"Director: Robert Aldrich"

• The Killing of Sister George | DVD | (01/01/2008) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  When June Buckridge (Beryl Reid) arrives at her London flat and announces 'They are going to murder me', her long-time lover and doll-cuddling flat mate Alice 'Childie' McNaught (Susannah York) realises that things are going to change. For June is referring to her character Sister George, a loveable nurse she portrays in a popular daytime serial. To make matters worse, the widowed executive at the BBC responsible for the decision to kill off Sister George - Mercy Croft (Coral Browne) is also a predatory lesbian who is after Childie and will stop at nothing to get what she wants.

• Where Eagles Dare / Kelly's Heroes / The Dirty Dozen | DVD | (17/10/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £17.99

  Three all time classic war films on this fantastic boxed set featuring the screen presence of Clint Eastwood Richard Burton Donald Sutherland and Telly Savalas. Where Eagles Dare: The mission is clear. Get in. Get the general. Get out. Commandos charged with freeing a U.S. general from an Alpine fortress should also be told to trust nothing - including the search-and-rescue orders just issued. Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood go Where Eagles Dare in this twisty World War

• The Longest Yard | DVD | (05/09/2005) from £8.08   |  Saving you £7.91 (97.90%)   |  RRP £15.99

  First Down...And Ten Years To Go. In this rough-and-tumble yarn actually filmed on-location at the Georgia State Prison the cons are the heroes and the guards are the heavies. Eddie Albert is the sadistic warden who'll gladly make any sacrifice to push his guards' semi-pro football team to a national championship. Reynolds plays one time pro quarterback Paul Crewe now behind bars for leading State Police on a wild chase in a ""borrowed"" car. He agrees to organize a prisoners' team

• The Mean Machine (aka The Longest Yard) | DVD | (01/07/2002) from £19.19   |  Saving you £3.79 (23.40%)   |  RRP £19.99

  First Down...And Ten Years To Go. In this rough-and-tumble yarn actually filmed on-location at the Georgia State Prison the cons are the heroes and the guards are the heavies. Eddie Albert is the sadistic warden who'll gladly make any sacrifice to push his guards' semi-pro football team to a national championship. Reynolds plays one time pro quarterback Paul Crewe now behind bars for leading State Police on a wild chase in a ""borrowed"" car. He agrees to organize a prisoners'

• The Big Knife | Blu Ray | (28/08/2017) from £16.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Mere months after delivering one of the definitive examples of film noir with Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich brought a noir flavour to Hollywood with his classic adaptation of Clifford Odets stage play, The Big Knife. Charles Castle, one of Hollywood s biggest stars, looks like he has it all. But his marriage is falling apart and his wife is threatening to leave him if he renews his contract. Studio boss Stanley Shriner Hoff isn t taking the news too well, and he ll do anything he can to get his man to sign on the dotted line even if means exposing dark secrets... Winner of the Silver Lion at the 1955 Venice Film Festival, The Big Knife also boasts a remarkable cast list including Jack Palance (Shane) as Castle and Rod Steiger (On the Waterfront) as Hoff, plus Shelley Winters (The Night of the Hunter), Ida Lupino (On Dangerous Ground), Jean Hagen (Singin in the Rain) and Everett Sloane (Citizen Kane). SPECIAL EDITION CONTENTS Brand-new 2K restoration from original film elements produced by Arrow Films exclusively for this release High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation Original uncompressed LPCM mono audio Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing Commentary by film critics Glenn Kenny and Nick Pinkerton, recorded exclusively for this release Bass on Titles Saul Bass, responsible for The Big Knife s credit sequence, discusses some of his classic work in this self-directed documentary from 1972 Theatrical trailer Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Sean Phillips FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Illustrated collector s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Nathalie Morris

• Too Late the Hero | DVD | (01/01/2008) from £15.43   |  Saving you £-9.44 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Three years after he made 'The Dirty Dozen', Robert Aldrich returned to the theme of war and not only produced and directed but wrote the story and screenplay for this action-packed adventure epic, featuring reluctant heros and a stunning climax!It is WWII, November 1942 and the U.S launches a major naval offensive in the South Pacific. To ensure battle plans remain secret, a Japanese radio installation must be destroyed and so American naval officer (Cliff Robertson) is ordered by his commander (Henry Fonda) to join a squad of British misfits on a suicide mission to take out the facility. Michael Caine is one of the misfits - a cynical soldier who'd just as likely shoot his commanding officer as obey him. However, when the ragtag band learn of secret Japanese plans, what began as a simple suicide mission becomes a war.

