Scaramouche2004

This film, although only 25 years old at the time of writing is terribly dated and has some pretty despicable ideals right at the core of it.

Let's take a bunch of cool, popular and good looking but totally nasty, hateful and vacuous high school kids and give them 90 minutes screen time to be condescending and hurtful to the nerdy kids.

Let's also make a bet and pretend to like the nerdiest girl in school and really mess with her head and her emotions. Let's see if Mr. Cool can take her to the prom and turn her from a nerd into a popular kid like us, because that is the only way she can ever really be validated as a viable human being. Right?

Once again it's another teen aimed movie that reinforces the rather awful stereotype of bullies and victims mainly to an audience who were probably living this very real existence ever damn day of their lives on one side of that fence or the another.

At the heart of it all is super cool Zack Siler (it's as if his parents knew he'd be in the cool gang, otherwise their would have called him Arthur) he's the douche that made the bet.

They try to soften his character by trying to convince us that apart from the inhuman evil he's committing by accepting this incredibly cruel bet, he's deep down a kind hearted and clearly very bright student, who finds redemption and comes to realise.. nerds deep down may almost be real people with actual feelings after all.

Layney Boggs (it's as if her parents knew too) is our poor unsuspecting victim who having already had to cope with the loss of her cancer stricken mother and years and years of taunting and bullying because of her perfectly normal hobbies and interests, we have to now sit back and watch being set up for yet another appalling soul destroying let down..proper entertaining stuff.

Literally everyone in this movie (except for Layney, her father, her brother and possibly Zack's more kind hearted sister) is a truly disgusting morally bankrupt person.

You reach the end of the movie hoping that the prom they are all going to is the same one at the end of Carrie so they will all get their just desserts.

I spent the entirety of this movie and pretty much every time I've watched it since over the last 25 years, clenching my teeth and my fists, calling most of the characters all sorts of expletives.

The only real light spot in the movie is Matthew Lillard who plays an egotistical minor TV personality who is too full of himself to bully anybody but spends his limited time in the movie making himself look a prat in front of everyone else.

I was 26 when this movie came out, so I guess I was already long past passed all that high school bullsquirt, but give it a go yourself.

If you like to bully people or indeed like being bullied yourself then this is the move for you.

Judy Holliday was one of the most gifted and talented performers Hollywood was ever lucky enough to have.

She was stunningly beautiful, could sing and dance, act alongside the best of them and boy was she funny. A superb comedian.

The film version of Born Yesterday and her portrayal of ditzy moll Billie Dawn is the role for which Ms Holliday will always be best remembered and associated (although by saying this, the last thing I wish to do is diminish or disparage any of her subsequent roles, because all of her screen performances were just as good)

She had originated the role on Broadway several years earlier alongside Paul Douglas and although Columbia studio heads tried to recast the role for the movie adaptation, with Rita Hayworth or Jean Arthur (even a relatively unknown Marilyn Monroe auditioned for the part) they finally agreed that the role was to associated with Holliday for it to be played by anyone else.

Paul Douglas however turned down the role of Harry Brock and he was replaced by the similarly built Broderick Crawford, who was at the time riding high from an Oscar win for the previous years All the Kings Men playing a fast talking, blustering and overbearing character not too dissimilar to Harry Brock

Columbia's biggest leading man William Holden was cast as Paul Verrall to give the movie the big box office name that it needed and established director George Cukor was assigned to oversee the project.

It tells the story of a corrupt uncouth galoot of a millionaire (Harry Brock) descending on Washington to buy himself a corrupt congressman or two to keep in his pocket.

He considers his girlfriend and kept women (Billie Dawn) too uneducated and embarrassing to present to the polite society of Washington, so he hires a journalist (Paul Verrall) to give her the smattering of education she needs to pass herself off as a lady.

As Billie gets smarter she also gets wiser as to how corrupt Harry is and questions why she is wasting her life with such a bully, especially as she has now fallen head over heals in love with Paul, and together they take a principled stand to bring an end Harry's dodgy dealings.

Cukor directs Garson Kanin's (uncredited) script well, finding the perfect balance between comedy, romance and drama, however the scene where Harry slaps Billie twice across the face is quite hard to watch. We knew what a bully Harry was without having to witness such a display of violence towards a character the audience had taken to their hearts. The words 'Gratuitous' and 'Cukor' seldom go together but in this particular instance I felt they did.

