UK
“The Man Between” is a 1953 British thriller film directed by Carol Reed and starring James Mason, Claire Bloom, Hildegard Knef and Geoffrey Toone. A British woman on a visit to post-war Berlin is caught up in an espionage ring smuggling secrets into and out of the Eastern Bloc.
The script, which was written on a day-to-day basis as the film was being shot, concerns the adventures of a motley crew of swindlers and ne’er-do-wells trying to lay claim to land rich in uranium deposits in Kenya as they wait in a small Italian port to travel aboard an ill-fated tramp steamer en route to Mombasa.
Picking a pocket leads to blackmail and murder for a petty criminal (Sidney Tafler) in London.
Fictionalized story of British aerospace engineers solving the problem of supersonic flight.
The summer of 1940, Pilot Officer T.B. Baird arrives straight out of flight school to join a front line RAF squadron at the height of the Battle of Britain. After an unfortunate start and a drumming down from his commanding officer, Baird (nicknamed ‘Septic’ due to his initials) must balance the struggle to impress his Group Captain, regain his pride, fit in with his fellow squadron mates, and survive one of the most intense air battles in history. This is the story of just one of “The Few” and how they managed to fight off the might of the Luftwaffe, despite overwhelming German air power.
In this crime drama, an escaped convict is recaptured and charged with killing two people in a lonely waystation during a snowstorm. Fortunately, a novelist is around to prove him innocent.
James Stewart plays aeronautical engineer Theodore Honey, the quintessential absent-minded professor: eccentric, forgetful, but brilliant. His studies show that the aircraft being manufactured by his employer has a subtle but deadly design flaw that manifests itself only after the aircraft has flown a certain number of hours. En route to a crash site to prove his theory, Honey discovers that he is aboard a plane rapidly approaching his predicted deadline.
Hoffmann is a lovelorn young man in Nuremberg who is watching his latest love, Stella, dance in the ballet. In the interval he goes to the tavern where he tells his friends the tales of the three major loves of his life. Each story forms a separate act of this filmic version of the Offenbach opera.
Ebeneezer Scrooge (Alastair Sim) contentedly meanders through his life as a cruel miser until one fateful Christmas Eve when he is visited by three ghosts. The spirits show him how his behavior over the years has made him a lonely, bitter old man, and how his heart has grown colder. Using events from Scrooge’s idealistic past, dreary present and dismal future, the apparitions try their best to melt his steely soul. Tightfisted Ebeneezer Scrooge learns the error of his ways through the intervention of the ghost of his former partner and of the three spirits and, just in time for the holidays, manages to make everyone’s lives a little brighter, his included!
P.C. George Dixon (Warner) a long-serving traditional “copper” who is due to retire shortly, takes a new recruit, Andy Mitchell (Hanley), under his aegis, introducing him to the easy-going night beat. Dixon is a classic Ealing ‘ordinary’ hero, but also anachronistic, unprepared and unable to answer the violence of Tom Riley (Bogarde). Called to the scene of a robbery at a local cinema, Dixon finds himself face-to-face with Riley, a desperate youth armed with a revolver. Dixon initially tries to talk Riley into surrendering the weapon, but Riley panics and fires. Dixon walks to his own death almost uncomprehending. Dixon is taken to hospital, but dies some hours later. The ending is another Ealing quirk, with ordinary decent society, including ‘professional’ criminals used to violence, banding together to track down and catch the murderer, who is trapped in the crowd at White City greyhound track in west London. To Andy Mitchell falls the honour of arresting Riley.
A struggling actress tries to help a friend prove his innocence when he’s accused of murdering the husband of a high society entertainer.
An American pulp writer arrives in post-WWII Vienna only to find that the friend who waited for him is killed under mysterious circumstances. The ensuing mystery entangles him in his friend’s involvement in the black market, with the multinational police, and with his Czech girlfriend.
The film is told through the naive eyes of a diplomat’s young son, Phillipe, who idolises his best friend, the diplomat’s butler Baines. Baines has constructed a heroic persona, full of exotic adventures, that fascinates the boy.
In this classic drama, Vicky Page is an aspiring ballerina torn between her dedication to dance and her desire to love. While her imperious instructor, Boris Lermontov, urges to her to forget anything but ballet, Vicky begins to fall for the charming young composer Julian Craster. Eventually Vicky, under great emotional stress, must choose to pursue either her art or her romance, a decision that carries serious consequences.
A gang of street boys foil a master crook who sends commands for robberies by cunningly altering a comic strip’s wording each week, unknown to writer and printer. The first of the Ealing comedies.
In this Dickens adaptation, orphan Pip discovers through lawyer Mr. Jaggers that a mysterious benefactor wishes to ensure that he becomes a gentleman. Reunited with his childhood patron, Miss Havisham, and his first love, the beautiful but emotionally cold Estella, he discovers that the elderly spinster has gone mad from having been left at the altar as a young woman, and has made her charge into a warped, unfeeling heartbreaker.