• The Last Sunset (Universal) | DVD | (19/05/2007) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Hollywood legends Rock Hudson and Kirk Douglas star on opposite sides of the law in this dramatic tale of justice and forbidden love. Sheriff Dana Stribling (Hudson) hunts down Brendan O'Malley (Douglas), a hot-headed but affable rogue charged with murder. O'Malley takes refuge in Mexico at the ranch of his former lover Belle Breckenridge (Dorothy Malone), whose husband hires him to drive his herd of cattle to Texas. Stribling agrees to ride along, assuring O'Malley that a hangman's noose waits for him at the end of their journey. Lawman and outlaw are joined by the Breckenridges and their young teenage daughter Missy (Carol Lynley), who draws the attention of O'Malley. A tense and gripping western with a dark twist and standout performances from two all-time acting greats.

• The Dirty Dozen | DVD | (19/06/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Train them! Excite them! Arm them!...Then turn them loose on the Nazis! Atten-hut! Twelve jailbirds will earn their freedom... if they survive a suicide mission against the Nazi brass. Tough-as-nails Lee Marvin leads a nothing-to-lose convict squad in this all-time action trendsetter. They don't make 'em like this anymore!

• Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte | DVD | (16/01/2006) from £13.95   |  Saving you £-0.96 (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Charlotte Hollis (Bette Davis) has been closeted in her mansion a deteriorating Southern plantation since the grisly murder of her married lover many years earlier. When the country wants to tear down the house to build a highway the spinster's relatives and friends appear to rally behind her but each slowly preys on her mind until the gruesome rumorus of the last forty years appear to be coming true... On hand are cousin Miriam (Olivia de Havilland) Dr. Drew Bayliss (Joseph Cott

• The Grissom Gang | DVD | (08/04/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  The Grissom Gang is director Robert Aldrich's take on British author James Hadley Chase's once-notorious novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish, which was itself a synthesis of the plot of William Faulkner's Sanctuary with the lurid exposes of the criminal rampage of Arizona Clark "Ma" Barker and her alleged criminal brood. Aldrich sticks surprisingly close to Chase's plot, although he considerably deepens all the characterisations and cuts through the prurient sex sensation to create a surprisingly moving and complicated relationship between kidnapped heiress Barbara Blandish (Kim Darby) and the homicidally psychopathic but also childish Slim Grissom (Scott Wilson), the most feared member of the gang headed by the grotesquely horrible Ma (Irene Dailey). Barbara is abducted after a jewel heist gone wrong by a trio of inept small-timers, who are swiftly rubbed out by the more organised Grissom mob, and though Ma insists that after the girl's father has come across with the million-dollar ransom she will be mercilessly put down, Slim becomes enchanted with the girl, who eventually becomes his lover. In the book, the girl was drugged and raped, but here we get a delicate, creepy shifting of power to the point when Miss Blandish can browbeat her fearsome captor into mixing her a perfect martini, and the new attachment between crook and captive creates a rift with the rest of the gang that inevitably pays off in various hails of machine gunfire as the plan falls apart and the authorities close in. Aldrich manages the kind of claustrophobic black comedy games of terror and flirtation he perfected in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, but attacks the rat-tat-tat tommy gun scenes with action skills honed on The Dirty Dozen. Most of these films trusted costumes, cars and music to evoke the 1920s, but screenwriter Leon Griffiths takes care with period slang and the supporting cast have a real Depression era Warner Brothers feel, with Connie Stevens as a dumb but ferocious blonde showgirl, Tony Musante as the slick-haired official ladykiller in the gang and Robert Lansing as an impeccably down-at-heel but compassionate private detective. On the DVD: The advertised extras--notes, trivia and photo gallery--are disappointingly thin, but the 16:9 letterboxed print is almost flawless, with lovely pastels for the clothes and sets and bright scarlet for the many bursts of blood. --Kim Newman

• The Flight Of The Phoenix | DVD | (17/04/2006) from £13.23   |  Saving you £-0.24 (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  In a gripping tale of courage resourcefulness and determination the consequences of a plane crash strip bare the morals of the survivors. The pilot of the doomed aircraft Frank Towns (James Stewart) is an aviator of the old school used to seat-of-the-pants flying distrustful of new technology. With his navigator Lew Moran (Richard Attenborough) he is piloting a cargo-cum-passenger plane high above the Arabian desert when a powerful sandstorm rises from below. Trusting his instin

