"Actor: Jeanne De Casalis"

• Jamaica Inn | DVD | (11/06/2007) from £4.49   |  Saving you £5.50 (122.49%)   |  RRP £9.99

  It's generally acknowledged that the Master of Suspense disliked costume dramas and Jamaica Inn--a rip-roaring melodrama drawn from a Daphne du Maurier pot-boiler, set in 1820s Cornwall--is about as costumed as they come. So what was he doing directing it? Killing time, essentially. In 1939 Hitchcock was due to leave Britain for Hollywood, but delays Stateside left him with time on his hands. Never one to sit idle, he agreed to make one picture for Mayflower Productions, a new outfit formed by actor Charles Laughton and émigré German producer Erich Pommer. An innocent young orphan (the 19-year-old Maureen O'Hara in her first starring role) arrives at her uncle's remote Cornish inn to find it a den of reprobates given to smuggling, wrecking and gross overacting. They're all out-hammed, though, by Laughton at his most corseted and outrageously self-indulgent as the local squire to whom Maureen runs for help. Since his star was also the co-producer, Hitch couldn't do much with the temperamental actor. He contented himself with adding a few characteristic touches--including a spot of bondage (always a Hitchcock favourite), and the chief villain's final spectacular plunge from a high place--and slyly sending up the melodramatic absurdities of the plot. Jamaica Inn hardly stands high in the Master's canon, but it trundles along divertingly enough. Hitchcock fanatics will have fun comparing it with his two subsequent--and far more accomplished--Du Maurier adaptations, Rebecca and The Birds. --Philip Kemp

• Cottage To Let | DVD | (17/04/2019) from £8.85   |  Saving you £1.14 (12.88%)   |  RRP £9.99

  A wartime cottage on a Scottish estate becomes a focus of attention when not only the new tenant but a London evacuee and a downed fighter pilot all move in. The interest may not be unconnected with the fact that the landowner is also a key British military inventor. For a start the butler is obviously a Scotland Yard flatfoot.

• Nell Gwyn | DVD | (14/06/2004) from £4.31   |  Saving you £8.68 (201.39%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Anna Neagle stars as the humble orange seller Nell Gwyn who captures the heart of a king in this bawdy and controversial British historical drama. In a 17th century England revelling in its freedom after years of Puritan domination King Charles II (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) promises to restore to the nation ""its old good nature its old good manners and its old good humour"". Wild and free Nell Gwyn captures his imagination like no other woman. She becomes his mistress and in effect th