"Actor: Raymond Ma"

• Laxdale Hall / The Glen is Ours | DVD | (05/04/2010) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Laxdale Hall a rarely seen British comedy receiving its first release to home entertainment is a 1952 film directed by John Eldridge and starring Ronald Squire Kathleen Ryan Raymond Huntley Prunella Scales Fulton Mackay Roddy McMillan Jameson Clark and Jean Colin with Rikki Fulton as a poacher in his first film role. The few residents of Laxdale who own cars are refusing to pay their road fund licence because of the poor state of the only road which links them to the rest of Scotland. A parliamentary delegation including Samuel Pettigrew M.P. (Raymond Huntley) and Andrew Flett (Fulton Mackay) is dispatched to the Scottish Highlands to quell the rebellion! Along the way they encounter resistance from school teacher Morag McLeod (Prunella Scales in her first film) and her roguish dad Roderick McLeod (Jameson Clark). With a brief appearance by Rikki Fulton in his film debut as a salmon poacher there's plenty of action and laughter. Filmed amongst the beautiful scenery of Applecross Laxdale Hall is not to be missed. Also features The Glen Is Ours (1946) a timeless parable of politicians at odds with the will of their electorate. Recently de-mobbed Hector Andrews takes to the hustings to stop Cadisburn Glen being sold and converted from a beauty spot into an amusement park. With Ealing stalwarts Edie Martin and Anthony Baird and Sheila Latimer recently seen in BBC Scotland's Still Game.

• Joan Crawford Collection | DVD | (05/10/2009) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Titles Comprise: Mildred Pierce: Joan Crawford delivers a critically acclaimed performance as Mildred Pierce a woman clawing her way to success to provide her daughter with everything she lacks. No sacrifice is too much - ending her middle class marriage climbing to the top of a male-dominated business world and marrying a man she doesn't love - but is murder a step too far? Grand Hotel: Oscar-winning drama with an all-star cast exploring the interwoven relationships of the residents of a plush Berlin hotel... Humoresque: Glamorous socialite Helen Wright (Joan Crawford) takes what she wants clothes alcohol men uses them up and tosses them aside. Then she meets brilliant young violinist Paul Boray (John Garfield). But this is one toy she can't break. Instead her love for Paul brings Helen to the breaking point. In this acclaimed and profound exploration of desire Crawford makes Helen a rich layered character torn between selfless love and selfish impulses. Garfield matches her as the driven genius. Possessed: She loves him when he goes away for months. She loves him when he refuses to marry her. But when callow David Sutton chooses to marry someone else Louise Howell's love for him takes a darker turn. Give her a gun and she'll love him to death. Joan Crawford reteams with producer Jerry Wald of her Academy Award winning 'Mildred Pierce' and claims a 1947 Best Actress Oscar nomination for her portrayal of tempestuous mentally unstable Louise. The Damned Don't Cry: It's a man's world. And Ethel Whitehead learns there's only one way for a woman to survive in it: be as tempting as a cupcake and as tough as a 75-cent steak. In the first of three collaborations with director Vincent Sherman Joan Crawford brings hard-boiled glamour and simmering passion to the role of Ethel who moves from the wrong side of the tracks to a mobster's mansion to high society one man at a time. Some of those men love her. Some use her. And one a high-rolling racketeer abuses her. When the racketeer murders his rival in Ethel's swanky living room she flees a sure murder rap right back to the poverty she thought she had escaped. And this time there may not be a man to pick up the pieces of her shattered life.

• My New Gun | DVD | (10/03/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  The life of a young suburban housewife is transformed through a series of mishaps when her husband gives her a gun...