The funniest scene for me was the game of 'Gin' between Harry and Billy. Both Broderick Crawford and Judy Holliday are superbly funny in it.,

Another high point but purely because it highlights just what a great actress Judy Holliday was, is the scene where she is talking to the would-be corrupt senator and it's clear she doesn't know what the word constituent means.

There's a bit of flag waving patriotism slipped into the 'sight-seeing' scenes which may have the viewer believing that he is watching an old Frank Capra film from the 30's (Miss Dawn goes to Washington perhaps) but this mainly serves as Billie's catalyst for change, realising bullies have no rights or jurisdiction over decent ordinary people.

Every performance in this film is worthy of praise but none more so than Judy Holliday, who deservedly won an Oscar for her performance.

It's truly heartbreaking that she only made a few films throughout that one decade and that she was taken from the world at just 43 years old due to breast cancer. A monumental loss.

We are lucky to have her films preserved on digital so we can keep her long extinguished flame burning for evermore.

Who doesn't love Cary Grant?

The debonair urbane movie star who for nearly 35 years from 1931-1966 entertained and delighted audiences worldwide with his easy going on-screen persona. A handsome matinee idol who from one film to the next could easily switch up from comedy to drama effortlessly and with equal aplomb.

Well it seems one person who didn't love Cary Grant all that much was Archie Leach, and who can blame him? And It seems Cary Grant's opinion of Archie Leach was equally damning.

A poor boy born into the poverty and hardships of Edwardian England, to a neglectful father and an overly protective mother who was herself walking a mental tightrope between insanity and reality, it was a life anybody would want to escape from.

If that existence wasn't bad in itself, his father committed Archie's mother to an insane asylum, telling the boy she had died and then abandoned him to start a new family. It would be nearly thirty years before Archie found out the truth by which time Archie was the rich and famous Hollywood movie star known to the world as Cary Grant.

It was a discovery that would pull the already emotionally fragile Cary back to his roots and a life and identity he had spent so long trying to supress and bury. Two men in one body, each at loggerheads with the other. Never at peace.

Archie had found a permanent role to play in Cary Grant, the rich and sophisticated American actor, the very antithesis to who he really was and in his mind the fewer people who knew that the better. It's no wonder the off screen Cary was such an emotionally flawed character that few people ever really got to know or get close too.

Two people who did get to know him 'warts and all' was the actress Dyan Cannon, his forth wife and Jennifer Grant, their daughter from the marriage.

Most of the source material for this mini series is taken from Dyan Cannon's own autobiographical book 'Dear Cary' which documents their short and troubled marriage. I've read it, and thought it always tried to strike a fair balance. It tried to tell the truth without resorting to outright character assassination. Believe me I've read biographies of Cary Grant that have been far less complimentary of him.

One thing that does shine through Ms. Cannons book however, is her understanding.

Although the marriage didn't survive and the failure of it she lays squarely in Cary's lap due to his unreasonable and sometimes erratic behaviour, she understands the root causes of why he became the kind of man he did. He was troubled, hurt, guilt ridden, lost and confused. The sympathy and heartbreak she feels for the journey that had moulded him is clear and palpable throughout.

Dyan Cannon serves as executive producer on 'Archie' as does their daughter Jennifer and star Jason Issac's who manages to pull off a reasonable impersonation of Grant with his mannerisms and unique accent.

Like the book 'Dear Cary' it does not shy away from telling the truth about the marriage but it does so in a way that we too are conscious of the emotional past which is driving him and we are therefore able to sympathise to a great degree and we do not judge him too harshly.

One book I would very much like to read and have never been able to find, is 'Good Stuff' written by Jennifer Grant about her life with her father. One thing 'Archie' does portray clearly and accurately was what a dedicated and loving father he was.

With his daughter he found that special unbreakable bond, the parent/child closeness he was so cruelly denied himself. I truly feel that their shared love for Jennifer was the reason Archie and Cary were finally able to reconcile with each other and finally become one.

Jennifer, more than anybody, got to see that side of him over the last twenty years of his life so I'm hoping 'Good Stuff' when I finally get to read it, would redress the balance and neutralise some of the sourness 'Dear Cary' may have created in our minds.

My main criticism of 'Archie' however, is it is poorly researched in regards to the timeline of events. It was the mid 1930's when Cary found out his mother was alive, this series depicts it as being the 40's around the same time Cary was divorcing Barbara Hutton. Also it depicts Cary and Dyans first meeting taking place in 1961 and he was intending to offer her a role in North by Northwest, a movie he had made two years previously in 1959.

