"Actor: Jack Mullaney"

• South Pacific | DVD | (08/03/2004) from £6.20   |  Saving you £9.79 (157.90%)   |  RRP £15.99

  The dazzling Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, brought to lush life by the director of the original stage version, Joshua Logan. Set on a remote island during the Second World War, South Pacific tracks two parallel romances: one between a Navy nurse (Mitzi Gaynor) "as corny as Kansas in August" and a wealthy French plantation owner (Rossano Brazzi), the other between a young American officer (John Kerr) and a native girl (France Nuyen). The theme of interracial love was still daring in 1958, and so was director Logan's decision to overlay emotional moments with tinted filters--a technique that misfires as often as it hits. The comic relief tends to fall flat and an overly spunky Mitzi Gaynor is a poor substitute for the stage original's Mary Martin. But the location scenery on the Hawaiian island of Kauai is gorgeous and the songs are among the finest in the American musical catalogue: "Some Enchanted Evening", "Younger than Springtime", "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair", "This Nearly Was Mine". That's Juanita Hall as the sly native trader Bloody Mary, singing the haunting tune that launched a thousand tiki bars, "Bali H'ai". The movie is based on stories from James Michener's book Tales from the South Pacific. --Robert Horton, Amazon.com

• The Young Stranger | DVD | (30/06/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  A story of teenage tearing-away in 1950s America, The Young Stranger fails to make a serious, gripping narrative of the events that follow the somewhat innocuous pivotal moment when 16-year-old Harold "Hal" Ditmar (James MacArthur) punches a cinema manager. Adapted from a TV play and released two years after the benchmark for delinquency movies, Rebel Without a Cause, it has none of that film's raw urgency, seeming staid and inconsequential in comparison. The primary problem is that Hal makes an unconvincing hoodlum. His misdemeanour is less an act of rebellion than a brief misunderstanding. Far from articulating the angst of a generation, his angry tirades against his parents (Kim Hunter and James Daly) and the police set him apart from his peers and feel more like the self-pitying whines of a privileged individual. This sensation is further exacerbated by the fact that all of his problems are swiftly resolved in an all-too-neat ending. Still, The Young Stranger is an interesting period piece, not least for an amusingly tame car chase from first-time feature director John Frankenheimer. --Paul Philpott

• Kiss Them For Me | DVD | (01/08/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  In this light-hearted wartime comedy three WWII Navy men orchestrate a 4-day leave for themselves in San Francisco. Once ashore they immediately set out to make it a swinging celebration - to last as long as possible! Chief among the party-bound is Commander Andy Crewson (Cary Grant). Desperate to keep the men on the straight and narrow Lieutenant (Werner Klemperer) commits the trio to becoming spokesmen at a shipyard that's owned by a local tycoon. But before long the rowdy Cre