best known as Inspector Clouseau's long-suffering superior Dryefus in the Blake Edwards/Peter Sellers Pink Panther movies that greatly increased his name recognition.

We look back at the work of Herbert Lom, the much-loved Czech-born actor who has died aged 95. His career took in everything from low-budget noir to the Pink Panther movies

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A refugee from the Nazis at the age of 22, Lom arrived in London in 1939 and immediately set about continuing the acting career he'd started in his home city of Prague. His first role was a small but eyecatching one: Napoleon, in the Fox-produced biopic The Young Mr Pitt, with Robert Donat as the wily but principled British prime minister – starts at 6:30. (He would play Boney again in 1956, in the Audrey Hepburn War and Peace.)

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Lom's unmistakeable charisma quickly won him admirers: though lead roles would be few and far between later on, he quickly scored one as the mysterious hypnotist in Brit thriller The Dark Tower, where he exerts his fateful,...

Sad news in Tinseltown. Actor Herbert Lom, best known for playing Clarles Dreyfus, the exasperated police commissioner and boss of Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films, died Thursday at age 95, per the BBC. His family said he passed away peacefully in his sleep. Throughout his career, the Czech-born thespian appeared in more than 100 films, portraying Napoleon in 1942's A Young Mr. Pitt and again in 1956's War and Peace. He also notably starred in The Seventh Veil with James Mason in 1945, and alongside Alec Guinness and a pre-Clouseau Sellers in the 1955 comedy The Ladykillers. His most recent role was that of a professor in the 2004 TV movie Marple: The  Murder at...

Actor best known for playing chief inspector Dreyfus in the Pink Panther movies has died aged 95

Herbert Lom, the Czech-born character actor best known for his roles in The Ladykillers and the Pink Panther franchise, has died at the age of 95. In a career spanning 60 years, he specialised in dark, dangerous, at times positively demented turns in a number of British film classics. "To British eyes, all foreigners are sinister," he once remarked.

Lom was born Herbert Karel Angelo Kuchacevic ze Schluderpacheru, in Prague, the son of a count, and fled to London ahead of the 1939 Nazi occupation. He played Napoleon Bonaparte in the 1942 epic The Young Mr Pitt and starred as the King of Siam in the original stage production of The King and I. Other notable screen credits include the pirate captain in Spartacus, the lordly general in El Cid, an underworld kingpin in Night and the City,...

Herbert Lom, the Czech-born actor best know for his role as Chief Inspector Dreyfus in the Pink Panther films, has died aged 95, it has been reported. As Inspector Clouseau’s long-suffering superior, Dreyfus gradually cracked under the stress, with a nervous twitch developing into full-blown homicidal insanity over the course of the film series. On top of that long-running comedy role, Lom appearing in a diverse body of film roles. Credits include the 1955 Ealing classic The Ladykillers, historical epic El Cid, and the original...

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Herbert Lom, the Czech-born actor best known as Inspector Clouseau’s long-suffering boss in the Pink Panther movies, died Thursday, his son said. He was 95. Alec Lom said his father died peacefully in his sleep.

Herbert Lom had a handsomely lugubrious look that was suited to comedy, horror and everything in between. It served him well over a six-decade career in which roles ranged from Napoleon Bonaparte — whom he played twice — to the Phantom of the Opera.

The London-based star appeared in more than 100 films, including Spartacus and El Cid, and acted alongside film greats including Charlton Heston and Kirk Douglas.

London, Sep 27: Veteran actor Herbert Lom, known for his roles in the comedy film series "Pink Panther", has died in his sleep Thursday morning, his family said. He was 95.

The actor appeared in more than 100 films, including classics such as "Spartacus", "El Cid" and "The Ladykillers".

During his career, Herbert Lom played many roles including Napoleon Bonaparte in two films, but his most famous role was of Charles Dreyfus in the "Pink Panther" films.

"Like.