How these basic accuracies could have been missed is anyone's guess.. for a factual biopic it's pretty inexcusable.

Worth watching for anyone who is a Cary Grant fan or anyone who has read Dyan Cannons book.

I'm somebody who consumes sitcoms and comedy movies by the score, I have binge watched so many great shows over the years and loved them all, From Family Ties to Friends, From Scrubs to The Big Bang Theory, From Parks & Rec to Brooklyn Nine Nine, comedy shows are my thing.

The Good Place however was an unexpected surprise. It is one of the most ingenious, intriguing, unique, thought provoking and touching shows I have ever watched whilst still remaining both fun and funny.

It's a show that literally deals with death and what happens to your immortal soul after you die. In the case of The Good Place it is Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) who has died and we follow her journey into The Good Place, a spiritual heaven where only the most wholesome and decent people go after a life spent doing selfless good deeds on earth.

It seems during our time on earth our selfless good deeds and ethical and moral behaviour earn us reward points, and our selfish bad deeds and our unethical and immoral behaviour lose us points.

The Good Place is the eternal paradise waiting for those of us who manage to accrue the most points during our short mortal existence.

It's a perfect paradise where magical things can happen and your every whim and desire is immediately catered for on request through a walking, talking AI being named Janet (D'arcy Carden) and Eleanor has earned a place amongst the great and the good, the humanitarians and aid workers, the life savers and the life givers, the moral and the courageous.....or has she?

It turns out that she hasn't. The list of good deeds that are used to explain why Eleanor has qualified for an eternal existence in paradise are not her good deeds at all, They must clearly belong to another Eleanor Shellstrop, as our Eleanor has spent her life being what she self describes as an 'Arizona trash bag'

She spent the entirety of her short life being selfish, slutty, self obsessed, immoral, dishonest and generally unpleasant to everybody and anybody, so why is she here?

It soon becomes apparent however that her erroneous presence in The Good Place is causing their Garden of Eden to glitch and malfunction almost as if it's got an enormous bellyache after eating some dodgy food. It knows something is wrong..it detects a disturbance in the force.

Ted Danson plays Michael, the omnipotent architect of 'The Neighbourhood' who cannot understand what is happening to his creation and Eleanor cannot tell him because she'll be booted 'downstairs' to The Bad Place where an eternity of endless torture awaits her alongside all the other Arizona Trash Bags of the world,

Eleanor realises that in order to stabilise The Good Place and to genuinely earn her right to stay there, she must set out to become a better person and she must do it before she is identified as an imposter.

Originally introduced to Eleanor as her afterlife eternal 'Soulmate', Chidi Anagonye was an ethics and moral philosophy professor on earth. He is highly neurotic and wrestles with even the slightest decision obsessed as he is with making the perfect ethical choice every time. Eleanor come clean with Chidi and tells him that she is the reason the world is glitching and that she shouldn't have been sent to The Good Place but that she needs him to teach her all he knows to make her become a better person so she can stay,

This of course sends Chidi into meltdown as withholding the truth, covering up that truth with further lies and overall being party to an intrigue goes against his moral code and everything he stands for. He is however a kind hearted and compassionate person who is committed to helping his fellow man whenever he can so he agrees to tutor Eleanor on the quiet.

Also in on the secret is Tahani Al Jamil, (Jameela Jamil) a self obsessed British socialite and compulsive name dropper who earned her place in heaven by raising billions of pounds for charity and a buddhist monk named Jianyu Li, (Manny Jacinto) living (or rather in this case NOT living) under a vow of silence.

An extra twist here is that Jianyu is also not meant to be in The Good Place as he's really a hip-hop loving, petty criminal and part time arsonist named Jason Mendoza from Jacksonville, Florida, a man so stupid that he met his end by locking himself in a safe he intended to rob wearing a snorkel to help him breath inside.

However he makes up for his lack of intelligence by being an expert with Molotov cocktails guaranteed to get him out of most situations

When the pressures of keeping each others secrets reach boiling point, and their fears of discovery increase, they realise that their Good Place is becoming an unbearable personal torture chamber far worse than anything The Bad Place has to offer which leads Eleanor to a startling realisation.

And thats just the first season.

What follows are three more seasons where Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, Jason, Michael and Janet take us on an emotional journey of self discovery through their afterlife, where they take on the Demons of The Bad Place, a celestial judge and even challenge the existence and structure of heaven and hell itself.

