Reviews

This damaged film was probably only recovered because it has a young Audrey Hepburn, way down the credits list. There are quite a few missing frames after 00:35. The film itself, adapted from a wordy radio play, is a domestic farce-drama with two middle class couples living in a supposedly crowded but seemingly spacious house in the suburbs during the postwar housing shortage. No doubt on the wireless - for which it was originally written - it could have sounded suitably claustrophobic and drab. However the cinema was about fantasy, and the producers decided to set in the film in what would have been considered at the time fabulous middle class luxury. No attempt was made to adapt it for that change. They look for a nanny - even though one of the women has no job and could presumably look after two children - and this and an absolute rotter in an Austin Atlantic lead to a dreadful situation. Product placement - Lux soap flakes.

Charlie Drake, the small, red haired, fat trying comedian, is Sands, a travel agent in this film written and directed by John Paddy Carstairs. Carstairs made some great films for Norman Wisdom, but he struggled a lot to make anything of the strictly middle school comic (as in Adam Sandler) Charlie Drake. Sands is sent to the middle east to establish a resort in an area contested by two local tribal leaders, one with a secret oil contract, after another travel agent is assasinated. There are long scenes of big healthy girls in the harem, the boys in year 7 would have liked that. Product placement - Cinzano.

Alastair Sim, Diana Dors, Stanley Holloway, Dennis Price, George Cole and Sidney James in this Girl's Own story about a drippy young woman in the midlands chosen in a beauty pageant in Westbourne (Blackpool) to advertise soap. All the actors play their respective characters, Diana Dors as a bad girl in the pageant, Stanley Holloway as the avuncular father, Dennis Price as a philandering film star, George Cole as a ingenuous working class piker, and Sidney James as a dodgy geezer running a strip show. But it doesn't really save the contrived and well worn plot.

Bob Monkhouse, a 1950s heart-throb, is a graduate dentist, who together with his friend is hired by a toothpaste company to sell their product. In the origin of the Oral B myth, they are threatened with being struck off the dentists's register if they are involved with advertising. They come up with a new toothpaste with the worrying ingredient "luminous thymol" and get the idea to advertise it with a new Anglo-American satellite launched conveniently close to a TV station. This fairly tedious Hanna-Barbera style plot comprises the majority of the film. Much more interesting ideas are simply discarded presumably to appeal to the middle school market. In an early scene, there is a shot of a Morris Minor lowlight.

A broad interpretation of the Rasputin story with a hippy, beatnik Rasputin and women dressed in clothes of the early 1960s. There seemed to be a lot of people from Essex in Russia at the time. Rasputin is a monk who seduces and hypnotises women at the imperial court and schemes for power by claiming to be able to cure the Tsarina's child. His aide is a defrocked doctor. His mistress undresses behind a screen but in front of a window open to the street. A tap and a wall move in the shabby set. Rasputin moodily tosses the top counterpane of a box of chocolates left by a stage hand.

The diary of a vet by James Herriot made into a film before the television series. It still has the Hillman Minx but different actors and the vet is already married. It's supposed to be set in the 1930s but the vet has rather long (Beatles style) hair, and in an early scene his wife has flares. Despite being made by the conservative Readers Digest, it features the famous vet scene with the vet's arm right up a heifer's nasty, and Tristan crashes the car when he's on the sauce, but he doesn't quite have the English hopelessness of Peter Davison (in the books Tristan is a bit of a ladykiller by the way).

Even the crap films used to be better in the 1980s, even if this actually came out in 1991. Dumb kickboxing martial arts gangster film (for a change) as a pair of mismatched cops in Los Angeles go after a Japanese gangster who runs a brewery and a nightclub and has an unnecessarily complicated plan to distribute methamphetamines. He has distinctive cars, and is Japanese after all, so should be easy to trace in LA, but perhaps this film is not to be thought of too hardly. There is a high death count. It kind of renders the Tarantino Kill Bill films somewhat pointless.

