From Robert Donat’s heart-breaking Mr Chips to the real-life Mr Bachmann, Judi Dench’s venomous schoolmarm to Paul Giamatti’s classics stickler in The Holdovers, cinema loves teachers, whether inspirational or awful
I had a few teachers I adored in my years at school – and one or two, perhaps, who even inspired me in some capacity – but I can’t say a film about my relationship with them would make for particularly thrilling viewing. Teaching is hard graft, and often thankless; even the best in the profession are rarely rewarded with the kind of dewy, triumphant tributes that cap off many a Hollywood classroom drama. Yet the inspirational teacher film remains a mainstay: film-makers never tire of imagining the schooldays they’d like to have had.
Paul Giamatti offers a variation on the type in The Holdovers, out on VOD last week: the curmudgeonly, academically oriented teacher with (surprise!
I had a few teachers I adored in my years at school – and one or two, perhaps, who even inspired me in some capacity – but I can’t say a film about my relationship with them would make for particularly thrilling viewing. Teaching is hard graft, and often thankless; even the best in the profession are rarely rewarded with the kind of dewy, triumphant tributes that cap off many a Hollywood classroom drama. Yet the inspirational teacher film remains a mainstay: film-makers never tire of imagining the schooldays they’d like to have had.
Paul Giamatti offers a variation on the type in The Holdovers, out on VOD last week: the curmudgeonly, academically oriented teacher with (surprise!
- 2/24/2024
- by Guy Lodge
- The Guardian - Film News
Anthony Asquith’s unusual look at wartime espionage garnered good notices in 1958, perhaps from reviewers rebelling against the trend toward ruthless screen violence. Star Paul Massie is fine as an emotionally-stricken Allied assassin who balks at carrying out his mission; the acting support from Irene Worth and Leslie French is superb. Screenwriter Paul Dehn was an ace at sharp, no-nonsense thrillers, but this story is soft around the edges — it seems to be explaining non-chivalric warfare to your sweet old grandmother. Which reminds us, Lillian Gish has a small role, too.
Orders to Kill
Blu-ray
Powerhouse Indicator
1958 / B&w / 1:75 widescreen / 112 93 min. / Street Date September 20, 2022 / available from Amazon / 34.99
Starring: Eddie Albert, Paul Massie, Lillian Gish, James Robertson Justice, Leslie French, Irene Worth, John Crawford, Lionel Jeffries, Sandra Dorne, Lillabea (Lillie Bea) Gifford, Anne Blake, Sam Kydd, Ann Walford, Denyse Alexander, Ralph Nosseck.
Cinematography: Desmond Dickinson
Art Director: John Howell
Film...
Orders to Kill
Blu-ray
Powerhouse Indicator
1958 / B&w / 1:75 widescreen / 112 93 min. / Street Date September 20, 2022 / available from Amazon / 34.99
Starring: Eddie Albert, Paul Massie, Lillian Gish, James Robertson Justice, Leslie French, Irene Worth, John Crawford, Lionel Jeffries, Sandra Dorne, Lillabea (Lillie Bea) Gifford, Anne Blake, Sam Kydd, Ann Walford, Denyse Alexander, Ralph Nosseck.
Cinematography: Desmond Dickinson
Art Director: John Howell
Film...
- 9/17/2022
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Anthony Asquith’s 1928 film to get a new score from John Altman.
The BFI London Film Festival (Oct 7-18) has announced that its Archive Gala will be a new restoration of Anthony Asquith’s Shooting Stars.
The restoration by the BFI National Archive will receive its world premiere on Oct 16 with a new live score by John Altman, the BAFTA and Emmy award-winning composer whose work includes Titanic and Goldeneye. The score has been written for a 12 piece ensemble playing multiple instruments.
Shooting Stars, first released in 1928, was Asquith’s first film as co-director and scriptwriter and is a drama set behind the scenes at a film studio.
Annette Benson (Mae Feather) and Brian Aherne (Julian Gordon) play two mis-matched, married stars and Donald Calthrop (Andy Wilkes) a Chaplin-esque star at the same studio, with whom Mae becomes romantically involved.
Chili Bouchier, Britain’s first sex symbol of the silent era, plays a key role...
The BFI London Film Festival (Oct 7-18) has announced that its Archive Gala will be a new restoration of Anthony Asquith’s Shooting Stars.
The restoration by the BFI National Archive will receive its world premiere on Oct 16 with a new live score by John Altman, the BAFTA and Emmy award-winning composer whose work includes Titanic and Goldeneye. The score has been written for a 12 piece ensemble playing multiple instruments.
Shooting Stars, first released in 1928, was Asquith’s first film as co-director and scriptwriter and is a drama set behind the scenes at a film studio.
Annette Benson (Mae Feather) and Brian Aherne (Julian Gordon) play two mis-matched, married stars and Donald Calthrop (Andy Wilkes) a Chaplin-esque star at the same studio, with whom Mae becomes romantically involved.
Chili Bouchier, Britain’s first sex symbol of the silent era, plays a key role...
