"Actor: Orson"

• Orson Welles' Macbeth | DVD | (17/07/2000) from £17.46   |  Saving you £2.53 (14.49%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Orson Welles' Macbeth is an expressionist masterpiece about a doomed man of ordinary ambition who believes an evil prophecy that he will become King. The shortest of Shakespeare's tragedies, Welles long considered Macbeth to be the most filmable of the Bard's work. Produced on a slim budget over a mere 32 days, the results are consistently impressive. As depicted by Welles, the title character is not a warrior king or conscience-stricken, poetic soul on a par with Hamlet; rather, he is revealed to be a facile, superstitious man consigned to fate even as the character does not trust to fate. For her part, Lady Macbeth (Jeanette Nolan) is merely obsessed with the unimpeded exercise of her will to power, viewing her husband's life as a tale told by an idiot (she is particularly effective during the "out, damned spot" scene from Act V). Welles has also created some new scenes here, conflating several characters into a "Holy Father" (Alan Napier) while eliciting strong supporting turns from actors such as Dan O'Herlihy (Macduff) and Roddy McDowall (Malcolm). All of this unfolds within a highly disordered state in which nature itself is on the rant ("Fair is foul and foul is fair"). Though the technically poor soundtrack and the occasional indecipherable Scottish brogue make the film seem a trifle compromised at times, each moment feels preternaturally alive. There is an almost Brechtian quality here, with Welles giving us splendid pieces then leaving it to us to fit them into a theatrically coherent puzzle. Refusing to believe that Birnham Wood could ever travel to Dunsinane, Macbeth is finally exposed as a man of insufficient character. As such, some might suggest that this Macbeth is more accurately described as the story of how Malcolm became King. --Kevin Mulhall

• The Graham Greene Collection | DVD | (05/09/2016) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £29.99

• Three Cases of Murder and Orson Welles Ghost Story | DVD | (11/10/2010) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Unseen for many years Three Cases Of Murder and Return To Glennascaul are something of a treat for lovers of British film. The main feature is an excellent portmanteau in which the viewers' imagination is challenged by the bizarre and macabre. A notable supporting cast of British actors includes John Gregson Elizabeth Sellars Andre Morell Hugh Pryse Eddie Byrne and Alan Badel.

• The Stranger | DVD | (29/04/2015) from £12.15   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  The legendary story that hovers over Orson Welles' The Stranger is that he wanted Agnes Moorehead to star as the dogged Nazi hunter who trails a war criminal to a sleepy New England town. The part went to Edward G. Robinson, who is marvellous, but it points out how many compromises Welles made on the film in an attempt to show Hollywood he could make a film on time, on budget and on their own terms. He accomplished all three, turning out a stylish if unambitious film noir thriller, his only Hollywood film to turn a profit on its original release. Welles stars as unreformed fascist Franz Kindler, hiding as a schoolteacher in a New England prep school for boys and newly married to the headmaster's lovely if naive daughter (Loretta Young). Welles, the director, is in fine form for the opening sequences, casting a moody tension as agents shadow a twitchy low-level Nazi official skulking through South American ports and building up to dramatic crescendo as Kindler murders this little man, the lovely woods becoming a maelstrom of swirling leaves that expose the body he furiously tries to bury. The rest of the film is a well designed but conventional cat-and-mouse game featuring an eye-rolling performance by Welles and a thrilling conclusion played out in the dark clock tower that looms over the little village. --Sean Axmaker

• Waterloo | Blu Ray | (05/09/2019) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• The Black Rose | DVD | (31/01/2011) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Tyrone Powers stars in this glossy historical adventure as a Saxon nobleman who travels to China to make his fortune. Cast out of 13th century England after a failed rebellion against his Norman oppressors Walter of Gurnie (Tyrone Power) first travels to North Africa where he encounters headstrong tribal leader Bayan (Orson Welles). As he journeys further afield he eventually reaches China where at the insistence of his hosts he remains accumulating scientific knowledge. Finally fleeing his captors Walter returns to his native land where his past sins forgotten he is hailed as a hero.

