News

Courtesy of BFI

by James Cameron-wilson

Between the years 1931 and 1937, Michael Powell directed twenty-three films: twenty-three films in six years. Sadly, ten of those works are no longer with us due to the fact that they were printed on the highly volatile nitrate film stock, which was not only extremely difficult and expensive to store, but was highly flammable. Michael Powell, who went on to direct such classics as The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, was still in his twenties when he started directing but was known for his sense of economy and swiftness of turning a project around. Thanks to a government initiative set up to boost British cinema by establishing a quota system – so that a proportion of British films had to be shown in British cinemas alongside the big-budget Hollywood releases – the ‘quota quickie’ was born.

All those British crime films once deemed undesirable for the National Image are beginning to get the attention they deserve. This story of a single day in a working class section of London has plenty of criminal activity but blends it in with the everyday crimes of desperation and boredom. The Sandigate girls are flirting with trouble but Googie Withers’ Rose Sandigate has gone much further: she’s hiding an escaped fugitive who was once her lover in the vain hope of recapturing her lost youth. Director Robert Hamer examines a dozen distinctive characters on the edge of respectability, in one of the most original ‘Brit noirs’ we’ve seen to date.

It Always Rains on Sunday

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1947 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 92 min. / Street Date November 5, 2019 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Googie Withers, John McCallum, Jack Warner, Edward Chapman, Susan Shaw, Patricia Plunkett, Nigel Stock, David Lines, Sydney Tafler,...

The Favourite Photo: Courtesy of New York Film Festival The Favourite, 9pm, Film4, Monday, November 7

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has never been one to play a story straight, and he brings his surreal sensibilities to this consideration of the 18th Century court of Queen Anne (played with just the right quantity of black humour and sentiment by Olivia Colman). Here Duchess of Marlborough Sarah (Rachel Weisz) and her cousin Abigail (Emma Stone) vie to be top dog in the queen's affections. Acidic and expletive-laced this is not your grandma's costume drama and all the better for it as the actresses spark off one another like flint on, if you'll pardon the pun, stone. Praise is also due to cinematographer Robbie Ryan whose often distorted framing only adds to the film's off-kilter feel. Read what the director and cast said about the film.

Pink String And Sealing Wax, Talking Pictures TV,...

In film history, the anthology genre is the most challenging. Episodic films often have several directors and screenwriters which gives them an inconsistent tone and quality. But the genre’s pitfalls haven’t stopped such filmmakers including Akira Kurosawa (“Dreams”), the Coens (“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”), Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez (“Sin City”); Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese (“New York Stories”); and Joe Dante, John Landis, George Miller and Steven Spielberg (“Twilight Zone: The Movie”).

Wes Anderson joined them with his latest film “The French Dispatch,” which received a nine-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival. The comedy brings to life three stories from an American magazine published in a fictional French city and features his stock company of actors including Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody and Owen Wilson.

If you are a fan of the genre, here are the best anthology movies that...

Dead of Night

Blu ray

Kino Lorber

1945 / 1.33 : 1 / 102 Min.

Starring Mervyn Johns, Michael Redgrave, Googie Withers

Cinematography by Douglas Slocombe

Directed by Basil Dearden, Alberto Cavalcant, Charles Chrichton, Robert Hamer

Anthology films have been a reliable Hollywood staple since D.W. Griffith’s time-traveling Intolerance and Paramount’s depression-era dramedy If I Had a Million. The short story format has proved especially popular with horror movie fans who prefer their thrills lean, mean and straight to the point.

That humble subgenre contains multitudes – from Masaki Kobayashi‘s elegant Kwaidan to the comic book stylings of Freddie Francis’s Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors to the state of the art shocker Nightmare Cinema – but the great-granddaddy of them all is surely the 1945 classic from Britain’s Ealing Studios – Dead of Night.

Mervyn Johns, the eternal Everyman, plays Walter Craig, a restoration expert whose newest project – a provincial manor called “Pilgrim’s...

