"Actor: Louise BROOKS"

• Diary of a Lost Girl | Blu Ray | (24/11/2014) from £12.49   |  Saving you £7.50 (60.05%)   |  RRP £19.99

  A masterwork of the German silent cinema whose reputation has only increased over time Diary of a Lost Girl [Tagebuch einer Verlorenen] traces the journey of a young woman from the pit of despair to the moment of personal awakening. Directed with virtuoso flair by the great G. W. Pabst Diary of a Lost Girl represents the final pairing of the filmmaker with screen icon Louise Brooks mere months after their first collaboration in the now-legendary Pandora’s Box [Die Büchse der Pandora]. Brooks plays Thymian Henning an unprepossessing young woman seduced by an unscrupulous and mercenary character employed at her father’s pharmacy (played with gusto by Fritz Rasp the degenerate villain of such Fritz Lang classics as Metropolis Spione and Frau im Mond). After Thymian gives birth to his child and rejects her family’s expectations for marriage the baby is stripped from her care and Thymian enters a purgatorial reform school that seems less an institute of higher learning than a conduit for fulfilling the headmistress’s sadistic sexual fantasies. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present this glorious restoration of an iconic German film for the first time anywhere on Blu-ray. Special Features New high-definition 1080p presentation of the film on the Blu-ray Original German intertitles with optional English subtitles Piano score of Javier Pérez de Aspeitia New and exclusive video essay by filmmaker and critic David Cairns 40-PAGE BOOKLET including writing by Louise Brooks Lotte Eisner Louelle Interim Craig Keller and R. Dixon Smith

• One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest | DVD | (12/04/1999) from £6.90   |  Saving you £7.09 (102.75%)   |  RRP £13.99

  One of the key movies of the 1970s, when exciting, groundbreaking, personal films were still being made in Hollywood, Milos Forman's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest emphasised the humanistic story at the heart of Ken Kesey's more hallucinogenic novel. Jack Nicholson was born to play the part of Randle Patrick McMurphy, the rebellious inmate of a psychiatric hospital who fights back against the authorities' cold attitudes of institutional superiority, as personified by Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). It's the classic antiestablishment tale of one man asserting his individuality in the face of a repressive, conformist system--and it works on every level. Forman populates his film with memorably eccentric faces, and gets such freshly detailed and spontaneous work from his ensemble that the picture sometimes feels like a documentary. Unlike a lot of films pitched at the "youth culture" of the 1970s, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest really hasn't dated a bit, because the qualities of human nature that Forman captures--playfulness, courage, inspiration, pride, stubbornness--are universal and timeless. The film swept the Academy Awards for 1976, winning in all the major categories (picture, director, actor, actress, screenplay) for the first time since Frank Capra's It Happened One Night in 1931. --Jim Emerson

• PANDORA'S BOX | Blu Ray | (16/09/2024) from £16.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Eureka Entertainment to re-issue G. W. Pabst's sordid melodrama PANDORA'S BOX, one of silent cinema's great masterworks, starring Louise Brooks. Presented on Blu-ray from a new restoration as part of The Masters of Cinema Series. Available from 16 September 2024.In a role intended at one point for Marlene Dietrich (The Blue Angel), 22 year-old Louise Brooks (Diary of a Lost Girl), with her fragile beauty and iconic dark bob hairstyle, gives a performance decades ahead of its time that immortalised her as an icon. Largely condemned and censored upon its initial release for its daring treatment of sexuality and female desire, Brooks' understated yet erotically charged performance endures as among the most modern of the silent era.Adapted from a pair of plays by Frank Wedekind, Pandora's Box tells the story of sex worker Lulu, a free spirit whose open sexuality breeds chaos in its wake. When Lulu's latest lover, the newspaper editor Dr Ludwig Schon (Fritz Kortner, The Hands of Orlac), announces plans to leave her to marry a more respectable woman, Lulu is devastated. Cast in a musical revue written by Schon's son, Alwa (Francis Lederer, The Return of Dracula), Lulu seduces Schon once more - only to have their tryst exposed, and Schon's plans for a more socially acceptable marriage shattered. Left with no choice but to marry Lulu, Schon meets with tragedy on their wedding night. Lulu stands trial for the incident, facing years of imprisonment. With the aid of her former pimp (Carl Goetz, Tom Sawyer), an infatuated lesbian countess (Alice Roberts, The Merry Widower) and Alwa, she flees toward a fate of increasing squalor and peril, finally crossing paths one Christmas Eve with Jack the Ripper.Reviled and bowdlerised at its debut, Pandora's Box has since been recognised as one of the masterpieces of early German cinema. A sordid melodrama made with great style, it affirms G. W. Pabst as a daring and important director and Louise Brooks as one of cinema's most exquisite and distinctive performers. The Masters of Cinema series is proud to present Pabst's masterpiece in a new restoration on Blu-ray.1080p HD presentation on Blu-ray from a definitive 2K digital restoration | Optional English subtitles | Orchestral Score by Peer Raben | Audio commentary by critic Pamela Hutchinson | The New Woman & The Jazz Age: The Dangerous Feminine in Pandora's Box - Visual appreciation by author and critic Kat Ellinger | Godless Beasts - Video essay by David Cairns | Lulu in Wonderland - Video essay by Fiona Watson | Restoring Pandora's Box - Interview with Martin Koerber | PLUS: A 28-page collector's booklet featuring an essay by film critic and historian Imogen Sara Smith, author of Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City

• PANDORA'S BOX | Blu Ray | (30/10/2023) from £34.29   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (2 Disc Special Edition) | DVD | (07/08/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £13.99

  A nice rest in a state mental hospital beats a stretch in the pen right? Randle P. McMurphy (Nicholson) a free-spirited con with lightning in his veins and glib on his tongue fakes insanity and moves in with what he calls the ""nuts"". Immediately his contagious sense of disorder runs up against numbing routine. No way should guys pickled on sedatives shuffled around in bathrobes when the World Series is on. This means war! On one side is McMurphy. On the other is soft-spoken Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) among the most coldly monstrous villains in film history. At stake is the fate of every patient on the ward...