• Citizen Kane | DVD | (20/09/1999) from £9.99   |  Saving you £10.00 (100.10%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Arguably the greatest of American films, Orson Welles' 1941 masterpiece, made when he was only 26, still unfurls like a dream and carries the viewer along the mysterious currents of time and memory to reach a mature (if ambiguous) conclusion: people are the sum of their contradictions and can't be known easily. Welles plays newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane, taken from his mother as a boy and made the ward of a rich industrialist. The result is that every well-meaning or tyrannical or self-destructive move he makes for the rest of his life appears in some way to be a reaction to that deeply wounding event. Written by Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz, and photographed by Gregg Toland, the film is the sum of Welles's awesome ambitions as an artist in Hollywood. He pushes the limits of then-available technology to create a true magic show, a visual and aural feast that almost seems to be rising up from a viewer's subconscious. As Kane, Welles even ushers in the influence of Bertolt Brechton film acting. This is truly a one-of-a-kind work, and in many ways is still the most modern of modern films this century. --Tom Keogh

• A Man For All Seasons | DVD | (26/11/2001) from £17.98   |  Saving you £2.01 (11.18%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Robert Bolt's successful play, A Man for All Seasons, was not considered a hot commercial property by Columbia Pictures--a period piece about a moral issue without a star, without even a love story. Perhaps that's why Columbia left director Fred Zinnemann alone to make the film as long as he stuck to a relatively small budget. The results took everyone by surprise, as the talky morality play became a box-office hit and collected the top Oscars for 1966. At the play's heart is the standoff between King Henry VIII (Robert Shaw, in young lion form) and Sir Thomas More (Paul Scofield, in an Oscar-winning performance). Henry wants More's official approval of divorce, but More's strict ethical and religious code will not let him waffle. More's rectitude is a source of exasperation to Cardinal Wolsey (Orson Welles in a cameo), who chides, "If you could just see facts flat on without that horrible moral squint". Zinnemann's approach is all simplicity, and indeed the somewhat prosaic staging doesn't create a great deal of cinematic excitement. But the language is worth savouring, and the ethical politics are debated with all the calm and majesty of an absorbing chess game. --Robert Horton, Amazon.com

• Immortal Story | DVD | (29/06/2015) from £11.59   |  Saving you £1.40 (12.08%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Welles' second-to-last feature The Immortal Story is an adaptation of a book by Danish author Isak Dinesen and stars Jeanne Moreau. The year is 1860 in the Portuguese colony of Macao Mr. Clay (Welles) is an aging rich merchant who is the subject of town gossip. He likes his clerk Levinsky (Roger Coggio) to read to him to help him relax in the evenings and one night he recounts a tale about a rich man who paid a poor sailor five guineas to father a child with his beautiful young wife. Mr. Clay has no wife and no heir to his fortune and resolves to make the story true...Levinsky approaches Virginie Ducrot (Moreau) another clerk's mistress and strikes a bargain for 300 guineas. Now to find the sailor...

• The Lady from Shanghai (Dual Format Limited Edition) | Blu Ray | (24/04/2017) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Legend has it that Orson Welles more or less conned studio boss Harry Cohn over the phone into making The Lady from Shanghai by grabbing the title from a nearby paperback. In any case, this is one of Welles's most fascinating works, a bizarre tale of an Irish sailor (Welles) who accompanies a beautiful woman (Rita Hayworth) and her handicapped husband (Everett Sloane) on a cruise and becomes involved in a murder plot. But never mind all that (the aforementioned legend also claims that Cohn offered a reward to anyone who could explain the plot to him). The film is really a dream of Welles's driving preoccupations both on and off-screen at the time: the elusiveness of identity, the mystique of things lost, and most of all the director's faltering marriage to Hayworth. In the tradition of male filmmakers who indirectly tell the story of their love affairs with leading ladies, Welles tells his own, photographing Hayworth as a deconstructed star, an obvious cinematic creation, thus reflecting, perhaps, a never-satisfied yearning that leads us back to the mystery of Citizen Kane. --Tom Keogh