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger officially become ‘The Archers’ for this sterling morale-propaganda picture lauding the help of the valiant Dutch resistance. It’s a joyful show of spirit, terrific casting (with a couple of surprises) and first-class English filmmaking.

One of Our Aircraft is Missing

Blu-ray

Olive Films

1942 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy /103 82 min. / Street Date November 15, 2016 / available through the Olive Films website / 29.98

Starring Godfrey Tearle, Eric Portman, Hugh Williams, Bernard Miles, Hugh Burden, Emrys Jones, Pamela Brown, Joyce Redman, Googie Withers, Hay Petrie, Arnold Marlé, Robert Helpmann, Peter Ustinov, Roland Culver, Robert Beatty, Michael Powell.

Cinematography Ronald Neame

Film Editor David Lean

Camera Crew Robert Krasker, Guy Green

Written by Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

Produced by The Archers

Directed by Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

There are still a few more key Powell-Pressburger ‘Archer’ films waiting for a quality disc release, Contraband and Gone to Earth for just two.

Constance Cummings: Stage and film actress ca. early 1940s. Constance Cummings on stage: From Sacha Guitry to Clifford Odets (See previous post: “Constance Cummings: Flawless 'Blithe Spirit,' Supporter of Political Refugees.”) In the post-World War II years, Constance Cummings' stage reputation continued to grow on the English stage, in plays as diverse as: Stephen Powys (pseudonym for P.G. Wodehouse) and Guy Bolton's English-language adaptation of Sacha Guitry's Don't Listen, Ladies! (1948), with Cummings as one of shop clerk Denholm Elliott's mistresses (the other one was Betty Marsden). “Miss Cummings and Miss Marsden act as fetchingly as they look,” commented The Spectator. Rodney Ackland's Before the Party (1949), delivering “a superb performance of controlled hysteria” according to theater director and Michael Redgrave biographer Alan Strachan, writing for The Independent at the time of Cummings' death. Clifford Odets' Winter Journey / The Country Girl (1952), as...

Night and the City

Written by Jo Eisinger

Directed by Jules Dassin

UK, 1950

Harry Fabian is probably the best at what he does, even if he is never very successful. Richard Widmark’s character in Night and the City, out now on a gorgeous new Criterion Collection Blu-ray, is a low-level con who works wherever he can, however he can, doing whatever he can to make a buck. He enters Jules Dassin’s 1950 film noir classic on the run; he will always be on the run: always hustling, always running. Sincere though his half-baked plans may be, he is perpetually—pathetically—down on his luck. He has the ambition, there’s no doubt about that, and as he shrewdly stumbles past one obstacle after another, it becomes almost humorous in the way he manages to charm his way through life, always just by the skin of his teeth. He cooks...

Night and the City

Written by Joe Eisinger

Directed by Jules Dassin

United Kingdom, 1950

In the heart of the London night Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) runs wild in the streets and alleyways of this most famous of English cities. Harry, a con artist, owes someone a hefty sum and his only recourse is to plead his lover Mary Bristol (Gene Tierney) to lend him some pounds to call off the hounds. Such is the life the protagonist has led for some years now, much to Mary’s consternation and chagrin. What once was a happy companionship has turned more more strenuous. A get rich scheme here, another there but always the same result: Harry gets nowhere fast. His latest attempt to make it big arrives in form of an aging wrestler, Gregorius the Great (Stanislaus Zbyszko) whom he encounters by happenstance at a wrestling event a few nights later. The...

This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending the TCM Festival in Hollywood. I had a full weekend and got to enjoy the true movie experience---great movies projected on big screens with enthusiastic and appreciative audiences. Between films we'd emerge onto Hollywood Boulevard with its own movie being created live and in the moment. As comedian Dana Gould said in his introduction to Freaks "the Boulevard was the only place you are likely to stand next to Cher at the urinal in the men's room. Take a look at the schedule, Here

Among the celebrities I saw on the red carpet and clicked photos of were Maureen O'Hara (still gorgeous), Kim Novak, Shirley Jones and Margaret O'Brien---and in the background were Chaplins, Marilyns, Elvis, Michael Jackson and multiple copies of Spiderman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Iron Man, Star Wars characters, Transformers, Pirates (I heard one woman excitedly say, "Oh my god...it's Johnny Depp."), Mickey and Minnies and Elmo. In the parking lot elevator one night I stood next to a tall African American male, his Elmo head ticked under his arm next to his furry red body. I asked if he had a long and hot day. He told me that he comes around 4pm when it isn't so warm and works until midnight. "Do you do ok?"

