Sad news this weekend. The inimitable Googie Withers has died at the age of 94 after a long and varied career in film, theatre and television. Although she worked with directors like Alfred Hitchcock (a small part in The Lady Vanishes [1938]), Michael Powell (a member of the resistance in One of Our Aircraft Is […]
When my friend Howard Curle offered to write a guest post for my blog, I was happy to accept. Howard has taught film here in Winnipeg for many years, initially at the University of Manitoba and now at the University of Winnipeg, and we occasionally get together to watch and discuss movies from my collection […]
Christopher Smith is an English director whose first feature, Creep (2004), was an attempt to emulate Gary Sherman’s Raw Meat (aka Deathline, 1973) and Douglas Cheek’s C.H.U.D. (1984); it had a woman trapped overnight in the London Underground, pursued by the mutant remnants of some medical experiments in a hidden lab, but it never quite […]
British TV has always been primarily a writer’s medium; since the ’50s, the biggest stars have tended to be the writers, with writers’ names attached possessively to projects. Television production was often built around writers such as Alan Bennett, Alan Bleasdale and Dennis Potter, who was one of the biggest, with each of his new […]
Alexander Mackendrick (1912-1993), who was born in the United States but grew up in Scotland from the age of five, made only nine features between 1949 and 1969, when he took up a teaching position at the California Institute of the Arts. But within that limited output, he managed to create several masterpieces, including his […]
In my rather long film-going life, I have often been out of sync with generally held opinions. I didn’t much like the Star Wars movies when they transformed popular culture, I found myself laughing at Titanic while surrounded in a crowded theatre by sniffling people who bought into it completely … So it doesn’t surprise […]
British director Michael Reeves was only 25 when he died of a drug overdose in 1969. This fact has placed quite a burden on the work which he left behind – three low-budget features made in three years. For a long time fans in particular of his final film, Witchfinder General, lamented the loss of […]
One of the real pleasures of the BFI’s Flipside series of DVDs and Blu-Rays is the sheer eclecticism of the choices being made available. The series’ mandate is to present fringe works, movies outside the mainstream. So far, we have gained access to early thrillers by Pete Walker (Man of Violence, The Big Switch); three […]
By coincidence, having recently finally caught up with Robert Young’s Vampire Circus, I’ve just come across a short film he wrote and directed six years later for the British government’s Central Office of Information. Twenty Times More Likely (1978) is a motorcycle safety film included in the BFI’s fourth volume of COI documentaries – Stop! […]
I recently got to see the final film produced by Ealing Studios, The Siege of Pinchgut (1959), a tense hostage drama made far from the cozy English countryside and villages the studio is often associated with. Directed and co-written by Harry Watt, starring an American (Aldo Ray) and shot on location in Australia, it seems […]