• Ferry To Hong Kong | DVD | (14/02/2011) from £6.09   |  Saving you £6.90 (113.30%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Mark Conrad (Curt jurgens) is an unwanted nomad - doomed to sail the Hong Kong ferry unable to disembark at either port of call. The ferry captain(Orson Welles) treats his unwanted passenger with disdain and contempt. Sylvia Syms plays an enchanting schoolmistress who falls in love with Conrad despite his constant rebuffs. Join this mismatched triangle as they battle with pirates and a raging typhoon on the Ferry to Hong Kong.

• Rita Hayworth - Screen Goddess Boxset | DVD | (03/10/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £49.99

• The Eyes of Orson Welles | DVD | (17/09/2018) from £5.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Granted exclusive access to hundreds of private drawings and paintings by Orson Welles, filmmaker Mark Cousins dives deep into the visual world of this legendary director and actor, to reveal a portrait of the artist as he's never been seen before - through his own eyes, sketched with his own hand, painted with his own brush. Executive produced by Michael Moore, The Eyes of Orson Welles brings vividly to life the passions, politics and power of this brilliant 20th-century showman, and explores how the genius of Welles still resonates today in the age of Trump, more than 30 years after his death.

• Orson Welles - Screen Legends | DVD | (05/06/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £24.99

  What more is there to say about Orson Welles? One of the most talented and enigmatic artists that Hollywood has ever seen this box set gathers several films in his oeuvre for your viewing pleasure. Citizen Kane (Dir. Orson Welles 1941): In May of 1941 RKO Radio Pictures released a controversial film by a 25-year-old first-time director. That premier of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane was to have a profound and lasting effect of the art of motion pictures. It has been hai

• Tempo - Volume 1 | DVD | (21/01/2013) from £9.98   |  Saving you £12.00 (150.19%)   |  RRP £19.99

  ITV's seminal arts programme, Tempo ran for eight years through a decade which saw a creative explosion within all aspects of the performing arts. Its fluid style of presentation allowed an almost open-ended remit, enabling it to cover subjects as diverse as cinema, music, dance, photography, writing - and much more besides. At a time when television was being criticised for dumbing down, Tempo - more than any other series - showed that ITV could indeed go highbrow whilst still remaining populist - a philosophy and outlook that was to continue into the 1970s and beyond with its successors Aquarius and The South Bank Show.Unseen for decades, this two-disc set contains interviews, reportage and features on Jacques Tati, Stan Tracey, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lee Strasberg, Tom Jones, Orson Welles, Harold Pinter, Charles Eames, Jean Luc-Godard and more.

• The Root of Heaven | DVD | (23/04/2018) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  John Huston directs this 1950s drama starring Errol Flynn, Juliette Gréco, Trevor Howard, Eddie Albert and Orson Welles. Based on the novel by Romain Gary, the film follows crusading environmentalist Morel (Howard), who is determined to protect elephants from the threat of extinction. Though Morel initially struggles to gain traction for his project in French Equatorial Africa, he wins over Minna (Gréco), a local tavern worker, and Forsyth (Flynn), a former member of the British Army looking to correct past wrongs. Can the intrepid trio make a difference to the future of elephants?

• RoGoPaG (Masters of Cinema) (DVD) | DVD | (27/08/2012) from £10.99   |  Saving you £6.00 (54.60%)   |  RRP £16.99