"An average weekend brings in $700-800 and it is fun." I asked him what he does the rest of the week and he told me he created movie money props for films and sells copies on ebay.

I saw 17 films and three special events. What a pleasure to see classics projected on the big screen (a mix of 35mm and Dcp) to packed houses of appreciative fans. Once again I was impressed with the diversity of the audiences. Couples, young people and people of color far out-numbered the stereotype of middle aged white film geek guys. And they knew their movies.

I saw a few classics I had never seen --- Mary Poppins (when it came out in 1964 a left-leaning high school kid would not be caught dead seeing that) and The Best Years of Our Lives (I just never saw it--no excuses). Both were great for different reasons.

There were rare discoveries such as the pre-code Hat Check Girl (racy Ginger Rogers) and the powerful and all but forgotten The Stranger's Return directed by King Vidor withLionel Barrymore and Miriam Hopkins (when will someone do a major tribute?)

But the true revelation was the 1944 British comedy of mannersOn Approval . This was a joy of witty banter, great acting and certainly one of the most bizarre finales I have ever experienced with stuffed animal heads coming to life among other visions you have never seen. The first show sold out so an extra screening was scheduled and it too was full. Lucky or me I got in after being turned away from the first one. The film was restored by that hero of lost cinema, David Shepard.

I just got an email from Jessica Rosner that she will have a 35mm print available. There is also a BluRay and if there is enough demand the owners might consider making a Dcp.

She wrote:

“It is about two couples in Victorian England ( and Scotland) who try a shocking experiment in living together to see if they are "compatible" before marriage. The magnificent foursome is led by Clive Brook who also directed and adapted the famous play upon which it is based. The extraordinary Beatrice Lillie co-stars in one of her very few film appearances and she is aided by the lovely if oddly named Googie Withers and the always fine Roland Culver.

This Brand New print is from a negative made from a nitrate fine grain at the BFI. It is not flawless but it looks excellent.

Below is a link to the write up on the fest site about On Approval and audience reaction to it. I urge you to read it as it really captures the film much better than my write up.

http://filmfestival.tcm.com/on-approval-sparkles-with-wit/

This second link is for local news station festival write up highlighting On Approval as fest fave

(scroll down till you see the still) http://www.kpbs.org/news/2014/apr/14/rants-and-raves-tcm-film-festival/

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Thanks Jessica. After the screening I wanted to know how the film could be shown in cinemas and you have answered my question.

And here are some good articles about the movie.

http://www.examiner.com/article/clive-brook-adapts-directs-and-stars-on-approval-1944

http://www.examiner.com/article/classic-films-focus-on-approval-1944

Anthony Slide writes: http://books.google.com/books?id=Rf5CCA7_Lv4C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false...

Wendy Hughes, who has died in Sydney aged 61, will be remembered by her peers as one of the finest actors of her generation.

Hughes won the AFI award for best actress for Careful, He Might Hear You in 1983 and was nominated on six other occasions, for Newsfront, My Brilliant Career, Lonely Hearts, My First Wife, Echoes of Paradise and Boundaries of the Heart.

.She was a brilliant actress who set the standard and was pioneering for her era,. filmmaker Philippe Mora, who was a close friend in the 1980s and early 1990s, told If.

.In my opinion without Wendy there would have been no Judy Davis, no Nicole Kidman and no Cate Blanchett. If timing had been different she would have been a major international star. As it is she leaves a legacy of perfect performances as one of Australia's greatest actresses..

Mora wanted to cast Hughes as the female...

