"Actor: Francis Lederer"

• Midnight (Criterion Collection) - UK Only | Blu Ray | (14/07/2025) from £22.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Screwball comedy doesn't get any more effortlessly elegant and gleefully irreverent than this roulette wheel of romantic deception, gleaming with cunning wit and Continental élan. A couture-clad Claudette Colbert is divine as a penniless American chorus girl who crashes Parisian high society by posing as a wealthy Hungarian baronessbut both a scheming nobleman (John Barrymore) and a smitten taxi driver (Don Ameche) are soon on to her game. Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett's sophisticated scripta typically subversive blend of fairy-tale escapism and caustic social observationand the pitch-perfect direction of master craftsman Mitchell Leisen yield a topsy-turvy Cinderella story with a cynical bite. BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack New audio commentary featuring author and film critic Michael Koresky New program featuring audio excerpts of a 1969 interview with director Mitchell Leisen Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of the film from 1940 Trailer English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing PLUS: An essay by film critic David Cairns New cover by Abigail Giuseppe

• PANDORA'S BOX | Blu Ray | (16/09/2024) from £16.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Eureka Entertainment to re-issue G. W. Pabst's sordid melodrama PANDORA'S BOX, one of silent cinema's great masterworks, starring Louise Brooks. Presented on Blu-ray from a new restoration as part of The Masters of Cinema Series. Available from 16 September 2024.In a role intended at one point for Marlene Dietrich (The Blue Angel), 22 year-old Louise Brooks (Diary of a Lost Girl), with her fragile beauty and iconic dark bob hairstyle, gives a performance decades ahead of its time that immortalised her as an icon. Largely condemned and censored upon its initial release for its daring treatment of sexuality and female desire, Brooks' understated yet erotically charged performance endures as among the most modern of the silent era.Adapted from a pair of plays by Frank Wedekind, Pandora's Box tells the story of sex worker Lulu, a free spirit whose open sexuality breeds chaos in its wake. When Lulu's latest lover, the newspaper editor Dr Ludwig Schon (Fritz Kortner, The Hands of Orlac), announces plans to leave her to marry a more respectable woman, Lulu is devastated. Cast in a musical revue written by Schon's son, Alwa (Francis Lederer, The Return of Dracula), Lulu seduces Schon once more - only to have their tryst exposed, and Schon's plans for a more socially acceptable marriage shattered. Left with no choice but to marry Lulu, Schon meets with tragedy on their wedding night. Lulu stands trial for the incident, facing years of imprisonment. With the aid of her former pimp (Carl Goetz, Tom Sawyer), an infatuated lesbian countess (Alice Roberts, The Merry Widower) and Alwa, she flees toward a fate of increasing squalor and peril, finally crossing paths one Christmas Eve with Jack the Ripper.Reviled and bowdlerised at its debut, Pandora's Box has since been recognised as one of the masterpieces of early German cinema. A sordid melodrama made with great style, it affirms G. W. Pabst as a daring and important director and Louise Brooks as one of cinema's most exquisite and distinctive performers. The Masters of Cinema series is proud to present Pabst's masterpiece in a new restoration on Blu-ray.1080p HD presentation on Blu-ray from a definitive 2K digital restoration | Optional English subtitles | Orchestral Score by Peer Raben | Audio commentary by critic Pamela Hutchinson | The New Woman & The Jazz Age: The Dangerous Feminine in Pandora's Box - Visual appreciation by author and critic Kat Ellinger | Godless Beasts - Video essay by David Cairns | Lulu in Wonderland - Video essay by Fiona Watson | Restoring Pandora's Box - Interview with Martin Koerber | PLUS: A 28-page collector's booklet featuring an essay by film critic and historian Imogen Sara Smith, author of Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City

• PANDORA'S BOX | Blu Ray | (30/10/2023) from £34.29   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• Pandora's Box | DVD | (24/06/2002) from £17.68   |  Saving you £2.31 (13.07%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Made at the very end of the silent era, Pandora's Box is one of the last flowerings of German cinema's greatest decade. It also marked the highpoint of two careers: Austrian director GW Pabst and American actress Louise Brooks. A merge of two linked plays by the decadent German playwright Frank Wedekind, it's the story of Lulu, the archetypal femme fatale (the same plays served as source for Alban Berg's masterly 1935 opera). At once sensual and innocent, a force of uninhibited sexuality, Lulu brings ruin on all her lovers both male and female, and ultimately upon herself. Hollywood never knew what to do with Brooks who, with her fierce intelligence and her open delight in sex, refused to play the coy flappers then in fashion. In Pabst, whose genius, she wrote, "lay in getting to the heart of a person", she found the director she needed, and he brought out her a screen persona with a depth of eroticism that's still breathtaking to see. The film features some of the finest German acting talent of the period--Fritz Kortner, Franz Lederer--but it's Brooks' luminous performance that rivets the eye and makes her a great screen icon. Though the action is nominally set in the late-19th century--Lulu ends up in a shadowy London where she encounters Jack the Ripper--Pandora's Box breathes the gamey air of the Weimar Republic, vividly captured by Günther Krampf's pungent photography. This release runs well over two hours and includes, for the first time in decades, over 30 minutes of cut footage, restoring the film to something very close to Pabst's original masterpiece. On the DVD: Pandora's Box on DVD is a clean, crisp transfer in the classic 4:3 ratio, and the mono soundtrack brings out all the detail of Peer Rubens' Kurt Weill-inflected score, stylishly performed by the Kontraste Ensemble. Dialogue intertitles can be read in either English or German. We also get an outstanding 60-minute documentary, Looking for Lulu, about Brooks' life and career: warmly narrated by Shirley MacLaine, it features excerpts from an interview with Brooks from 1976. --Philip Kemp

• Blood Creature / Werewolf In A Girls Dormitory | DVD | (20/02/2006) from £17.53   |  Saving you £-0.54 (N/A%)   |  RRP £16.99

  Blood Creature: On a secluded island a mad misguided scientist's experiments to turn a panther into a man are thwarted by a survivor of a shipwreck. Inspired by H.G. Wells 'The Island Of Doctor Moreau' Blood Creature makes an impassionate plea against immoral scientific experiments. Werewolf In A Girl's Dormitory: A reform school for wayward girls is plagied by monstrous attacks. Suspicion falls on several dubious characters when a death is caused from what appears to

• Romance in Manhattan | DVD | (17/05/2012) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A