As mentioned earlier, this show is one of a kind. It's unique. There has never been a show like this before which is what makes it so wonderful. It's funny, dramatic, thought provoking..even inspiring in places. It's characters (even the bad guys) are great to watch, the overall story is ingenious and it all culminates in a great 1 hour final episode which is both satisfying and very emotional...it a shame but it seems even eternity has to have an end.

It really does gets you thinking...where do we go after we shuffle off this mortal coil? I'd like to think there is a Good Place waiting for us all somewhere...and if it is anything like the Good Place depicted here it will certainly take the sting out of dying.

I'd like to think this show got it dead right.. after all, if I got to spend an eternal afterlife with Kristen Bell as my soulmate then that would be the closest to a Heaven I would ever need to get.

The 1980's was not a great decade for westerns. People were just not making them anymore.

All the great westerns stars of the past were now either too old, too retired or just too dead to make them anymore.

Clint Eastwood is one of just a few actors who's name has become specifically synonymous with the genre, which is strange considering that out of over 70 credited appearances before the camera only a very small number of them have been westerns.

Not counting the TV series Rawhide which aired between 1959 and 1965 and discounting all those pre-stardom pre-Rawhide bit parts in the mid 1950's, Eastwood only made 11 western movies in out of 51 credited movie appearances since 1964 according to IMDb.

There are a few Eastwood movies like Coogans Bluff (1968) Bronco Billy (1980) Honky Tonk Man (1982) Perfect World (1993) and Cry Macho (2021) which it can be argued are modern day westerns, but I think that may be stretching it a bit,

No, The reason Clint Eastwood has become so synonymous with the western genre is not so much based on how many he made, but because they were all so bloody good when he did finally get around to making one,

For instance only three western movies have ever won the Best Picture Oscar and one of them was Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992) This is a man who knows the genre well and knows how to transfer these great stories to the screen better than anybody,

Pale Rider (1985) is no exception. It was the only western he made during the 1980's and it was a long awaited return to the genre after an absence of nearly a decade. Not since The Outlaw Josey Wales in 1976 had Eastwood saddled up his horse, clipped on his spurs and loaded up his six shooter.

Returning to the mysterious unnamed stranger role that had made him so famous in the Sergio Leone Spaghetti westerns of the mid 1960's Eastwood plays a preacher who rides into town to help a small shanty town of Gold prospectors being terrorised by a local business man who wants to steal their land, steal their claims and introduce industrial scale, landscape wrecking hydraulic mining to the area,

He arrives as if almost in answer to a prayer made by a 14 year old girl called Meghan (Sydney Penny) who is praying for a deliverer to protect her little community from the evil it is being subjected to.

"Send us a miracle" she asks, the clouds part and in rides The Preacher. Is he real, or has he been conjured as an avenging angel? We never know for sure.

All we know is he arrives, sorts out the bad guys and rides off at movies end as if he was no more than a wind of retribution blowing through the town. Classic Eastwood.

Watching Pale Rider you can't help but feel that Clint was trying to repopularise the western genre by bringing in and reimagining so many elements from the classic westerns that had so captured the public imagination in the 1950's.

The film can so easily be identified as a remake of Shane (1953) and the final 'showdown' where he stands alone against a whole gang of gunfighters echos the plight of Gary Cooper's character in High Noon (1952)

Eastwood also brings in elements from his own previous westerns, most notably High Plains Drifter (1973) in as much as his character has a supernatural ambiguity attached to it,

The supporting cast includes Michael Moriaty, Carrie Snodgress, Chris Penn, Richard Dysart. Richard Kiel and John Russell..most well known as TV's 'Lawman' who was made his name in TV westerns at the same time as Clint did back in the late 50's and early 60's.

Pale Rider became one of the biggest hits of the year and caused a short lived revival in western movies around the mid 80's but it soon petered out again. It wasn't until the early 90's that westerns were to make a serious comeback.

The 1970's were the decade for American cop movies, not to mention the TV police detective shows that seemed to be being churned out with such regularity throughout the decade.

It clearly was a genre defining period in big screen and small screen entertainment. So much so that by the end of the 1970's vertically every veteran actor or upcoming newbie had all rolled their dice in the game at least once, some with more success than others.

The film that really started the ball rolling though was 'Dirty Harry' made right at the beginning of the decade in 1971.

Cop/detective films were nothing new of course, they had been making them way back in the 30's and the film noir vogue of the late 1940's gave us the model for the hard boiled 'Private eye' or dishevelled police Lieutenant.

However, although back in the day these films were considered 'gritty' they were still heavily sanitised by the Hays office. It wasn't until movie censorship was well and truly consigned to history that true realism could be brought in and the lines between good and evil could be blurred into total ambiguity.