Actor known for his Shakespearean roles, but who also appeared on TV and in films including Winstanley and Orlando

Jerome Willis, who has died at the age of 85, was an actor who might have described himself, without bitterness, as an "attendant lord". He was a natural Shakespearean, in possession of a strong physique and the ability to speak verse with enviable confidence. In a distinguished career spanning almost 60 years, he brought to every part he undertook a perceptive intelligence that illuminated even the smallest cameo. He also became a familiar face on television from 1974 to 1978 as Charles Radley, the deputy governor of Stone Park prison in Within These Walls, with Googie Withers as his boss.

Jerome began his career as a disc jockey, newsreader and actor by turns, posted to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1946 for his national service in the Raf and serving in communications for the Ceylonese station Radio Seac.

Jean Kent: British film star and ‘Last of the Gainsborough Girls’ dead at 92 (photo: actress Jean Kent in ‘Madonna of the Seven Moons’) News outlets and tabloids — little difference these days — have been milking every little drop from the unexpected and violent death of The Fast and the Furious franchise actor Paul Walker, and his friend and business partner Roger Rodas this past Saturday, November 30, 2013. Unfortunately — and unsurprisingly — apart from a handful of British publications, the death of another film performer on that same day went mostly underreported. If you’re not "in" at this very moment, you may as well have never existed. Jean Kent, best known for her roles as scheming villainesses in British films of the 1940s and Gainsborough Pictures’ last surviving top star, died on November 30 at West Suffolk Hospital in Bury St Edmunds, England. The previous day, she had suffered a fall at her...

The 2013 TCM Classic Film Festival continues to expand, with newly added appearances by legendary stars at screenings of some of their most memorable films, including Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Mickey Rooney, Jonathan Winters, Marvin Kaplan, Barrie Chase, Polly Bergen,Coleen Gray, Theodore Bikel and Norman Lloyd, as well as producer Stanley Rubin, Clara Bow biographer David Stenn, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) film collections manager Katie Trainor and director Nicholas Ray’s widow, Susan Ray. In addition, TCM’s Essentials Jr. host and Saturday Night Live star Bill Hader will present screenings of Shane (1953) and The Ladykillers(1955).

And The Film Forum’s Bruce Goldstein will present a special screening of Frank Capra’s The Donovan Affair (1929), complete with live voice actors and sound effects to replace the film’s long-lost soundtrack.Mel Brooks is slated to talk about his comedy The Twelve Chairs (1970). Carl Reiner, Mickey Rooney, Jonathan Winters, Marvin Kaplan...

The 66th annual British Academy Film Awards are here! And there was much rejoicing.

We’re here at the Royal Opera House in London to bring you all the up to the minute news on who won, who looked really annoyed when they lost, and who knows what else will be in store for us tonight?

Lord Stephen of Fry is leading proceedings once again and I’ll be updating you fine people with the winners as they are announced.

The full list of awards and nominees can be found here, and as the awards are announced I’ll update the liveblog below with the nominees and the winners.

The ceremony is due to start at around 7pm and if you’re hungry for all the red carpeting then head over here to see the arrivals from around 5pm.

Updates will be added at the top…But not anymore as we’ve finished.

After World War Two, just as the Us was getting hot under the collar about imaginary left-wing plots to seduce the nation via hidden messages in the movies, by a remarkable coincidence British cinema was infiltrated by a genuine socialist conspiracy.

Late in the war, as victory began to seem graspable, people started thinking about what kind of United Kingdom they wanted to live in: Winston Churchill may have led the nation through the conflict, but now something different was required. Sir Michael Balcon, head of Ealing Studios, was part of a group of filmmakers and creative types working behind the scenes to prepare the ground for a Labour government and the introduction of socialist programmes like the National Health Service.

Humphrey Jennings' eloquently understated propaganda short A Diary for Timothy looks at a new-born baby and wonders what kind of world he'll grow up in: as critic Raymond Durgnat observed,...