- 8/20/2015
- by michael.rosser@screendaily.com (Michael Rosser)
- ScreenDaily
I. The Rattigan Version
After his first dramatic success, The Winslow Boy, Terence Rattigan conceived a double bill of one-act plays in 1946. Producers dismissed the project, even Rattigan’s collaborator Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont. Actor John Gielgud agreed. “They’ve seen me in so much first rate stuff,” Gielgud asked Rattigan; “Do you really think they will like me in anything second rate?” Rattigan insisted he wasn’t “content writing a play to please an audience today, but to write a play that will be remembered in fifty years’ time.”
Ultimately, Rattigan paired a brooding character study, The Browning Version, with a light farce, Harlequinade. Entitled Playbill, the show was finally produced by Stephen Mitchell in September 1948, starring Eric Portman, and became a runaway hit. While Harlequinade faded into a footnote, the first half proved an instant classic. Harold Hobson wrote that “Mr. Portman’s playing and Mr. Rattigan’s writing...
After his first dramatic success, The Winslow Boy, Terence Rattigan conceived a double bill of one-act plays in 1946. Producers dismissed the project, even Rattigan’s collaborator Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont. Actor John Gielgud agreed. “They’ve seen me in so much first rate stuff,” Gielgud asked Rattigan; “Do you really think they will like me in anything second rate?” Rattigan insisted he wasn’t “content writing a play to please an audience today, but to write a play that will be remembered in fifty years’ time.”
Ultimately, Rattigan paired a brooding character study, The Browning Version, with a light farce, Harlequinade. Entitled Playbill, the show was finally produced by Stephen Mitchell in September 1948, starring Eric Portman, and became a runaway hit. While Harlequinade faded into a footnote, the first half proved an instant classic. Harold Hobson wrote that “Mr. Portman’s playing and Mr. Rattigan’s writing...
- 3/25/2015
- by Christopher Saunders
- SoundOnSight
Playwright and screenwriter Terence Rattigan was an indubitable influence on mid-century British cinema. He authored several of the era’s most notable titles, including The Browning Version (1951), Lean’s The Sound Barrier (1952) Olivier’s troubled The Prince and the Showgirl (1957) and Anatole Litvak’s The Deep Blue Sea (1952), which was recently remade by Terrence Davies in 2011. But it would be a 1958 American adaptation of his play, Separate Tables, from director Delbert Mann that would prove to be his most critically lauded work, nominated for seven Academy Awards, and snagging two (Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress). By today’s standards, it’s a film that feels painstakingly melodramatic. Reconsidered within the framework of Rattigan’s own impressive oeuvre, the material hasn’t aged well, and as time has gone on, its cramped exploration of sexual dysfunction now plays like a euthanized product crippled by censorship of the author’s own...
- 7/29/2014
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
Shirley Temple dead at 85: Was one of the biggest domestic box office draws of the ’30s (photo: Shirley Temple in the late ’40s) Shirley Temple, one of the biggest box office draws of the 1930s in the United States, died Monday night, February 10, 2014, at her home in Woodside, near San Francisco. The cause of death wasn’t made public. Shirley Temple (born in Santa Monica on April 23, 1928) was 85. Shirley Temple became a star in 1934, following the release of Paramount’s Alexander Hall-directed comedy-tearjerker Little Miss Marker, in which Temple had the title role as a little girl who, left in the care of bookies, almost loses her childlike ways before coming around to regenerate Adolphe Menjou and his gang. That same year, Temple became a Fox contract player, and is credited with saving the studio — 20th Century Fox from 1935 on — from bankruptcy. Whether or not that’s true is a different story,...
- 2/11/2014
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Oscar-nominated ‘Imitation of Life’ actress Juanita Moore has died Juanita Moore, Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nominee for the 1959 blockbuster Imitation of Life, died on New Year’s Day 2014 at her home in Los Angeles. According to various online sources, Juanita Moore (born on October 19, 1922) was 91; her step-grandson, actor Kirk Kahn, said she was 99. (Photo: Juanita Moore in the late ’50s. See also: Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner photos at the 50th anniversary screening of Imitation of Life at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.) Juanita Moore movies The Los Angeles-born Juanita Moore began her show business career as a chorus girl at New York City’s Cotton Club. According to the IMDb, Moore was an extra/bit player in a trio of films of the ’40s, including Vincente Minnelli’s all-black musical Cabin in the Sky (1942) and Elia Kazan’s socially conscious melodrama Pinky (1949), in which Jeanne Crain plays a (very,...
- 1/2/2014
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Marta Eggerth: Operetta and film star — a sort of Jeanette MacDonald of Central European cinema — dead at 101 Marta Eggerth, an international star in film and stage operettas who frequently performed opposite husband Jan Kiepura, died on December 26, 2013, at her home in Rye, New York. The Budapest-born Eggerth had turned 101 last April 17. (Photo: Marta Eggerth ca. 1935.) Although best known for her roles in stage musicals such as the Max Reinhardt-directed 1927 Hamburg production of Die Fledermaus, and various incarnations of Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow, Marta Eggerth was featured in nearly 40 films. The vast majority of those were produced in Austria and Germany in the 1930s, as the Nazis ascended to power. Marta Eggerth films Marta Eggerth films, which frequently made use of her coloratura soprano voice, include Max Neufeld’s drama Eine Nacht im Grandhotel ("A Night at the Grand Hotel," 1931); the Victor Janson-directed musicals Once There Was a Waltz...
