Classic Films

• Rebel Without A Cause (2 Disc Special Edition) | DVD | (07/08/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £6.99

  Jim Stark... a kid from a 'good' family - what makes him tick... like a bomb? In one of cinemas most influential and gripping roles James Dean plays Jim Stark the new kid in town whose loneliness frustration and anger mirrored those of most postwar teens - and reverberates more than 40 years later. Natalie Wood (as Jim's girlfriend Judy) and Sal Mineo (in his screen debut as Jim's tag-along pal Plato) were Academy Award nominees for their achingly true performances. Director Nicholas Ray was also an Oscar nominee for this landmark film chosen as one of the Top-100 American Films by the American Film Institute.

• The River | DVD | (31/07/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Director Jean Renoir's entrancing first colour film shot entirely on location in India is a visual tour de force. Based on the novel by Rumer Godden the film eloquently contrasts the growing pains of three young women with the immutability of the holy Bengal River around which their daily lives unfold. Enriched by Renoir's subtle understanding and appreciation for India and its peoples The River gracefully explores the fragile connections between transitory emotions and everlasting creation.

• The Battle of Britain | DVD | (01/09/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  This is a spectacular retelling of a true story that shows courage at its inspiring best. Few defining moments can change the outcome of war . But when the outnumbered Royal Air Force defied unsurmountable odds in engaging the German Luftwaffe they may well have altered the course of history!

• Lost Films of Laurel & Hardy: The Complete Collection, Vol. 7 | DVD | (30/05/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.16

• Chaplin Mutuals, Vol. 2 | DVD | (19/11/1997) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.16

• Will Hay - Windbag The Sailor | DVD | (03/12/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  This classic comedy has Will Hay as a bogus sea captain Ben Cutlet. He is tricked into taking command of an unseaworthy ship the Rob Roy which the owners intend to sink.He and two stowaways escape on a raft to an island inhabited by cannibals. The natives are frightened into friendliness by the radio set which the trio stole from the ship. Ben and the stowaways recapture the Rob Roy from the crooked crew whose efforts to sink her have proved in vain and sail home in triumph to their native town.

• Will Hay - Good Morning Boys | DVD | (03/12/2001) from £6.06   |  Saving you £5.19 (108.12%)   |  RRP £9.99

  The headmaster of St Michael's school Dr Benjamin Twist (Will Hay) finds himself in hot water after a government inspection. He is asked to resign unless he can prove that his educational methods work and so when he comes into possession of the French paper he does not need much coaxing before showing it to his students. The boys pass with honours but a congratulatory trip to Paris goes awry when they and Twist inadvertently help to steal the Mona Lisa.

• Will Hay - Convict 99 | DVD | (03/12/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  One of Will Hay’s brisker comic efforts, 1936’s Convict 99 sees Dr Benjamin Twist, Hay’s clueless schoolmaster, caught in a case of mistaken identity and invited to head up a prison for especially hard-boiled criminals. Unable to believe his luck, Dr Twist celebrates his success with a few drinks, is still drunk when he arrives to take up his post and, confused with a new batch of inmates, ends up behind bars himself. There he makes the acquaintance of Moore Marriott as "Jerry the Mole", who has been digging an escape tunnel for nigh on 40 years and is only a fortnight away from his release date. When eventually reinstated as governor, Hay runs a loose ship, with inmates waited on by wardens, allowed to bet and even play the stock market. However, when a criminal on the outside attempts to defraud Twist, their indignation is naturally aroused. Convict 99 is a typical outtake from Hay’s bizarrely lawless universe, in which for all his harrumphing and bluster, he’s unable to exercise any sort of discipline whatsoever over the men in his charge. Hay plays exactly the same character from film to film, one so ill-equipped for any situation he’s equally suited for all. Whereas Twist is an incompetent who somehow muddles through, Hay the comic actor is a master of timing and double-takes who knows precisely how to create the air of a shambles. On the DVD: the original 1930s film stock has been well restored, give or take the odd crackle. But there are no extras, except scene index. --David Stubbs

• Will Hay - Old Bones Of The River | DVD | (03/12/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  When Professor Benjamin Tibbets (Will Hay) travels to Africa up river to open schools for the natives he experiences several setbacks. His new pupils are less than receptive and when the commander of the local base goes down with malaria he takes on his duties as well. Aided by the crew of the boat on which he arrived (Moore Marriott and Graham Moffatt) he sets about collecting taxes from the locals with hilarious results.

• Will Hay - Hey! Hey! USA! | DVD | (03/12/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Dr. Benjamin Twist (Will Hay) is invited to act as tutor to the son of a millionaire in the United States of America after posing as a famous professor. Twist discovers that two gangs of villains are out to kidnap his precocious young pupil Bernie Schultz...

• Vixen | DVD | (28/03/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Is she woman ... or animal? Vixen (Erica Gavin) and her bush pilot husband Tom (Garth Pillsbury) live in the remote Canadian Northwest. A young robust woman Vixen eagerly finds ways to temper her fiery libido while Tom is off picking up passengers in his plane. Also a racist she takes pleasure in ridiculing conscientious objector Niles (Harrison Page) a black American friend of her brother's. When Tom brings Dave (Robert Aiken) and Janet (Vincene Wallace) an attractive young

• Millionairess / Trial And Error With Peter Sellers | DVD | (29/05/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £24.99

  The Millionairess (1960): Based on a play by George Bernard Shaw which studies an immensely wealthy woman who falls for the charms of a poor Indian doctor. Sophia Loren plays a spoilt heiress able to buy anything she wants. When she meets an Indian doctor (Peter Sellers) whose sole concern is to help the poor and needy she knows that this is the man for her. Although in love with her he is so terrified of being in her power that he foils all her attempts to 'buy' him. Only

