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Lust-filled treachery in the steaming tropics! He dared to love a cannibal empress! Taglines like that suggest that it wasn’t easy to sell Carol Reed’s phenomenally good adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s classic, a tale of human self-degradation and malevolence in the tropics. Long difficult to see, it’s finally here to dazzle a generation that might appreciate its superb performances. Forget Lord Jim and Colonel Kurtz. Trevor Howard’s back-stabbing Peter Willems shows us the price of total betrayal: permanent banishment from humanity.

Outcast of the Islands

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1951 / B&w / 1:37 flat / 100 93 min. / Street Date April 29, 2020 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Trevor Howard, Ralph Richardson, Robert Morley, Wendy Hiller, Aissa, George Coulouris, Tamine, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Peter Illing, Betty Ann Davies, Frederick Valk, A.V. Bramble, Marne Maitland, James Kenney, Annabel Morley.

Cinematography: Edward Scaife, John Wilcox

Production Design: Vincent Korda

Second Unit Director: Guy Hamilton...

Critics compare this sophisticated spy thriller to Carol Reed’s earlier Triumph set in Vienna with Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles — but it’s a different story altogether, not about black-market evil but the perils of moral compromise in a divided Berlin. James Mason and Claire Bloom are stunningly good together, in a moody suspense that’s completely serious — no comic relief or ‘fun’ jeopardy to distract from the fascinating, you-are-there setting, a Berlin trying to rebuild itself. With Hildegard Knef, and an extended, beautifully filmed nighttime chase that seals an unlikely romance.

The Man Between

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1953 / B&w / 1:37 flat Academy / 102 min. / Street Date November 5, 2019 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: James Mason, Claire Bloom, Hildegard Knef, Geoffrey Toone, Aribert Wäscher, Ernst Schróder, Dieter Krause, Hilde Sessak, Karl John, Ljuba Welitsch, Reinhard Kolldehoff.

Cinematography: Desmond Dickinson

Film Editor: Bert Bates

Original Music: John Addison

Written by Harry Kurnitz,...

Top stars Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis and Gina Lollobrigida earn their keep in Carol Reed’s powerful tale of ambition and excellence performing forty feet above a circus arena. The best circus movie ever is also among Reed’s most exciting, best directed movies, a solid show all around.

Trapeze

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1956 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 106 min. / Street Date September 25, 2018 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Gina Lollobrigida, Katy Jurado, Thomas Gomez, Sidney James, Johnny Puleo.

Cinematography: Robert Krasker

Costume Design: Veniero Colasanti

Editorial Supervisor: Bert Batt

Production Design: Rino Mondelli

Dialogue Coach: Harriet White Medin

Original Music: Malcolm Arnold

Written by James R. Webb & Liam O’Brien from a novel by Max Catto

Produced by James Hill, Harold Hecht, Burt Lancaster

Directed by Carol Reed

For a long time it seemed that Carol Reed had been canonized for The Third Man, Odd Man Out and...

Guy Hamilton, who directed four James Bond movies including the 1964 classic Goldfinger, passed away earlier today at the age of 93. The filmmaker died on the Spanish island of Majorca where he lived. No details about the cause of death were given at this time, but we'll be sure to keep you posted with more updates as soon as they come in.

Guy Hamilton was born September 16, 1922 in Paris, France, and he got his start in the film business in the late 1940s. He served as director Carol Reed's assistant for five years, before becoming an assistant director on his 1949 classic film The Third Man. He also served as an assistant director on The Angel With the Trumpet, The Great Manhunt, Outcast of the Islands and the John Huston classic The African Queen, before making his directorial debut in 1951 with The Ringer.

He went on to direct An Inspector Calls,...

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Guy Hamilton, who transformed James Bond, dies at the age of 93.

Guy Hamilton, best known for the his work on the James Bond movies, Goldfinger, Diamonds are Forever, Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun, has died at the Hospital Juaneda Miramar in the city of Palma de Mallorca on the Spanish island of Mallorca. He was 93.

Hamilton raised the profile of the James Bond movies through his work with original film 007 actor Sean Connery and Roger Moore, who played the spy starting with Live and Let Die and in 1974's The Man with the Golden Gun, which Hamilton directed.

"Incredibly, incredibly saddened to hear the wonderful director Guy Hamilton has gone to the great cutting room in the sky. 2016 is horrid," Moore wrote on Twitter.

Hamilton worked with Michael Caine on Battle of Britain and Harrison Ford on the 1978 adaptation of Force 10 from Navarone.

