"Actor: Fontaine"

• Letter From An Unknown Woman | DVD | (18/09/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  In turn of the century Vienna a dashing man arrives at his flat instructing his manservant that he will leave before morning: the man is Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan) formerly a concert pianist planning to leave Vienna to avoid a duel. His servant gives him a letter from an unknown woman. In the letter he experiences the lifelong passion of Lisa Berndle for him: first as a girl who was his neighbor; next as a young woman who in secret has his child; then as a mature woman who meets him again and abandons husband and son to be with him. Each time he does not remember who she is or that they have ever met. By morning he has finished the letter and her husband awaits satisfaction..... This haunting tale is perhaps cinema's greatest unrequited love story and is considered to be one of Ophuls' great masterpieces.

• A Damsel in Distress | DVD | (18/07/2011) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Nice work if you can get it! Fred Astaire glides through this effervescent comedy of confused courtship written by master humorist PG Wodehouse. Fred stars as Jerry Halliday an American in England who's lured to Tottleigh castle by a love letter from lovely Lady Alyce Marshmorton (Joan Fontaine). But it wasn't actually Lady Alyce who wrote the letter and - what's more - she's set her heart on someone else! Determined to win her hand Jerry goes a-wooing - if only his helpful staff didn't keep making his life so difficult. Featuring some of George Gershwin's finest songs (I Can't Be Bothered Now Things are Looking Up) A Damsel In Distress is one of Fred Astaire's funniest and very best loved films.

• King Of The Kickboxers | DVD | (27/12/2004) from £24.99   |  Saving you £-19.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  The murder of his brother has left Jake moody and frustrated. The killer was a martial arts champion who is now asking for volunteers to star in his new kickboxing movie. Jake decides to take him up on his invitation....

• Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea | DVD | (01/08/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Renowned producer Irwin Allen (The Master Of Disaster) produces and directs an all-star cast including Joan Fontaine Barbara Eden Peter Lorre and Frankie Avalon. The stunning visual effects and breathtaking underwater photography make this one of the most respected sci-fi adventure classics of all time. A routine scientific expedition to the North Pole turns into a race to save all mankind when a radiation belt in space causes a fiery inferno on Earth. Admiral Nelson (Walt

• The Lost Weekend | Blu Ray | (25/06/2012) from £31.98   |  Saving you £-7.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £22.99

  "I'm not a drinker--I'm a drunk." These words, and the serious message behind them, were still potent enough in 1945 to shock audiences flocking to The Lost Weekend. The speaker is Don Birnam (Ray Milland), a handsome, talented, articulate alcoholic. The writing team of producer Charles Brackett and director Billy Wilder pull no punches in their depiction of Birnam's massive weekend bender, a tailspin that finds him reeling from his favorite watering hole to Bellevue Hospital. Location shooting in New York helps the street-level atmosphere, especially a sequence in which Birnam, a budding writer, tries to hock his typewriter for booze money. He desperately staggers past shuttered storefronts--it's Yom Kippur, and the pawnshops are closed. Milland, previously known as a lightweight leading man (he'd starred in Wilder's hilarious The Major and the Minor three years earlier), burrows convincingly under the skin of the character, whether waxing poetic about the escape of drinking or screaming his lungs out in the D.T.'s sequence. Wilder, having just made the ultra-noir Double Indemnity, brought a new kind of frankness and darkness to Hollywood's treatment of a social problem. At first the film may have seemed too bold; Paramount Pictures nearly killed the release of the picture after it tested poorly with preview audiences. But once in release, The Lost Weekend became a substantial hit, and won four Oscars: for picture, director, screenplay, and actor. --Robert Horton

• Ute Lemper - The Thousand And One Lives Of Ute Lemper - A Trilingual Portrait | DVD | (21/01/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The Thousand and One Lives of Ute Lemper, Valerie Esposito's 1998 documentary on the idiosyncratic singer and actress, is a fascinating study of an uncompromising performer who defies categorisation. Every facet of her career is represented here: the award-winning musical star of Chicago; the cabaret artist who sinks her teeth into Weill like nobody since Lenya; the avant-garde pop singer who has worked with modern composers from Elvis Costello to Philip Glass; and the muse who inspired Michael Nyman to write her a song cycle. But Lemper can be an acquired taste. She works at show songs with an intensity and individuality that set her apart from mainstream musical actors. The result can be so stylised that the emotional truth she strives for becomes self-conscious and even disengaged. There are some unanswered questions here--why, for example, does she no longer have any contact with Nyman?--but elsewhere her frankness in discussing her influences and her approach to work combines with the glimpses of her family life to provide a useful portrait of this extremely modern, versatile show woman. On the DVD: The Thousand and One Lives of Ute Lemper is presented in 4:3 picture format and has the quality of a top-class television production. The PCM stereo sound reproduces the various textures of Lemper's live and recorded work to good effect. There are no extras but the booklet notes are comprehensive. The running time stated on the cover is misleading: 145 minutes is actually the combined total of the English, German and French versions of the documentary.--Piers Ford

• Operation Condor | DVD | (19/11/2001) from £6.81   |  Saving you £6.18 (90.75%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Jackie Chan appears as Condor an adventurer hired to track down a lost hoard of gold buried in the North African desert during the Second World War. Our hero is joined by three women in a race to get to the gold and outwit their evil pursuers.

