original film

  I’m a diehard Billy Wilder fan, brought up by a mother who absolutely adored film. Along with my brother, I was introduced at an early age by mama to the likes of Hitchcock, Curtis, Mankiewicz, Hawks, Powell and Pressburger, classic filmmakers who visited our home on Friday nights and Sunday afternoons, making magic in … Continue readings →

Tags : Arthur Conan Doyle, Billy Wilder, film trailers, great films, Patrick Kinkaid, reading on location, Sherlock Holmes, The Apartment Billy Wilder, The Continuity Girl, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes trailer

  WE WERE REMINDED OF THE SPLENDOUR OF GEORGE STEVENS’ GIANT the other day when we were reviewing Brown-Eyed Girl, the fourth and final book in Lisa Kleypas’s ‘Travis family’ series. It perhaps may seem odd to link a contemporary romance, albeit a very good one, with an iconic 20th-century film by such a great … Continue readings →

  A rare bit of footage featuring an interview on Arlene Francis’s ‘Home’ with Charles Eames (with Ray in the background). In it, he discusses their various chairs and introduces the Eames Lounge Chair for Herman Miller. Ray is very much treated as ‘Mrs Eames’, Charles’s ‘helper’. Oh, you wouldn’t get away with that today. … Continue readings →

  New Zealand-born Len Lye was an experimental animator and sculptor. He is known primarily for a series of innovative films produced in the 1930s and 40s, the earlier while working with John Grierson’s much acclaimed GPO Film Unit. A Colour Box (1935) was particularly influential – wonderful Norman McLaren took up animation full time … Continue readings →

  Night Mail, the GPO Film Unit’s 1936 documentary, seemingly had everything going for it from the start – from its directors Harry Watt and Basil Wright, narrators John Grierson and Stuart Legg to the poem that WH Auden wrote especially for it and the music score composed by a 23-year-old Benjamin Britten. The GPO … Continue readings →