- 12/31/2013
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Jean Kent: ‘The Browning Version’ 1951, Gainsborough folds (photo: Jean Kent in ‘The Browning Version,’ with Michael Redgrave) (See previous post: “Jean Kent: Gainsborough Pictures Film Star Dead at 92.”) Seemingly stuck in Britain, Jean Kent’s other important leads of the period came out in 1948: John Paddy Carstairs’ Alfred Hitchcock-esque thriller Sleeping Car to Trieste (1948), with spies on board the Orient Express, and Gordon Parry’s ensemble piece Bond Street. Following two minor 1950 comedies, Her Favorite Husband / The Taming of Dorothy and The Reluctant Widow / The Inheritance, Kent’s movie stardom was virtually over, though she would still have one major film role in store. In what is probably her best remembered and most prestigious effort, Jean Kent played Millie Crocker-Harris, the unsympathetic, adulterous wife of unfulfilled teacher Michael Redgrave, in Anthony Asquith’s 1951 film version of Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version — a Javelin Films production...
- 12/4/2013
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Popular stalwart of film classics such as The Browning Version and Fanny By Gaslight
Jean Kent, the fiery, sexy, red-haired bad girl of British movies in the 1940s, who has died aged 92, was a fine actor, and clearly enjoyed life, her work and – while it lasted – her cinema fame. While never a top star, she gained a considerable following, and from the 1960s appeared regularly on television. Her film breakthrough came as a result of stage work: after the revue Apple Sauce, starring Vera Lynn and Max Miller, reached the London Palladium in 1941, she was offered a long-term contract, and the first of her Gainsborough Pictures appearances came in It's That Man Again (1943), with another wartime entertainer, the radio comic Tommy Handley.
It took another four films for her to make her first real mark as Lucy, the friend of Phyllis Calvert in the title role of the melodrama Fanny By Gaslight,...
Jean Kent, the fiery, sexy, red-haired bad girl of British movies in the 1940s, who has died aged 92, was a fine actor, and clearly enjoyed life, her work and – while it lasted – her cinema fame. While never a top star, she gained a considerable following, and from the 1960s appeared regularly on television. Her film breakthrough came as a result of stage work: after the revue Apple Sauce, starring Vera Lynn and Max Miller, reached the London Palladium in 1941, she was offered a long-term contract, and the first of her Gainsborough Pictures appearances came in It's That Man Again (1943), with another wartime entertainer, the radio comic Tommy Handley.
It took another four films for her to make her first real mark as Lucy, the friend of Phyllis Calvert in the title role of the melodrama Fanny By Gaslight,...
- 12/2/2013
- by Sheila Whitaker
- The Guardian - Film News
Actress Jean Kent, whose film and television career in the U.K. spanned over five decades, died at age 92, BBC News reported. Family friend Michael Thornton shared the news, stating that the actress suffered an injury at her home in Suffolk and passed away at a hospital. Kent's roles included turns in Caravan (1946) and The Browning Version (1951), as well as appearing alongside Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier in The Prince and the Showgirl (1957). The British Film Institute honored Kent in 2011. When asked at the ceremony if she had a message for fans, the actress recalled her
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- 11/30/2013
- by THR Staff
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Separate Tables
Directed by Lin Snider and Justin Bennett
Out of the Box Theatre Company
West End Theater , 263 West 86th Street, NYC
October 2-5, 2013 (Closed)
If you know of stage play more perfectly realized than Out of the Box Theatre's polished realization of Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables, let me know and I will rush to see it. However, that is unlikely, as co-directors Lin Snider and Justin Bennett have created a profound rarity indeed: a flawless production. Everything about this rendering of Rattigan's play, which opened in London in 1954 and on Broadway in 1956, is sheer perfection: every performance, the set, the costumes, the invisible effortless direction, the brief musical interludes -- all make for one of the most exhilarating evenings of theater I have ever experienced. It is unfortunate that such a fine production was limited to only six performances: a production of this outstanding caliber deserved a much longer run,...
Directed by Lin Snider and Justin Bennett
Out of the Box Theatre Company
West End Theater , 263 West 86th Street, NYC
October 2-5, 2013 (Closed)
If you know of stage play more perfectly realized than Out of the Box Theatre's polished realization of Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables, let me know and I will rush to see it. However, that is unlikely, as co-directors Lin Snider and Justin Bennett have created a profound rarity indeed: a flawless production. Everything about this rendering of Rattigan's play, which opened in London in 1954 and on Broadway in 1956, is sheer perfection: every performance, the set, the costumes, the invisible effortless direction, the brief musical interludes -- all make for one of the most exhilarating evenings of theater I have ever experienced. It is unfortunate that such a fine production was limited to only six performances: a production of this outstanding caliber deserved a much longer run,...
