"Actor: John Brown"

• The Stranger | DVD | (18/03/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £4.99

  The Stranger, according to Orson Welles, "is the worst of my films. There is nothing of me in that picture. I did it to prove that I could put out a movie as well as anyone else." True, set beside Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, or even The Trial, The Stranger is as close to production-line stuff as the great Orson ever came. But even on autopilot Welles still leaves most filmmakers standing. The shadow of the Second World War hangs heavy over the plot. A war crimes investigator, played by Edward G Robinson, tracks down a senior Nazi, Franz Kindler, to a sleepy New England town where he's living in concealment as a respected college professor. The script, credited to Anthony Veiller but with uncredited input from Welles and John Huston, is riddled with implausibilities: we're asked to believe, for a start, that there'd be no extant photos of a top Nazi leader. The casting's badly skewed, too. Welles wanted Agnes Moorehead as the investigator and Robinson as Kindler, but his producer, Sam Spiegel, wouldn't wear it. So Welles himself plays the supposedly cautious and self-effacing fugitive--and if there was one thing Welles could never play, it was unobtrusive. What's more, Spiegel chopped out most of the two opening reels set in South America, in Welles' view, "the best stuff in the picture". Still, the film's far from a write-off. Welles' eye for stunning visuals rarely deserted him and, aided by Russell Metty's skewed, shadowy photography, The Stranger builds to a doomy grand guignol climax in a clock tower that Hitchcock must surely have recalled when he made Vertigo. And Robinson, dogged in pursuit, is as quietly excellent as ever. On the DVD: not much in the way of extras, except a waffly full-length commentary from Russell Cawthorne that tells us about the history of clock-making and where Edward G was buried, but precious little about the making of the film. Print and sound are acceptable, but though remastering is claimed, there's little evidence of it. --Philip Kemp

• West Of The Divide / Riders Of Destiny / Sagebrush Trail | DVD | (13/10/2003) from £8.97   |  Saving you £4.02 (30.90%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Contains the titles: 'Riders Of Destiny' 'West Of The Divide' and 'The Sagebrush Trail'. In Riders Of Destiny a secret agent is sent in to restore the water supply to a group of ranchers. In West Of The Divide a man pretends to be a killer and in Sagebrush Trail a wrongly convicted cowboy searches for a murderer.

• West Of The Divide | DVD | (11/08/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  A man searching for his brother pretends to be a killer to gather information more quickly...

• Maestro's from the Vaults - Abba Collection Box Set | DVD | (12/11/2012) from £40.48   |  Saving you £-15.49 (N/A%)   |  RRP £24.99

  Experience Abba’s extraordinary journey, with this ultimate Limited Edition DVD collectors, and take a journey beyond the glitz and the glamour, to the heart of what made Abba so special. Disc 1: World's Greatest Albums ArrivalThe Arrival album took their song writing and studio achievements to new level. To help tell the story of the making of Arrival, the programme enlists the help of a team of respected music industry figures, including Emma Jones and DJ Mick Brown. Also on hand to analyse the album’s wonderful songs, is gifted musician Neal McArthur who deconstructs the playing style of Benny Anderson. Disc 2: World's Greatest Albums - The Gold SinglesDrawing on rare ABBA performances from TV and film archives around theworld, this is the first ever independent film review of ABBA Gold. The film draws on the reflections of a team of leading critics, musicologists and working musicians to produce the most authoritative and comprehensive review of a landmark in popular music. Disc 3: Rock Milestones - The VisitorsThe Visitors was the final album by the Swedish pop legends and reflects the turbulent emotions the band was going through at the time. Drawing on rare footage of Abba in performance, this penetrating film critically assesses the album. Disc 4 and Disc 5: Abba Rock Case Studies - Part 1 and 2This two part series provides fans of the band with a perfect historical career retrospective. We hear from John Tobler and Jeff Rose, two publicists for the band who give unique insights into what it was like to work with one of the hottest properties the pop industry has ever seen.

