"Actor: Evelyn Ellis"

• The Lady From Shanghai | DVD | (18/08/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Legend has it that Orson Welles more or less conned studio boss Harry Cohn over the phone into making The Lady from Shanghai by grabbing the title from a nearby paperback. In any case, this is one of Welles's most fascinating works, a bizarre tale of an Irish sailor (Welles) who accompanies a beautiful woman (Rita Hayworth) and her handicapped husband (Everett Sloane) on a cruise and becomes involved in a murder plot. But never mind all that (the aforementioned legend also claims that Cohn offered a reward to anyone who could explain the plot to him). The film is really a dream of Welles's driving preoccupations both on and off-screen at the time: the elusiveness of identity, the mystique of things lost, and most of all the director's faltering marriage to Hayworth. In the tradition of male filmmakers who indirectly tell the story of their love affairs with leading ladies, Welles tells his own, photographing Hayworth as a deconstructed star, an obvious cinematic creation, thus reflecting, perhaps, a never-satisfied yearning that leads us back to the mystery of Citizen Kane. --Tom Keogh

• The Joe Louis Story | DVD | (15/03/2004) from £6.73   |  Saving you £-1.74 (-34.90%)   |  RRP £4.99

  A biopic of one of the first true greats of boxing in the 20th century this film is interspersed with footage from the real Joe Louis in action. The fact that Louis is treated on equal par with the white characters in the story led to the film being banned in certain parts of southern America when originally released!