London — Herbert Lom, the Czech-born actor best known as Inspector Clouseau's long-suffering boss in the "Pink Panther" movies, died Thursday, his son said. He was 95.

Alec Lom said his father died peacefully in his sleep.

Herbert Lom had a handsomely lugubrious look that was suited to comedy, horror and everything in between. It served him well over a six-decade career in which roles ranged from Napoleon Bonaparte – whom he played twice – to the Phantom of the Opera.

The London-based star appeared in more than 100 films, including "Spartacus" and "El Cid," and acted alongside film greats including Charlton Heston and Kirk Douglas.

But Lom was most famous for playing Charles Dreyfus, boss to Peter Sellers' befuddled Clouseau in the popular "Pink Panther" series, from "A Shot in the Dark" in 1964 to "Son of the Pink Panther" in 1993.

"It was a delight to him later in his career to be...

Though best known for playing Charles Dreyfus in the Pink Panther films, the Herbert Lom Phantom Of The Opera for Hammer Studios in 1962 is the version I grew up and the actor had a ton of cult and horror credits including as Captain Nemo in Mysterious Island (1961) and as Van Helsing in Jess Franco’s Count Dracula (1970). Born Herbert Charles Angelo Kuchacevich Schluderpacheru in Prague in 1917, he began performing on stage and screen in Czechoslovakia, before leaving for England at the start of World War II. He made his film debut in 1937 and entertained us all throughout eight decades of sterling work, appearing in over 100 films.

From The BBC News:

Actor Herbert Lom, best known for playing Charles Dreyfus in the Pink Panther films, has died aged 95. The Czech-born, London-based actor starred opposite Peter Sellers in several films as Inspector Clouseau’s irritable boss. Lom appeared in more than...

Veteran actor Herbert Lom, fondly remembered for his roles in the Pink Panther films during his half-century of film appearances, has died at the age of 95.

The Czech-born, London-based star appeared in more than 100 films including classics such as Spartacus, El Cid and The Ladykillers.

He died peacefully in his sleep this morning, his family said.

During his career, Lom portrayed Napoleon Bonaparte on two occasions, one of which was the screen adaptation of Tolstoy's

War And Peace.

But his most famous role was as fed-up and irritable Charles Dreyfus, the boss of Peter Sellers' bumbling character Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films.

He first appeared as the police chief in 1964's A Shot In The Dark and, as the films went on, became increasingly mentally unstable as a result of Clouseau's incompetence.

Herbert Lom, best known as put-upon police chief Charles Dreyfus in the Pink Panther franchise, has died. The Czech-born actor was 95. The domiciled Londoner cut his teeth playing villains, with turns in classics like Jules Dassin's Night And The City and as The Ladykillers' homicidal European, Louis Harvey, alongside Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers. He then shifted gears with turns in historical epics Spartacus (1960) and El Cid (1961).Lom, who joined the European diaspora when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, was cast twice as a different kind of European dictator. He played Napoleon in 1942's The Young Mr. Pitt and again in the 1956 adaptation of War And Peace. The best-known and most beloved role of his 60-year acting career, though, came later in a franchise that reunited him with Sellers to often hilarious effect. Tormented chief Dreyfus debuted in 1964's A Shot In The Dark, with Lom's depiction of...

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Although Ealing Studios did not exclusively make comedies – actually, less than ten percent of their output was comic – it is the run of comedies from the late ’40s into the ’50s that the studio is best remembered for, and it’s not difficult to see why. Under the leadership of Michael Balcon, the legendary British producer who also founded Gainsborough Pictures, they produced incredibly sharp, witty and likeable comedies ranging from the whimsy of a film like Passport to Pimlico to the razor-sharp black comedy of Kind Hearts and Coronets, also released in 1949.

The movies were quintessentially British, and often got funnier as they got darker precisely because the characters had to uphold good British virtues while getting away with political upheaval (Passport to Pimlico), theft (The Lavender Hill Mob, one of their best) or murder (Kind Hearts and Coronets). This paradox is prevalent in Passport to Pimlico,...

