Network Distributing is pleased to announce the next batch of titles within “The British Film” range which will be available in the UK later this year. Each feature once again benefits from a new transfer, an instant play facility and will be presented in special slim-line space-saving packaging. Some of the highlights from October are a documentary about the body narrated by Vanessa Redgrave with music from Roger Waters, more gems from the vaults from Ealing Studios, classic horror, British musicals and a courtroom drama starring Richard Attenborough.
7 October
The Body £9.99
Vanessa Redgrave and Frank Finlay narrate an intimate and innovative documentary from the seventies about the human body cut to music from Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters. Commentary by poet and playwright Adrian Mitchell.
The Final Programme £9.99
Cult director Robert Fuest’s dystopian sci-fi thriller. Robert Finch stars as Jerry Cornelius, a Nobel Prize winning physicist and playboy who...
7 October
The Body £9.99
Vanessa Redgrave and Frank Finlay narrate an intimate and innovative documentary from the seventies about the human body cut to music from Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters. Commentary by poet and playwright Adrian Mitchell.
The Final Programme £9.99
Cult director Robert Fuest’s dystopian sci-fi thriller. Robert Finch stars as Jerry Cornelius, a Nobel Prize winning physicist and playboy who...
- 10/28/2013
- by nospam@example.com (Cinema Retro)
- Cinemaretro.com
A dignified comic actor in farce and on TV, and a dedicated disability campaigner alongside her husband, Brian Rix
The acting career of Elspet Gray, who has died aged 83, was obscured but not extinguished by being so closely bound up with her marriage to the farceur Brian Rix. In 1951, Gray gave birth to a daughter, Shelley, who had Down's syndrome. In later life she was active alongside her actor-manager husband after he left the stage in 1977 to work for people with learning disabilities – initially through presenting a BBC television series, and then as secretary general of Mencap. However, she made periodic returns to the stage and maintained a screen presence: in 1979, for instance, she was a paediatrician guest in Fawlty Towers, and in 1994 the first bride's mother in Four Weddings and a Funeral.
As well as bringing up her subsequent three children, she visited Shelley every week in the residential...
The acting career of Elspet Gray, who has died aged 83, was obscured but not extinguished by being so closely bound up with her marriage to the farceur Brian Rix. In 1951, Gray gave birth to a daughter, Shelley, who had Down's syndrome. In later life she was active alongside her actor-manager husband after he left the stage in 1977 to work for people with learning disabilities – initially through presenting a BBC television series, and then as secretary general of Mencap. However, she made periodic returns to the stage and maintained a screen presence: in 1979, for instance, she was a paediatrician guest in Fawlty Towers, and in 1994 the first bride's mother in Four Weddings and a Funeral.
As well as bringing up her subsequent three children, she visited Shelley every week in the residential...
- 2/20/2013
- by Dennis Barker
- The Guardian - Film News
Director of British comedy films in the tradition of saucy seaside postcards
During the 1970s, British cinema produced dozens of sex comedies, of which the director Bob Kellett, who has died aged 84, was something of a master. Kellett's films superseded the Carry On series, whose innuendo had become smuttier and less funny, and predated the more vulgar Confessions movies. They were in the tradition of Donald McGill's saucy seaside postcards, which George Orwell had extolled as being "symptomatically important as a sort of saturnalia, a harmless rebellion against virtue".
Kellett, who was born in Lancaster, went to Bedford school, where he was captain of the rowing team. After school, he had various jobs, including growing and selling orchids, selling encyclopedias, and writing for an advertising agency, before entering the film industry in the early 50s. After working on several features as script editor for the producer Ian Dalrymple at Pinewood Studios,...
During the 1970s, British cinema produced dozens of sex comedies, of which the director Bob Kellett, who has died aged 84, was something of a master. Kellett's films superseded the Carry On series, whose innuendo had become smuttier and less funny, and predated the more vulgar Confessions movies. They were in the tradition of Donald McGill's saucy seaside postcards, which George Orwell had extolled as being "symptomatically important as a sort of saturnalia, a harmless rebellion against virtue".
Kellett, who was born in Lancaster, went to Bedford school, where he was captain of the rowing team. After school, he had various jobs, including growing and selling orchids, selling encyclopedias, and writing for an advertising agency, before entering the film industry in the early 50s. After working on several features as script editor for the producer Ian Dalrymple at Pinewood Studios,...
- 12/4/2012
- by Ronald Bergan
- The Guardian - Film News
Catherine Deneuve stars in Francois Ozon's stage adaptation, a hilarious French comedy of deliberate naffness, says Peter Bradshaw
If Hillary and Tenzing were to erect a tent at Everest's peak, on stilts, the overall effect could not be more high camp than this bizarre and often hilarious 1970s-set drawing-room comedy from French film-maker François Ozon, and starring a resplendent Catherine Deneuve. It is a period pastiche executed with brilliant attention to detail and a weird, suppressed passion, like a sitcom in a bad dream. A batsqueak of strangeness is audible above the dialogue and perky orchestral score, and something odd occasionally peeps out from the soft furnishings. Buñuel might have taken it further; Ozon coolly leaves it at the garish, minutely rendered surface level. There is, however, more than enough here to generate comedy, satire and shrewd comment on what might be going on in the collective mind of Giscard d'Estaing's France,...
If Hillary and Tenzing were to erect a tent at Everest's peak, on stilts, the overall effect could not be more high camp than this bizarre and often hilarious 1970s-set drawing-room comedy from French film-maker François Ozon, and starring a resplendent Catherine Deneuve. It is a period pastiche executed with brilliant attention to detail and a weird, suppressed passion, like a sitcom in a bad dream. A batsqueak of strangeness is audible above the dialogue and perky orchestral score, and something odd occasionally peeps out from the soft furnishings. Buñuel might have taken it further; Ozon coolly leaves it at the garish, minutely rendered surface level. There is, however, more than enough here to generate comedy, satire and shrewd comment on what might be going on in the collective mind of Giscard d'Estaing's France,...
- 6/16/2011
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Catherine Deneuve leads a blue-chip cast in a François Ozon screwball comedy which is arch, knowing and self-aware
Venice is this year becoming a festival notable for high drama and high camp, and so it proves again with this enjoyable, farcical French picture from the prolific master craftsman François Ozon, based on a 1980 stage play by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy.
It's a wacky 70s-period screwball comedy with a blue-chip cast and a tone which is arch, knowing and self-aware but also somehow affectionate and even, I suspect, deeply serious about the indomitable spirit of France itself, in the queenly person of Catherine Deneuve. It is a veritable palimpsest of irony levels; perhaps only a French audience can fully respond to its nods and winks.
The British film industry might produce an equivalent, perhaps, by hiring Michael Winterbottom to direct a post-modernised screen adaptation of a Brian Rix farce, using...
Venice is this year becoming a festival notable for high drama and high camp, and so it proves again with this enjoyable, farcical French picture from the prolific master craftsman François Ozon, based on a 1980 stage play by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy.
It's a wacky 70s-period screwball comedy with a blue-chip cast and a tone which is arch, knowing and self-aware but also somehow affectionate and even, I suspect, deeply serious about the indomitable spirit of France itself, in the queenly person of Catherine Deneuve. It is a veritable palimpsest of irony levels; perhaps only a French audience can fully respond to its nods and winks.
The British film industry might produce an equivalent, perhaps, by hiring Michael Winterbottom to direct a post-modernised screen adaptation of a Brian Rix farce, using...
- 9/5/2010
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
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