We are fortunate therefore that by the late 1960's actors like Clint Eastwood and Director Don Siegel were free to not only bring such stories and portrayals to the screen but do so better than anybody else could.

Eastwood and Siegel started their collaborations a few years before in 1968 with the film Coogans Bluff, a film where the good cop was literally a modern day cowboy who was a tough and merciless as the bad guys themselves.

The character of Coogan must have stayed within the psyche of both Eastwood and Siegel however as the character of 'Dirty' Harry Callaghan bears more than just a passing resemblance and they found the perfect vehicle in which to resurrect him.

By 1971 the social situation in America had digressed to the point where victims rights were being overlooked because, murderers, rapists, drug dealers and kidnappers who were also human beings also had rights that were considered just as important.

Many high profile cases had seen criminals acquitted to reoffend, all because their 'rights' were violated through some bureaucratic technicality and people were quite rightly getting angrier.

Dirty Harry sets out to redress the balance. As in Coogans Bluff, Eastwood plays a cop who is more akin to a western lawman than anything suited to contemporary San Francisco.

He wants results and cares more about getting the job done rather than how it is achieved. You step out of line around Harry you're just going to end up dead punk!

The plot involves a psychotic serial killer, blackmailing the city, and leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. The city want to cooperate with his demands to stop more people getting killed, Harry wants to find the killer himself and deal with him in his own way...in order to stop more people being killed.

You see many times throughout the movie where Harry has run ins with his superiors who want to namby pamby their way around the situation whilst Harry believes the longer they dick around with this guy the more people are going to get hurt.

One poignant scene is where the killer has kidnapped a 14 year old girl and buried her alive. Time is running out to find out where she is before her oxygen runs out...Harry with anger and desperation for the girls welfare clearly etched in his face literally tortures the wounded perp until he finally gives up the information he needs to save her.

The next scene sees that his arrest, his evidence and the killers confession will all be thrown out as inadmissible due the way it was obtained and the killer is going to be set free.

"That man had rights" says the DA

"What about (the girl)? She's raped and left in a hole to die, what about her rights? Who speaks for her?" replies a frustrated Harry, hardly believing what he is hearing.

The film was a huge hit and I said at the beginning of this review it started off a decade long run of hard boiled loose canon cop movies, but it was not without us detractors.

Many called it fascist or right wing, citing that the police had no right to be Jury, Judge and executioner. Many of the original intended stars (which incidentally included Frank Sinatra, John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman and Charles Bronson) turned it down for this very reason.

I personally do not find it so, for however brutal Harry Callaghan seems at times, you know his actions all stem from his desire to save lives and protect innocent people from the actions of evil people. There is nothing wrong with wanting to do that.

I think if there is a moral to the story at all, it is that if you don't want to be shot and tortured by a cop don't kidnap 14 year old girls and bury them alive... under those circumstances the Dirty Harry's of this world, no matter how dirty they are, will pose no threat to you whatsoever.

Don Siegel would leave the Dirty Harry franchise after just this one outing, but Clint would go on to make 4 sequels over the next 18 years featuring Harry Callaghan. He was not only the character Eastwood would become most associated with but a character that has become one of the most iconic in movie history.

Coogan's Bluff represents a milestone in Clint Eastwood's career.

When it was made in 1968, Eastwood was mainly known as a 'Western' actor, known to most American audiences as having played Rowdy Yates on the western TV series Rawhide between 1959 and 1965.

Between seasons he had ventured over to Spain to make three Italian 'Spaghetti Westerns' for Director Sergio Leone...you may have heard of them!!!!

When the 'Dollars' trilogy was released in the US, it catapulted Clint Eastwood to international superstardom, playing a new kind of character, the ambiguous good guy, the anti hero, as tough, as ruthless, as cold blooded as as merciless as the bad guys he goes up against.

Universal studios were quick to capitalise on his popularity and cast him in an American made Spaghetti western called Hang 'Em High which made big money and further cemented Eastwood's status as the tough cowboy.

However with his next movie Clint Eastwood and his newly formed 'Malpaso' production company wanted to try something different.

Teaming up with Director Don Siegel, Coogan's Bluff took Eastwood's 'Man with No Name' character and transported him to the modern day. (Well...as modern as 1968 was in those days)

As the film opens we see an escaped, fugitive Native American Indian on the western plains...we are automatically suckered in into believing it's another western, Eastwood doing his thing in his usual familiar setting.