  Conceived by the legendary Italian producer Alfredo Bini, the multi-director portmanteau film Let's Wash Our Brains: RoGoPaG (Laviamoci il cervello: RoGoPaG) brought together four esteemed directors of European cinema to contribute comic episodes reflective of the swinging post-boom era. The resulting omnibus collectively examines social anxieties around sex, nuclear war, religion, urbanisation - and the promise of a modern cinema.Roberto Rossellini's Illibatezza (Virginity) follows an airline stewardess plagued by an obsessed American tourist whose 8mm camera enables the indulgence of a personal, and solipsistic, vision of the Ideal. Jean-Luc Godard's Il nuovo mondo (The New World) takes place in an Italian-dubbed Paris beset by nuclear fallout, and wittily chronicles the changes that take place in the lives - and medicine cabinet - of a handsome young couple. Pier Paolo Pasolini's scandalous La ricotta (Ricotta, as in the curded cheese) presents the goings-on around a film shoot devoted to the Crucifixion and presided over by none other than Orson Welles (playing a kind of stand-in for Pasolini himself); it is this episode that landed Pasolini with a suspended four-month prison sentence. Lastly, Ugo Gregoretti's Il pollo ruspante (Free-Range Chicken) depicts a middle-class Milanese family flirting with the purchase of real-estate and engaging catastrophically with an antagonistic consumerist infrastructure.

• Citizen Kane - 75th Anniversary Edition | Blu Ray | (02/05/2016) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £27.99

  New remastered collector's edition including extraordinary collectables. Orson Welles' masterwork (number 1 in the American Film Institute's list of Best American Movies) dazzles anew in a superb 75th-anniversary high-definition digital transfer. It's grand entertainment, sharply acted (starting many of Welles' Mercury Players on the road to thriving film careers) and directed with inspired visual flair. Chronicling the stormy life of an influential publishing tycoon, this Best Original Screenplay Academy Award winner (1941) is rooted in themes of power, corruption, vanity the American Dream lost in the mystery of a dying man's last word: Rosebud. Special Features: - Commentary by Peter Bogdanovich - Commentary by Roger Ebert - Opening: World Premiere of Citizen Kane [1941 Newsreel] - Interview with Ruth Warrick - Interview with Robert Wise - Production Stills Gallery (62 cnt.) - Still Photography Commentary by Roger Ebert - Gallery of rare photos, Alternate Ad Campaigns, Studio correspondence, call sheets and other memorabilia - Theatrical Trailer Collectables: - 5 x one sheet/Lobby card reproductions - 48-page book with photos, storyboards and behind the scenes information - 20-page 1941 souvenir programme reproduction - 10 x production memos and correspondence

• Compulsion | Blu Ray | (29/02/2016) from £18.98   |  Saving you £3.00 (17.66%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Winner of the Cannes Film Festival Best Actor Award for all three of its stars (Stockwell, Dillman and Welles), Richard Fleischer's stylish and compelling thriller sees two law students murder a young boy in cold blood to prove their intellectual superiority. Sadistic bully Artie Straus (Bradford Dillman) and timid introvert Judd Steiner (Dean Stockwell) commit the 'perfect crime', but their arrogance leads to their arrest. Loosely based on the notorious 1924 murder trial of thrill-killers Leopold and Loeb, this outstanding film also features cinema legend Orson Welles as the criminal defence lawyer who takes on their case. Special Features: New 4K restoration The Guardian Interview with Richard Fleischer (1981, audio only): the award-winning director discusses his career after a screening of Compulsion The Guardian Interview with Richard Fleischer (1994): Fleischer returns to the NFT for this filmed interview Orson Welles in the Courtroom Scene from Compulsion (1959, audio only): reproduction of the original 7 vinyl Lobby cards, posters and stills gallery Original theatrical trailer Optional DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio HoH subtitles on the feature and the trailer

• The Kremlin Letter | DVD | (25/07/2011) from £15.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  In this star-studded black-hearted spy thriller directed and co-written by the legendary John Huston (The Maltese Falcon The African Queen) a potentially catastrophic diplomatic letter from the CIA must be recovered at all costs. Drafted in is Rone (Patrick O'Neal) a young agent with a photographic memory to make his way through a treacherous maze of shadowy cities and shady characters. Based on the acclaimed novel by Noel Behn drawn from his work within the U. S. Army Counterintelligence Corps The Kremlin Letter is a brutal level-headed examination of espionage leaving behind any trace of gadgetry or glamour.