• Suspicion | DVD | (21/04/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Repeated viewings can't dispel the shock of the final scene of Suspicion, Hitchcock's classic 1941 romantic mystery--a brief but disorientating confrontation that suddenly inverts the heroine's mounting conviction that she's married a murderer, forcing us to reconsider virtually every scene and line of dialogue that's preceded it. It's a masterful coup de grâce for the director, who has built a puzzle around the corrosive power of suspicion, threaded with deft ambiguities that toy with dramatic conventions and character archetypes in nearly every frame. As embodied by Joan Fontaine, who nabbed an Oscar in this second outing with the director, Lina McLaidlaw is a buttoned-up, bookish heiress whose prim exterior conceals longings for a more engaged emotional life. Her solution materialises in the darkly handsome Johnnie Aysgarth, a gambler, womaniser and spendthrift who flirts, then pursues, and soon marries her. As Aysgarth, Cary Grant is both irresistible and sinister, capable of deceit and petty theft, as well as grander designs on his bride's impending fortune. Lina's passion for Johnnie is clouded by each new revelation about his apparent dishonesty, from clandestine gambling to real-estate development schemes; more troubling are clues implicating him in the death of his best friend, and the prospect that Johnnie may be slowly poisoning Lina herself. By the time we see him ascending a darkened staircase with a suspicious glass of milk, an image made all the more indelible through the spectral glow the director captures in the glass, the evidence seems damning indeed. In fact, even as Hitchcock stacks the deck against Johnnie, and takes full advantage of Grant's skill at conveying such menace, the director also dots his landscape with visual clues to Lina's own neurotic (and erotic) obsessions. The final scene forces us to re-evaluate her behaviour while leaving enough of a cloud over Johnnie to rob him, and us, of a complete exoneration. It's a wicked, unsettling payoff to a brilliantly executed thriller. --Sam Sutherland

• Fantastic Voyage/Voyage to Bottom of the Sea | DVD | (02/06/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Irwin Allen's visually impressive but scientifically silly Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea updates 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as the world's most advanced experimental submarine manoeuvres under the North Pole while the Van Allen radiation belt catches fire, giving the concept "global warming" an entirely new dimension. As the Earth broils in temperatures approaching 170 degrees F, Walter Pidgeon's maniacally driven Admiral Nelson hijacks the Seaview sub and plays tag with the world's combined naval forces on a race to the South Pacific, where he plans to extinguish the interstellar fire with a well-placed nuclear missile. But first he has to fight a mutinous crew, an alarmingly effective saboteur, not one but two giant squid attacks and a host of design flaws that nearly cripple the mission (note to Nelson: think backup generators). Barbara Eden shimmies to Frankie Avalon's trumpet solos in the most form-fitting naval uniform you've ever seen; fish-loving Peter Lorre plays in the shark tank; gloomy religious fanatic Michael Ansara preaches Armageddon; and Joan Fontaine looks very uncomfortable playing an armchair psychoanalyst. It's all pretty absurd, but Allen pumps it up with larger-than-life spectacle and lovely miniature work. Fantastic Voyage is the original psychedelic inner-space adventure. When a brilliant scientist falls into a coma with an inoperable blood clot in the brain, a surgical team embarks on a top-secret journey to the centre of the mind in a high-tech military submarine shrunk to microbial dimensions. Stephen Boyd stars as a colourless commander sent to keep an eye on things (though his eyes stay mostly on shapely medical assistant Raquel Welch), while Donald Pleasence is suitably twitchy as the claustrophobic medical consultant. The science is shaky at best, but the imaginative spectacle is marvellous: scuba-diving surgeons battle white blood cells, tap the lungs to replenish the oxygen supply and shoot the aorta like daredevil surfers. The film took home a well-deserved Oscar for Best Visual Effects. Director Richard Fleischer, who had previously turned Disney's 1954 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea into one of the most riveting submarine adventures of all time, creates a picture so taut with cold-war tensions and cloak-and-dagger secrecy that niggling scientific contradictions (such as, how do miniaturised humans breathe full-sized air molecules?) seem moot. --Sean Axmaker

• Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) DVD | DVD | (18/07/2011) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Hoping to expose fatal flaws in the legal system a writer (Dana Andrews Laura) places a bet that he can have himself convicted of murder on purely circumstantial evidence by planting false clues at a crime scene before sensationally revealing his trick at the last minute. However a series of disastrous coincidences leaves him facing execution - and a frantic search for the true killer begins. Fritz Lang's ingenious thriller (his last Hollywood film and the companion-piece to While The City Sleeps) also stars Academy Award winner Joan Fontaine (Rebecca) and Arthur Franz (The Caine Mutiny).

