Just as he's about to get out of the game entirely, a drug dealer gets drawn back in to the doublecrossing world of the London mafia in this refreshing British thriller.
The title of 1969's Carry On Again Doctor says it all; almost the same cast playing similar characters to their previous year's outing in Carry On Doctor. This one rejoices in the alternative title "Bowels are Ringing". But the enduring popularity of these films owes almost everything to their basic formula and if it occasionally seems a bit cobbled together, all the old favourites are still here. This time, the setting moves from the National Health Service to the private sector and even stretches as far as the "Beatific Islands" when Jim Dale is exiled to a missionary clinic for his overzealous attention to the female patients--who include Barbara Windsor of course. There, orderly Sid James rules the roost of the clinic with his harem of local women. Trivia addicts can spot Mrs Michael Caine in a brief role as a token dusky maiden. The second half of the Talbot Rothwell script picks up nicely as the characters converge on the private hospital back in England where Dale rakes in the money with a bogus weight loss treatment. Hattie Jacques is in fine form as Matron, Kenneth Williams fascinates with his usual mass of mannerisms and Joan Sims is stately as the Lady Bountiful figure financing most of the shenanigans. It's a tribute to their professionalism that we can still lose ourselves in some of the creakiest old jokes around. --Piers Ford
Armchair Theatre was ITV's flagship drama anthology series. Initially screened between 1956 and 1973, it was hugely popular, with viewing figures occasionally reaching twenty million, and became a byword for quality in televised drama.Pioneering, immensely influential and sometimes challenging in its content, the series consistently drew upon a wide range of talent. Armchair Theatre became a showcase for the post-war generation of British writers who sought to place sensitive social topics - in particular the British class system - under the microscope. Throughout, the series featured a number of powerful, award-winning plays, and its lasting influence was a testament to producer Sydney Newman's passionate belief in television's potential to bring high-quality drama to the viewing public. This collection brings together a further eight plays, initially broadcast between 1970 and 1974. Featuring scripts by Donald Churchill (Spooner's Patch), P.J. Hammond (Sapphire and Steel) and Roger Marshall, whose play ties into an episode of his most memorable series Public Eye, the programmes include accomplished performances from, among others, John Thaw, Anton Rodgers, Kenneth Haigh, Bill Maynard, Susannah York, Gordon Jackson and Warren Clarke.
The time is present day. The scene is a boxing-match dinner at a deluxe London hotel. At the head of the top table sits Gangster.
A group of music students decide to share a flat together which results in a series of amusing adventures.
Jack Ryan as a young covert CIA analyst uncovers a Russian plot to crash the U.S. economy with a terrorist attack.
A quiet seaside town is engulfed by a thick fog in this chilling horror remake.
Who Dares Wins starring Lewis Collins Edward Woodward and Richard Widmark is an uncompromising and exciting action thriller which dramatises the activities of the SAS. When a British government undercover agent is assassinated a radical anti-nuclear group is held responsible. SAS agent Skellen is called upon to infiltrate the group and put an end to their terrorist activities. However the group raids the American embassy and Skellen from within the residence must use his skill and courage to support and guide his SAS colleagues. It will require the full force of the world's most lethal fighting unit to save the lives of several high-ranking hostages...
The complete series of the BBC comedy.
An Englishman’s home may well be his castle, but it would be a very different castle indeed if Germany had won WWII. Set in an alternate 1970s on an Earth where Germany won the Second World War and is now occupying England, Peter Ingram (Kenneth More) is the lead writer of a popular soap opera set in Blitz-era London. Ingram’s life sees little adventure. He knowingly turns a blind eye to the realities of local Nazi rule, opting for the easy life. After the inclusion of a Jewish character in his television series is met with strong objection, his eyes finally begin to open. And when the woman he loves (Isla Blair) reveals that she was born a Jew, he has a difficult decision to make. Will Peter join his lover in the underground resistance or continue to lodge his head firmly in the sand? Also starring Kathleen Byron (Saving Private Ryan, The Elephant Man) and Nigel Havers (A Passage to India) and directed by Paul Ciappessoni (Angels, Softly Softly, Doomwatch, Doctor Finlay’s Casebook).
