Paul Joyce Archives - Jeremy C. Processing

Director – Robert Day – 1960 – UK – Cert. U – 78m

****

Three prisoners plot a heist with the perfect alibi… that they are incarcerated in prison at the time – classic British prison comedy is out on UK Blu-ray on Monday, August 4th

Very much of its time, this British prison comedy concerns three convicts and an outside contact who sets them up with the perfect job. The top-billed performer is Peter Sellers, a British household name by this time thanks to radio’s long-running comedy series The Goon Show TIMES, but far from being a straightforward vehicle for Sellers’ indisputable comic talents, the film is very much an ensemble piece, with a main cast that reads like a who’s who of British comedy acting talent of the time.

Prisoner Dodger Lane (Peter Sellers) and his two cellmates Jelly Knight (David Lodge) and Lennie Price (Bernard Cribbins) have engineered themselves a cushy existence in one of H.M. Prisons where every morning at 7 a.m. sharp, groceries are delivered by van via a rope through their cell window and their beloved cat Strangeways is periodically taken out for a walk by friendly Chief Prison Officer Jenkins (George Woodbridge). The latter is due to retire shortly, and soon after that, the three men’s sentence (for the same crime) is due to end.… Read the rest

The Devils

Director – Ken Russell – 1971 – UK – Cert. 18 – 106m 41s (cut)

*****

UK DVD release date 19/03/2012, cert. 18, 107 mins plus extras, £19.99. Reviewed for Third Way

40 years after its 1971 theatrical release, the late Ken Russell’s key work reaches UK DVD in its original UK X Certificate version with a host of invaluable DVD extras. Although a more complete (2004 restoration) director’s cut exists, the nature of the excised material makes the current cut as complete as is ever likely to be released on DVD. In terms of controversy, the film has everything – sex, religion, politics and torture – and Russell’s original cut didn’t hold back in any of these areas. This presented headaches for not only the distributor Warner Bros. in terms of a mainstream US release but also the UK censor who questioned, as the BBFC’s secretary John Trevelyan succinctly put it, “whether artistic quality justifies total freedom.”

The plot concerns seventeenth century France where Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue) is attempting to increase the Catholic Church’s hold on the nation by persuading decadent monarch Louis XIII (Graham Armitage) to knock down the walls surrounding cities that enable their functioning as self-governing entities.… Read the rest