"Actor: Robert Townsend"

• Streets of Fire (Collector's Edition) | Blu Ray | (14/03/2023) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• A Soldier's Story | DVD | (04/10/2010) from £6.73   |  Saving you £-0.74 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Charles Fuller adapted his Pulitzer Prize-winning A Soldier's Play for the big screen in 1984. The film version, A Soldier's Story is essentially a murder mystery, played out against a background of inter and intra-racial conflict at a Second World War training camp. To the consternation of his white opposite number at the camp, a black captain (Howard W Rollins) arrives to investigate the death of a black sergeant (Adolph Caesar). Suspicion immediately falls on a pair of bigoted white officers but as the tale unfolds in a series of flashbacks, it soon becomes clear that a different kind of prejudice is also at work. Assisted by some excellent performances, director Norman Jewison opens the story out from its stage roots. There's a wonderful baseball scene (filmed on location at Little Rock) in which the double standards of Dennis Lipscomb's fidgety white captain are exposed with neat irony; he'll cheer his successful black team all the way home in the name of sport. His gradual, forced liberalisation provides the film with an important comic element. A Soldier's Story wears its heart on its sleeve without being superficial in any way. It's a compelling tale, well told and often highly entertaining, in which nobody gets off lightly, least of all the good guy. On the DVD: The widescreen presentation helps give an epic feel to what could, in other hands, have been a claustrophobic production. The picture quality is fine. But the monaural sound track is often rather muffled, leaving you straining to catch some of the dialogue. This is also a shame because the blues music--an inspired job by Herbie Hancock, assisted by Patti Labelle singing her lungs out as bar owner Big Mary--is an important element of the film's underlying theme and deserves to be better heard. The extras are valuable. Norman Jewison's commentary is detailed and sensitive. As he says, the film deals with "ideas in racism never seen on screen before", and he acknowledges the strength of his actors in getting those ideas across. "March to Freedom" is an excellent short documentary which features the moving testimonies of black servicemen on the insufferable prejudices they encountered while attempting to defend their country during the Second World War; A Soldier's Story is thus put sharply into context. --Piers Ford

• The Mighty Quinn | DVD | (19/05/2003) from £9.43   |  Saving you £3.56 (37.75%)   |  RRP £12.99

  A highly enjoyable sleeper, The Mighty Quinn is a variation on one of those 1930s studio pictures about two boyhood friends who grow up on different sides of the law. But it's 1989, and things are a bit different. Denzel Washington, smooth as Jamaican rum, plays the police chief of a Caribbean island, a place where crime isn't exactly a pressing concern. Thus the chief is put out when the clues in a murder case point to his old buddy, a dreadlocked ne'er-do-well played by a mischievous Robert Townsend. Director Carl Schenkel is much more interested in friendships and great island atmosphere than in the actual unlocking of the case, and that's just fine. Add in a bouncy soundtrack of reggae music, and The Mighty Quinn becomes one of those hard-to-resist vacation movies. --Robert Horton

• Skeleton Coast | DVD | (03/09/2001) from £4.99   |  Saving you £-2.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £2.99

  Tough action story in which a group of renegade mercenaries are called upon to enter Angolan territory to rescue a CIA agent who captured by some bad guys involved in the African Civil War.

• A Soldier's Story | DVD | (17/08/2009) from £9.98   |  Saving you £-3.99 (-66.60%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Charles Fuller adapted his Pulitzer Prize-winning A Soldier's Play for the big screen in 1984. The film version, A Soldier's Story is essentially a murder mystery, played out against a background of inter and intra-racial conflict at a Second World War training camp. To the consternation of his white opposite number at the camp, a black captain (Howard W Rollins) arrives to investigate the death of a black sergeant (Adolph Caesar). Suspicion immediately falls on a pair of bigoted white officers but as the tale unfolds in a series of flashbacks, it soon becomes clear that a different kind of prejudice is also at work. Assisted by some excellent performances, director Norman Jewison opens the story out from its stage roots. There's a wonderful baseball scene (filmed on location at Little Rock) in which the double standards of Dennis Lipscomb's fidgety white captain are exposed with neat irony; he'll cheer his successful black team all the way home in the name of sport. His gradual, forced liberalisation provides the film with an important comic element. A Soldier's Story wears its heart on its sleeve without being superficial in any way. It's a compelling tale, well told and often highly entertaining, in which nobody gets off lightly, least of all the good guy. On the DVD: The widescreen presentation helps give an epic feel to what could, in other hands, have been a claustrophobic production. The picture quality is fine. But the monaural sound track is often rather muffled, leaving you straining to catch some of the dialogue. This is also a shame because the blues music--an inspired job by Herbie Hancock, assisted by Patti Labelle singing her lungs out as bar owner Big Mary--is an important element of the film's underlying theme and deserves to be better heard. The extras are valuable. Norman Jewison's commentary is detailed and sensitive. As he says, the film deals with "ideas in racism never seen on screen before", and he acknowledges the strength of his actors in getting those ideas across. "March to Freedom" is an excellent short documentary which features the moving testimonies of black servicemen on the insufferable prejudices they encountered while attempting to defend their country during the Second World War; A Soldier's Story is thus put sharply into context. --Piers Ford

• Taxman | DVD | (11/08/2003) from £6.98   |  Saving you £-0.99 (-16.50%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Al Benjamin is a New York tax investigator who is on the hunt for millions of dollars in tax fraud. He goes undercover into the world of the Russian Mafia joined by Romero an NYPD patrolman.

• Altered Species | DVD | (14/07/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  On a moonlit night in a remote research laboratory a major scientific breakthrough is about to have some disastrous side effects. A chemical compound that was created to 'hunt and destroy' deadly cancer ells has leaked from the buildings waste disposal system into the basement. Suddenly the rodents used in the laboratories experiments are not the only rats in the facility that will become an Altered Species.

• Black Listed | DVD | (31/05/2004) from £10.49   |  Saving you £2.50 (23.83%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Frustrated with the legal process a young and ambitious lawyer approaches his former college classmates and colludes with them to meter out strong justice where the all too lacking legal system has failed. These hyper-intelligent modern day vigilantes wreak out justice and vengeance upon those that were spared by the technicalities and limitations of our legal system. Sometimes the defenders of innocence become the criminals.

• The Mighty Quinn | DVD | (05/06/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Life in the easygoing Carribean is hard on Police Chief Xavier Quinn (Washington). Dubbed The Mighty Quinn by sarcastic islanders and nagged by a wife who'd rather he were babysitting Quinn is suddenly thrust into action when his childhood friend Maubee (Robert Townsend) is accused of murder. Forced to search for his elusive friend Quinn meets up with a colourful array of suspects including the dead man's beautiful mistress (Rogers) who dreams of being a lounge singer an eccentric voodoo sorceress with snakes in her parlour (Esther Rolle) and a mysterious American visitor with dubious intentions...

• Altered Species | DVD | (19/04/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  On a moonlit night in a remote research laboratory, a major medical breakthrough is about to have deadly results...