What with all the television shows, film retrospectives and books, it almost as if Charles Dickens has come back to life

1812 will be much in evidence this year in celebration of Charles Dickens's birth. The BFI is putting on a Dickens-on-screen retrospective. There have been BBC adaptations of Great Expectations and Edwin Drood. And later in the year Claire Tomalin's blockbuster biography, will be out in paperback. In the dreary winter months of an ongoing recession, what better refuge than among Dickens's bone-familiar archetypes.

Everyone has been made to watch David Lean's Great Expectations at least once, but there are lesser known gems in the BFI line-up. The 1922 silent version of Oliver Twist; George Cukor's 1935 David Copperfield, with Wc Fields as Mr Micawber; and Alastair Sim, in what look like the teeth worn by Alec Guinness four years later in The Ladykillers, played Scrooge in 1951. Every...

Buster Keaton, Bugsy Malone and the Wizard of Oz are captivating children at film clubs across the UK

Black and white images flicker across absorbed young faces as timeless stories unfold. To the delight of the education charity Filmclub, classic films are captivating children as young as seven.

In the past year, a quarter of all the films watched by its members have been pre-1979 movies and some, such as The Electric Edwardians (1900), date right back to the birth of cinema.

Launched in 2008 by film director Beeban Kidron and educationist Lindsay Mackie, Filmclub (@filmclub) helps schools set up film clubs and supplies a huge range of thoughtfully curated films.

Libby Serdiuk, aged 10, was "pleasantly surprised by The General (1926):

"I had never watched a film without sound or colour. Before I knew it my eyes were glued to the screen! The stunts were exhilarating to watch, Buster Keaton was mind blowing,...

When given the opportunity to interview John Landis, I had to take it. After all, this is a man whose films I’ve grown up on (The Blues Brothers may very well be my most-watched movie of all time), so the idea of talking to him was pretty thrilling. Thankfully, it turns out that he’s a great conversationalist.

While we started off with his latest project, Burke and Hare, the discussion soon veered toward the creative state of Hollywood, as well as what he has planned next. There are many other places we could have gone, but I think that the ensuing talk was both informative and enlightening.

Without further ado:

How did this material get into your hands?

John Landis: I was visiting my friend, Gurinder Chadha, who is an English director. Do you know Gurinder?

I don’t know if I do.

You know a movie called Bend It Like Beckham?...

(Alexander Mackendrick, 1965, PG, Eureka!)

Alexander Mackendrick made several of Ealing Studios' finest films (Whisky Galore, The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers among them), but only two of his post-Ealing pictures approach greatness. One is the devastating attack on demagogic journalism, Sweet Smell of Success (1957), the other his neglected version of Richard Hughes's 1929 novel, A High Wind in Jamaica, a book that anticipated Lord of the Flies.

Superficially an exciting nautical adventure yarn, the subtle, psychological fable centres on a party of Victorian children, captured by Caribbean pirates on their way to England, who send their accidental captors to the gallows. Its real theme is a continuing preoccupation of Mackendrick's, the idea of innocence as a destructive force rather than a simple virtue, and the children come over as merciless, unaccountable subversives. As the chief pirates, Anthony Quinn and James Coburn head an excellent cast.

Douglas Slocombe...

Throughout the classic comedies produced by Ealing Studios in the ’40s and ’50s run both a lightness of touch and a subtly unsentimental look at human character. Their classics all involve crime and greed: for money and the freedom that comes with it in The Ladykillers and The Lavender Hill Mob, for money and social standing in Kinds Hearts and Coronets. But the (amateur) criminals in the latter two are gentlemen; very English and very charming. In The Ladykillers, the gentility is merely a disguise for professional criminals. Often, the apparent civility of polite society helps their characters veil their repressed, anarchic sides.

