Film

A Touch of Honey is based on a Shelagh Delaney play which she wrote when just eighteen. It’s set in the industrial landscape of Salford and was the first and acclaimed role of Rita Tushingham as Jo. She is the illegitimate daughter of Helen (Dora Bryan) a flighty woman first introduced as [...]

The northern new wave did not just launch actors like Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay and Alan Bates but directors and producers like Tony Richardson and Carel Reisz. The latter two, assisted by producer Harry Salzman, were the staple force behind Saturday Night and Sunday Morning based on the novel [...]

The northern kitchen sink celebration continued at the Rosen Multiplex with This Sporting Life which some film historians judge the epitome of the genre, others the end of it. Most agree it was Richard Harris’ best performance as Frank Machin the troubled but brilliant rugby league player. The [...]

My main objection to those who clamour for more gay roles is that it implies that actors cannot do the very thing they do best i.e. assume roles. Many had to act as a way out of their upbringing often quite different to their film image. Sean Connery was no privileged Etonian but an Edinburgh [...]

The latest film festival at the Rosen Multiplex celebrates Northern British Kitchen sink of the early 1960s. The two best known actors are Albert Finney from Salford who made his name in Saturday Night, Sunday Morning and had a distinguished career in film and television and Tom Courtenay from [...]

In the Sky Arts director series I watched a tribute to Stephen Frears the other day whose canon of work includes My Beautiful Laundrette, Liaisons Dangereuses and The Queen.   The first film he directed was Gumshoe. This was way back in 1971. I enjoyed it at the time and I enjoyed it when I [...]

This adaptation of John Preston’s novel based on Sutton Hoo has rightly received critical acclaim. It stars Ranulf Fiennes as Basil Brown the excavator commissioned by widow Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan) to investigate mounds on her land. He unearths a ship used to bury a Saxon King. The theme is [...]