• Young At Heart | DVD | (23/03/2009) from £9.98   |  Saving you £3.01 (30.16%)   |  RRP £12.99

  "Young @ Heart" is a chorus like no other. With ages ranging between 75 and 93, this rowdy bunch of seniors based in Northampton, Massachusetts, have won sensational reviews performing rock classics all over the world!

• Born to Be Bad | DVD | (09/05/2011) from £20.00   |  Saving you £-7.01 (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  When Christabel (Joan Fontaine) comes to live with her cousin Donna Foster (Joan Leslie) she fools everyone with her sugary exterior. But soon the calculating, rapacious Christabel begins to sow seeds of discontent between Donna and her wealthy fianc Curtis (Zachary Scott) by convincing Curtis that his fianc is a gold-digger. When their engagement is broken and Donna leaves for London, Christabel tricks Curtis into marrying her. But it is only his money that Christabel is passionate about because she is in love with Nick (Robert Ryan), a rugged writer who loves her in return, but hates her for what she had done and who she is.

• Bilitis | DVD | (10/04/2006) from £9.97   |  Saving you £4.02 (40.32%)   |  RRP £13.99

  The story takes place in England around the beginning of the 20th Century. Sensually exploring a young schoolgirl's awakening to love during her summer vacation. The young girl, Bilitis, is shocked when she witnesses her friend Melissa and her husband making love. Melissa encourages Bilitis to discover the aspect of love by seeing a young photographer, Lucas. He tries to make love to Bilitis, and she rebuffs him and runs to Melissa, who in comforting Bilitis finds herself responding to her kisses. But she tells Bilitis there must be nothing more between them. Bilitis discovers Melissa's husband is with another woman, so she decides to find another man for Melissa. Doing so Bilitis is realising she is not yet ready herself for adulthood.The English photographer David Hamilton has achieved unusual visual beauty in making his first motion picture enhanced by the music of Francis Lai.

• Out Of Control | DVD | (03/09/2001) from £6.49   |  Saving you £-3.50 (N/A%)   |  RRP £2.99

  One Of Them Is Destined To Die. 50 year old Eddie begins a relationship with a young woman when she shows up at his diner. He doesn't realise that she's running from a sinister past...

• Hitchcock - Rebecca / Spellbound / The Paradine Case / Notorious | DVD | (22/10/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £49.99

  The four classic films included in this Box Set are: 'Rebecca' 'Spellbound' 'The Paradine Case' 'Notorious

• The Affairs of Susan | DVD | (21/03/2016) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Oscar-winning screen idol Joan Fontaine (Suspicion, Rebecca) stars as Susan Darrell, a stunning but naïve actress from New York who is about to get married. Though she only met her fiancé Richard (Walter Abel) a few weeks previously, the lovebirds are set on tying the knot and throw a party to celebrate. Mingling amongst their guests, Richard finds three former because of Susan's and starts probing them on how they met. All the men clearly still carry a torch for Susan, but each of them knows a very different woman not so naïve after all. Broadway big-shot Roger (George Brent), Millionaire Mike (Don DeFore) and novelist Bill (Dennis O'Keefe) each give Richard a conflicting portrait of his fiancée. With their wedding rapidly approaching, Richard is left wondering exactly what kind of woman he will be facing at the altar William A. Seiter (Laurel and Hardy Sons of the Desert) directs an all-star cast in this sharp, witty comedy-drama as chaotic and enchanting as Susan herself. Also stars Byron Barr.

• Wizards of the Lost Kingdom - uncut Fassung (in HD neu abgetastet) | Blu Ray | (04/07/2025) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• The Bigamist | DVD | (22/10/2007) from £13.48   |  Saving you £-0.49 (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  The Bigamist goes where no movie has gone before; it gives us a bigamist as the central character and manages to make us sympathise with his plight. Harry Graham is a salesman who longs to spend time with his wife played by Joan Fontaine but she's a workaholic businesswoman who rarely finds time in her schedule for her husband. While on a sales trip Graham befriends a waitress played by Ida Lupino and as friendship turns to love Graham calls and teases wife about meeting another woman; we see a quick flash of fear in her eyes but then she immediately changes the conversation in a fake chirpy tone and pretends nothing bothers her. The well-detailed characters bring the drama of The Bigamist to life. The waitress is a tough but compassionate character much more full of life than Fontaine's Eisenhower era wife. Significantly we also discover that the waitress is much more fertile than Fontaine - who cannot bear children. This subtle critique of '50s families and the sterility of home life when business becomes more important than family communication makes The Bigamist just as relevant today as when it was made in 1953.

• Air Crash Investigation Collection (Seasons 1-18) - 48-DVD Box Set ( Mayday ) ( Air Emergency (Air Disasters) ) | DVD | (15/11/2019) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• Unternehmen Feuergürtel (Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea) | Blu Ray | (13/07/2017) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A