"Actor: Steven Ritch"

• City of Fear (Standard Edition) | Blu Ray | (26/06/2023) from £9.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Vince Edwards (Murder by Contract) and John Archer (Decision at Sundown) face off in the explosive City of Fear, a violent and shocking film noir classic.When drug dealer Vince busts out of San Quentin, he takes a canister he believes to contain heroin... but it actually contains a payload of deadly radioactive Cobalt, enough to vaporise most of Los Angeles, if the police can't track him down.Directed by Irving Lerner (Murder by Contract), and shot by the great Lucien Ballard (Buchanan Rides Alone), City of Fear is a tense film noir which, as with Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly, taps into the anxieties of the nuclear age.Product FeaturesHigh Definition remasterOriginal mono audioAudio commentary with film critic and writer Adrian Martin (2021)Pulp Paranoia (2010, 7 mins): filmmaker Christopher Nolan discusses the influence of film noirThe Autobiography of a Jeep (1943, 10 mins): light-hearted documentary produced and directed by Irving Lerner about the then-new, all-purpose vehicleThe Autobiography of a Jeep audio commentary with film historian Jeremy Arnold (2021)Hymn of the Nations (1944, 29 mins): documentary produced and edited by Lerner, and directed by Alexander Hammid, featuring famed conductor Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra performing the music of Giuseppe Verdi, presented in its complete, uncut versionThe Cummington Story (1945, 20 mins): documentary short, written and directed by Helen Grayson and Larry Madison, produced by Lerner, and featuring the music of Aaron Copland, re-enacting the stories of a group of refugees who relocated to a small American town during World War IIOil's Well That Ends Well (1958, 17 mins): the Three Stooges are convinced they can make money from uraniumOriginal theatrical trailerImage gallery: promotional and publicity materialsNew and improved English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

• House Of Games | DVD | (02/02/2004) from £9.43   |  Saving you £3.56 (37.75%)   |  RRP £12.99

  David Mamet's 1987 directorial debut House of Games is mesmerising study of control and seduction between two kinds of detached observers: a gambler who is also a con artist and a psychotherapist who is also an emerging pop-psych guru in the book market. The latter (played by Lindsay Crouse) meets the former (Joe Mantegna) when one of her clients is driven to despair from his debts to the card shark. Mantegna's character agrees to drop the IOUs in exchange for Crouse's attention at the seedy House of Games in Seattle, a mecca for conmen to talk shop and hustle unsuspecting customers. The shrink gets so caught up in the arcane rules and world view of her guide over subsequent days that she observes--with no false rapture--various stings in progress inside and outside the club. Mamet's story finally becomes a fascinating study of two people protecting and extending their respective cosmologies the way rival predators fight for the same piece of turf. The psychological challenge is compelling; so is the stylised dialogue, with its pattern of pauses and hiccups and humming meter. Mostly shooting at night, Mamet also gave Seattle a different look from previous filmmakers, turning its familiar puddles into concentrations of liquid neon and poisonous noir. --Tom Keogh

• A Child Is Waiting | DVD | (06/07/2009) from £17.53   |  Saving you £-1.54 (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  A Child Is Waiting