• Great Pianists Of The Bell Telephone Hour | DVD | (30/08/2002) from £23.09   |  Saving you £1.90 (7.60%)   |  RRP £24.99

  Great Pianists Of The Bell Telephone Hour (1959 - 1967)

• Edward G. Robinson - Scarlet Street / The Stranger | DVD | (18/03/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  In a way, Scarlet Street is a remake. It's taken from a French novel, La Chienne (literally, "The Bitch") that was first filmed by Jean Renoir in 1931. Renoir brought to the sordid tale all the colour and vitality of Montmartre; Fritz Lang's version shows us a far harsher and bleaker world. The film replays the triangle set-up from Lang's previous picture, The Woman in the Window, with the same three actors. Once again, Edward G Robinson plays a respectable middle-aged citizen snared by the charms of Joan Bennett's streetwalker, with Dan Duryea as her low-life pimp. The plot closes around the three of them like a steel trap. This is Lang at his most dispassionate. Scarlet Street is a tour de force of noir filmmaking, brilliant but ice-cold. The Stranger, according to Orson Welles, "is the worst of my films. There is nothing of me in that picture". But even on autopilot Welles still leaves most filmmakers standing. A war crimes investigator, played by Edward G Robinson, tracks down a senior Nazi to a sleepy New England town where he's living in concealment as a respected college professor. Welles wanted Agnes Moorehead as the investigator and Robinson as the Nazi Franz Kindler, but his producer, Sam Spiegel, wouldn't wear it. So Welles himself plays the supposedly cautious and self-effacing fugitive--and if there was one thing Welles could never play, it was unobtrusive. Still, the film's far from a write-off. Welles' eye for stunning visuals rarely deserted him and, aided by Russell Metty's skewed, shadowy photography, The Stranger builds to a doomy grand guignol climax in a clocktower that Hitchcock must surely have recalled when he made Vertigo. And Robinson, dogged in pursuit, is as quietly excellent as ever. On the DVD: sparse pickings. Both films have a full-length commentary by Russell Cawthorne which adds the occasional insight, but is repetitive and not always reliable. The box claims both print have been "fully restored and digitally remastered", but you'd never guess. --Philip Kemp

• John Wayne - Western Hero (Flatpack) | DVD | (24/09/2012) from £7.51   |  Saving you £7.48 (99.60%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Hell Town: Dare Rudd takes a liking to his cattleman cousin Tom's girlfriend, who asks Tom to hire Dare to head the big cattle drive. Dare loses the money for the drive to card sharps, but Tom wins it back, and Dare saves Tom's life. Frontier Horizon: The Three Musquiteers convince a group of settlers to exchange their current property for land which, unbeknownst to our good guys, is going to be worthless. They are captured before they can warn the ranchers. The Lucky Texan...

• The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies - Limited Edition Steelbook 3D & 2D Blu-ray (Includes Ultraviolet Copy) | Blu Ray | (20/04/2015) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies brings to an epic conclusion the adventures of Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) and the Company of Dwarves. The Dwarves of Erebor have reclaimed the vast wealth of their homeland, but now must face the consequences of having unleashed the terrifying Dragon, Smaug, upon the defenseless men, women and children of Lake-town.As he succumbs to dragon-sickness, the King Under the Mountain, Thorin Oakenshield, sacrifices friendship and honor in his search for the legendary Arkenstone. Unable to help Thorin see reason, Bilbo is driven to make a desperate and dangerous choice, not knowing that even greater perils lie ahead.An ancient enemy has returned to Middle-earth. Sauron, the Dark Lord, has sent forth legions of Orcs in a stealth attack upon the Lonely Mountain. As darkness converges on their escalating conflict, the races of Dwarves, Elves and Men must decide-unite or be destroyed. Bilbo finds himself fighting for his life and the lives of his friends as five great armies go to war.

• West Of The Divide | DVD | (23/02/2004) from £15.98   |  Saving you £-2.99 (-23.00%)   |  RRP £12.99

  A man searching for his brother pretends to be a killer to gather information more quickly...