An expedition at the end of the nineteenth century drops an improbable bathysphere into the Carribean to look for treasure. The crew mutiny and the scientists end up under the sea. Where is this ? they say, it's Atlantis (Malta actually). Taken by guards to the third city, whose helmets are in the sci-fi tradition, completely unfunctional, one of them meets the Atlantans, who are space travellers with special powers but use mediaeval cannons against giant lizards, and lose. Released a year after Star Wars, indeed.

Leslie Philips and Terry-Thomas star in this roughly made dirty film made in Menorca, an island off the coast of Spain. Phillips is a photographer and Thomas a con-man who wants to offload a large consignment of dodgy local wine. He hits upon the scheme of adulterating with substances to make it more palatable. In an early scene, the background repeats and they don't have any actual wine glasses. The minor actors and the extras seem to enjoy themselves a lot. Cinema goers at the time weren't so happy.

The film-musical of Cliff Richard and The Shadows is a selection of brassy dance sets and a couple of The Shadows songs with a basic story where bus mechanics take a bus to France, pick up some girls going to Athens, and an American "boy" stows away to ensure a US cinema release. Along the way they stop in a very Greek looking Yugoslavia and meet some Kossacks (in Yugoslavia ?) who must have come across the Black Sea and got lost or kidnapped by Tito. Product placements - BEA airlines, Intervilla Holidays and BP Zoom Scooter 2 stroke fuel mix.

Peter Cushing is a man called Doctor Who. Picking up a damaged constable he travels to London in the year 2150 AD.

The Earth is ruled by a not particularly invincible group of daleks armed with rather pathetic pesticide sprayers, turning the intelligent people into PVC clad robomen (good diea for Halloween actually) and everyone else into slaves building a huge mine in Bedfordshire drilling to the earth's core.

They have a wicked 1950s flying saucer with headlight cowls, honeycomb grille and tailfins. Groovy music, which was by Barry Gray, who did the music for "The Thunderbirds".

"Blackboard Jungle" film with Kenneth More as an avuncular prelate with a selection of cardigans. A group of teenage motorcycle people lose their licence after an accident. Bored on a Friday night they end up in one of those dismal modernist 1960s churches playing on the organ. The name of the film is named after a well gay song they sing. About halfway through the producers run out of plot and go for an extended shopping trip and then for something to do some activities with the Princes Award or something. The film was sponsored by the tobacco industry and Coca-Cola.

This religious film is a collection of sermons, light on theology and morality but heavy on conservative politics. Peter is a Scottish man who leaves to live in USA, where his ambition leads him from a small Episcopalian church in flyover country to being the priest of the White House and a Senator. He marries a dull woman and conveniently dies off before the complications of middle age. Peter Todd played this character just a year after the totally immoral trainwreck of a film "Don't bother to knock".

Expensive cinematography in the Antarctic and an original orchestral score is wasted in this trainwreck of a film adapted from a novel. John Hurt is a useless young wastrel, an unprepossessing young man who sexually assaults Hayley Mills early in the film before being sent on a mission to the south pole to observe penguins. Tony Britton ("Tinker" from Lovejoy) is a friend as is Jackie Gleason the daughter from "Bless This House". Mr Forbush lives above a bijou restaurant with baked beans in a big glazed pot which appears to be the same building as the home of Tara (Hayley Mills). Most of the cinematography, expensively shot at taxpayers expense, is wasted by Hurt's witless commentary.

Film work must have been thin on the ground in 1962 in Britain as quite a lot of decent actors struggle valiantly in this hoary old chestnut.

There's a good orchestral score (if hackneyed) and some nice cinematography too, although the producers couldn't be bothered colourising the film.

A young couple just moved on from a post in Jamaica are in a rivalry for a position in a provincial medical college with the catty middle class staff of the college. Quite apropos of nothing at all, the wife dabbles in a bit of voodoo to help her husband.

There's some lovely knitwear. The print is surprisingly good as this is the type of nonsense that would have been run on television in the 1960s and 1970s about a million times.

Essentially an extended music video clip for Cliff Richards.

Richards is a merchant banker who is moved to Birmingham and what follows is a montage of the brutalist concrete architecture that made Birmingham worse, and shots of flyovers before they were covered in tags and vomit.

