"Actor: Wesley Addy"

• Kiss Me Deadly (1955) | Blu Ray | (05/08/2019) from £17.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  In this atomic adaptation of Mickey Spillane's novel, directed by Robert Aldrich (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, The Dirty Dozen), the good manners of the 1950s are blown to smithereens. Ralph Meeker (Paths of Glory, The Dirty Dozen) stars as snarling private dick Mike Hammer, whose decision one dark, lonely night to pick up a hitchhiking woman sends him down some terrifying byways. Brazen and bleak, Kiss Me Deadly is a film noir masterpiece as well as an essential piece of cold war paranoia, and it features as nervy an ending as has ever been seen in American cinema.

• Kiss Me Deadly | DVD | (04/08/2003) from £17.99   |  Saving you £-5.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  A terrific film noir full of skewed camera angles and mysterious whose-shoes-are-those shots, Kiss Me Deadly is about as dark and exciting as noir gets. A young woman (Cloris Leachman) in bare feet and a trench coat throws herself into the traffic to flag down help and the car she stops belongs to detective Mike Hammer. Not even 15 minutes into the film and there's already been a murder, a mysterious letter, an attempt to kill Hammer and, of course, a warning to stay out of it. Hammer, tired of lowlife divorce cases, smells something big and can't let it go. Mike Hammer is a detective so cool he can win a fight with nothing more than a box of popcorn as a weapon; he knows his opera singers as well as his amateur prize-fighters and he makes the ladies swoon--but he's far from a conventional hero. In fact, he's emphatically not a nice guy; Hammer happily whores out his secretary-girlfriend Velma to cinch up those divorce cases and has a penchant for slamming other people's fingers in drawers. Even the bad guys know he's a sleazebag ("What's it worth to you to turn your considerable talents back to the gutter you crawled out of?"). Ralph Meeker plays Hammer's ambivalence brilliantly, swinging easily between sexy and just plain mean. --Ali Davis

• Tora! Tora! Tora! | DVD | (17/04/2019) from £7.94   |  Saving you £12.05 (151.76%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Here is just one of the many mishaps chronicled in Tora! Tora! Tora!: "Sir, there's a large formation of planes coming in from the north, 140 miles, 3 degrees east." "Yeah? Don't worry about it." The epic film shows the bombing of Pearl Harbour from both sides in the historic first American-Japanese coproduction: American director Richard Fleischer oversaw the complicated production (the Japanese sequences were directed by Toshio Masuda and Kinji Fukasaku, after Akira Kurosawa withdrew from the film), wrestling a sprawling story with dozens of characters into a manageable, fairly easy-to-follow film. The first half maps out the collapse of diplomacy between the nations and the military blunders that left naval and air forces sitting ducks for the impending attack, while the second half is an amazing re-creation of the devastating battle. While Tora! Tora! Tora! lacks the strong central characters that anchor the best war films, the real star of the film is the climactic 30-minute battle, a massive feat of cinematic engineering that expertly conveys the surprise, the chaos and the immense destruction of the only attack by a foreign power on American soil since the Revolutionary war. The special effects won a well-deserved Oscar, but the film was shut out of every other category by, ironically, the other epic war picture of the year, Patton. --Sean Axmaker, Amazon.com

• Network | DVD | (17/03/2003) from £17.11   |  Saving you £-1.12 (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Media madness reigns supreme in screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky's scathing satire about the uses and abuses of network television. But while Chayefsky's and director Sidney Lumet's take on television may seem quaint in the age of "reality TV" and Jerry Springer's talk-show fisticuffs, Network is every bit as potent now as it was when the film was released in 1976. And because Chayefsky was one of the greatest of all dramatists, his Oscar-winning script about the ratings frenzy at the cost of cultural integrity is a showcase for powerhouse acting by Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway and Beatrice Straight (who each won Oscars), and Oscar nominee William Holden in one of his finest roles. Finch plays a veteran network anchorman who's been fired because of low ratings. His character's response is to announce he'll kill himself on live television two weeks hence. What follows, along with skyrocketing ratings, is the anchorman's descent into insanity, during which he fervently rages against the medium that made him a celebrity. Dunaway plays the frigid, ratings-obsessed producer who pursues success with cold-blooded zeal; Holden is the married executive who tries to thaw her out during his own seething midlife crisis. Through it all, Chayefsky (via Finch) urges the viewer to repeat the now-famous mantra "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" to reclaim our humanity from the medium that threatens to steal it away. --Jeff Shannon

