Hay Petrie
Phillipe, the son of an ambassador in London, idolizes Baines, his father's butler, a kind of hero in the eyes of the child, whose perception changes when he accidentally discovers the secret that Baines keeps and witnesses the consequences that adults' lies can cause.
A curio dealer sells a monkey's paw that can grant the possessor three wishes but warns that disaster will follow.
A working-class boy wins a scholarship to a public school, as part of a post-World War Two experiment in bringing boys of different social classes together.
Set in post Second World War Britain, Noose is the story of black market racketeers who face attempts to bring them to justice by an American fashion journalist, her ex-army fiancée and a gang of honest toughs from a local gym. When a corpse turns up at black market front The Blue Moon Club, Yank reporter Carole Landis starts snooping, much to gang boss Joseph Calleia’s annoyance. And soon there’s a hit man on the way...
In this Dickens adaptation, orphan Pip discovers through lawyer Mr. Jaggers that a mysterious benefactor wishes to ensure that he becomes a gentleman. Reunited with his childhood patron, Miss Havisham, and his first love, the beautiful but emotionally cold Estella, he discovers that the elderly spinster has gone mad from having been left at the altar as a young woman, and has made her charge into a warped, unfeeling heartbreaker.
A London cabby uncovers the city's secret nightlife in this surprising plug for post-war National Savings.
Working-class girl Joan Dodd's plan to marry Jack Fowler is thwarted when her mother Gladys interferes. Hoping to improve her daughter's social status, Gladys arranges for Joan to wed her boss Adolphus Pickering while Jack is away at war. Jack arrives home to discover his love is engaged to another man. Who will Joan decide to marry?
Two wealthy Victorian widows are courted tentatively by two impoverished British aristocrats. When one of the dowagers suggests that her beau go away with her for a month to see if they are compatible, the fireworks begin.
Three modern day pilgrims investigate a bizarre crime in a small town on the way to Canterbury.
A Royal navy Commander is tricked by a pretty girl who is working for the Nazis. She tricks him into revealing some military secrets and he is court martial. He vows to track her and her accomplices down.
The Shipbuilders is a 1943 British drama film directed by John Baxter and starring Clive Brook, Morland Graham and Nell Ballantyne. The film is set in a Clyde shipyard in the build-up to the Second World War. It was based on a novel by George Blake.
A steelworker rises through the ranks to become manager of three steel mills, but ruthless ambition overwhelms him.
The captain of a British cargo ship shanghais a group of sabateurs, unaware that the daughter of the ship’s owner is among them.
The story of flyer Amy Johnson the girl from Yorkshire who won the hearts of the British public in the 1930s with her record-breaking solo flights around the world. Her marriage to fellow aviator Jim Mallison was less noteworthy.
Cottage to Let is a 1941 spy film starring Leslie Banks, Alastair Sim and John Mills. Set in World War II Scotland, its plot concerns Nazi spies trying to kidnap an inventor.
Will Hay, back in his role as a hapless teacher, is hired by a grim school in remotest Scotland. The school soon starts to be haunted by a legendary ghost, whose spectral bagpipes signal the death of one of the staff. Hay, assisted by Claude Hulbert and Charles Hawtrey, has to unravel the mystery before he becomes the next victim.
A young couple become engaged, but enjoy a number of comedic aventures before their wedding day.
Hitler's doctor is gradually realising that the Nazi regime isn't as good as it pretends to be when his friends start to "disappear" into the camps. His wife is courted by the party and accepts a political post in Berlin. Meanwhile Dr Karl decides to try to do something to counteract the Nazi propaganda and with the help of an engineer and a few friends he sets up the Freedom Radio to counteract the Nazi propaganda.
George Pearson, an employee at an underwear factory, is caught between his modern wife and his meddling mother. After buying a special yarn and getting his wife to promote it, he has an argument with his boss, Mr Dawson who insults Pearson's wife and refuses to apologise. Pearson then resigns. After finding out that the yarn is actually worth a fair amount, Mr Dawson tries to buy it from Pearson but he has some competition.
A young man's fiancé dies after contracting a terminal illness, and in his efforts to contact her he gets involved with a group of spiritualists.
Rex Harrison plays a young Englishman who suffers periodic bouts of amnesia. When the plane he is riding in crashes, Harrison blacks out again and awakens in Paris. He is told that for the past ten days he has been involved in espionage of some sort or other--and now his life isn't worth two francs. Based on the novel The Disappearance of Roger Tremayne by Bruce Graeme, the seriocomic Ten Days in Paris served as the inspiration for a multitude of future reluctant-spy escapades.
This film is based on the true story of Pastor Martin Neimuller, who was sent to Dachau concentration camp for criticising the Nazi party. The small German village of Altdorf in the 1930's has to come to terms with Chancellor Hitler and the arrival of a platoon of Stormtroopers (preceded by a flock of sheep). The Stormtrooper go about teaching and enforcing 'The New Order' but Pastor Hall is a kind and gentle man who won't be cowed. Some villagers join the Nazi party avidly, some just go along with things, hoping for a quiet life but Pastor Hall takes his convictions to the pulpit.
When a neutral Danish merchant ship is forced to put into port after trying to evade British wartime contraband control, its captain becomes involved in a beautiful British Naval Intelligent agent's efforts to capture a group of German spies operating from a London cinema.
A madman kills a man who has just inherited a large estate, then impersonates his victim to gain entrance to the estate so he can murder his enemies.
During World War I, a British farmer is abducted by the Germans to take the place of a spy about to be executed whom he closely resembles.