• Dreams That Money Can Buy | DVD | (31/07/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Hans Richter was for four decades one of the most influential members of the cinematic avant-garde. In this film he made the bold attempt to introduce this work to a wider audience. Using the framing story of a man who discovers how to craft and sell dreams to a series of anxious clients Richter allotted each dream (seven in all) to artists who included Max Ernst Man Ray Marcel Duchamp and Alexander Calder. Some chose to reprise their work in cinematic form - Ernst recreates a sequence from his collage novel La Semaine de Bont and Richter uses music by composers ranging from Darius Milhaud and John Cage to Duke Ellington. Shot for just $25 000 in a Manhattan loft the film went on to win the Venice Film Festival Award for the best original contribution to the progress of cinematography.

• The Magnificent Showman (John Wayne) | DVD | (05/06/2006) from £12.59   |  Saving you £-2.60 (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Hollywood's take on the big-top life as the Duke shepherds his three-ring extravaganza through a European tour while searching for the aerialist he loved and lost - the mother of his daughter. Plenty of real-life circus performers perfectly balance the performance of The Duke.

• Carry On Christmas - 1972 (DVD) | DVD | (30/10/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  More camp christmas capers with the Carry On crew.

• Rashomon | DVD | (16/02/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £4.99

  Rashomon DVD - classic film by Akira Kurosawa. Won Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 1952.

• The Dracula Legacy Set | DVD | (06/10/2014) from £33.73   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  The original Dracula is one of the silver screen's most unforgettable characters and along with the other Universal Classic Monsters defined the Hollywood horror genre. Dracula: Complete Legacy Collection includes all 5 films from the original legacy including the frightening classic starring Bela Lugosi and the timeless films that followed. These landmark motion pictures defined the iconic look of the famed vampire and continue to inspire countless remakes and adaptations that strengthen the legend of Dracula to this day. Films Included: Dracula (1931) Dracula's Daughter (1936) Son of Dracula (1943) House of Frankenstein (1944) House of Dracula (1945) Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) Special Features: Dracula (1931) The Road to Dracula: An Original Documentary by David J. Skal Feature commentary With Film Historian David J. Skal New Score by Phillip Glass preformed by the Kronos Quartet Poster and Photo Montage Theatrical Trailer Dracula's Daughter and Dracula (1931) Spanish Version Dracula's Daughter Dracula 1931 (Spanish Version) House of Frankenstein Theatrical Trailer House of Dracula Inspirations for Van Helsing: Dracula Featurette Van Helsing Trailer The Chronicles of Riddick Trailer

• Stranger/Orson Welles on Film | DVD | (27/06/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £4.30

  The Stranger, according to Orson Welles, "is the worst of my films. There is nothing of me in that picture. I did it to prove that I could put out a movie as well as anyone else." True, set beside Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, or even The Trial, The Stranger is as close to production-line stuff as the great Orson ever came. But even on autopilot Welles still leaves most filmmakers standing. The shadow of the Second World War hangs heavy over the plot. A war crimes investigator, played by Edward G Robinson, tracks down a senior Nazi, Franz Kindler, to a sleepy New England town where he's living in concealment as a respected college professor. The script, credited to Anthony Veiller but with uncredited input from Welles and John Huston, is riddled with implausibilities: we're asked to believe, for a start, that there'd be no extant photos of a top Nazi leader. The casting's badly skewed, too. Welles wanted Agnes Moorehead as the investigator and Robinson as Kindler, but his producer, Sam Spiegel, wouldn't wear it. So Welles himself plays the supposedly cautious and self-effacing fugitive--and if there was one thing Welles could never play, it was unobtrusive. What's more, Spiegel chopped out most of the two opening reels set in South America, in Welles' view, "the best stuff in the picture". Still, the film's far from a write-off. Welles' eye for stunning visuals rarely deserted him and, aided by Russell Metty's skewed, shadowy photography, The Stranger builds to a doomy grand guignol climax in a clock tower that Hitchcock must surely have recalled when he made Vertigo. And Robinson, dogged in pursuit, is as quietly excellent as ever. On the DVD: not much in the way of extras, except a waffly full-length commentary from Russell Cawthorne that tells us about the history of clock-making and where Edward G was buried, but precious little about the making of the film. Print and sound are acceptable, but though remastering is claimed, there's little evidence of it. --Philip Kemp

• Tess of the Storm Country | DVD | (14/12/1999) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £18.46

• Murder | DVD | (24/07/1999) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £4.30

  This 1930 drama was an early field day for Alfred Hitchcock and his evolving ideas about the blurring of opposites: reality and illusion, guilt and innocence, observing and doing, men and women. A rare whodunit in the director's canon, the story of Murder finds a stage actress (Norah Baring) convicted of murdering a female friend. Herbert Marshall stars as a veteran theatre actor and, coincidentally, member of the jury who has grave doubts about the verdict and decides to investigate the crime on his own. His efforts lead him through a world with which he is sufficiently familiar--that of backstage intrigues--and toward what some critics have charged is an unfortunate link between villainy and a gay stereotype. But that limited critique completely misses the playful overlapping of faulty perceptions invited by this movie, in which Hitchcock deliberately confuses us at times about whether the action we're seeing is real or occurring on a stage. Even when the distinction is obvious, thematic echoes bounce wildly between the two, such as an early scene in which policemen observing a play don't realise the solution to the real murder is weirdly foretold in what they're watching. --Tom Keogh