- 10/9/2013
- by Jay Reisberg
- www.culturecatch.com
(Anthony Asquith, 1929; BFI, PG)
Educated at Winchester and Oxford, lifelong socialist, closet gay, son of a Liberal prime minister, Anthony Asquith (1902-1968) is a currently undervalued film-maker whose career began in the silent era when he studied American cinema in Hollywood and German expressionism in Berlin. The British character in its various forms fascinated him, especially the middle classes, and he found an important collaborator in Terence Rattigan. Their association lasted from 1937 to the mid-1960s, resulting in numerous crucial works, including the wartime morale-booster The Way to the Stars and that masterpiece of stiff-upper-lip repression, The Browning Version.
Just before the coming of sound Asquith made two silent classics, A Cottage on Dartmoor and Underground that put his rival Hitchcock into the shade in the way it absorbed foreign influences and experimented with new styles. Underground is an exhilarating celebration of modern city life as embodied by the London underground system,...
Educated at Winchester and Oxford, lifelong socialist, closet gay, son of a Liberal prime minister, Anthony Asquith (1902-1968) is a currently undervalued film-maker whose career began in the silent era when he studied American cinema in Hollywood and German expressionism in Berlin. The British character in its various forms fascinated him, especially the middle classes, and he found an important collaborator in Terence Rattigan. Their association lasted from 1937 to the mid-1960s, resulting in numerous crucial works, including the wartime morale-booster The Way to the Stars and that masterpiece of stiff-upper-lip repression, The Browning Version.
Just before the coming of sound Asquith made two silent classics, A Cottage on Dartmoor and Underground that put his rival Hitchcock into the shade in the way it absorbed foreign influences and experimented with new styles. Underground is an exhilarating celebration of modern city life as embodied by the London underground system,...
- 7/2/2013
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Festival theatre's Angus Jackson to direct Langella in role often called the Ever~est of acting at Minerva theatre in November
Frank Langella, the triple-Tony award winning actor who memorably portrayed Richard Nixon on stage and screen, is to take on King Lear for the Chichester Festival Theatre, it will be announced on Thursday.
The role is often called the Everest of acting and has been played in recent years by Derek Jacobi at the Donmar Warehouse and Ian McKellen at the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Langella has accepted an invitation to star in a production at the Minerva theatre in November which will then transfer to New York in the new year.
It will be directed by associate director of the theatre Angus Jackson, who said: "It is tremendously exciting that he's reached a moment to do King Lear and he's going to do it with us, with me and in the Minerva.
Frank Langella, the triple-Tony award winning actor who memorably portrayed Richard Nixon on stage and screen, is to take on King Lear for the Chichester Festival Theatre, it will be announced on Thursday.
The role is often called the Everest of acting and has been played in recent years by Derek Jacobi at the Donmar Warehouse and Ian McKellen at the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Langella has accepted an invitation to star in a production at the Minerva theatre in November which will then transfer to New York in the new year.
It will be directed by associate director of the theatre Angus Jackson, who said: "It is tremendously exciting that he's reached a moment to do King Lear and he's going to do it with us, with me and in the Minerva.
- 6/20/2013
- by Mark Brown
- The Guardian - Film News
Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Sept. 4, 2012
Price: DVD $24.95 each, Blu-ray $29.95 each
Studio: Olive Films
Olivia De Havilland doesn't like what she sees in The Dark Mirror.
The Dark Mirror (1946) and Secret Beyond the Door (1947), two classic film noir crime movies, make their DVD and Blu-ray debuts from Olive Films.
The Dark Mirror finds Olivia De Havilland ( Gone with the Wind) portraying twin sisters who are implicated in a Hollywood murder, while a police detective (Thomas Mitchell) must figure out if one or both were involved in the killing. As a psychiatrist approached by the detective to help with the complicated case, Lew Ayres agrees to see them separately and he’s immediately attracted to one of them and fears the other one to be killer. But he’s also worried that if he’s wrong he could end up on a slab in the morgue himself.
The movie features taut direction...
Price: DVD $24.95 each, Blu-ray $29.95 each
Studio: Olive Films
Olivia De Havilland doesn't like what she sees in The Dark Mirror.
The Dark Mirror (1946) and Secret Beyond the Door (1947), two classic film noir crime movies, make their DVD and Blu-ray debuts from Olive Films.
The Dark Mirror finds Olivia De Havilland ( Gone with the Wind) portraying twin sisters who are implicated in a Hollywood murder, while a police detective (Thomas Mitchell) must figure out if one or both were involved in the killing. As a psychiatrist approached by the detective to help with the complicated case, Lew Ayres agrees to see them separately and he’s immediately attracted to one of them and fears the other one to be killer. But he’s also worried that if he’s wrong he could end up on a slab in the morgue himself.
The movie features taut direction...
- 6/21/2012
- by Laurence
- Disc Dish
To celebrate the centenary of Terrence Rattigan’s birth his estate has commissioned playwright David Hare to write a new companion piece to accompany Rattigan’s one act masterpiece The Browning Version. Hare’s new play, South Downs, premiered with The Browning Version at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester to rave reviews and now makes its transfer to the west end.
