Starring Dame Helen Lydia Mirren
Elijah Moshinsky directed the BBC Television Shakespeare adaptation in 1982, ignoring the ancient British period setting in favour of a more timeless and snow-laden atmosphere inspired by Rembrandt and his contemporary Dutch painters. Richard Johnson, Claire Bloom, Helen Mirren, and Robert Lindsay play Cymbeline, his Queen, Imogen, and Iachimo, respectively, with Michael Pennington as Posthumus.Read More »
An arrogant Paris painter attracts a number of women from the 1920s to the 1970s, though he focuses on leaving a legacy for his daughter.Read More »
The Jewel in the Crown (1984) is a British television serial about the final days of the British Raj in India during World War II, based upon the Raj Quartet novels by Paul Scott.
Granada Television produced it for the ITV network.Read More »
Scripted (but not directed) by Ingmar Bergman, Best Intentions is a multilayered backwards glance at the courtship of Bergman’s own parents. Henrik Bergman (Samuel Froler) is a struggling theology student in the year 1909. His intended, Anna Aakerbloom (Pernilla August, who married director Bille August while the film was in progress) is from a well-to-do family. Despite the expected class differences and personality clashes, love-or at least mutual understanding-prevails. But after a harsh, spare few years as the wife of a clergyman, Anna yearns for the more bountiful pleasures of her family home. Bergman writes himself into the proceedings as a mewling infant. The current three-hour theatrical version of Best Intentions (original title: Den Goda Viljan) was simultaneously prepared as a six-hour TV miniseries, which ran in Europe, Scandanavia, and Japan.Read More »
HBO Europe has commissioned Polish at Home, a series of 14 short films about isolation from 16 Polish filmmakers working during lockdown.
The project asked 16 filmmakers (two projects are collaborations) to create 14 short films. The plots must take place in the time of the pandemic, they cannot exceed 10 minutes, all must adhere to lockdown restrictions and the filmmakers must shoot them on their own in four weeks, although the format and genre is up to them.Read More »
Dr. Trotta is shot at night in his garden. He was a fan of the odd band “Joker Five” among which Keller suspects the perpetrator. The female singer of this band, a friend of Trottas son Peter, died a few weeks earlier of complications of an abortion. A direct guilt can be proved, but who bears the moral responsibility for the tragic event?Read More »
New York Times:
THE setting is a rather grand English country home on the Isle of Wight. Two women are bickering as they play lawn tennis. An elderly man reading beneath a tree spots a fly on his hand and begins having an odd attack. A young stranger suddenly appears and gives the man mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or, so to speak, a kiss of life. Later, the victim will thank him for having braved not only the garlic on his breath but ”an old man’s slack mouth.”Read More »
Cream in My Coffee is a television drama by Dennis Potter, broadcast on ITV on 2 November 1980 as the last in a loosely connected trilogy of plays exploring language and betrayal. A juxtaposition between youth and old age, the play combines a non-linear narrative with the use of popular music to heighten dramatic tension, a feature of much of Potter’s work. Cream in My Coffee was awarded the Prix Italia for best drama in 1981 and Peggy Ashcroft gained a BAFTA Best Actress award in 1981. The play’s title is taken from the popular song “You’re the Cream in My Coffee”, from the 1929 Broadway musical Hold Everything!Read More »
Mark Cunliffe:
“You don’t know how low I was, how down. Everything was like it was raining all the time. The way the rain sort of glints all dull like on the slates. On the roof”
In 1978, tired of and frustrated by not having the power over the BBC’s drama department Dennis Potter went some way to realise his dream of being a writer with total control over his work by forming the independent production company Pennies From Heaven (or PFH) Ltd with producer Kennith Trodd and his agent Judy Daish. Two years later, the companies independent nature came to fruition thanks to a deal with BBC rival, LWT to produce six new plays by Potter along with three other plays comprising of two from Salford socialist Jim Allen and one writer/performer Ken Campbell.Read More »