"Actor: Dirk Harvey"

• Darling | DVD | (30/03/2015) from £7.99   |  Saving you £10.00 (125.16%)   |  RRP £17.99

  "It's far too pleased with itself. I wince when I see it now", director John Schlesinger observes of his 1965 film, Darling. You can tell why he's embarrassed. Looking back, his swinging 60s' satire about a model (Julie Christie) so keen to get ahead that she ditches her husband and betrays a succession of boyfriends looks hideously dated. With its self-consciously hip dialogue and unnecessary voice-over, the screenplay by Frederic Raphael (who also wrote Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut) doesn't help. Most of the men Christie encounters, whether Laurence Harvey's slick businessman (who can't pass a mirror without preening himself in it) or Dirk Bogarde's neurotic TV pundit (who has delusions of literary grandeur), are as narcissistic as she is. Although this seems to be a cautionary tale about slick, superficial London media and fashion folk, it's obvious that the filmmakers are half in love with the world they're pretending to lampoon. The visual gags--rich, society matrons at a charity event gorging themselves on food or Christie's poster being plastered over an image of a starving child--are heavy-handed in the extreme. Still, Christie is tremendous in the role which established her as an international star (she won an Oscar). However shallow and selfish her character seems, we can't help but warm to her. --Geoffrey Macnab

• Darling | Blu Ray | (30/03/2015) from £10.99   |  Saving you £12.00 (109.19%)   |  RRP £22.99

  "It's far too pleased with itself. I wince when I see it now", director John Schlesinger observes of his 1965 film, Darling. You can tell why he's embarrassed. Looking back, his swinging 60s' satire about a model (Julie Christie) so keen to get ahead that she ditches her husband and betrays a succession of boyfriends looks hideously dated. With its self-consciously hip dialogue and unnecessary voice-over, the screenplay by Frederic Raphael (who also wrote Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut) doesn't help. Most of the men Christie encounters, whether Laurence Harvey's slick businessman (who can't pass a mirror without preening himself in it) or Dirk Bogarde's neurotic TV pundit (who has delusions of literary grandeur), are as narcissistic as she is. Although this seems to be a cautionary tale about slick, superficial London media and fashion folk, it's obvious that the filmmakers are half in love with the world they're pretending to lampoon. The visual gags--rich, society matrons at a charity event gorging themselves on food or Christie's poster being plastered over an image of a starving child--are heavy-handed in the extreme. Still, Christie is tremendous in the role which established her as an international star (she won an Oscar). However shallow and selfish her character seems, we can't help but warm to her. --Geoffrey Macnab

• Darling | DVD | (05/03/2007) from £9.94   |  Saving you £6.05 (60.87%)   |  RRP £15.99

  A beautiful but amoral model sleeps her way to the top of the London fashion scene at the height of the Swinging Sixties

• Harum Scarum (Elvis Presley) | DVD | (04/02/2005) from £17.25   |  Saving you £-3.26 (N/A%)   |  RRP £13.99

  ""Go East Young Man "" sings show-biz star and martial arts wiz Johnny Tyronne. To hear is to obey. A clandestine group called the Assassins kidnaps Johnny and whisks him to a remote Arabian realm isolated from the world for 2 000 years. Sheik meets desert chic when Elvis Presley plays Johnny and teams with former Miss America Mary Ann Mobley (Presley's Girl Happy co-star) in this tuneful frolic shot on the original 1925 Cecil B. DeMille set from King of Kings and directed by movie musical veteran Gene Nelson. The kidnappers want Johnny to use his fighting finesse to kill a desert king. Johnny a hitman? No he's a hit man a top singer of songs like Kismet Harem Holiday and nine more all part of the jammin' swashbucklin' fun of Harum Scarum.