South Downs and The Browning Version work very well together; Hare identifies key themes in Rattigan’s work and constructs his own narrative to reflect these. Both plays centre on a socially awkward and lonely lead and the meaning and implication of rules within a ridged schooling system.
Whilst both plays do share many common themes, it is also through their differences that the plays create a connection. Hare chooses to write about the boys at school, not the masters like Rattigan, and adds an interesting autobiographical element to South Downs.
South Downs and The Browning Version work very well together; Hare identifies key themes in Rattigan’s work and constructs his own narrative to reflect these. Both plays centre on a socially awkward and lonely lead and the meaning and implication of rules within a ridged schooling system.
Whilst both plays do share many common themes, it is also through their differences that the plays create a connection. Hare chooses to write about the boys at school, not the masters like Rattigan, and adds an interesting autobiographical element to South Downs.
- 5/9/2012
- by Will Pond
- Obsessed with Film
Our critics' picks of this week's openings, plus your last chance to see and what to book now
• Which cultural events are in your diary this week? Tell us in the comments below
Opening this weekTheatre
I Dreamed a Dream
SuBo is played by Elaine C Smith in this new musical based on the life of the Britain's Got Talent sensation, who has given her personal endorsement to this money-spinner – sorry, show. Theatre Royal, Newcastle (0844 811 2121), until 31 March, then touring.
Fierce festival
Birmingham gets ready for boundary-busting performances from UK and international performers, including Ann Liv Young, Playgroup and Graeme Miller. The festival takes place in unusual spaces all across the city, including the soon to be demolished library and under Spaghetti Junction. Various locations, Birmingham, Thursday to 8 April.
Film
The Hunger Games (dir. Gary Ross)
Suzanne Collins's teen bestseller is turned into an exciting dystopian thriller. Jennifer Lawrence stars.
• Which cultural events are in your diary this week? Tell us in the comments below
Opening this weekTheatre
I Dreamed a Dream
SuBo is played by Elaine C Smith in this new musical based on the life of the Britain's Got Talent sensation, who has given her personal endorsement to this money-spinner – sorry, show. Theatre Royal, Newcastle (0844 811 2121), until 31 March, then touring.
Fierce festival
Birmingham gets ready for boundary-busting performances from UK and international performers, including Ann Liv Young, Playgroup and Graeme Miller. The festival takes place in unusual spaces all across the city, including the soon to be demolished library and under Spaghetti Junction. Various locations, Birmingham, Thursday to 8 April.
Film
The Hunger Games (dir. Gary Ross)
Suzanne Collins's teen bestseller is turned into an exciting dystopian thriller. Jennifer Lawrence stars.
- 3/25/2012
- The Guardian - Film News
Terence Davies’ newest film, “The Deep Blue Sea,” takes place, like much of his work, in post-World War II England. In it, Rachel Weisz plays Hester Collyer, a woman who abandons her passionless marriage to a wealthy barrister (Simon Russell Beale) for a torrid affair with a troubled former Royal Air Force pilot (Tom Hiddleston), the consequences of which plunge her into despair. When we got a chance to speak with the director, a natural storyteller with a mischievous sense of humor and infectious laugh, we would never have guessed he suffered from an acute case of homesickness for his native U.K., a fact he admitted toward the end of our time together.
We started by asking him about societal differences between England in the 1950’s versus 2012. “What I think people don't understand is how traumatic the war was for Britain. When the war was over, Britain didn't get...
We started by asking him about societal differences between England in the 1950’s versus 2012. “What I think people don't understand is how traumatic the war was for Britain. When the war was over, Britain didn't get...
- 3/22/2012
- by Thomas Dodson
- The Playlist
One of the United Kingdom’s most lauded stylists, Terence Davies has carefully crafted a body of work that fits squarely into the class-conscious, post-neorealist tradition of British cinema, working without much fanfare or regard for the exigencies of commercial filmmaking that the age and his stature would seem to demand.
Now in his mid-sixties, Davies has in the last 30 years quietly established himself as one of the finest British filmmakers of his generation. He is not a cinephile and his lugubrious, sublimely photographed and insidiously hard-hearted narratives — such as 1988′s Distant Voices, Still Lives, which will screen as part of a career retrospective at BAMCinematek this week, and 1992′s The Long Day Closes, which will receive a two-week repertory engagement at the Film Forum starting later this month — draw as much from his own innate sensibility and preoccupations, and a lyrical and meditative film grammar that seems all his own,...
Now in his mid-sixties, Davies has in the last 30 years quietly established himself as one of the finest British filmmakers of his generation. He is not a cinephile and his lugubrious, sublimely photographed and insidiously hard-hearted narratives — such as 1988′s Distant Voices, Still Lives, which will screen as part of a career retrospective at BAMCinematek this week, and 1992′s The Long Day Closes, which will receive a two-week repertory engagement at the Film Forum starting later this month — draw as much from his own innate sensibility and preoccupations, and a lyrical and meditative film grammar that seems all his own,...