To Go On Two Legs: Gregory’s Fascinating Recapitulation of a Cinematic Train Wreck

Documentarian David Gregory graduates from an extensive history of shorts with his first feature length achievement, the verbosely titled Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s The Island of Dr. Moreau. However, the title is something of a misnomer, much like another recent examination of a project that never came to fruition with its originating director, Jodorowsky’s Dune. Stanley, who had gained a successful cult following in the early 90s for Hardware (1990) and the Miramax distributed Dust Devil (1992), would engage in the sort of uphill production battle that rivalled historical studio horror stories. Weather, nervous producers, pampered diva personalities, and ultimately, Stanley’s own limitations in reigning in such aggressive setbacks would result in his being fired from the set. However, the strangeness doesn’t stop there. Gregory manages to convey the extremity of a much maligned production,...

Above: 1978 re-release poster for Tabu (F.W. Murnau, USA, 1931)

I only recently came across the posters of German artist Boris Streimann (1908-1984)—who was known to also sign his work as B. Namir—and was immediately struck by both the dynamism and the color of his work. The author of hundreds, if not thousands, of posters from the late 20s through the late 60s, Streimann loved diagonals. All of the posters I have selected— the best of his work that I could find—work off a strong diagonal line, with even his varied and very inventive title treatments (which could have been the work of another designer) often placed on an angle. On top of the sheer energy and movement of his posters, his use of color is extraordinary: brash and expressionistic like his brushwork. I especially love the multi-colored accordion in Port of Freedom, the loin cloth in Tabu, and...

(1945-53, StudioCanal, PG)

A public school boy from the professional middle-class, the ruggedly handsome Trevor Howard (1913-88) was the first new British star to emerge after the second world war, usually playing middle-class professionals – doctors, lawyers, military men, colonial officials. He was, however, Oscar-nominated as Paul Morel's hard-drinking, working-class father in Sons and Lovers (1960).

His movie career lasted more than 40 years, but his most memorable star parts came early on. Five of these are in this excellent box set, starting with his decent doctor caught up in a chaste but passionate affair with housewife Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter (1945), a classic example of British understatement, and the first of his three films with David Lean. This is followed by his cynical intelligence officer pursuing black marketeer Harry Lime through the sewers of postwar Vienna in the Carol Reed-Graham Greene masterpiece The Third Man (1949).

In the third film,...

“Leave death to the professionals,” he memorably growled as Major Calloway in Carol Reed's The Third Man, quite possibly this country's finest film. The craggy, intense Trevor Howard also played the conflicted married man in David Lean's exquisite Brief Encounter, and both masterpieces are included here, along with Odette, Outcast of the Islands and Heart of the Matter (arguably the British actor's most accomplished performance). Howard once said, “I've been number two in films for donkey's years” – but what a number two, with his gruff presence always enhancing a picture.

Feature Aliya Whiteley 26 Sep 2013 - 07:13

An acting great British of the post-war era, Trevor Howard's the subject of a new movie box set. Aliya looks at its five classic films...

It's difficult to describe Trevor Howard. I could start by saying he was a great leading man of British post-war cinema, but that leaves out his supporting turns in films like The Third Man, and his character performances, such as Captain Bligh in Mutiny On The Bounty (1962), or Sir Henry At Rawlinson End (1980). He could be called an upper-class gentleman, but in Sons And Lovers (1960) he played a Nottinghamshire miner perfectly.

I could talk about how he wasn't traditionally handsome, but the look in his eyes when he falls passionately for Celia Johnson (Brief Encounter) contains a male beauty that continues to define cinematic love today. Or maybe I could mention how perfectly he inhabited the role of...

To mark the release of the Trevor Howard Box Set on 23rd September. We’ve been given three copies to give away. The box set contains numerous classic movies including Brief Encounter, The Third Man (Special Edition), Odette, Outcast of the Islands and Heart of the Matter.

The inimitable, gravelly voiced Trevor Howard was one of Britain’s finest character actors, and an important figure in post-war British cinema. With a career spanning over 40 years, on both stage and screen, Howard starred in some of the finest films in cinematic history. A celebrated actor within the industry he was Oscar, Bafta, Golden Globe and Emmy nominated many times for his work, winning twice.

This collection brings together some of his finest work, with five of the very best films from his illustrious career. The much loved classic Brief Encounter, directed by Noël Coward, was the film that launched his career,...

(Carol Reed, 1951, Studio Canal, PG)

Carol Reed was acclaimed as an important new talent when Graham Greene, as film critic of the Spectator, reviewed his second film as a director, Midshipman Easy, in 1935. After the second world war they found fame, collaborating on The Fallen Idol and The Third Man. Reed thought they might scale new heights with a film of Joseph Conrad's 1896 novel An Outcast of the Islands. But Greene, in thrall since childhood to Conrad, had been trying to escape the Polish writer's influence and rejected Reed's invitation. A pity, because it might have been a revealing masterpiece.

Instead, it's an ambitious, deeply flawed picture, filmed on unromantically observed south- east Asian locations with a powerful performance by Trevor Howard as the self-destructive Willems and Ralph Richardson (a key exponent of Greene) providing a highly stylised portrait of the godlike Captain Lingard. A crucial film in an important,...