The Queen enjoys vintage royal footage, while Derek Jacobi's Sidney Turtlebaum character is set to ride again

Royal album

Trash was thrilled to witness the Queen visiting BFI Southbank last week as the old place celebrated its 60th birthday. The Queen appeared to enjoy the film presentation in the venerable National Film Theatre and, dressed in elegant purple coat and hat, flashed a satisfied smile at me – or so I like to think – as she walked along the aisle to the exit. She had just been treated to some lovely stuff from the BFI archive, including Scenes at Balmoral (1896), the first known filmed images of a British monarch, which depicted Queen Victoria and Tsar Nicholas II in the grounds of the Scottish castle.

Her Majesty – it's "Ma'am as in jam", according to the protocol instructions I received – must have then been very moved to see home cine footage from...

Ealing Studios' name is synonymous with comedy largely because of three films released on consecutive weeks in 1949: Passport to Pimlico, Whisky Galore! and Kind Hearts and Coronets. Before then it was associated with the form of realism created by the documentarists Alberto Cavalcanti and Harry Watt, brought in by Michael Balcon early in the second world war to give his studio a greater authenticity. The finest movie in this mode is It Always Rains on Sunday, made in 1947 in grimy, Blitz-scarred east London and being revived in a new print as an example of the darker side of Ealing in the BFI Southbank's Ealing retrospective. Superbly photographed by the great Douglas Slocombe in the Picture Post manner, a style radically different from the elegant Kind Hearts and Coronets, it's 24 hours in the life of Bethnal Green, cleverly dovetailing the lives of some 20 characters ranging from spivs, petty crooks...

Skyfall (12A)

(Sam Mendes, 2012, UK/Us) Daniel Craig, Javier Bardem, Judi Dench, 143 mins

It starts with a bang, but ends with a poignant whimper. This is supposedly a smarter Bond, you see, giving you first-class action and breathtaking imagery, but also a Freudian look into the secret agent's psyche. A pity, then, that the plot is utter nonsense. Bardem's Joker-ish baddie isn't interested in world domination; he has a personal score to settle, and an unfeasibly cunning plan…

Elena (12A)

(Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2011, Rus) Nadezhda Markina, Andrey Smirnov. 109 mins

The Return director finds form with a penetrating look at class resentment in money-obsessed modern Russia, perfect conditions for a noir-ish drama. Markina is magnificent as a hard-up divorcee, who does what she has to when her wealthy partner begins to ail.

Room 237 (15)

(Rodney Ascher, 2012, Us) 102 mins

This investigation into the myriad interpretations of Kubrick's The Shining goes far deeper than anyone needed,...

★★★★☆ A key part of the BFI's Ealing: Light and Dark season and rereleased this Friday, Robert Hamer's It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) is a much-underrated kitchen sink crime drama set over one dreary Sunday, telling a tale of working-class life set within London's East End. Based on the novel by Arthur La Bernby, the story concerns the family life of Rose Sandgate (Googie Withers), a typical East End housewife married to the much older George (Edward Chapman) and living with his two young daughter Vi (Susan Shaw) and Doris (Patricia Plunkett) and their own young son, Alfie (David Lines).

Read more »...

Kind Hearts director Robert Hamer shows the same masterly ensemble control two years earlier in this East End melodrama

Robert Hamer's brilliant, brittle melodrama of London's East End, originally released in 1947, came out two years before his masterpiece Kind Hearts and Coronets. It shows the same masterly ensemble control. The film is in many ways a precursor to kitchen-sink movies like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – and that huge, teeming market scene bears comparison with Carné's Les Enfants du Paradis. It follows a typical Sunday in a working-class neighbourhood. It's raining of course, but there's nothing dull and Sunday-ish about what's going to happen. Googie Withers is Rose, a former barmaid who has settled for marriage with a dull but steady widower with children. Handsome escaped convict Tommy Swann (John McCallum) turns up in their garden shed, pleading for help: she and Tommy were once sweethearts and his reappearance...

It always rained for the Ealing Studios director, but with the reissue of a lost noir classic, it's time his talent was recognised

Robert Hamer was the odd man out at Ealing Studios. He wasn't the only falling-down drunk there, and I daresay he wasn't the only unhappily closeted homosexual, but his work as a writer and director has a sharpness and bite lacking in the genial comedies we associate with the studio.