- 3/21/2012
- by Brandon Harris
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
"With The Deep Blue Sea," writes Nick Pinkerton in the Voice, "the great British director Terence Davies returns to the postwar period — though in a sense, he has never left. Born in 1945, Davies's cinema is defined by a mixed pity and fondness for the world of yesterday, a past he seemingly finds impossible to put behind him or to do without. The era's hypocritical propriety and quivering repression has most frequently been held up for 'enlightened,' Pleasantville-style condescension, but Davies is a great historical filmmaker because he feels the period too intimately to mock its rituals and mores, knows that no progress occurs without loss."
A retrospective of Davies's work is running at New York's BAMcinématek through March 27, while Sing, Memory: The Postwar England of Terence Davies opens today at the Harvard Film Archive and runs through March 26. On March 28, The Long Day Closes (1992) opens for a week-long run at New York's Film Forum.
A retrospective of Davies's work is running at New York's BAMcinématek through March 27, while Sing, Memory: The Postwar England of Terence Davies opens today at the Harvard Film Archive and runs through March 26. On March 28, The Long Day Closes (1992) opens for a week-long run at New York's Film Forum.
- 3/19/2012
- MUBI
"In the late 1950s Terence Rattigan fell victim to time and trend," begins Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times. "You could look up 'unfashionability' in an illustrated dictionary and there was the playwright's mug shot: the Winslow Boy/Browning Version/Deep Blue Sea man looking out glumly into a condemned future. Today, with the Angry Young Playwright generation, his usurpers, looking more like the condemned ones, the cry 'Anyone for Terence?' is heard throughout theatreland. Now it invades cinema. Terence Davies's The Deep Blue Sea is one Terry's tribute to another: a Rattigan play about tortured love in postwar England adapted by the filmmaker who gave us his tortured love paean — love of family, of childhood, of the tender nightmares of growing up in 1950s Liverpool — in Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988). Davis hasn't made a feature since 2000, his film of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. His style doesn't spread easily.
- 11/27/2011
- MUBI
Terence Rattigan's romantic drama set in a repressive postwar Britain is brought to the big screen superbly by Terence Davies
If we count his first three short films made on shoestring budgets between 1976 and 1983 as a trilogy, and his next, Distant Voices, Still Lives, as a diptych (they were actually made separately), Terence Davies has directed a mere seven films in 35 years. This puts him in the same exclusive league for low output and high quality as his contemporary, Terrence Malick. Davies's last film, Of Time and the City (2008), was a withering documentary about the sad decline of his hometown, Liverpool, and it followed two feature pictures adapted from American novels set at different times and in different American milieux, John Kennedy Toole's The Neon Bible and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth.
His outstanding new movie, The Deep Blue Sea, is a version of a play by Terence Rattigan,...
If we count his first three short films made on shoestring budgets between 1976 and 1983 as a trilogy, and his next, Distant Voices, Still Lives, as a diptych (they were actually made separately), Terence Davies has directed a mere seven films in 35 years. This puts him in the same exclusive league for low output and high quality as his contemporary, Terrence Malick. Davies's last film, Of Time and the City (2008), was a withering documentary about the sad decline of his hometown, Liverpool, and it followed two feature pictures adapted from American novels set at different times and in different American milieux, John Kennedy Toole's The Neon Bible and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth.
His outstanding new movie, The Deep Blue Sea, is a version of a play by Terence Rattigan,...
- 11/27/2011
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Release Date: Dec. 6, 2011
Price: Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion
Michael Redgrave (l.) and Margaret Lockwood do some investigating in The Lady Vanishes.
It’s great to see Alfred Hitchcock’s (Psycho) quick-witted and devilish 1938 comedy-thriller The Lady Vanishes get the Criterion treatment.
In the movie, beautiful Margaret Lockwood (Night Train to Munich) is traveling across Europe by train when she meets a charming spinster (Dame May Whitty, Suspicion), who then seems to disappear into thin air. The younger woman turns investigator and finds herself drawn into a complex web of mystery, adventure and even some romance.
Co-starring Michael Redgrave (The Browning Version) and Paul Lukas (The Ghost Breakers), The Lady Vanishes remains an audience favorite and one of the great filmmaker’s purest delights.
Criterion’s Blu-ray edition offers a high-definition digital restoration of the classic film with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack.
There are a number of bonus features on the Blu-ray...
Price: Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion
Michael Redgrave (l.) and Margaret Lockwood do some investigating in The Lady Vanishes.
It’s great to see Alfred Hitchcock’s (Psycho) quick-witted and devilish 1938 comedy-thriller The Lady Vanishes get the Criterion treatment.
In the movie, beautiful Margaret Lockwood (Night Train to Munich) is traveling across Europe by train when she meets a charming spinster (Dame May Whitty, Suspicion), who then seems to disappear into thin air. The younger woman turns investigator and finds herself drawn into a complex web of mystery, adventure and even some romance.
Co-starring Michael Redgrave (The Browning Version) and Paul Lukas (The Ghost Breakers), The Lady Vanishes remains an audience favorite and one of the great filmmaker’s purest delights.
Criterion’s Blu-ray edition offers a high-definition digital restoration of the classic film with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack.
