Returning to cinemas on 29th March, ahead of its 4K UHD Collector’s Edition and digital download release from Studio Canal’s Vintage Classics label on 22nd April, is the Ealing Studios’ 1951 classic and one of British cinema’s most beloved comedies, The Lavender Hill Mob. Directed by Charles Crichton, from a […]
Ealing Studios
Alexander MacKendrick (The Man with a White Suit & Sweet Smell of Success)
Season Finale Baby! This week, I am joined by Graham (POP SCREEN) and Aidan (LB) to talk about Ealing man turned award-winning educator, Alexander MacKendrick. A man whose teachings have been turned into one of the definitive filmmaking books, “on Filmmaking” it’s called, funnily enough. As for his films, we […]
Robert Hamer (It Always Rains on Sunday & Kind Hearts and Coronets)
The Halfway House: beguiling Ealing, with hints of later ghost stories (Review)
Who’s up for a ghost story at Christmas? Plenty of people, judging by the British television schedules, with adaptations of MR James and Susan Hill jostling for position alongside Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight’s revisionist A Christmas Carol. The dark, chilly, rainy nights lend themselves perfectly to a fireside tale, […]
The Blue Lamp (1950) The movie that birthed the influential Dixon of Dock Green (Review)
Scott of the Antarctic (1948) A timelessly charming tale of survival (Review)
Ealing proving once again that didn’t just deal in black comedies concerned with a brand of pure Britannia that has since been consigned to history with Studio Canal’s release of Scott of the Antarctic. Sometimes Hitchcock editor, Charles Frend directs the now fabled story of Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated South […]
Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945) The Darkest Soap Opera you’ve never seen (Review)
Ealing Studios are regarded as the bastion of post-war Cinema, the home of the finest comedies Britain has ever produced, but what is often overlooked is their innate Gothicism. With the artifice of its sets and the embers of Victorian London architecture, there is a Gothic grandeur running through the […]
Cinema Eclectica 54 – Mummies Aren’t Daddies
Cinema Eclectica 54 – Mummies Aren't Daddies
The Ladykillers (1955) Impossibly influential dark comedy caper is still as fresh as a daisy (Review)
Few cinematic institutions rival Ealing Studios; the only similar shadows are cast by British Horror emblem Hammer and the Hong Kong Martial Arts stalwarts, the Shaw Brothers. Between 1930 and 1959, the West London studio bore cinematic fruit that not only stands up to this day, many titles could also […]