The revival of Hamer's almost forgotten kitchen sink noir classic from 1947, It Always Rains On Sunday, may come as a shock to those who know Hamer only through his comic masterpiece Kind Hearts And Coronets. Kind Hearts lacks exactly that titular quality, being a spiritedly mean-minded account of multiple murder by a spurned minor aristocrat. Likewise Hamer's last film, School For Scoundrels, which was completed by others as Hamer was by then often battling terrifying Dt hallucinations.

1948 was a good year for mermaids.

In Britain, producer Betty E. Box presented Miranda, starring Glynis Johns as a Cornish water-nymph who goes on dry land disguised as an invalid, making merry with the menfolk. Six years later, a sequel, Mad About Men, continued the character's amorous adventures in Technicolor.

Meanwhile in America, William Powell romanced mute mermaid Ann Blyth, an apparent manifestation of his mid-life crisis, in Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid. (Tarzan and the Mermaids, the same year, did not supply any true amphbious ladies.)

What do these fish stories reveal about their respective countries of origin? None of the films' directors have much in the way of auteur credentials—Ken Annakin directed the first Miranda film, staying true to the tradition of innocuous entertainment which was the defining quality of his career, and Ralph Thomas directed the second: though his son Jeremy has produced major films for Bertolucci and Cronenberg,...

Actor Dominic West was the toast of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) TV Awards on Sunday after scoring a top prize for his creepy portrayal of serial killer Fred West.

The Wire star landed the Best Actor prize for his role in U.K. series Appropriate Adult, a reconstruction of the police investigation into the notorious murderer, while his co-star Emily Watson won Best Actress for playing Janet Leach, who sat in on the interviews Fred West gave to cops.

As he collected his award, West said, "I hope she (Leach) has had some closure and I hope she feels we honoured the suffering she endured and the suffering of all of West's victims, living and dead."

Watson appeared emotional as she gave her winner's speech and told the BBC after the ceremony, "It was such a disturbing place to go. In my speech I was very overwhelmed I forgot to thank Janet Leach, she gave very generously to us.

"The public perception of the West case is a tabloid-driven view and then I read the script and it was a very intelligent piece full of integrity. It's a deep abyss right in the middle of our society."

Appropriate Adult enjoyed a triple win at the London ceremony - Monica Dolan won Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Rosemary West, nm1377339 autoFred West[/link]'s wife. Sherlock's Andrew Scott fought off competition from his co-star Martin Freeman to win Best Supporting Actor.

Beloved Australian entertainer Rolf Harris was awarded a BAFTA Fellowship in honour of his lengthy career, and as he was applauded he declared, "Thank you so much, that's very moving", before adding, "How nice to be presented with this... I can't begin to tell you just how humbled I am by being here in this distinguished company, so many previous recipients of this BAFTA Fellowship."

Other winners included Shane Meadows' This Is England 88, which took the Best Mini-Series prize, Doctor Who writer Stephen Moffat, who received a Special BAFTA for "outstanding creative writing contribution to television", and Absolutely Fabulous star Jennifer Saunders (Female Performance in a Comedy Programme).

The ceremony also featured a memorial segment, remembering the stars lost in the past 12 months, including Davy Jones, actresses Anna Massey, Googie Withers and Betty Driver, presenters Jimmy Savile and Bob Holness, actors Peter Falk, George Baker and Colin Tarrant, and comedian Frank Carson.

Presenters at the ceremony included West, actresses Helen McCrory, Melissa George and Emilia Fox, and actors Benedict Cumberbatch, Matt Smith, Sam Claflin and Timothy Spall.

While New Yorkers have plenty of opportunity to see classic films on the big screen, you'll be hard pressed to find a lineup as front to back awesome as the Film Society Of Lincoln Center's "15 For 15: Celebrating Rialto Pictures."