• Vera Cruz | Blu Ray | (02/09/2013) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Vera Cruz was only director Robert Aldrich's second Western (his first, made a few months earlier, was the revisionist, pro-Native-American Apache), but it's such an assured, stylish affair that he might have been roaming the sagebrush for decades. In the aftermath of the American Civil War two lone adventurers make their way south of the border, where Mexico is fighting a civil war of its own to rid the country of the French-imposed Emperor Maximilian. Neither the dour Benjamin Trane (Gary Cooper) nor the grinning, devil-may-care Joe Erin (Burt Lancaster) has much in the way of idealism, but Trane still retains a thin bitter edge of integrity, a quality quite alien to the cheerfully amoral Erin. In uneasy alliance, constantly looking to outwit or double-cross each other, the two find themselves escorting a beautiful French countess (Denise Darcel) and a shipment of gold across country. Cooper and Lancaster create a superb double-act, using their contrasted screen personas to point up the humour and the cynicism of the two mercenaries' relationship. Darcel makes less than she might of the femme fatale role, but there are relishable cameos from Cesar Romero as a suavely duplicitous aristo and Ernest Borgnine as another gringo with an exceptionally vicious streak. The script, according to Aldrich, was written on the run, "always finished about five minutes before we shot it", but you wouldn't guess it from the laconic wit of the dialogue. It looks great, too--Ernest Laszlo's widescreen photography makes the most of the handsome Mexican locations. With its irreverent take on the accepted moral conventions of the genre, Vera Cruz ushered in a new kind of Western, and its central love-hate relationship would be replayed in Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country (1962) and Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). On the DVD: Not much in the way of extras but the mono sound has been expertly remastered to the benefit of Hugo Friedhofer's spirited score. Above all, the film's presented in its full Superscope ratio (16:9), a blessed relief after all those years when it showed up panned-and-scanned on BBC1. If ever a movie needed widescreen, it's this one--if only to fit in all Burt's teeth. You can see why they called him "Crockery Joe". --Philip Kemp

• Emperor Of The North Pole | DVD | (03/09/2007) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  It is during the great depression in the US and the land is full of people who are now homeless. Those people commonly called ""hobos"" are truly hated by Shack (Borgnine) a sadistical railway conductor who swore that no hobo will ride his train for free. Well no-one but ""A"" Number One (Lee Marvin) who is ready to put his life at stake to become a local legend - as the first person who survived the trip on Shack's notorious train.....

• The Dirty Dozen (2 Disc Special Edition) | DVD | (07/08/2006) from £17.99   |  Saving you £-1.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £16.99

  Train them! Excite them! Arm them!...Then turn them loose on the Nazis! Atten-hut! Twelve jailbirds will earn their freedom... if they survive a suicide mission against the Nazi brass. Tough-as-nails Lee Marvin leads a nothing-to-lose convict squad in this all-time action trendsetter. They don't make 'em like this anymore!

• The Essential War Collection | DVD | (08/06/2009) from £34.97   |  Saving you £-9.98 (N/A%)   |  RRP £24.99

  Set Comprises: Battle of the Bulge (1965): For this epic recreation of one of World War II's most crucial confrontations director Ken Annakin (The Longest Day) captures the explosive action of massive forces squaring off as well as the brave individual ingenuity of weary GIs trying to survive a cruel European winter. The cast is a juggernaut of stars: Henry Fonda Robert Shaw Robert Ryan Charles Bronson Telly Savalas and more. Full Metal Jacket (1987): Full Metal Jacket begins by following the trials and tribulations of a platoon of fresh Marine Corps recruits focusing on the relationship between Gunnery Sergeant Hartman and Privates Pyle and Joker. We see Pyle grow into an instrument of death as Hartman has foreseen of all of his recruits. Through Pyle's torment and Joker's unwillingness to stand up against it the climax of part one is achieved with all three main characters deciding their fates by their action or inaction. The second chapter of Full Metal Jacket delves into Joker's psyche and the repeated referral to the fact that he joined the Corps to become a killer. When his mostly behind the scenes job as a combat correspondent is interfered with by the Tet offensive he is thrust into real combat and ultimately must choose if he really is a killer. Memphis Belle (1990): Matthew Modine and Eric Stoltz head the dynamic cast of Memphis Belle an adventure inspired by true World War II heroics. During spring 1943 they took to the war-torn skies for the most dangerous mission in defence of freedom. If the ten-man crew of the bomber Memphis Belle returned they would receive a hero's welcome and renew flagging public morale. But the odds were stacked heavily against them in the true courageous story of the brave fly-boys who each fought mortal fear while fighting the enemy together. Where Eagles Dare (1968): Commandos posing as German soldiers parachute into a small mountainside town to rescue a supposed allied general from a Nazi hideaway fortress that can only be reached by cable car. Escape to Victory (1981) This is no ordinary soccer match: this is war! The battlefield: a stadium in occupied Paris. The armies: German all-stars vs. ragtag Allied POWs. The objective: demonstrate another proof of Aryan superiority. Guess who wins? Better yet guess who cleverly uses the match as a means of escape? Sylvester Stallone Michael Caine and Max von Sydow star in this rouser directed by the legendary John Huston. The climatic match is a heart-in-the-throat hat-in-the-air exhibition of brute force and balletic grace featuring soccer legends Pele Bobby Moore Osvaldo Ardiles Co Prins Mike Summerbee and more. Score a splendid entertainment goal for 'Victory'! Kelly's Heroes (1970): In this less-than-serious look at World War II Lieutenant Kelly (Clint Eastwood) learns about a German gold shipment destined for France. With his ragtag fellow soldiers he is determined to slip behind enemy lines and retrieve it. The Dirty Dozen (1967): Atten-hut! Twelve jailbirds will earn their freedom... if they survive a suicide mission against the Nazi brass. Tough-as-nails Lee Marvin leads a nothing-to-lose convict squad in this all-time action trendsetter.