• Life And Death of Colonel Blimp, The / A Matter Of Life And Death | DVD | (17/03/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Two masterpieces of British cinema are paired here--Powell and Pressburger's first Technicolor triumph, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) and their even more ambitious A Matter of Life and Death (1946). Both pictures are transcendent examples of the filmmakers' craft, and remain models of great cinema long after their original wartime propaganda brief has expired. Based on a famously satirical cartoon strip that mocked outmoded attitudes of fair play at a time of "total war", Blimp subsequently became notorious as the film Churchill tried to have banned. Because the War Office objected to the screenplay, they refused to allow P&P's first choice for the role, Laurence Olivier, and the duo cast unknown stage actor Roger Livesey in his place. It is Livesey's sympathetic performance that transforms Clive "Sugar" Candy from an object of satire to one of warm affection, effectively reversing the film's intended message about old-fashioned decency versus wartime pragmatism. Anton Walbrook is a profound presence in a role that mirrored the actor's own plight as a German in Britain, while Deborah Kerr is a living leitmotif in the film, playing no fewer than three distinct but deliberately related roles. Briefed by the Ministry of Information to make a film that would foster Anglo-American relations in the post-war period, the duo, known as "the Archers", came up with A Matter of Life and Death, an extravagant and extraordinary fantasy in which David Niven's downed pilot must justify his continuing existence to a heavenly panel because he has made the mistake of falling in love with an American girl (Kim Hunter) when he really should have been dead. National stereotypes are lampooned as the angelic judges squabble over his fate. In a neat reversal of expectations, the heaven sequences are black and white, while earth is seen in Technicolor. Daring cinematography mixes monochrome and colour, incorporates time-lapse images, and even toys with background "time freezes" 50 years before The Matrix. Roger Livesey and Raymond Massey lead the fine supporting cast. On the DVD: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and A Matter of Life and Death are presented in reasonably sharp 4:3 ratio with good mono sound. Blimp comes with a 25-minute documentary feature that tells us nothing revelatory about making the film, but has good new interviews with cinematographer Jack Cardiff (then an apprentice) and eloquent admirer Stephen Fry. Text biographies and stills are also included. Life and Death has no extras. --Mark Walker

• Read Or Die | DVD | (18/08/2003) from £12.95   |  Saving you £10.03 (100.70%)   |  RRP £19.99

  A sinister plot is afoot and only one schoolteacher - a special agent with an affinity for rare books can stop it. She is Ms. Yomiko Readman - better known to her colleagues in Section A of Library Special Operations as ""Agent Paper"". Someone is bent upon procuring a rare lost Beethoven manuscript and has enlistedia few of history's most extraordinary personalities through stolen DNA to aid in the endeavor. Readman and her fellow super-powered operatives must tangle with the likes

• Nine Dead Gay Guys | DVD | (08/11/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  The hilarious story of two lads from Ireland as they stumble their way through the London gay underworld in search of gainful employment. When one of the lads accidentally shags a punter (Steven Berkoff) to death they are forced to look for ""work"" elsewhere. It is then that they discover the myth of ""The Bread in the Bed"" - a huge bed full of money. A gloriously politically incorrect caper ensues as they search for this elusive bed resulting in the unfortunate demise of ""Nine Dead G

• The Woman In The Window | DVD | (12/01/2009) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  The Woman In The Window

• The Playboy of the Western World | Blu Ray | (10/05/2021) from £8.05   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Brian Desmond Hurst adapts and directs JM Synge's scandalous comedy in what was to be the final film of a highly successful career stretching back to the mid-1930s. Featuring stunning cinematography of County Kerry by multiple Oscar-winner Geoffrey Unsworth and a memorable soundtrack from influential composer Seán Ó Riada, The Playboy of the Western World stars Siobhán McKenna and Gary Raymond alongside a host of players from Dublin's Abbey Theatre. It is featured here as a brand-new High Definition remaster from original film elements in its original theatrical aspect ratio. Weary and dishevelled, Christy Mahon stumbles into a remote inn on the Irish coast and tells anyone who'll listen how he's murdered his tyrannous father with a spade. As he enthrals the locals and charms the girls, his tale grows in its telling... until the day Christy's father turns up and he's not as dead as expected! SPECIAL FEATURES: The Man Who Played the Playboy: 2021 interview with Gary Raymond Theatrical trailer Image gallery