When a young airman miraculously survives bailing out of his aeroplane without a parachute, he falls in love with an American radio operator. But the officials in the other world realise their mistake, and despatch an angel to collect him.
A series of stories about the lives and loves of nine men in a Prisoner of War Camp over five years. Location shooting in the British occupied part of Germany adds believability. The main story is of Hasek (Redgrave) a Czech soldier who needs to keep his identity a secret from the Nazis, to do this he poses as a dead English Officer and corresponds with the man’s wife. Upon liberation they meet and decide to continue their lives together. The other inmates’ stories are revealed episodically.
At a railway station cafe, housewife Laura Jesson meets doctor Alec Harvey. Both of them are already married, but they continue to meet at the cafe every Thursday despite the knowledge that their blossoming love is impossible.
An English mystery novelist invites a medium over for dinner in the hopes of gathering enough material for his latest book, as well as exposing her as a charlatan. However, a series of incidents occur during the course of the evening, which result in a chain of supernatural events being set in motion which wreak havoc on his present marriage.
A mismatched collection of conscripted civilians find training tough under Lieutenant Jim Perry (David Niven) and Sergeant Ned Fletcher (William Hartnell) when they are called up to replace an infantry battalion that had suffered casualties at Dunkirk. Original Story by Eric Ambler – Screenplay by Eric Ambler and Peter Ustinov – Directed by Carol Reed.
During the Allied Bombing offensive of World War II the public was often informed that “A raid took place last night over …, One (or often more) of Our Aircraft Is Missing”. Behind these sombre words hid tales of death, destruction and derring-do. This is the story of one such bomber crew who were shot down and the brave Dutch patriots who helped them home.
Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book is given the full treatment in this lavish retelling filled with huge sets, exotic animals, a large cast and the incomparable Sabu, starring as Mowgli, the young orphan boy raised by wolves. Curious to reconnect with his human village, Mowgli returns only to find disappointment in the greed and treachery of man. Over time, Mowgli and the village members do grow to trust one another, but not before the village finds itself under siege. It’s up to Mowgli and his jungle friends to save the day.
This 1942 fictionalized biopic chronicles the true story of how two of the most remarkable men in aviation history – visionary Spitfire designer R.J. Mitchell and his test pilot Geoffrey Crisp – designed a streamlined monoplane that led to the development of the Spitfire.
Eccentric Cambridge archaeologist Horatio Smith (Howard) takes a group of British and American archaeology students to pre-war Nazi Germany to help in his excavations. His research is supported by the Nazis, since he professes to be looking for evidence of the Aryan origins of German civilisation. However, he has a secret agenda: to free inmates of the concentration camps.
Sir William Hamilton, a widower of mature years, is British ambassador to the Court of Naples. Emma who comes for a visit with her mother wouldn’t cut the grade with London society but she gets along well with the Queen of Naples. Emma likes being Lady Hamilton and life goes smoothly until Lord Nelson pays a visit. Sir William decides at first to let his young wife have her fling and pretends not to know what is going on. But the real life lovers, whose first screen romance was in “Fire Over England” (1937) have an even more burning passion for each other in this film.
Depressing and realistic family drama about the struggles of unemployment and poverty in 1930s Lancashire. The 20-year-old Kerr gives an emotionally charged performance as Hardcastle, one of the cotton workers trying to make life better. Interlaced with humour that brings a ray of sunshine to the pervasive bleakness, this remains a powerful social study of life between the wars, and was a rare problem picture to come out of Britain at the time.
A shy British teacher looks back nostalgically at his long career, taking note of the people touched his life.
In Cornwall, around 1800, a young woman discovers that she’s living near a gang of criminals who arrange shipwrecks for profit.
A German submarine is sent to the Orkney Isles in 1917 to sink the British fleet.
Derrick De Marney finds himself in a 39 Steps situation when he is wrongly accused of murder. While a fugitive from the law, De Marney is helped by heroine Nova Pilbeam, who three years earlier had played the adolescent kidnap victim in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. The obligatory “fish out of water” scene, in which the principals are briefly slowed down by a banal everyday event, occurs during a child’s birthday party. The actual villain, whose identity is never in doubt (Hitchcock made thrillers, not mysteries) is played by George Curzon, who suffers from a twitching eye. Curzon’s revelation during an elaborate nightclub sequence is a Hitchcockian tour de force, the sort of virtuoso sequence taken for granted in these days of flexible cameras and computer enhancement, but which in 1937 took a great deal of time, patience and talent to pull off. Released in the US as The Girl Was Young, Young and Innocent was based on a novel by Josephine Tey.
The husband and wife acting team of Mae Feather and Julian Gordon is torn apart when he discovers she is having an affair with the screen comedian Andy Wilks.
Public schoolboy Roddy Berwick is expelled from school when he takes the blame for a friend’s theft and his life falls apart in a series of misadventures.
The life story of one of Britain’s most notorious bare-knuckle fighters, Lenny McLean, also known as “the Guv’nor.”