There are a number of bonus features on the Blu-ray...
- 9/19/2011
- by Laurence
- Disc Dish
The author's stylish language will be heard once more in the movie, fifty years after he was branded as old-fashioned amid the coming of drama's angry young men
The spare, stylish dialogue of Terence Rattigan, at one time the highest-paid screenwriter in the world, will soon be heard in Britain's cinemas once more. In the final phase of a centenary year that has seen the late playwright's work revived on stages across the country, next month will bring not just a celebration of his theatrical legacy at Chichester Festival Theatre, but the release of a new film version of The Deep Blue Sea – the play regarded by many as Rattigan's masterpiece.
Director Terence Davies is due to show his film, which stars Rachel Weisz as the troubled Hester Collyer, at the Toronto Film Festival before its British premiere in November.
Davies, the acclaimed experimental screenwriter and filmmaker from Liverpool behind Distant Voices,...
The spare, stylish dialogue of Terence Rattigan, at one time the highest-paid screenwriter in the world, will soon be heard in Britain's cinemas once more. In the final phase of a centenary year that has seen the late playwright's work revived on stages across the country, next month will bring not just a celebration of his theatrical legacy at Chichester Festival Theatre, but the release of a new film version of The Deep Blue Sea – the play regarded by many as Rattigan's masterpiece.
Director Terence Davies is due to show his film, which stars Rachel Weisz as the troubled Hester Collyer, at the Toronto Film Festival before its British premiere in November.
Davies, the acclaimed experimental screenwriter and filmmaker from Liverpool behind Distant Voices,...
- 8/22/2011
- by Vanessa Thorpe
- The Guardian - Film News
Anna Chancellor has rarely been cast in lead roles. That hasn't stopped her starring in the current BBC drama The Hour and a double bill of Rattigan and David Hare at Chichester. But life didn't always run this smoothly...
A couple of weeks ago, Anna Chancellor was watching daytime television when her Poirot episode came on ("Every actor's been on Poirot," she says). She had recorded it in 1993 but had not seen it since and now she was quite taken aback. She plays Virginie Mesnard, a raven-haired Belgian who asks the great detective to investigate the death of a young politician (the case turns, national stereotypes be damned, on a tainted box of chocolates) and in the process becomes the unrequited love of his life. Poirot takes to wearing a lavender brooch that Virginie gave him in her memory.
"I never played the romantic lead ever," she says. "I knew...
A couple of weeks ago, Anna Chancellor was watching daytime television when her Poirot episode came on ("Every actor's been on Poirot," she says). She had recorded it in 1993 but had not seen it since and now she was quite taken aback. She plays Virginie Mesnard, a raven-haired Belgian who asks the great detective to investigate the death of a young politician (the case turns, national stereotypes be damned, on a tainted box of chocolates) and in the process becomes the unrequited love of his life. Poirot takes to wearing a lavender brooch that Virginie gave him in her memory.
"I never played the romantic lead ever," she says. "I knew...
- 8/20/2011
- by Tim Lewis
- The Guardian - Film News
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,...
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,...
- 7/16/2011
- by Dennis Barker
- The Guardian - Film News
Another week has gone by and as usual, Criterion has put up some choice content on their page on Hulu Plus. Using the service more than ever to stream films that I’ve seen before and don’t own or have never even heard of until Criterion put them up, I’ve valued Hulu Plus more than ever. I also want to thank all those who have used our referral link to sign up. It pays for this article to keep going so please, sign up here to keep it going with no hiccups whatsoever. But you want to know what new and amazing films are streaming. So without further adieu…
It’s Alain Resnais’ birthday so you should be streaming his film Night And Fog (1955), a very harsh and intense depiction of the Holocaust, one of the first truthful accounts around.
Also you can stream the film we’re covering this week,...
It’s Alain Resnais’ birthday so you should be streaming his film Night And Fog (1955), a very harsh and intense depiction of the Holocaust, one of the first truthful accounts around.
Also you can stream the film we’re covering this week,...
- 6/4/2011
- by James McCormick
- CriterionCast
Unlike his famous contemporary, Asquith struggled with the transition to sound – but his partnership with Terence Rattigan produced classic cinema and theatre
When Alfred Hitchcock, interviewed by François Truffaut, lamented the "photographs of people talking" that passed for movies, he was voicing an old commonplace. Even before the coming of sound Anthony Asquith, the director with whom Hitchcock was then routinely compared (both were young, promising, stylistically similar, socially distinct) complained of films comprising "alternate close-ups of two men talking across a table with subtitles giving their conversation sandwiched in between. That is not a real film, but a photographed play."
For the cognoscenti cinema meant movement, rhythm, Battleship Potemkin. In a word, montage. Asquith was there in February 1929 when Vsevolod Pudovkin, in front of an English audience after the London debut of The End of St Petersburg, described the "Kuleshov experiment". Its inspirational conclusion, in Asquith's paraphrase, was that...
