"Actor: Fritz KORTNER"

• 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

• Midnight Menace | DVD | (17/08/2015) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Veteran screenwriter and director Sinclair Hill captured the unease of a world on the brink of war in this Hitchcockian tale of sabotage and intrigue in the international arms trade. A compelling pre-war thriller, Midnight Menace stars silent-era Hollywood idol Charles Farrell, Australian star Margaret Vyner and noted Austrian-German character player Fritz Kortner. Released in the US as Bombs Over London, Midnight Menace is featured here in a brand-new transfer from the original film elements, in its as-exhibited theatrical aspect ratio. Following the unexplained death of a reporter, Brian Gaunt, the cartoonist on the 'Daily World', begins his own investigation. Assisted by his reporter fiancee, they find one clue leading to the operations of an international arms ring: it is the word 'Saska', which Gaunt incorporates into his next newspaper cartoon in the hope that it will bring results. It does... but not what he expects! SPECIAL FEATURES Image gallery Original pressbook PDFs

• The Razor's Edge | DVD | (16/01/2006) from £14.98   |  Saving you £-1.99 (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Narrated by on-screen observer Maugham (Herbert Marshall) this intriguing tale centers on a soul-searching World War I veteran (Tyrone Power) who finds he can not settle back into the world of the upper class. Shunning his planned marriage and career he travels abroad to seek the meaning of life and career he travels abroad to seek the meaning of life and causes his distraght fiancee (Gene Tierney) to seek solace with another man (John Payne)...

• Somewhere In The Night | DVD | (16/01/2006) from £6.99   |  Saving you £6.00 (85.84%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Meet That Guild Gal...She gives as Good as She Gets! A man awakens in a Honolulu hospital with no memory of his identity. He has three personal items: a wallet a letter from an angry ex-lover and a note from one Larry Cravat and apparent business associate. Searching for Cravat the amnesiac heads to Los Angeles enlisting the help of a saloon singer (Nancy Guild) her boss (Richard Conte) and a police lieutenant (Lloyd Nolan). When he starts asking questions he's blindsided by goons and chased by cops... But ultimately makes a shocking discovery.

• Abdul the Damned | DVD | (08/07/2013) from £4.96   |  Saving you £5.03 (50.40%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Set amid the turbulence of the Young Turk movement within the dying Ottoman Empire, Abdul the Damned was among the first films directed in Britain by Karl Grune, acclaimed director of 1923's Die Strasse (The Street), who had fled Nazi Germany in 1933; the film also features starring roles for fellow German emigre and Pandora's Box star Fritz Kortner, Scottish screen idol John Stuart, and Swedish silent-era heart-throb Nils Asther. Turkey, 1900: Sultan Abdul Hamid II becomes infatuated with T...