There was so much more to Ealing Studios than its famous comedies. But there's one category of Ealing films that's really obscure. The 30-odd documentaries and propaganda shorts released by the studio ...

Mavis dreams of owning her own home, and the dream seems finally within reach. But her husband Arthur has dreams of his own ...

Steven Moffat's work can veer between high farce and deep introspection, often in successive lines of the same script. But his trademark is his meticulous and enterprising use of structure (for ...

The Square Peg (d. John Paddy Carstairs, 1958) is perhaps the best of the Wisdom comedies. Well constructed and unsentimental, it features many memorable comic sequences and numerous unexpectedly ...

A naive, hot-headed young market trader finds himself in prison for a minor assault, beginning a spiral of events that will lead him into the hangman's noose. In 1965, the BBC's Wednesday Play ...

As an actor, John Hurt is drawn to misfit roles, outsiders and mavericks, victims and - occasionally - oppressors, sometimes pathetic (the Elephant Man), sometimes defiant (Emperor Caligula, or the ...

An ambitious young working-class man moves to the wealthy town of Warnley to work for the council. He pursues the daughter of the local industrialist, but also falls in love with a married French ...

Cast: Margaret Ford (Mother); Rachel Steel (Daughter); Dave Swarbrick (Detective); Mica Nava (Martha); Suzie Hickford, Jessica Swift, Laka Koc (Rapunzel); Kathy Idden (Mrs. Heron); Christopher ...

In 1935, the notion that film should be considered an art form, something to be preserved in the same way books and paintings are, was still quite revolutionary. The BFI National Archive was one of ...

A decade of radical change - not least for British cinema ...

There was certain inevitability that Sydney Tafler would be found playing the title role in Wide Boy (d. Ken Hughes, 1952). In British films of the late 1940s, 50s and 60s, Tafler was most likely to ...