However when Eastwood as the pursuing lawman rides into view, he does so not on a horse but in a dusty Jeep and we get excited because we know this is going to be interesting..a cowboy in the modern day.

It was a genius stroke...a smart move, try something different but have enough of the tried and tested in there not to make it too much of a dramatic shift.

Set and made in New York in the psychedelic hippie era of the late 1960's, it tells a fish out of water story of Arizona Sheriff 'Coogan' sent to the big Apple to extradite a fugitive who through his no nonsense attempts to cut through the bureaucratic red tape bogging down the modern world of policing, allows the fugitive to escape.

Coogan then has to employ all his western skills learned on the prairie to track his prey through the concrete jungle of New York.

It may not seem so to modern audiences but for 1968, the violence displayed in this film was considered pretty brutal and cutting edge, and the character played by Eastwood paved the way for the tough, no nonsense, cop on the edge movies of the 1970's including 1971's Dirty Harry and it's sequels not to mention countless imitators.

Eastwood would return to the western genre only sporadically over the next 25years, but it was this movie, that marked his transition from cowboy to cop that was to define his career for the next three decades.

Excellent support is given by Lee J. Cobb as the New York police captain, Susan Clark as Eastwood's love interest and Don Stroud and Tisha Sterling as the drugged out hippies he is chasing.

Although The Spoilers was made by Universal who were back in 1942 was a mainly 'B' picture studio, this film is too great to have been a 'B' picture, yet not quite so polished as to be an 'A' picture either.

It starred Randolph Scott and Marlene Dietrich who were two long standing and pretty big box office draws, and a youthful John Wayne on loan from Republic who since his breakout role in 1939's Stagecoach was finally breaking away from the poverty row studio westerns he had made by the bucketload throughout the 1930's and onto bigger more prestigious projects.

Wayne plays a goldminer who along with his partner (the great Harry Carey) is desperately trying to defend his rightful claim from a corrupt Gold Commissioner played by Randolph Scott and an equally corrupt judge who plan to steal the mine for themselves.

The wonderful Marlene Dietrich all but recreates her 'Frenchy' role from Destry Rides Again as she plays the towns tough saloon owner, who is Wayne's love interest but desired by Scott...as if they didn't have enough to fight over already!

Wayne may have a love rival for Dietrich's affections but Dietrich has one too in the form of the lovely Margeret Lyndsay, the corrupt judges daughter who also has her heart set on Wayne.

However the business of the heart remains secondary to that of the goldmine.

Wayne's character is a decent man who welcomes the judge and his daughter to the town. He has often expressed a wish to see proper law and order for their boomtown, and when it comes he wishes to cooperate fully with it. However when that law and order shows it's true colours and all but hoodwinks him out of his mine, then The Duke is out to get it back in the old fashion way, by the fist and by the gun.

The whole film culminates in one of the best choreographed fist fights ever put onto film as two (quite obvious in certain shots) stunt doubles who we have to accept are John Wayne and Randolph Scott beat the hell out of each other for several knuckle breaking, lip splitting, tooth loosening minutes.

It's a plot that has been used many times before, in fact this is the fourth version of The Spoilers to finds its way onto our screens, following two silent versions and an early pre-code talkie with Gary Cooper in the Wayne part. It would go on to be made again in the 1950's with Anne Baxter and Rory Calhoun, however the Wayne/Scott/Dietrich movie is the definitive version.

It was a big success on release and the three stars really play well off each other. In fact so popular was it that Universal immediately rushed another Wayne/Scott/Dietrich project into production with the movie 'Pittsburgh' which was released later the same year.

If you can get passed Randolph Scott, a western idol and hero in his own right, for once playing an uncharacteristic baddie who gets his a$$ kicked (which is pretty difficult) then I recommend this movie most heartily.

The Shootist brought an end to a 50 year career of one of the greatest icons of the screen. It was not intended to be John Wayne's final picture, and contrary to rumour he was not terminally Ill when it was made.

However he was never the intended star. Paul Newman, Charles Bronson, George C. Scott and Clint Eastwood were all considered before Director Don Siegel had Wayne sign on the dotted line.

Siegel who at the time was most noted for his work with the aforementioned Eastwood, realised that The Duke was a different animal altogether.

He couldn't just make a Clint Eastwood movie with John Wayne in it. He knew that to make a John Wayne western, he would need John Wayne's input to make it work.