• One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest | DVD | (30/10/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £13.99

  A big Oscar winner in 1975, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest still holds up remarkably well. Ken Kesey's novel, an allegory of repression and rebellion set in a mental hospital in the early 1960s, is cannily adapted by Czech director Milos Forman into a comedy drama with a cool, unassuming, near-documentary look. Jack Nicholson has his most jacknicholsonian role as Randle P McMurphy, a livewire troublemaker who unwisely cons his way out of prison and into a mental institution without realising he has switched from serving a sentence with a release date to being committed until adjudged sane by the same people he is winding up on a daily basis. Louise Fletcher, in a career-defining turn, is Nurse Ratched, the soft-spoken sadist who represents the worst type of matronly authoritarianism and clashes with Randle all down the line. Taking another look at the picture after all these years, it's a surprise that all the unknown actors who seemed like real mental patients have graduated to becoming prolific character actor stars: Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd, Vincent Schiavelli, Brad Dourif, the late Will Sampson, Sidney Lassick, Michael Berryman. Unlike many Best Picture Oscar winners, this deals with profound subject matter without seeming self-important: Forman's approach and all-round great acting make it play as a small character story as well as a Big Statement about the human condition. Full marks also for Jack Nitzsche's musical saw-based score. On the DVD: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest comes to DVD in a two-disc special edition with a great-looking anamorphic 1.85:1 print and 5.1 Dolby Digital soundtrack, plus tracks in French and Italian and optional subtitles in half a dozen languages. Disc 2 has the trailer, about 13 minutes of deleted scenes (mostly from the first third of the film, and all pretty good) and a making-of retrospective documentary with interesting material from producers Michael Douglas (who inherited the rights from Kirk) and Saul Zaentz, Forman, screenwriter Bo Goldman and many cast-members (though not Nicholson). There's also a commentary track by Forman, Douglas and others which repeats a few things from the documentary but also goes into more scene-specific detail about the development and shooting. --Kim Newman

• Pandora's Box | DVD | (24/06/2002) from £17.68   |  Saving you £2.31 (13.07%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Made at the very end of the silent era, Pandora's Box is one of the last flowerings of German cinema's greatest decade. It also marked the highpoint of two careers: Austrian director GW Pabst and American actress Louise Brooks. A merge of two linked plays by the decadent German playwright Frank Wedekind, it's the story of Lulu, the archetypal femme fatale (the same plays served as source for Alban Berg's masterly 1935 opera). At once sensual and innocent, a force of uninhibited sexuality, Lulu brings ruin on all her lovers both male and female, and ultimately upon herself. Hollywood never knew what to do with Brooks who, with her fierce intelligence and her open delight in sex, refused to play the coy flappers then in fashion. In Pabst, whose genius, she wrote, "lay in getting to the heart of a person", she found the director she needed, and he brought out her a screen persona with a depth of eroticism that's still breathtaking to see. The film features some of the finest German acting talent of the period--Fritz Kortner, Franz Lederer--but it's Brooks' luminous performance that rivets the eye and makes her a great screen icon. Though the action is nominally set in the late-19th century--Lulu ends up in a shadowy London where she encounters Jack the Ripper--Pandora's Box breathes the gamey air of the Weimar Republic, vividly captured by Günther Krampf's pungent photography. This release runs well over two hours and includes, for the first time in decades, over 30 minutes of cut footage, restoring the film to something very close to Pabst's original masterpiece. On the DVD: Pandora's Box on DVD is a clean, crisp transfer in the classic 4:3 ratio, and the mono soundtrack brings out all the detail of Peer Rubens' Kurt Weill-inflected score, stylishly performed by the Kontraste Ensemble. Dialogue intertitles can be read in either English or German. We also get an outstanding 60-minute documentary, Looking for Lulu, about Brooks' life and career: warmly narrated by Shirley MacLaine, it features excerpts from an interview with Brooks from 1976. --Philip Kemp

• Diary of a Lost Girl | DVD | (21/05/2007) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  A masterwork of the German Silent Cinema whose reputation has only increased over time Diary of a Lost Girl (Tagebuch einer Verlorenen) traces the journey of a young woman from the pit of despair to the moment of personal awakening. Directed with virtuoso flair by the great G. W. Pabst Diary of a Lost Girl represents the final pairing of the filmmaker with screen icon Louise Brooks mere months after their first collaboration in the now-legendary Pandora's Box. Brooks plays Thymiane Henning an unprepossessing young woman seduced by an unscrupulous and mercenary character employed at her father's pharmacy (played with gusto by Fritz Rasp the degenerate villain of such Fritz Lang classics as Metropolis Spione and Frau im mond). After Thymiane gives birth to the child and subsequently rejects her familys expectations for marriage the baby is stripped from her care and Thymiane is relegated to a purgatorial reform school that functions less as an educational institution and more like a conduit for fulfilling the headmistress's sadistic libidinal fantasies. When Thymiane at last manages to escape and learn the fate of her child she despondently enters a brothel - where she nonetheless flourishes emotionally and sexually and life begins anew.

• Louise Brooks: Looking for Lulu | DVD | (29/06/1999) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.77