Eric Portman
A private eye is hired by an insurance company to investigate a shipping magnate suspected of deliberately sinking his own ships for the insurance money. He finds himself involved in a web of deception, double-crossing and murder.
The Whisperers tells the story of an impoverished old woman living alone in a seedy apartment who enjoys a rich fantasy life as an heiress. When she discovers stolen money hidden by her son, she believes her fantasy has come true.
A dog with a spying device under its skin is sent to the Russian government as a present. When the Russians send the dog to a veterinary, British intelligence must get to the dog first and retrieve the spying device.
During a routine patrol, a reporter is given permission to interview a a hardened cold-war warrior and captain of the American destroyer USS Bedford. The reporter gets more than he bargained for when the Bedford discovers a Soviet sub and the captain begins a relentless pursuit, pushing his crew to breaking point.
Joe Beckett, seasoned citizen of the bedsitter belt, aged about 22, is the renegade son of modest, respectable parents and, to use his own description, 'an emotional leper'. He decides that he needs a violent shock to shake him back into life, and as a result accepts a commission to carry out the murder of a total stranger for a man he meets in a coffee bar...
Joe Newman, a naturalised Briton, is telephoned by his German father, whom he believed long dead, at the same time as a funeral is taking place in Bavaria - with his father's name on the coffin. His investigation in Bavaria reveals startling facts and the obstruction he meets makes him suspect foul play.
Michael Anderson's 1961 suspense thriller stars Deborah Kerr as a London wife who suspects her wealthy husband (Gary Cooper) might be a murderer. The cast also includes Eric Portman, Diane Cilento, Hermione Gingold and Michael Wilding. This was Gary Cooper's last film.
The story revolves around the Dinky Doos, a provincial musical troupe living from hand to mouth.
A lonely child must stay with her uncaring aunt and uncle after her mother is hospitalized. Her estranged father is a fugitive. For love and companionship, the eleven-year old girl becomes friends with the housemaid. When at long last, she meets her dad, she must vow to never reveal his location to the police.
Allied prisoners of various nationalities pool their resources to plan numerous escapes from an "escape-proof" German P.O.W. camp housed in a Medieval castle.
A woman is unhappy in her marriage to a boring, stiff judge, so she takes up with a wild-living RAF pilot, who ends up being more than she can handle. (TCM.com)
Archaeologists Van Heflin and Eric Portman undertake an expedition in Tunisia in search of an ancient mask. Director Jack Lee's 1954 adventure film also stars Wanda Hendrix and Jacques Francois.
Now old, ill, poor, and largely forgotten, William Freise-Greene was once very different. As young and handsome William Green he changed his name to include his first wife's so that it sounded more impressive for the photographic portrait work he was so good at. But he was also an inventor and his search for a way to project moving pictures became an obsession that ultimately changed the life of all those he loved.
A police chief stationed in Egypt sets out to crack down on drug traffickers along the frontiers. With his assistant, he attempts to block the smugglers' passage along the notorious Cairo Road route into the country.
"The Spider and the Fly is set in Paris during the cloud-cuckoo days before WW I. The storyline intertwines the destinies of three people. Guy Rolfe plays Phillipe de Ledocq, a resourceful safecracker who always manages to elude arrest. Eric Portman is cast as police-chief Maubert, who will not rest until Ledocq is behind bars. And Nadia Gray is Madeleine, the woman beloved by both Ledocq and Maubert. Just as Maubert has managed to capture his man, Ledocq is released at the behest of the government, who wants him to steal secrets from the German embassy revealing the whereabouts of the Kaiser's secret agents. And just how does Madeleine figure into all of this? Spider and the Fly is a diverting precursor to the 1960s TV series It Takes a Thief." ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
A man falls in love with a beautiful young woman and begins to suspect that he may have also loved her in a previous life.
Justice, the poets have it, is a blind goddess. Eric Portman stars as the lawyer defending a lord, Hugh Williams, accused by his secretary Michael Dennison of having diverted public funds for his own use.
An attractive young French girl instigates rivalry between two brothers when she becomes the bride of the younger one.
When a man discovers his wife is having an affair, he commits the perfect crime.
The son of a notorious hangman is gradually becoming insane and he finds himself unable to resist the urge to strangle women to death.
An African music student returns home and has to defeat the witch doctor who dominates his tribe and take them to healthier land. Three years in the making, Dickinson's film survived the loss of film-stock and equipment when a U-Boat sunk their ship en route to locations in Tanzania.
A film showing the role played by the RAF, Dominion squadrons and briefly the USAAF in the preparation, invasion and securing of the Normandy beachheads in June 1944.
Three modern day pilgrims investigate a bizarre crime in a small town on the way to Canterbury.
During the Second World War a British schoolteacher working in Denmark is caught up when the Germans invade.