The series honors the reknowned arthouse distribution shingle founded in 1997 that has brought some of the best known (and previously unknown) classics of cinema to American audiences. And the selection here by programmers Scott Foundas, Eric Di Bernardo and Adrienne Halpern represents the breadth and scope of the films Rialto has put their stamp on, ranging from the French New Wave ("Breathless") to film noir ("Rififi") to comedy ("Billy Liar") and more. There is something here for everybody and with the series kicking off tonight, we've got a special prize for some lucky readers.

Courtesy of Film Society Of Lincoln Center, we've got a copy of the excellent Rialto DVD...

"TCM Remembers 2011" is out. Remembered by Turner Classic Movies are many of those in the film world who left us this past year. As always, this latest "TCM Remembers" entry is a classy, immensely moving compilation. The haunting background song is "Before You Go," by Ok Sweetheart.

Among those featured in "TCM Remembers 2011" are Farley Granger, the star of Luchino Visconti's Senso and Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and Strangers on a Train; Oscar-nominated Australian actress Diane Cilento (Tom Jones, Hombre), formerly married to Sean Connery; and two-time Oscar nominee Peter Falk (Murder, Inc., Pocketful of Miracles, The Great Race), best remembered as television's Columbo. Or, for those into arthouse fare, for playing an angel in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire.

Also, Jane Russell, whose cleavage and sensuous lips in Howard Hughes' The Outlaw left the puritans of the Production Code Association apoplectic; another Australian performer, Googie Withers, among...

Veteran British actress Googie Withers has died at the age of 94.

The star, born Georgette Lizette Withers, passed away at her home in Sydney, Australia on Friday. No further information was available as WENN went to press.

Withers was working as a dancer in London's West End when she was asked to be an extra in the 1935 movie The Girl in the Crowd - but she ended up with a main role after director Michael Powell fired a lead actress.

She went on to rack up credits in films such as The Gang's All Here and One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, and also appeared on Broadway.

But she will be best remembered for playing Blanche in Alfred Hitchcock's 1938 thriller The Lady Vanishes, opposite Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave.

Withers was the first non-Australian to be made an Officer of the Order of Australia and she was awarded a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2002.

She married Australian actor John McCallum, who helped create the cult TV series Skippy the Bush Kangaroo.

They had three children and lived together in Sydney until McCallum's death last year.

Actress Googie Withers, best known for her role in Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, has died aged 94. Googie (born Georgette Lizette Withers) died in her home in Australia on Friday. She was born in British India in 1917, and she took up acting at 12 years old, when her family returned to England. She worked on a huge number of British films throughout the '30s and '40s, including The Lady Vanishes, Powell and Pressburger's One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing and Ealing Studios' portmanteau spooker Dead Of Night. Withers met her husband,...

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A striking presence on stage and in the great days of British film, she played the prison governor of TV's Within These Walls

Followers of postwar cinema may well recall Googie Withers's striking presence in It Always Rains On Sunday, an unusually intense film for the Ealing Studios of 1947. A bored wife, she gives shelter to an ex-lover, now a murderer on the run, played by John McCallum, soon to be her real-life husband. The lovers were shown as unsympathetically as they might have been in French film noir, and the weather was bad even by British standards.

What Withers, who has died aged 94, brought to that performance was to define her strength in some of her most powerful roles. Too strong a face and too grand a manner prevented her being thought conventionally pretty, but she was imposingly watchable because of an obvious vigour and sexuality. Thus equipped,...

The Golden Age actress passes away in her Sydney home

A charismatic actress with tremendous personal glamour, Googie Withers was the sweetheart of an era and remains much loved by cinema-goers of a certain age. Now, 15 years after her final starring role, she has died.

Born in Karachi to british and Dutch parents, Withers studied acting in Italy before making her début on the London stage. She was soon snapped up by film studio talent spotters, taking on a series of small roles (including one in early Hitchcock thriller The Lady Vanishes) before finding her way to the...