George Cole is there and there's a famous scene of shooting the television set. Later there is a 1980s direct-to-video film style plot line where Richards and his girlfriend plan to open a burger bar selling "Brumburgers".

There's quite a lot of embarrassed people in the street scene, as if having to live in Birmingham wasn't punishment enough ! Product placement - BOAC airlines.

Ginger Rogers stars in this portmanteau of romance and thriller, which is called "Beautiful Stranger" on the title. Eddie Byrne is his usual disreputable self - "I stole it, I'm innocent".

Rogers is the girlfriend of an apparently reputable millionaire living on a continental island when she meets a young potter at a bijou beatnik house on the coast.

Bizarrely, her Rolls Royce keeps changing colour from white to silver, even during car chases. I'm not sure if this is a filming fault, because of film processing, or a mistake made in digitisation.

Eddie creeps around a house and the potter looks outside but doesn't see his Citroen (the same one as used by the police) parked clearly in front of the house. The same white telephone is used throughout the house and office.

Doris Day and Patrick O'Neal are husband and wife in this permissive comedy based on a stage play with Terry-Thomas as a stinker, playing a Hungarian but apparently with received pronunciation.

A young man is passed over for promotion by the bosses stupid son so he hatches a plan to steal the companies dividends. When there is a black out in New York, he has difficulty escaping and ends up sleeping with Doris Day.

Its a jolly and pretty well made film and I'm don't really understand all the negative comments. Perhaps because it's a foreign script, or because it's not dripping in gee-schucks All-American schmaltz like the other Doris Day films ?

Product placements - Kodak, The New York Times and Pan- Am. The Kaiser Group (Checker) provided the vehicles, an S series Valiant breaking down.

Christopher Lee is Fu Manchu and kidnaps the daughters of leading scientists in the Edwardian era in order to build a wireless transmitter that transmit power waves. He then hypnotises the women into submission (why not the scientists).

In one scene, what is clearly a pre-heterodyne wireless set he sends a message to his adversary, but then in the next scene behind it is a record player when he shows the message to his colleagues, like they changed the script halfway through.

There's also a scene where an actor turns off a noisy tap halfway through a telephone call, a car is shown whole after it has been crashed, a police constable that slips and slides on the road but recovers, a painful looking stage dive during a melee, and a flighty horse that looks like its about to run away.

Ernest Borgnine and John Mills star in this butchering of the Ray Lawlor play about cane cutters in the off - season.

Borgnine, known at the time as the star in "McHale's Navy", is the middle aged labourer (actually about 33 years old or so in the play) past his prime and Mills is his mate.

Angela Lansbury plays herself as a widow replacing Mills' girlfriend. In the play she was more salty than high class.

In the play, "Barney" - played by Mills - was still a fairly young man (still in his mid-ish twenties).

There is an odd scene where Bubba, the young ingenue is a barmaid filling up schooners with dregs (a Scottish bar ?).

Product placements - Peters Icecream (twice), Brylcreem, Toohey Old (twice), TAA (airlines), Tooths (beer) and Bex (twice - aspirin).

Chips Rafferty stars in this semi-realistic fable slash western film based in the mid-north of South Australia.

A family move to a selection in South Australia together with some English immigrants, a con man and his son and a Scottish carpenter.

Lucky for them, the land has already been cleared (it would have been densely covered in mallee forest at the time, but was completely cleared by 1950). They build a log cabin in an area with not many trees but plenty of loose stones, although the plot reason for this is later revealed. They drink from metal cups but have a wooden bucket and a thatched roof (rather than roofing iron) on their house.

When trouble arises with aborigines, they decide to shoot them, this being completely illegal of course.

B grade British film set (and made) in Hong Kong, although the leads are American.

The Five Dragons are a confederate involved in illegal activity in Hong Kong, when they decide to dissolve the confederate. A professor meets some young women at the pool and becomes involved.

The story is simple comic book stuff, and not particularly carefully made, but the film is livened up by many period scenes in Hong Kong and the comely Magda.

There is a song by a contemporary Japanese star called Yukari Ito. In one scene a (new) Toyota Corona turns into an (old) Morris Oxford before blowing up.