Wayne bought many ideas to the table and was keen to edit out all unnecessary violence, excessive bad language and vulgarity. He wanted a rewrite on the script to ensure his western credentials were not tarnished with Eastwood-esque coldbloodedness and he also wanted to hand pick his co-stars.

Wayne chose old friends Lauren Bacall who he had previously worked with in 1955's Blood Alley, John Carradine who's association with Wayne went back to the 1930's as part of John Ford's stock company of players and James Stewart who Wayne coaxed out of retirement to play a town doctor despite the fact that by this stage of his life Stewart was practically deaf.

It tells the story of aging gunfighter J. B Books who at the turn of the 20th century learns he is dying of cancer.

People are now getting civilised with respectable communities, horseless carriages and law and order. Gunfighters and ex-Marshall's are no longer the commodity they once were. They are now considered by decent folk no better than the bad guys they once planted and more pariah than hero. He is a living breathing relic of a bygone age.

When it's confirmed by the local Doctor that he doesn't have long left to live and the end he faces will be a painful and unpleasant one, he decides to go out on his terms and in his way by ridding the town of the last few ne'er-do-wells in a four way gunfight.

The townsfolk know he is dying and everyone from the local newspaper man, to the hand wringing undertaker want to sensationalise it for their own gain. Books doesn't resent dying but he does resent his death being cheapened and eagerly anticipated by greedy opportunists ready to cash in on his legend and name.

Two people he does trust and who do have his best interests at heart however, are his recently widowed Landlady Bond Rogers (Wayne specifically renamed the character after his long dead best friend and frequent co-star Ward Bond) played by Lauren Bacall and her son Gillom played by Ron Howard.

As we watch Book's steady decline as he reminisces on his many life experiences as swigs his laudanum straight from the bottle, you really do get the feeling that you're watching not just a man dying but an entire way of life about to expire.

He talks fondly about the years he spent living wild on the ranges and in the mountains of the old west, the freedom such a life gave him, a freedom and way of life all future generations of American youth would only ever get to read about and you know that when the inevitable end does come, we as an audience will be lamenting the loss of his life experience as much as the loss of the man.

Critics of the time were not kind to The Shootist. Box office takings were poor and unfortunately it does have a TV Movie feel to it, but it is none the less a great story that is very well told, And not worthy of all the bad reviews it garnered at the time. If they knew then that this was going to be John Wayne's final film, perhaps they would have been kinder to it, but at least their reviews were not tarnished by sympathy I suppose.

John Wayne never intended to retire and had other projects in the pipeline when he succumbed to cancer himself less than three years later, so although this was unintentionally the last movie he ever made, it seems a very fitting high point to end it on.

It also comes with a poignant message of a new and better way of life to come, as emphasised by the dying Books, as he watches with approval as Gillom throws away and rejects the smoking gun at the end of the movie. He knows as he dies he is leaving the world to better generation where gunfights and killings are not going to be their education.

So long Duke, thanks for your insurmountable and unequalled contribution to the western genre,

I've never been a huge fan of Montgomery Clift, amazing actor as he was, which is probably why I've given this film such a wide berth for so many years... it just goes to show how wrong a person can be.

Between the years 1946 and 1970 Howard Hawks and John Wayne collaborated on five motion pictures and I always thought 1959's Rio Bravo was my favourite..that is until today when I watched Red River for the first time.

John Wayne even manages to outJohnWayne himself as he plays a character a lot more tougher and ruthless than we would usually get to see.

He's an aging and embittered Cattle Baron determined to drive his giant herd all the way from Texas to Missouri, despite the threat of marauding hostile Indians and a band of infamous cattle rustlers. Hardened to the job, he is driving his men hard and is keeping them in line with harsh discipline and even harsher punishments for those who dissent.

Montgomery Clift plays Wayne's adopted son, who despite the obvious affection he has for the man who has brought him up, can no longer stand by and see Wayne's growing ruthlessness destroy both Wayne and the cattle empire they had both worked so long and hard to build,

Taking matters into his own hands he mutiny's against Wayne's leadership and casts him adrift, taking the herd and the men and changing course for the much nearer stock yards in Abilene.

However Wayne is in hot pursuit and has mercilessly vowed to kill Clift for this betrayal.

The great Walter Brennan plays his requisite toothless, old faithful much as he did in Rio Bravo and there is excellent support from Joanne Dru as Clift's love interest and John Ireland as Clift's co-mutineer and new 'best pal'

It is well documented that Ireland's drinking on set caused problems which resulted in Ireland's character being seriously cropped by Hawks for much of the finished picture which was a shame as the character was rather good.