Film director whose work included the wartime masterpiece Western Approaches

The director Pat Jackson, who has died aged 95, was best known for the semi-documentary war film Western Approaches (1944). This neglected classic – a feature-length portrait of the Battle of the Atlantic – was shot under the auspices of the Ministry of Information's Crown Film Unit and predominantly filmed at sea under hazardous conditions. The shoot's logistical nightmares were compounded by the vast size of the Technicolor camera. Jackson himself devised the story of the imminent convergence of a German U-boat and an English ship which is on the way to save a group of comrades in a lifeboat.

Jackson was in his late 20s when he shot Western Approaches with the outstanding cameraman Jack Cardiff and a cast of amateur actors. It was a remarkable achievement that remained unsurpassed throughout the writer-director's lengthy career. The film was well received in Britain and...

"He's a chin." Such was Josef von Sternberg's summation of Clive Brook, delivered when Marlene Dietrich asked what her leading man in Shanghai Express(1932) was like. Since Brook had already given a sympathetic and subtle performance for Sternberg in Underworld (1927), and since he was one of the few actors who actually liked Sternberg, this remark should perhaps be taken less as an insult, and more as a statement of intent: in Shanghai Express, Sternberg reduces his chum to a chin, rigid and inexpressive.

The real Brook was different, as his sole film as director attests. On Approval (1944) climaxed Brook's acting career (he returned to the screen in 1963 for John Huston, in The List of Adrian Messenger: the rest is silence) and serves as a definitive rebuttal to Sternberg's put-down, as it's a gay, wildly creative, consistently funny comedy. Being based on a play that was then fifty years...

Actor husband of Googie Withers, he co-created Skippy the bush kangaroo

The ruggedly handsome Australian actor John McCallum, who has died aged 91, enhanced the golden era of postwar British cinema with his extrovert muscularity. He starred in films such as The Loves of Joanna Godden and It Always Rains On Sunday (both 1947), then returned to Australia with his wife and frequent co-star, Googie Withers, to become an impresario in theatre, film and television. His TV hits included the popular series Skippy (1966-68), developed with the producer Lee Robinson, which followed the escapades of a daredevil kangaroo which McCallum had first named Hoppy. More than 90 episodes were filmed, and the series became one of the best known Australian TV exports.

McCallum's Scottish grandparents emigrated as farmers but edged their son into the role of a church organist in Brisbane. His father moved on to concert management and built the 3,000-seat Cremorne theatre in Brisbane,...

No 83 Vivien Leigh 1913-67

She was an army officer's daughter, born Vivian Hartley in Darjeeling, one of several daughters of the Raj to become actresses (others were Googie Withers, Merle Oberon, Julie Christie), and educated at convents in England and on the continent. At the age of six she confided to her school friend Maureen O'Sullivan (later her co-star in the 1938 movie A Yank at Oxford) that she was going to be a great actress, and entered Rada aged 18. Her dramatic education, however, was interrupted by marriage and motherhood. She was green-eyed, dark-haired, 5ft 3in, one of the most beautiful women in the world, and it was not long before she made an impression in minor plays and films and attracted the attention of Laurence Olivier, with whom she appeared in the costume movie Fire Over England (1937). Vivien accompanied him to Hollywood the following year, embarking on a love affair,...

Every Hollywood studio had its distinctive style, partly brought about by artists it had under contract. This quartet of classic 20th Century-Fox thrillers features three films directed by Otto Preminger (Fallen Angel, 1945; Whirlpool, 1949; Where the Sidewalk Ends, 1950). The fourth film is the greatest noir movie made in Britain, Jules Dassin's Night and the City (1950), the first film I saw being made. As an impressionable 15-year-old, I (and my parents) stumbled across a shoot in a Soho alley featuring Fox's new heavy Richard Widmark and femme fatale Googie Withers. Gene Tierney (the eponymous Laura in Preminger's first venture into noir) is in three of the movies, her Laura co-star Dana Andrews in two of them. Indicative of the way the genre reflected disturbing social undercurrents is that in all these films there were people – actors, writers and a director (Jules Dassin) – who became blacklisted McCarthy victims.

DVD and video reviewsPhilip French

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