• The Desert Trail | DVD | (11/08/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  A rodeo star joins his gambling friend in a few adventures including being unjustly accused of robbery. They fight to prove their innocence by travelling to Poker City to uncover the truth.

• Lawless Frontier / Neath The Arizona Skies / Texas Terror | DVD | (11/08/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  The Lawless Frontier: John Wayne plays a wrongly accused cowboy who must prove his innocence by taking on the real criminals... Neath The Arizona Skies: An Indian princess has to be protected from a gang of outlaws... Texas Terror: Sheriff John Higgins quits and goes into prospecting after he thinks he has killed his best friend in shooting it out with robbers...

• The Stranger | DVD | (18/10/1999) from £4.99   |  Saving you £8.00 (160.32%)   |  RRP £12.99

  The legendary story that hovers over Orson Welles' The Stranger is that he wanted Agnes Moorehead to star as the dogged Nazi hunter who trails a war criminal to a sleepy New England town. The part went to Edward G. Robinson, who is marvellous, but it points out how many compromises Welles made on the film in an attempt to show Hollywood he could make a film on time, on budget and on their own terms. He accomplished all three, turning out a stylish if unambitious film noir thriller, his only Hollywood film to turn a profit on its original release. Welles stars as unreformed fascist Franz Kindler, hiding as a schoolteacher in a New England prep school for boys and newly married to the headmaster's lovely if naive daughter (Loretta Young). Welles, the director, is in fine form for the opening sequences, casting a moody tension as agents shadow a twitchy low-level Nazi official skulking through South American ports and building up to dramatic crescendo as Kindler murders this little man, the lovely woods becoming a maelstrom of swirling leaves that expose the body he furiously tries to bury. The rest of the film is a well designed but conventional cat-and-mouse game featuring an eye-rolling performance by Welles and a thrilling conclusion played out in the dark clock tower that looms over the little village. --Sean Axmaker

• Headhunter | DVD | (02/04/2007) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £2.99

  Spoiled teenager Kevin is given a boat for his birthday and loads it up with beer to take his friends out on the open water. When Kevin is brutally eaten by a shark the rest of the stoner crew find themselves lost far out at sea. As tense rivalries threaten to tear the gang apart they soon come to experience a series of inexplicable paranormal events that slowly reveal the horrifying truth of the boat's history.

• The Cowboys | HD DVD | (17/03/2008) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £25.99

  The Cowboys gave John Wayne one of his juiciest late-career roles as a leather-tough rancher who deserted by his regular help hires 11 greenhorn schoolboys for a cattle drive across 400 treacherous miles.

• STAR PACKER | DVD | (30/07/2001) from £6.82   |  Saving you £6.17 (47.50%)   |  RRP £12.99

  john wayne star packer

• Hell Town | DVD | (21/01/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  A carefree cowhand finally wants to settle down but before he can he gets involved with rustlers...

• The Dirty Dozen | DVD | (31/05/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £49.99

  A model for dozens of action films to follow, this box-office hit from 1967 refined a die-hard formula that has become overly familiar, but it's rarely been handled better than it was in this action-packed World War II thriller. Lee Marvin is perfectly cast as a down-but-not-out army major who is offered a shot at personal and professional redemption. If he can successfully train and discipline a squad of army rejects, misfits, killers, prisoners, and psychopaths into a first-rate unit of specialised soldiers, they'll earn a second chance to make up for their woeful misdeeds. Of course, there's a catch: to obtain their pardons, Marvin's band of badmen must agree to a suicide mission that will parachute them into the danger zone of Nazi-occupied France. It's a hazardous path to glory, but the men have no other choice than to accept and regain their lost honor. What makes The Dirty Dozen special is its phenomenal cast including Charles Bronson, Donald Sutherland, Telly Savalas, George Kennedy, Ernest Borgnine, John Cassavetes, Richard Jaeckel, Jim Brown, Clint Walker, Trini Lopez, Robert Ryan, and others. Cassavetes is the Oscar-nominated standout as one of Marvin's most rebellious yet heroic men, but it's the whole ensemble--combined with the hard-as-nails direction of Robert Aldrich--that makes this such a high-velocity crowd pleaser. The script by Nunnally Johnson and Lukas Heller (from the novel by E.M. Nathanson) is strong enough to support the all-star lineup with ample humour and military grit, so if you're in need of a mainline jolt of testosterone, The Dirty Dozen is the movie for you. --Jeff Shannon