Equipped with an RAF uniform, an English accent, a photograph of his "wife" and a packet of Players (cigarettes), a German agent is parachuted into occupied Belgium to create anti-British propaganda. Unfortunately for him he chooses a night when the Belgian resistance are smuggling the crew of a British bomber home across the channel. Before he knows it he is landing on the south coast of England. With MI5 hot on his trail, the fugitive tries to contact his old German émigré friends in London. But they have all been interned on the Isle of Man. How will he escape back to Germany ?
A gripping tale of WWII naval warfare in the Baltics, starring John Mills as Lt. Freddie Taylor, a British submarine Captain. The crew of the Sea Tiger are summoned from leave on shore with their families, and sent on a secret mission to intercept the Nazi battleship Brandenburg. In the ensuing battle the British submarine is damaged by a German destroyer. The submarine is leaking fuel so badly that the crew won't be able to make it back to Britain before running out somewhere along the Danish coast. When it seems that their only option may be to blow up the submarine and try to escape to Denmark, seaman James Hobson (Eric Portman) hatches a plan...Working from a well constructed script, Anthony Asquith adds a strong sense of dramatic tension to the interactions between the men in the dangerous, claustraphobic atmosphere of the cramped submarine. Mills and Portman also give good, realistic portrayals of men at war in this tense story.
Millions Like Us is a 1943 British propaganda film, showing life in a wartime aircraft factory in documentary detail. It stars Patricia Roc, Eric Portman, Megs Jenkins, and Anne Crawford, was written by Sidney Gilliat, and directed by Gilliat and Frank Launder. It was filmed at Gainsborough Studios. When Celia Crowson (Roc) is called up for war service, she hopes for a glamorous job in one of the services, but as a single girl she is directed into a factory making aircraft parts. Here she meets other girls from all different walks of life, and begins a relationship with a young airman.
During the Allied Bombing offensive of World War II the public was often informed that "A raid took place last night over ..., One (or often more) of Our Aircraft Is Missing". Behind these sombre words hid tales of death, destruction and derring-do. This is the story of one such bomber crew who were shot down and the brave Dutch patriots who helped them home.
During the Nazi occupation of Belgium during World War II, a Belgian resistance group revives the newspaper "La Libre Belgique" to expose and counter Nazi propaganda efforts to deceive the people. They are so effective that the Nazis offer a reward for the capture of the paper's staff, although they don't know their identities. One of them is a well-known entertainer, and when his jealous partner hears of the reward, he turns him in. The paper's publishers escape capture, but their staff doesn't. The paper's founders must find not only a way to keep from getting captured by the Nazis but keep their newspaper going and get their staff released.
In the early days of World War II, a German U-boat is sunk in Canada's Hudson Bay. Hoping to evade capture, a small band of German soldiers led by commanding officer Lieutenant Hirth attempts to cross the border into the United States, which has not yet entered the war and is officially neutral. Along the way, the German soldiers encounter brave men such as a French-Canadian fur trapper, Johnnie, a leader of a Hutterite farming community, Peter, an author, Philip and a soldier, Andy Brock.
In this romantic tale Paderewski, the famed pianist, and two other plane crash survivors are guests of a Swedish baroness. Interwoven throughout this gentle and charming story are exquisite piano solos performed superbly by the elderly pianist, Paderewski.
Two boys - the prince Edward and the pauper Tom - are born on the same day. Years later, when young teenage Tom sneaks into the palace garden, he meets the prince. They change clothes with one another before the guards discover them and throw out the prince thinking he's the urchin. No one believes them when they try to tell the truth about which is which. Soon after, the old king dies and the prince will inherit the throne.
The film begins in a BBC studio with the 100th edition of "In Town Tonight". Flotsam and Jetsom open with a "topical number". Then there is an interview with a distinguished actor, which dissolves into a performance of one of his famous melodramas about a wicked moneylender etc.
Set in 15th-century Italy, The Cardinal stars Matheson Lang as one Cardinal de Medici. Bound by the rules of the confessional, the cardinal is unable to disclose the multitude of sins revealed to him by one of his most influential parishioners. De Medici's dilemma is compounded by the fact that the confessor has committed a murder for which the Cardinal's brother has been arrested. The basic plot gimmick was good for another go-round in the 1953 Hitchcock flick I Confess. This 7-reel British film was based on a play by Louis N. Parker.
In 1820's rural England, a young girl is tricked by tales of marriage by a villainous Squire, and when she becomes pregnant, and disappears, a gipsy lad is blamed.
A dead man's curse on a London party house seems to echo from 1780 to 1936.
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 émigré and Pandora’s Box star Fritz Kortner, Scottish screen idol John Stuart, and Swedish silent-era heart-throb Nils Asther. Turkey, 1908: Sultan Abdul Hamid II becomes infatuated with Therese, a young Viennese opera singer and she is forced to give in to him to protect her fiancé, Young Turk Talak Pasha. Will the fervour of Talak’s popular opposition to the Sultan’s rule eventually lead to the monarch's downfall?