• The Big Knife | Blu Ray | (28/08/2017) from £16.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Mere months after delivering one of the definitive examples of film noir with Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich brought a noir flavour to Hollywood with his classic adaptation of Clifford Odets stage play, The Big Knife. Charles Castle, one of Hollywood s biggest stars, looks like he has it all. But his marriage is falling apart and his wife is threatening to leave him if he renews his contract. Studio boss Stanley Shriner Hoff isn t taking the news too well, and he ll do anything he can to get his man to sign on the dotted line even if means exposing dark secrets... Winner of the Silver Lion at the 1955 Venice Film Festival, The Big Knife also boasts a remarkable cast list including Jack Palance (Shane) as Castle and Rod Steiger (On the Waterfront) as Hoff, plus Shelley Winters (The Night of the Hunter), Ida Lupino (On Dangerous Ground), Jean Hagen (Singin in the Rain) and Everett Sloane (Citizen Kane). SPECIAL EDITION CONTENTS Brand-new 2K restoration from original film elements produced by Arrow Films exclusively for this release High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation Original uncompressed LPCM mono audio Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing Commentary by film critics Glenn Kenny and Nick Pinkerton, recorded exclusively for this release Bass on Titles Saul Bass, responsible for The Big Knife s credit sequence, discusses some of his classic work in this self-directed documentary from 1972 Theatrical trailer Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Sean Phillips FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Illustrated collector s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Nathalie Morris

• Hiroshima | DVD | (06/01/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £2.99

  Beginning in the frenzied final months of World War II Hiroshima rockets backand forth between Truman Churchill and Hirohito to reach behind the headlines and tell the story of men and women both public and private whose lives and careers would be forever changed by this event creating a balanced portrait of the political moral and above all human cost of this historical decision. 'Hiroshima' weaves an unforgettable tapestry of those events which led to the decision which would indelibly change the course of human destiny.

• Rage Of Angels | DVD | (22/09/2003) from £4.99   |  Saving you £1.00 (20.04%)   |  RRP £5.99

  In 'Rage Of Angels' Jaclyn Smith plays determined young lawyer Jennifer Parker who fights against the odds to triumph as a top trial attorney in New York's tough world of power glamour and crime. Based on the best-selling novel by Sidney Sheldon this compelling drama switches from New York Acapulco and Paris as Jennifer finds herself in a highly-charged love triangle romantically pursued by two powerful men on opposite sides of the law. With the passion and tension in her life reaching boiling point Jennifer faces a terrifying confrontation that could destroy them all. As she moves from the law of the land to the law of the jungle the only case Jennifer can't seem to win is the trial for her heart.

• The Europeans | DVD | (17/07/2006) from £4.47   |  Saving you £5.52 (123.49%)   |  RRP £9.99

  In 1850 a few miles outside Boston the household of the dour Mr. Wentworth receives two unannounced visitors from Europe Eugenia and Felix the daughter and son of his half sister. Gertrude one of Wentworth's two daughters is instantly infatuated with her cousins and trouble brews...