• Chiller Theatre Features | DVD | (03/02/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  It's difficult sometimes to fathom how compilers think. This Chiller Theatre threesome consists of two classic silent horror films, plus a low-budget B-movie from the early 1960s. The connection? You decide! Yet these are films that belong in any self-respecting collection, and this package is a good way of acquiring them. Of those featuring Lon Chaney, it's the original 1923 The Hunchback of Notre Dame that comes across best. Chaney's grotesquerie is shot-through with pathos, and Patsy Ruth Miller's Esmeralda has enduring freshness. Wallace Worsley handles crowd scenes and cathedral stunts with aplomb, and there's an atmospheric "posthumous" soundtrack, though anyone looking for accuracy in the depiction of medieval French society is in for a shock. 1925's The Phantom of the Opera is slow-moving and uneventful by comparison, with Rupert Julian's direction never escaping the narrow Gothic trappings of the novel. Chaney cranks (or is that camps?) up his range of gestures to the limit, and Mary Philbin is an eye-catching heroine, but the denouement in the Paris sewers seems endless--with looped extracts of Schubert and Brahms as a hardly appropriate soundtrack. Cut to 1962, and The Carnival of Souls--made in Kansas for under $100,000--is an undeniable cult classic. Herk Harvey sustains the increasingly surreal narrative with ease, Candace Hilligoss is striking (if a tad gauche) as the young organist caught on the cusp of this world and the next, and Gene Moore's organ soundtrack is a masterly backdrop for the motley assemblage of ghouls who pursue her around the seaside pier in a memorable closing sequence. On the DVD: Chiller Theatre is very acceptably remastered--with 1.33:1 aspect ratio and 12 chapter headings per film--and decently if minimally packaged. --Richard Whitehouse

• PTU - Police Tactical Unit | DVD | (23/07/2007) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Into the perilous night... Set against a TsimShaTsui that never sleeps a stolen police gun triggers a suspenseful chain of events. Tracking down the missing gun before dawn cop LO first gets his car vandalized then his butt kicked. Suddenly he is wedged between two gangs on the brink of bloodbath while staving off investigations by both the Anti-vice Squad and Homicidal Unit who are embroiled in their own turf war. His only lifeline is a maverick team of Police Tactical Un

• Perry Mason - Series 2 | DVD | (14/09/2009) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £34.99

  Raymond Burr stars as the defense attorney who never lost a case in the landmark series Perry Mason. In every episode Mason matches wits with his courtroom adversary D.A. Hamilton Burger (William Talman). Every time Mason - aided by devoted secretary Della Street (Barbara Hale) and loyal private eye Paul Drake (William Hopper) - uncovers evidence that clears his client of murder.

• Alexei Sayle's Stuff - Series 2 | DVD | (23/01/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  This DVD features complete second series of the popular Liverpudlian comedian in his pomp; a winning combination of Pythonesque surrealism and 'alternative' comedy philosophy honed with a satirical edge.

• On The Beat / Man Of The Moment | DVD | (12/05/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  In 1962's On the Beat, Norman Wisdom's Pitkin, the most famous incarnation of his riotous buffoon character, is dreaming of something better as usual. Pitkin wants to follow in his father's footsteps and become a policeman, but being decidedly on the short side, has to settle for washing police cars. Of course it's not long before Norman is impersonating an officer of the law. Wisdom also plays his nemesis here, the German General Schreiber, as well as the chief suspect in a series of jewel robberies which only Pitkin's chaotic antics can solve. Terence Alexander effectively reprises his character from The Square Peg (1958), and Wisdom regular David Lodge, previously seen costarring in The Bulldog Breed (1960), is also on hand, though otherwise the supporting cast is less stellar than before. By the time of 1955's Man of the Moment, Wisdom was firmly established as Britain's favourite movie comedian, his shy, helpful and good-natured "gump" character forever unintentionally causing catastrophe in the great tradition of Charlie Chaplin. However, while Chaplin ventured into politics in Modern Times (1936) for satirical purposes, when Norman's minor civil servant here accidentally becomes the UK delegate at a conference in Geneva the emphasis is on farce and pratfalls. The plot sees Norman sticking up for the rights of the fictional kingdom of Tawaki against less-than-honest government interests, while his new-found status brings the attention of the ladies, including the return of his Trouble in Store (1953) costar Lana Morris. Continuing his collaboration with veteran director John Paddy Carstairs, the film is a polished laughter machine that continues to entertain. --Gary S Dalkin

• The Beverly Hillbillies - 4 Classic Episodes - Vol. 2 - The Clampetts Strike Oil / Getting Settled | DVD | (06/06/2005) from £4.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £4.99

  Four episodes from the Beverly Hillbillies television comedy are featured on this DVD. The episodes included are: The Clampets Strike Oil Getting Settled Meanwhile Back at the Cabin and The Servants.