When Alfred Hitchcock, interviewed by François Truffaut, lamented the "photographs of people talking" that passed for movies, he was voicing an old commonplace. Even before the coming of sound Anthony Asquith, the director with whom Hitchcock was then routinely compared (both were young, promising, stylistically similar, socially distinct) complained of films comprising "alternate close-ups of two men talking across a table with subtitles giving their conversation sandwiched in between. That is not a real film, but a photographed play."
For the cognoscenti cinema meant movement, rhythm, Battleship Potemkin. In a word, montage. Asquith was there in February 1929 when Vsevolod Pudovkin, in front of an English audience after the London debut of The End of St Petersburg, described the "Kuleshov experiment". Its inspirational conclusion, in Asquith's paraphrase, was that...
- 4/7/2011
- The Guardian - Film News
Last week this column featured a review from the most recent Eclipse Series release, Silent Naruse. Sharp-eyed, or perhaps somewhat obsessive-compulsive, readers may have taken note that I had not yet made any mention in this space of the Eclipse set that preceded Silent Naruse. There’s a simple reason for that: I was waiting for the late 50s/early 60s films included in Eclipse Series 25: Basil Dearden’s London Underground to come up in the meticulous chronological sequence I use in my main blog, Criterion Reflections, where I’ve just recently advanced to the movies of 1959. (And with that disclosure, those same sharp-eyed readers are now wondering just who I am to call anyone else “somewhat obsessive-compulsive.”) Well, since I’ve moved past the double feature of First Man Into Space and Corridors of Blood, that point in the timeline has been reached. This week, I’m buffing up and polishing Sapphire.
- 4/4/2011
- by David Blakeslee
- CriterionCast
The 2010 L.A. Stage Alliance Ovation Award nominees were announced last night at The Autry National Center for the American West in Griffith Park. Several winners of last year's Ovation Awards, including Jake Broder and Vanessa Claire Smith, presented the 2010 nominations. The Theatre at Boston Court was the most highly nominated theater company, garnering 17 nods. Among the company's nominated productions are "Oedipus el Rey" and "The Twentieth Century Way."Center Theatre Group followed closely behind with 16 nominations, while the Geffen Playhouse took 12. The brand-new "Ovation Honors," a series of awards recognizing theater excellence outside of the standard categories, have been given out for the first time this year. Ovations Honors awardees include "The Who's Tommy" for video design and "The Gogol Project" for music composition for a play. The complete list of nominees is as follows:Best SeasonCabrillo Music Theatre"The Andrews Brothers""Cinderella""Guys and Dolls""Little Shop of Horrors...
- 10/19/2010
- backstage.com
The 41st annual Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards, honoring distinguished achievements in theatre during 2009 in L.A. and vicinity, were handed out in a warm and entertaining ceremony at the Colony Theatre in Burbank, Calif., March 22, co-hosted by two very funny men: critic Wenzel Jones and actor-singer Jason Graae.Actors and other theater artists from many local companies—large and small—took home the coveted plaques. Rogue Artists Ensemble's offbeat "Gogol Project"—encompassing three works by Nikolai Gogol, using puppetry, masks, music, and digital projection—led the field with four awards. Earning three awards apiece were Roger Bean's hit jukebox musical "Life Could Be a Dream," the Matrix Theatre's premiere drama "Stick Fly," Pacific Resident Theatre's revival of "The Browning Version," and the Ahmanson Theatre's Broadway-bound musical "Minsky's."The Production award was shared by "Life Could Be a Dream," "Stick Fly," and the Mark Taper Forum/Donmar Warehouse staging...
- 3/23/2010
- backstage.com
The Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle, which consists of L.A.-area theater journalists in various media, has announced nominees and special awards for its 41st annual awards ceremony, to be held March 22 at Burbank’s Colony Theatre.Awards will be given in 20 categories, honoring excellence in theater over the past year. Eight special awards will include a special citation to actor Kirk Douglas for his lifetime contribution to Los Angeles theatre, as well as the new Milton Katselas Award for career or special achievement in direction, sponsored by Camelot Artists.The 2009 Special Awards include:– The Ted Schmitt Award for the world premiere of an outstanding new play: Julie Marie Myatt for the bittersweet domestic drama "The Happy Ones," which premiered at South Coast Repertory. The award is accompanied by an offer to publish and a $1,000 check funded by Samuel French, Inc.– The Polly Warfield Award for an excellent season...
- 1/25/2010
- backstage.com
A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929) Direction: Anthony Asquith Screenplay: Anthony Asquith; from a story by Herbert Price Cast: Norah Baring, Uno Henning, Hans Schlettow Uno Henning in A Cottage on Dartmoor Very little in a career overview of filmmaker Anthony Asquith prepares a viewer for the brilliant thriller A Cottage on Dartmoor, released by Kino, which he both wrote (from a story by Herbert Price) and directed. Asquith’s wonderful but straightforward adaptations of Pygmalion (1938) and The Browning Version (1951) — and, to a lesser extent, The Importance of Being Earnest (1952) and Libel (1959) — do not really speak to the dynamics of this 1929 film. The director fully embraces the tale of obsessive love in terms of silent [...]...
- 10/30/2009
- by Doug Johnson
- Alt Film Guide
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