When Prince Ahmad is blinded and cast out of Bagdad by the nefarious Jaffar, he joins forces with the scrappy thief Abu to win back his royal place, as well as the heart of a beautiful princess.
In coastal Cornwall, England, during the early 19th Century, a young woman discovers that she's living with a gang of criminals who arrange shipwrecking for profit.
When a wealthy, lonely university music student is beaten and has his apartment trashed by a fellow dorm resident-bully and his gang, he goes mad, lures the bully into his room on pretense of forgiveness, slips him a paralyzing agent in a drink, throws him in a trunk and locks him in, and taunts the bully with the promise that he will be buried alive in the trunk. Only, once he gets his trunk and his prey to his country estate, the vengeful victim finds things keep going wrong...
A German submarine is sent to the Orkney Isles in 1917 to sink the British fleet.
A disgraced officer risks his life to help his childhood friends in battle.
A short featurette about a murderer summoned by chance to sit on the jury and try the man accused of his crime.
British agent working in Russia is forced to remain longer than planned once the revolution begins. After being released from prison in Siberia he posses as a Russian Commissar. Because of his position among the revolutionaries he is able to rescue a Russian countess from the Bolsheviks.
A German-born woman works as a spy for the French in Switzerland during the First World War, and has to marry an interned French lieutenant in order to be able to stay in the country.
A young British woman, tricked into believing she was used during a whirlwind romance, marries a gentle widowed Italian opera star, whose songs she and her first love shared.
A man ignores a warning to stay away from a sinister house on marshland near Liverpool; when someone drowns close by, he finds the evidence doesn’t add up…
This early docudrama uses dramatic re-enactment, working models of early flying machines, and archival footage to trace man's attempts to fly from ancient times through the 1930's.
'Retired major and ex-enemies pledge peace at reunion.' (British Film Catalogue)
Koenigsmark is a 1935 British-French drama film directed by Maurice Tourneur and starring Elissa Landi, John Lodge and Pierre Fresnay. The film is based on the novel Koenigsmark by Pierre Benoît. It's sets were designed by the art director Lucien Aguettand. The film was known in the United States as Crimson Dynasty.
An American businessman's family convinces him to buy a Scottish castle and disassemble it to ship it to America brick by brick, where it will be put it back together. The castle though is not the only part of the deal, with it goes the several-hundred year old ghost who haunts it.
As the threat of Napoleonic invasion looms ever closer, a German duke and potential ally of England falls for a pretty ballerina.
The Loves of Mme. DuBarry was the American title of the 1935 British operetta I Give My Heart, based on the stage musical The DuBarry. German actress Gitta Alpar stars as Jeanne, the young 18th century Parisian milliner who sleeps her way to the uppermost rungs of French aristocracy, emerging at last as the glamorous Madame DuBarry, mistress of Louis XV (Owen Nares). Refusing to gloss over DuBarry's sexual peccadilloes (as previous films with Norma Talmadge and Dolores del Rio had done), the film presents the "heroine" as a whore, pure and simple-or, on second thought, not so pure and simple! Particularly troublesome for American censors was a scene in which DuBarry is depicted as a resident of a bawdy house. Otherwise, The Loves of Madame DuBarry is standard historical-drama fare, allowing dozens of top European actors to play "dress-up" for 90 minutes.
During the First World War, Russian officer Ignatoff, wounded, falls in love with his nurse, Natasha. But she is subject to an upcoming marriage of family convenience to Brioukow, a wealthy industrialist of peasant stock. Brioukow is unjustifiably jealous, since Natasha has not betrayed him. He forces Ignatoff into his debt as a means of humiliating him. When Ignatoff's new friend, Madame Sabline, offers to pay his debt, preventing his ruin, Ignatoff comes quickly to realize that Madame Sabline has an ulterior motive, one that could prove dangerous to more lives than just Ignatoff's.
a biopic of eighteenth-century Irish actress Peg Woffington. It was based on the play Masks and Faces.
An elderly shop-keeper and his grand-daughter are threatened by the rich, mean-spirited dwarf Quilp, and decide to flee across England to escape him. They are pursued both by Quilp and by the shop-keeper's long-lost brother, who wants to find them for a different reason.
'Ruritania. Incognito president falls in love with incognito queen he deposed.' (British Film Catalogue)
'1670. Irish patriot caught stealing Crown Jewels talks his way to pardon.' (British Film Catalogue)
King Charles II first meets Nell Gwyn after seeing her do a turn at Drury Lane. They soon become close, the King preferring her feisty irreverent company to that of the aristocratic French Duchess of Portsmouth. Nell becomes his most loyal subject, while ever-ready to take the Duchess down a peg. But the actress can never hope to be fully accepted by the King's circle despite his constant attentions.
In this murder mystery, Vicar Casson looks into the poisoning of a wealthy man. He soon finds that the man they convicted, the fiance of the rich man's niece, was innocent.
A well-known actor is murdered. Another performer becomes an amateur sleuth so she can prove her sister is innocent of the crime.
In 1931, Sir Malcolm Sargent – then a rising young conductor – acted as musical director for this first filmed musical version of Prosper Mérimée’s classic story of passion and fatal jealousy, Carmen. With a score based on Bizet’s opera, Gipsy Blood features celebrated American soprano Marguerite Namara as the capricious gypsy girl from the cigarette factory; her co-performers include Thomas Burke as Carmen’s tormented lover, Don José, and New Zealand-born baritone Lance Fairfax as his rival, the toreador Escamillo.
Early British thriller about a master criminal named 'Flash Jack', who heads a gang of top-hatted thieves that rob the wealthy. A detective tracks the crimes to a posh night club.