The first of Ealing’s run of classic comedies – which also includes The Man in the White Suit and Passport to Pimlico – was Whisky Galore!, the first movie directed by Boston-born Scotsman Alexander Mackendrick. It was produced by Ealing’s legendary Michael Balcon and co-edited by Charles Crichton,...

Okay, so Ealing films are not exactly new news - unless you've been frozen in time for 60 years, Captain America style - but it's not everyday that posters as lovely as these cross Empire's desk and we couldn't resist the urge to share them with you. The new posters - three quads and a dazzling one-sheet for Ealing's wartime propaganda thriller Went The Day Well? - are the handiwork of London-based graphic designer Sam Ashby.The posters have been commissioned for the digitally restored re-releases of the four Ealing classics. If you haven't seen them on the big screen - and frankly, most of us haven't - now's the chance. Kind Hearts And Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob and Whisky Galore! round out the releases.No sign yet of The Ladykillers or The Man In The White Suite but you'd be pretty churlish to complain about a revival that involves...

Alec Guinness is the timid bank clerk in one of the classic Ealing comedies celebrating its 60th birthday with a cinema rerelease

A warm welcome back, after 60 years, to this Ealing gem written by Teb Clarke and directed by Charles Crichton. Alec Guinness gives a great performance as Henry Holland, the mousy, bespectacled bank clerk – a creation on which Hg Wells and Dickens might have collaborated – in bomb-damaged postwar London. His job is to accompany gold bullion in the special van with armed security guards and, with the help of his friend Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway) figures out a way to pinch the gold and smuggle it out of the country into Paris smelted down into bogus lead paperweights in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. It's tremendously good fun, though lighter in tone than Ealing's two scabrous masterpieces Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers, and not quite matching their...

As The Lavender Hill Mob enjoys a 60th-anniversary re-release, let's have a butcher's at cockney characters in the movies

Like the perfect eccentric elderly relative you always wanted as a child (rather than your actual nan), it's always a pleasure to welcome back The Lavender Hill Mob. Ealing Studios' deathless heist caper is about to enjoy a 60th-anniversary re-release and will, as always, represent a slice of pure comic wonderment. But it's also a landmark in the history of the big-screen cockney, bringing with it a distinctive waft of fag ash and dog tracks.

Not that it makes a song and dance about it. That's sort of the point. If the first part of the film's title is a sleight of hand (Battersea's grubby central thoroughfare never actually appearing on camera), the second is a gag in itself – the very idea of Alec Guinness's exquisitely straitlaced Henry Holland...

It's because Hollywood has put horses out to pasture, and the days of the great equine role seem to have passed. Joe Queenan mourns the disappearance of Hollywood's mane players

At a certain age, actors – both men and women– start to complain that they are no longer offered the roles they once were, that the scripts they are sent by their agents are not equal to their talents. But isn't that even more true of horses? Horses used to be prominent figures in films, rearing their glorious heads and shaking their magnificent manes in everything from Fort Apache to Ben-Hur, not to mention idolatrously horse-centred motion pictures such as The Man from Snowy River and National Velvet. But the arrival of a new movie such as Secretariat drives home the point that horses no longer occupy the position of power in Hollywood that they once did, that a movie featuring...

Congratulations to Jamie Ellis, Christine Russell and Tim Newsome - a set is on its way to each you!

As the hi-def assault gathers momentum, Optimum Home Entertainment are releasing some bona fide classics on Blu-ray via The Studio Canal Collection. Revisiting Studio Canal's back catalogue, the 15th Feb sees a wonderfully eclectic trio released exclusively on Blu-ray for the first time. What's more, Optimum have 3 sets to give away for lucky Twitch readers in the UK.

 

First up is The Go-Between, based on LP Hartley's novel of the same name, starring Julie Christie, Edward Fox and Alan Bates in a magnificently English period drama, of lusty Victorians and adolescent confusion. This was probably the first film that gave me faith in movies being able to interpret novels successfully, having read the book at school and subsequently dug out the film. An in-her-prime Christie probably helped too...

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