• MGM War Collection | DVD | (06/06/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £49.99

  This great DVD collection contains the following titles: 1. Attack! (dir. Robert Aldrich 1956) 2. 633 Squadron (dir. Walter Grauman 1964) 3. The Bridge At Remagen (dir. John Guillermin 1969) 4. A Bridge Too Far (dir. Richard Attenborough 1977) 5. The Great Escape (dir. John Sturges 1963) 6. Hart's War (dir. Gregory Hoblit 2002) 7. Platoon (dir. Oliver Stone 1986) 8. Windtalkers (dir. John Woo 2002) 9. The Dogs Of War (dir. John Irvin 1981) 10. Under Fire (dir. Roger Spottiswoode 1983)

• Big Knife | DVD | (31/08/2009) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  The Big Knife

• Hustle | DVD | (03/10/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Jaded cynical edgy. Burt Reynolds is Lt. Phil Gaines a case-hardened Los Angeles detective who finds himself drawn into a dark complex puzzle that involves the death of a teenage girl. Complicating his investigation is his sizzling relationship with an icy hooker (Catherine Deneuve) who has a dangerous connection to the case - one of her high-powered clients (Eddie Albert) is a main suspect. Moreover the victim's unstable father (Ben Johnson) blurs the focus of Gaines' investigat

• MGM Western Greats - Part 1 | DVD | (06/06/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £49.99

  Includes the following classic 10 Westerns! 1. The Alamo (dir. John Wayne, 1960) 2. Apache (dir. Robert Aldrich, 1954) 3. The Big Country (dir. William Wyler, 1958) 4. A Fistful Of Dynamite (dir. Sergio Leone, 1971) 5. The Kentuckian (dir. Burt Lancaster, 1955) 6. Posse (dir. Mario Van Peebles, 1993) 7. Red River (dir. Howard Hawks, 1948) 8. The Scalphunters (dir. Sydney Pollack, 1968) 9. Vera Cruz (dir. Robert Aldrich, 1954) 10. Wild Bill (dir. Walter Hill, 1995)

• The Great Escape/Attack | DVD | (18/06/2007) from £11.30   |  Saving you £-2.31 (-25.70%)   |  RRP £8.99

  The Great Escape (Dir. John Sturges 1963): In 1943 the Germans opened Stalag Luft North a maximum-security prisoner-of-war camp designed to hold even the craftiest escape artist. In doing so however the Nazis unwittingly assembled the finest escape team in military history - brilliantly portrayed here by Steve McQueen James Garner Charles Bronson and James Coburn - who worked on what became the largest prison breakout ever attempted. One of the most ingenious and suspenseful adventure films of all time The Great Escape is a masterful collaboration between director John Sturges screenwriters James Clavell and W.R. Burnett and composer Elmer Bernstein. Attack (Dir. Robert Aldrich 1956): With a company of American soldiers trapped by the Germans during The Battle of the Bulge their captain is an abject psychopathic coward who has a record of exposing his men to danger. When his cowardice turns to sheer panic during combat it becomes necessary for the enlisted men to take things into their own hands...