The Enemy Below and Sink the Bismarck! form a double feature of semi-classic CinemaScope-era WWII naval dramas sailing from the Fox vault onto DVD for the first time. In The Enemy Below Robert Mitchum and Curt Jurgens are respectively captains of a US destroyer and a German U-boat whose vessels come into conflict in the South Atlantic. Both are good men with a job to do, the script noting Jurgens' distaste for Hitler and the Nazis and engaging our sympathy with the German sailors almost as much as the Americans. Made at the height of the Cold War of the 1950s, the film delivers a liberal message of cooperation wrapped inside some spectacular action scenes and a story that builds to a tense and exciting, moving finale. Sink the Bismarck! is a British film dating from three years later and adopts a more documentary style in recounting the race against time to track and destroy what was in 1941 the most powerful battleship then built, the Bismarck. Shot in gleaming black and white so as to make use of genuine WWII archive footage, the film is held together by the introduction of a fictional naval officer in overall command of the operation, played excellently by Kenneth More. To add some human warmth he is given a tentative romantic subplot with a WREN played by the luminous Dana Wynter. Though initially slow to gather steam, Sink the Bismarck! finally delivers an epic, thoroughly horrifying conclusion. On the DVD: The Enemy Below and Sink the Bismarck! come as a two-disc set with multiple language and subtitle options, including English for Hard of Hearing, but no extras other than the original trailers. These are presented at 16:9 and 2.35:1. Both are rather faded, but are fine examples of an era when watching the previews didn't guarantee a migraine. Both films are anamorphically enhanced in their original 2.35:1 CinemaScope, and, bar a little grain in some shots and the inevitably inferior archive footage, the picture quality is excellent. The Enemy Below boasts sturdy three-channel sound (left, front, right) while Sink the Bismarck! is in very well mixed stereo. --Gary S Dalkin
The discovery of valuable archaeological remains beneath a holiday caravan site is the cause of the mayhem in Carry On Behind. That said, the sub-"plots", which involve Windsor Davies and Jack Douglas as a pair of randy fishermen, a couple sharing their caravan with an outsize dog (no, it's not like that...), the obligatory giggling dolly birds and so on are all typical grist to the Carry On mill. The location is of course as bleakly miserable as such a place could ever be and will bring a frisson of familiarity to many Brits. Widely held to be one of the best in the series, the film would in fact have been a rather lacklustre effort were it not for the superbly over-the-top presence of Elke Sommer, whose performance as the strapping assistant to archaeologist Roland Crump (Kenneth Williams) seems like a wonderful hybrid of Ute Lemper and Charlie Dimmock. --Roger Thomas
Ten years after leaving university Peter and his best friends reunite for a New Year's party to end all parties. Having weathered most of life's triumphs and disasters there doesn't seem to be much left to shock them - but Peter has a special surprise that will test their friendship to the utmost. A wonderfully wicked comedy about life love and other natural disasters.
Based on the only surviving record of the infamous 1942 Wannsee Conference, the BBC/HBO produced Conspiracy reconstructs the two-hour meeting during which leading members of the SS and the Nazi government made definitive plans for the genocide of Europe's Jews. Sixteen men sit around a table and politely discuss the mechanics and ramifications of murdering millions. As SS General Reinhard Heydrich, overall architect of the Final Solution, Kenneth Branagh is brilliant, charming, manipulative and threatening, a cultured man seemingly without a soul. As his aid, SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann, Stanley Tucci is the incarnation of the banality of evil, an efficient and self-effacing bureaucrat in a fine performance marred only by a hint of the actor's American accent. Colin Firth is a powerful foil for Branagh as Dr Wilhelm Stuckart, author of Nazi Germany's race laws and a stickler for the rule of law, no matter how insane the law may have become; while David Threlfall makes a striking impression as the one man who comes closest to taking a moral stand, Dr Wilhelm Kritzinger. Directed in an elegantly controlled style by Frank Pierson, Conspiracy is the Janus face of the 1957 classic 12 Angry Men and a chilling companion to the BBC/HBO Churchill drama The Gathering Storm (2002). On the DVD: Conspiracy comes to DVD with text profiles of the four leading actors and the director and two featurettes, one running two minutes, the other four, neither of which is any more than an electronic press-kit. Sound is clear, perfectly good Dolby Surround, while the picture, though anamorphically enhanced at 16:9, is no more than adequate. --Gary S Dalkin
Titles Comprise: 1. Carry On Spying: Fearless agent Desmond Simpkins and James Bind aided and abetted by the comely Agent Honeybutt and Agent Crump battle against the evil powers of international bad guys STENCH and their three cronies. 2. Carry On Cleo: Ancient British slaves save Caesar (Kenneth Williams) from assassination in Rome 50 B.C. Meanwhile Mark Antony (Sid James) romances Egyptian Empress Cleopatra (Amanda Barrie). Revolting Britons include Kenneth Connor and Charles Hawtrey while Warren Mitchell plays a partner in the slave-trading firm Markus & Spencius. 3. Carry On Screaming: Who is stealing virgins and turning them into shop-window mannequins? What is the meaning of the gigantic hairy finger found at the scene of the latest crime? What clues can the mad professor or his deathly pale and impossibly buxom sister provide to the hopeless Detective Bung? 4. Carry On Cowboy: Sid James is on top form as the Rompo kid an outlaw who shakes up the sleepy residents of Stodge City. Kenneth Williams is the puritanical judge and Jim Dale plays Marshall P. Knutt a hapless plumber mistakenly sent to clean up the town.
A box set of classic film gems from Ealing studios Includes: 1. The Ladykillers (Dir. Alexander Mackendrick 1955) 2. The Man in The White Suit (Dir. Alexander Mackendrick 1951) 3. The Magnet (Dir. Charles Frend 1950) 4. Scott of The Antarctic (Dir. Charles Frend 1948)
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