"Actor: Herbert Lomas"

• Jamaica Inn | DVD | (11/06/2007) from £4.49   |  Saving you £5.50 (122.49%)   |  RRP £9.99

  It's generally acknowledged that the Master of Suspense disliked costume dramas and Jamaica Inn--a rip-roaring melodrama drawn from a Daphne du Maurier pot-boiler, set in 1820s Cornwall--is about as costumed as they come. So what was he doing directing it? Killing time, essentially. In 1939 Hitchcock was due to leave Britain for Hollywood, but delays Stateside left him with time on his hands. Never one to sit idle, he agreed to make one picture for Mayflower Productions, a new outfit formed by actor Charles Laughton and émigré German producer Erich Pommer. An innocent young orphan (the 19-year-old Maureen O'Hara in her first starring role) arrives at her uncle's remote Cornish inn to find it a den of reprobates given to smuggling, wrecking and gross overacting. They're all out-hammed, though, by Laughton at his most corseted and outrageously self-indulgent as the local squire to whom Maureen runs for help. Since his star was also the co-producer, Hitch couldn't do much with the temperamental actor. He contented himself with adding a few characteristic touches--including a spot of bondage (always a Hitchcock favourite), and the chief villain's final spectacular plunge from a high place--and slyly sending up the melodramatic absurdities of the plot. Jamaica Inn hardly stands high in the Master's canon, but it trundles along divertingly enough. Hitchcock fanatics will have fun comparing it with his two subsequent--and far more accomplished--Du Maurier adaptations, Rebecca and The Birds. --Philip Kemp

• Ghost Train | DVD | (17/04/2019) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  ""If this be a natural thing where do it come from where do it go? "" Tommy Gander a concert comedian; Teddy Deakin his pal; Jackie Withorp and her cousin Richard Winthrop; Miss Bourne a spinster visiting evacuees Herbert and Edna an engaged couple and Dr. Sterling travelling on a train to Cornwall miss their connections owing to a delay and have to spend a night in the waiting room of the eerie Cornish railway junction for Fal Vale. The station master tells them the s

• Three Silent Men/Inquest | DVD | (16/09/2013) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Three Silent MenAn inventor of a deadly weapon to be used against the allies is injured in a crash. Surgeon Sir James (Sebastian Shaw) saves his life but learns of the inventors plot. The next day the inventor is found dead. Could it be the surgeon? A 1940 Butchers production stars Derrick De Marney and Patricia Roc. InquestDirected by Roy Boulting this Charter production was made in 1939. It was Boultings second film on the way to; Twisted Nerve The Family Way and Seagulls Over Sorrento. Inquest is a whodunit played out through the coroners inquest. Filmed at Highbury Studios and starring Elizabeth Allan and Herbert Lomas.

• Will Hay - Ask A Policeman | DVD | (03/12/2001) from £9.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Ask a Policeman is arguably Will Hay's all-round best film, not so much for the qualities of his familiar star performance but for the mix of laughs and thrills in the manner of The Ghost Train or The Cat and the Canary. Hay plays Sgt Doubtfoot, commander of the police station in the coastal hamlet of Turnbotham Round, who hasn't made an arrest in 10 years. This is not because of the area's low crime rate, but because most of the poaching, pilfering and swindling in the village is the responsibility of his own constables, the geriatric Harbottle (Moore Marriott) and literal wide-boy Albert (Graham Moffatt). When the Chief Constable threatens to close the station, the bumbling coppers set out to investigate some crimes and go after a smuggling squire who has been using a local legend as a cover story (and planting his signal light on top of the police station itself). Director Marcel Varnel, working from a script by Sidney Gilliatt and Val Guest, manage some fine semi-horror business with "the 'earse of the 'headless 'orseman", a flaming carriage which dashes about the landscape, and a risky venture into Devil's Cave to find the old smuggler's route that turns out to lead to the cellar of Harbottle's general stores. Hay and his sidekicks are in top form, squabbling surreally over every possible filched coin from the police outing fund box or trying to sort out the plot, and there's a sublime scene as they try to get a clue out of the impossibly ancient Harbottle's even more elderly Dad (also Marriott). --Kim Newman

• Sherlock Holmes: The Speckled Band / The Sign Of Four | DVD | (06/11/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  The Speckled Band (Dir. Jack Raymond 1931): Helen Stoner becomes concerned when she hears a mysterious whistle - a sound her sister complained about right before her death. Sounds like a case of Holmes (Raymond Massey) and Watson (Athole Stewart). The Sign Of Four (Dir. Graham Cutts 1932): In this classic murder-mystery an escaped killer embarks on a ruthless quest to track down a missing treasure as well as the man who cheated him out of it.

• Asylum | DVD | (23/02/2009) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99