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The Great Escape

A Bank Holiday would not be one without showing The Great Escape (1963) and – sure enough – Film 4 showed it on a cold Easter Monday. The previous day I had watched another team movie – Ocean’s Eleven (2001) – but it compared unfavourably. The Great Escape has the [...]

April 23, 2025 // 0 Comments

Greta Scacchi

One of the reasons why I enjoy the repeats of Bergerac is the casting of the young actors and actresses who appear on it. In the first series – made in 1981 – appeared a young actress aged 21. I thought at first she was Liz Hurley because of  her fine facial features. In fact it was [...]

March 20, 2025 // 0 Comments

El Cid/The book and the film

I was recently given a new biography of El Cid, the Spanish 11th Century knight, by Nora Berend, a Cambridge University historian. Her thesis is that Rodrigo de Viva – far rom being a patriot – was a mercenary. She concedes that many of the primary sources are unreliable. However this [...]

January 12, 2025 // 0 Comments

Top Hat (1935)

Time was when Christmas television would show a ‘big film’ but now these are to be found on Amazon Prime or Netflix and the main channels have to recycle tired old war films or superannuated blockbusters. It was therefore a huge relief that BBC broadcast – at the unlikely time of 8.15 am [...]

January 4, 2025 // 0 Comments

Operation Daybreak

Fred Trueman one made the cutting comment: there haven been many great bowlers from the Kitkstall Lane Emd but Neil Mallender is not one of them” the same  or similar comment might be made of director Lewis Gilbert. He directed many niteable films like Alfie, Shirley Valentine , Educating Rita  [...]

December 30, 2024 // 0 Comments

(WW2) Arctic convoys & opening a Second Front.

It did not take Hitler long to repudiate the Molotov/Ribbentrop pact and invade the Soviet Union. It was also not that long after – with Stalin’s ‘not one step back’ and ‘scorched earth’ strategy – that the Wehrmacht was in trouble. Stalin implored the Allies to open a [...]

December 25, 2024 // 0 Comments

The Critic (2023 movie)

I missed out on this film on general release and watched it yesterday on Amazon Prime. It’s based upon the Anthony Quinn novel Curtain Call but fell short of the book. It featured Ian McKellen as the acerbic Daily Chronicle theatre critic Jimmy Erskine modelled on James Agate. Set in the 1930s, [...]

December 24, 2024 // 0 Comments

The Day of the Jackal (Sky Atlantic)

This mega-production by Sky starring Eddie Redmayne, Lashana Logan and Charles Dance inevitably invites comparison with the Frederick Forsyth best-selling novel and the 1973 Fred Zinnermann film with Edward Fox. Frederick Forsyth admitted that he was paid vast amounts of money to do nothing or [...]

December 13, 2024 // 0 Comments

The Art of Cinema/Sky Arts

Last week’s programme presented by Ian Nathan focussed on script supervisors, once called ‘continuity girls’. These provide an essential input by creating the illusion of reality in a film and avoiding ‘bloopers’. Clive James once presented a programme on Saturday mornings [...]

October 12, 2024 // 0 Comments

Lee movie (2023)

Yesterday I finally got to see Lee. Enjoyed would be the wrong word as her pictures of the campaign after the Normandy landings – and Dachau – were searing, but the film was impressive notably for the fine acting of Kate Winslet as Lee Miller. The film covers one year (1945) and one [...]

September 17, 2024 // 0 Comments

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