Carol Reed

From Carol Reed, the renowned director of Night Train to Munich, Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol, The Third Man, The Man Between, Trapeze and Oliver!, comes this thrilling drama starring Ralph Richardson (The Sound Barrier), Trevor Howard (The Offence), Robert Morley (When Eight Bells Toll), Wendy Hiller (Separate Tables), Kerima (The Devil Is a Woman), George Coulouris (Citizen Kane), Wilfrid Hyde-White (The Browning Version) and James Kenney (The Slasher). When the immoral Peter Willems (Howard) is accused of stealing in his position at a Dutch East Indies port, he persuades the man who gave him his start in life, the merchant ship captain Lingard (Richardson), to take him up-river to a secret trading post on a remote Indonesian island. There, he falls in love with the beautiful native woman Aissa (Kerima), as the cunning Babalatchi (Coulouris) tries to trick and blackmail him into disclosing the entrance of the secret trading route. Beautifully shot in black-and-white by John Wilcox (The Last Valley) and Edward Scaife (An Inspector Calls), Outcast of the Islands is a compelling adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s classic novel.Read More »

A butler working in a foreign embassy in London falls under suspicion when his wife accidentally falls to her death, the only witness being an impressionable young boy.Read More »

A Liverpool tug boat captain finds he’s won a fortune on the penny pools and it changes his life. However, after giving up his job and throwing a large expensive party, he discovers that he may not really have won after all.Read More »

Plot Summary:
Davey Fenwick leaves his mining village on a university scholarship intent on returning to better support the miners against the owners. But he falls in love with Jenny who gets him to marry her and return home as local schoolteacher before finishing his degree. Davey finds he is ill-at-ease in his role, the more so when he realises Jenny still loves her former boyfriend. When he finds that his father and the other miners are going to have to continue working on a possibly deadly coal seam he decides to act.Read More »

Synopsis:
Jim Wormold is an expatriate Englishman living in pre-revolutionary Havana with his teenage daughter Milly. He owns a vacuum cleaner shop but isn’t very successful so he accepts an offer from Hawthorne of the British Secret Service to recruit a network of agents in Cuba. Wormold hasn’t got a clue where to start but when his friend Dr. Hasselbacher suggests that the best secrets are known to no one, he decides to manufacture a list of agents and provides fictional tales for the benefit of his masters in London. He is soon seen as the best agent in the Western Hemisphere but it all begins to unravel when the local police decode his cables and start rounding up his “network” and he learns that he is the target of a group out to kill him.Read More »

Plot synopsis:
Johnny McQueen, leader of a clandestine Irish organization, has been hiding in the house of Kathleen and her mother, planning a hold-up that will provide his group with the funds needed to continue its activities. During the hold-up, things go sour…Read More »

Pope Julius II (Rex Harrison) pulls Michelangelo (Charlton Heston) from his life’s work making sculptures to instead throw a fresco up on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a dreary building the Church can’t afford to tear down. Michelangelo hates painting and does everything he can to dodge the assignment, but stays on thanks to the counsel of the Contessina di Medici (Diane Cilento), a married woman who can’t understand why the artist prefers his work to her company. Michelangelo drags his feet while architect Donato Bramante (Harry Andrews) tries to have the commission shifted to his favorite, Raphael (Tomas Milian).Read More »

An Englishman with a grudge against an insurance company for a disallowed claim fakes his own death in order but an insurance investigator starts snooping around.Read More »

Synopsis:
William Pitt the Younger, son of a famous politician father, becomes the youngest Prime Minister England has ever known, wins an election on the promise of peace and prosperity, yet ironically ends up as the presiding spirit of an interminable war with Revolutionary France. Both his health and his private life suffer from the strain.Read More »