• Abbott And Costello - Laugh-A-Thon | DVD | (21/04/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Abbott & Costello Classic Comedies three-disc collector's set consists of oddments from the latter days of their career that have fallen into public domain; which means you don't get their best routines or classiest productions, and indeed find the double act doing fairly tired schtick as Costello is chubbily chicken-hearted and Abbott grumpily money-grubbing. Africa Screams is a 1949 safari parody, with Costello running away yelping from sundry alligators, gorillas (including a Kong-sized giant), cannibals ("Chief have sweet tooth for little fat man") and lions amid backlot jungles as Abbott competes with stock villains for a fortune in diamonds. Jack and the Beanstalk, from 1952, finds the duo attempting to sell themselves as children's entertainers in a Wizard of Oz-influenced fairytale book-ended by sepia modern-day segments. The magical story unfolds in wonderfully gruesome cheap colour with some of the worst musical numbers ever committed to film ("he's perpendicular-la-la") as Jack the Clod (Costello) and Mr Dinkelpuss the Butcher (Abbott) climb the beanstalk and plod around the Giant's lair until the story runs out. Possibly the most interesting item is the third disc, which offers an episode of the Colgate Comedy Hour (aka The Abbott and Costello Show) from the 1950s. It shows the pair doing live routines closer to their original vaudeville act than their film roles (including an amazingly cruel bit in which Abbott slaps Costello every time he says the word "tin"). A loose plot about Latin American intrigue, with Lou hired to stand in for an assassination target "El Presidente", makes room for speciality guest stars ranging from child xylophonist Baby Mistin to four starlets (including Jane Russell and Rhonda Fleming) harmonising on a "Happy Easter" medley. Best of all, and now funnier than the comedy, are original hard-sell ads for household products like "Ajax, the foaming action cleanser" and "Halo, the shampoo that glorifies your hair". --Kim Newman

• Successful Coaching American Football-Running Backs | DVD | (14/04/2008) from £33.73   |  Saving you £-1.74 (N/A%)   |  RRP £31.99

  A valuable tool for all high school junior high and youth league coaches and players. Be a champion and learn from the legends of the game! Learn Drills & Mechanics Winning Techniques & Strategies & Develop Mental Toughness! This comprehensive 10-volume series teaches fundamental coaching techniques drills on the field demonstrations game footage and winning championship philosophy. Learn from these outstanding coaches who believe in the fundamentals and know how to teach them. This Series Features: Joe Paterno John Cooper Frank Beamer Boyd Epley Bobby Bowden Phil Fulmer Frank Solich Bob Toledo Mack Brown Tom Osborne This program teaches the fundamental techniques drills and championship philosophy. Learn how to improve your technique and learn from one of the legends of the game. Frank Solich has been associated with Nebraska football for the past 20 years. He was selected in 1998 to replace Tom Osborn as head coach. Solich has helped develop numerous All-Americans and All-Conference running backs and has played an important role in Nebraska's tremendous success.

• West Of The Divide / Blue Steel / Man From Utah | DVD | (11/08/2003) from £15.98   |  Saving you £-2.99 (-23.00%)   |  RRP £12.99

  West Of The Divide: A man searching for his brother pretends to be a killer to gather information more quickly... Blue Steel: A band of ruthless outlaws try to force out the townsfolk in a small community after gold is discovered there. But one brave man stands in their way in this tense film one of John Wayne's best early works... The Man From Utah: A John Wayne classic set at the rodeo where the Duke has to deal with the corrupt patron who has killed some