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:...
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:...
- 3/5/2022
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
The L-Shaped Room
Blu ray
Twilight Time
1962 / 1:85 / 126 Min. / Street Date December 19, 2017
Starring Leslie Caron, Tom Bell, Brock Peters
Cinematography by Douglas Slocombe
Written by Bryan Forbes
Music by Brahms, John Barry
Edited by Anthony Harvey
Produced by Richard Attenborough
Directed by Bryan Forbes
The winter of 1962 found British films at their most grandiose and self-effacing. Opening at the Odeon was Lawrence of Arabia, using every inch of that cavernous theater’s wide screen. Five minutes up the road Dr. No had just premiered in the smaller but no less lofty London Pavilion.
On the other side of the tracks art houses were bringing starry-eyed Brits back to earth with austere fare like John Schlesinger’s A Kind of Loving and Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.
Those sober-minded dramas, shot in low key black and white with ramshackle flats and grey skies as their backdrops,...
Blu ray
Twilight Time
1962 / 1:85 / 126 Min. / Street Date December 19, 2017
Starring Leslie Caron, Tom Bell, Brock Peters
Cinematography by Douglas Slocombe
Written by Bryan Forbes
Music by Brahms, John Barry
Edited by Anthony Harvey
Produced by Richard Attenborough
Directed by Bryan Forbes
The winter of 1962 found British films at their most grandiose and self-effacing. Opening at the Odeon was Lawrence of Arabia, using every inch of that cavernous theater’s wide screen. Five minutes up the road Dr. No had just premiered in the smaller but no less lofty London Pavilion.
On the other side of the tracks art houses were bringing starry-eyed Brits back to earth with austere fare like John Schlesinger’s A Kind of Loving and Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.
Those sober-minded dramas, shot in low key black and white with ramshackle flats and grey skies as their backdrops,...
- 2/6/2018
- by Charlie Largent
- Trailers from Hell
Stars: Leslie Caron, Anthony Booth, Avis Bunnage, Patricia Phoenix, Verity Edmett, Tom Bell, Cicely Courtneidge, Emlyn Williams, Jennifer White, Brock Peters, Gerry Duggan, Mark Eden | Written and Directed by Bryan Forbes
When watching a British film from the sixties, the realistic discussion of such things as growing up as a single parent, or considering abortion wasn’t something you’d expect to see in a film set in London. The L-Shaped Room though is one of the few that took a look at society, family, and love and didn’t hide from the awkward truths.
Jane Fosset (Leslie Caron) is an unmarried and pregnant French woman who finds a small seedy London boarding house with a room available. Struggling with the idea of having an abortion, at first the last thing she needs is to make friends with the misfits who live there. Slowly getting to know them though she soon becomes one of them,...
When watching a British film from the sixties, the realistic discussion of such things as growing up as a single parent, or considering abortion wasn’t something you’d expect to see in a film set in London. The L-Shaped Room though is one of the few that took a look at society, family, and love and didn’t hide from the awkward truths.
Jane Fosset (Leslie Caron) is an unmarried and pregnant French woman who finds a small seedy London boarding house with a room available. Struggling with the idea of having an abortion, at first the last thing she needs is to make friends with the misfits who live there. Slowly getting to know them though she soon becomes one of them,...
- 12/21/2017
- by Paul Metcalf
- Nerdly
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...
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...
- 6/20/2012
- by Michael Coveney
- The Guardian - Film News
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