• Classic Albums - Stevie Wonder - Songs In The Key Of Life | DVD | (22/10/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £17.99

  Taking more than two years from conception to release Stevie Wonder's classic 1976 double-album 'Songs In The Key Of Life' is now generally accepted as his finest creative hour in an enduring 35-year recording career that has been filled with many other highlights. The remarkable story of Wonder's 'Songs In The Key Of Life' project is told here. Stevie himself reminisces about the inspiration behind the album - It was a challenge doing an album that was related to life - and there are also contributions from Berry Gordy the founder and father figure of Motown Records Quincy Jones Herbie Hancock and lyrcist Gary Byrd among many others. In addition there is unique reunion of musicians who played on the original album sessions. Certainly 'Songs In The Key Of Life' is a truly remarkable album. Its story is vividly related in this 'Classic Album' programme including as a celebratory re-creation twenty years on of 'I Wish' and 'Sir Duke' with the original musicians who played on the session.

• The Powell & Pressburger Collection - 9 DVD Box Set | DVD | (15/08/2005) from £49.98   |  Saving you £-9.99 (N/A%)   |  RRP £39.99

  ***WARNING***ALL DVD TITLES CONTAIN ENGLISH SUBTITLES EXCEPT FOR THE DVD TITLE - A CANTERBURY TALE*** Never in the history of British film have two figures become as iconic as those of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Reigning throughout the 40s and 50s these two magnificent filmmakers brought to life British films and continue to radiate immense critical acclaim and inspiration for all contemporary film making. Includes: 1. A Matter of Life & Death (1946) 2. The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) 3. A Canterbury Tale (1944) 4. I Know Where I am Going (1945) 5. 49th Parallel (1941) 6. The Battle of the River Plate (1956) 7. Ill Met By Moonlight (1957) 8. They're A Weird Mob (1966) 9. The Red Shoes (1948)

• The Beverly Hillbillies - 4 Classic Episodes - Vol. 1 - Home For Christmas / No Place Like Home / Jed Rescues Pearl / Back To Californy | DVD | (04/10/2004) from £5.70   |  Saving you £-0.71 (N/A%)   |  RRP £4.99

  Four episodes from the Beverly Hillbillies television comedy are featured on this DVD. The episodes included are: Home For Christmas No Place Like Home Jed Rescues Pearl Back To California.

• Battle Cry | DVD | (21/07/2003) from £15.99   |  Saving you £-2.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £13.99

  The most interesting--and entertaining--aspect of Battle Cry, a long, episodic World War II drama, is that it marked the debut of one Justus E McQueen, who subsequently took the name of the good ol' Arkansas boy he played in the movie: LQ Jones. He's only one of eight or nine marine recruits who divide the screen time with commanding officer Van Heflin and James Whitmore as a lifer sergeant named Mac, "just Mac", who ramrods their squad and also delivers the movie's overbearing narration. Unfortunately, the narration is necessary to maintain continuity as the CinemaScope production galumphs its way from rounding up the melting-pot cast to seeing them through basic training and sundry, mostly amatory misadventures in San Diego, to further training in New Zealand and finally to baptism of fire on Guadalcanal. Trouble is, among the recruits only McQueen/Jones (whose job is mostly comic relief) and Aldo Ray (as a brawling lumberjack who's never known family life) have any charisma or acting chops--and that's not forgetting Tab Hunter, whose matinee-idol status at the time does not speak well for the 50s. Battle Cry is also a cardinal example of Hollywood's penchant for buying big, lusty, profane bestsellers (by Leon Uris, in this case) and then bowdlerising all the lustiness and profanity to appease the censors. Raoul Walsh, the poet laureate of lowdown gusto, does what he can in the circumstances, and as one of the first guys ever to direct a widescreen movie (1930's The Big Trail), he makes the battle scenes roar. --Richard T. Jameson

• Santa Fe Trail | Blu Ray | (14/09/2021) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• In The Mix | DVD | (27/08/2007) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  When the hottest DJ around (Usher) inadvertently saves the life of a Mafia princess (Chriqui) the reward for his bravery is a job protecting the woman from danger.