• The Grissom Gang | DVD | (08/04/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  The Grissom Gang is director Robert Aldrich's take on British author James Hadley Chase's once-notorious novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish, which was itself a synthesis of the plot of William Faulkner's Sanctuary with the lurid exposes of the criminal rampage of Arizona Clark "Ma" Barker and her alleged criminal brood. Aldrich sticks surprisingly close to Chase's plot, although he considerably deepens all the characterisations and cuts through the prurient sex sensation to create a surprisingly moving and complicated relationship between kidnapped heiress Barbara Blandish (Kim Darby) and the homicidally psychopathic but also childish Slim Grissom (Scott Wilson), the most feared member of the gang headed by the grotesquely horrible Ma (Irene Dailey). Barbara is abducted after a jewel heist gone wrong by a trio of inept small-timers, who are swiftly rubbed out by the more organised Grissom mob, and though Ma insists that after the girl's father has come across with the million-dollar ransom she will be mercilessly put down, Slim becomes enchanted with the girl, who eventually becomes his lover. In the book, the girl was drugged and raped, but here we get a delicate, creepy shifting of power to the point when Miss Blandish can browbeat her fearsome captor into mixing her a perfect martini, and the new attachment between crook and captive creates a rift with the rest of the gang that inevitably pays off in various hails of machine gunfire as the plan falls apart and the authorities close in. Aldrich manages the kind of claustrophobic black comedy games of terror and flirtation he perfected in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, but attacks the rat-tat-tat tommy gun scenes with action skills honed on The Dirty Dozen. Most of these films trusted costumes, cars and music to evoke the 1920s, but screenwriter Leon Griffiths takes care with period slang and the supporting cast have a real Depression era Warner Brothers feel, with Connie Stevens as a dumb but ferocious blonde showgirl, Tony Musante as the slick-haired official ladykiller in the gang and Robert Lansing as an impeccably down-at-heel but compassionate private detective. On the DVD: The advertised extras--notes, trivia and photo gallery--are disappointingly thin, but the 16:9 letterboxed print is almost flawless, with lovely pastels for the clothes and sets and bright scarlet for the many bursts of blood. --Kim Newman

• The Bostonians | DVD | (28/04/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Vanessa Redgrave (in an Oscar-nominated performance) and Christopher Reeve are the stars of THE BOSTONIANS Merchant Ivory Productions' acclaimed 1984 screen adaptation of the Henry James classic which charts the struggle between two charismatic forces - feminist and a chauvinist - to gain control over the destiny of a spirited young woman.The story takes place in Boston in the aftermath of the American Civil War - a time of political and social turmoil. Verena Tarrant (Madeleine Potter Slaves Of New York) a gifted young orator has attracted the attention of Olive Chancellor (Redgrave) who wished to nurture Verena as an inspirational force for the Woman's Movement But ranged against her is Basil Ransom (Reeve) a handsome male chauvinist who wants Verena as his wife. Against a backdrop of luminous New England landscapes battle is joined and for Olive the struggle will prove an odyssey that forces her to acknowledge her true nature.

• The Bostonians (the Merchant Ivory Collection) | DVD | (06/09/2004) from £17.97   |  Saving you £-4.99 (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  The daughter of a faith healer is forced to choose between her mother's religious activities and her desire to use her speaking ability to further the women's suffragette movement. To complicate matters more the man she loves is strongly opposed to the feminist cause.

• Rage Of Angels - The Final Revenge | DVD | (22/09/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £4.99

  Having made the heartrending decision to break away from her one true love and father of her child ambitious and married politician Adam Warner Jennifer (Jaclyn Smith) sets about rebuilding her career and finding happiness again. Dangerous ghosts from her past come back to haunt her though in the shape of ruthless mobster James Moretti. His brother Michael had been obsessed with Jennifer and had died because of it. Now the vengeful James is out to blackmail both Jennifer and Adam over their illicit love - and ultimately wants Jennifer dead. But hell hath no fury like the 'Rage of Angels'... based on the Sidney Sheldon novel.

• Hiroshima | DVD | (27/09/2010) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £2.99

  The atomic bombing of Hiroshima is inarguably the single most significant act of the twentieth century. This landmark presentation gives, for the first time, a balanced account of those events leading to the cataclysmic decision, which forever changed the course of human destiny. Beginning in the frenzied final months of World War II, rocketing back and forth between Washington and Tokyo, Alamogordo and Tinian, Hiroshima careens along the rapidly escalating course of the war. Reaching behind ...

• 5 Star DVD Starter Pack | DVD | (27/10/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £49.99

  This great value 10-way DVD box set is the ideal way to begin any DVD collection. It includes the following great movies in their original packaging! The Full Monty When Saturday Comes Big Bound Bachelor Party That Thing You Do National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon Volcano Boiling Point Commando