He played a gun fighter who joins the trail early on and who threatens to be a potential adversary of Clift, the two are friendly but there is a thinly veiled menace in their interactions. It came to nothing however as due to the character being sidelined mid-picture, Ireland is instead portrayed as Clift's loyal friend who is even prepared to put his own life on the line to protect Clift when Wayne finally catches up with them.

It's a fantastic movie, with great black and white cinematography capturing all the rugged sinew of the American old west.

I suppose it's also unique as it's perhaps the closest we ever got to see John Wayne play a baddie. Although is character was still essentially good, he blurred the lines very heavily here and turned in perhaps the finest performance of his long and illustrious career.

He may have won his Oscar for True Grit, but this in my humble opinion is a much superior performance.

The Cannonball Run, released in 1981 was something of a sleeper hit. Following on from Burt Reynolds' enormously successful Smokey and the Bandit films, it was a fun packed roller coaster of car chases and cameos but above all it was funny, very funny in fact.

It wasn't a huge hit with the critics (these kinds of film never are) but the audience loved it and made it one of the top box office hits of the year and making over $160m in the US alone from a budget of just $16m

It certainly gave Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jnr, a final roar and cinematic high to end their long and illustrious careers on (although Dom DeLuise and Jack Elam steal the movie from everybody with their hilarious larger than life performances)

I can imagine that after the fantastic laugh a minute first movie, audiences must have been really excited to see the Cannonballers out on the road again. It's a shame therfore they decided to follow up the first movie with this terribly unfunny effort.

In fact you can almost feel the disappointment audiences of the day must have felt while watching it, as the movie that could have been so great, consistently fails at almost every opportunity.

Sure the car chases are there, the premise is the same but it just didn't gel as well. There is too much movie parody, with gimmick casting from The Godfather movies offering both an unsatisfying plot and some unconvincing villains, instead of the usual band of highway patrol Smokey's.

Dean and Sammy are criminally underused in this sequel although they did manage to convince fellow Rat Packers and long time collaborators Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine and Henry Silva to join in on the fun, but even the presence of these big guns, failed to give this film the extra sparkle it needed.

In the final scenes of the first movie, you can see the cast breaking up with laughter as they were having so much fun on set (Farrah Fawcett almost looks like she was in pain she was laughing so hard)

Sadly, there is none of that here.

The movie tries too hard to be funny by using jokes and characterisations that are not and you can visibly see the cast giving up halfway through knowing that their attempts to recapture the original magic was just not working.

It's a shame Dean, Sammy and Frank had to end their movie careers with such a foul tasting film in their mouths, especially as they could have ended for Dean and Sammy on such a high with the previous movie.

Stick with the original.. funny and memorable, avoid this one at all costs as it's memorable for an altogether different reason,

I was always taught that if you had nothing nice to say about anything, don't say anything at all but I cannot and will not hold my tongue at trash like this being given 'artistic merit' by arty farty long haired, pipe smoking bohemians in tweed jackets and cravats just because they want to be seen as intellectuals who 'get it'

They're like those whiney voiced art commentators who always see more in a painting than is actually there insisting that a particular brush stroke was clearly an indication of the artists turbulent personal circumstances. Put a sock in it for gawds sake!

They can claim that this film is historically significant..... it is not. They can claim it's culturally important....it is not. They can claim the director had a higher vision and was breaking new ground...don't make me laugh!!!!

There is literally nothing new or clever about people taking their kit off and running around naked outdoors. They were making sepia movies of this back in Lumieres day, at least back then we didn't have suffer through boring, minimalist and so called 'profound' dialogue to go with it.

These classless, 'experimental' movies of the 70's were nothing more than a knee jerk reaction to the liberation from movie censorship as if they wanted revenge for the years of suppression.

All of these so called 'genius' directors were nothing of the sort they were just trying to plaster as much nudity onto our screens as possible, the more nudity they dared to exhibit, the more acclaim they felt they deserved, and should they cram their movie with enough pubic hair to fill a mattress and label it as 'art' they could climb to the very top of the avant garde tree.

It was really a very sad and depressing time for cinema, great dialogue was sidelined, great stories were shelved, I mean, who needs great dialogue or stories when you can have two naked people having a minimal conversation or a one word exchange while jumping on a trampoline holding a cabbage.

Get over yourselves. Next time you're having an 'It's the Arts' gathering with a bunch of fellow pseudo intellectual lefty luvvies over a bottle of Rioccha and rare cheeses as you ruminate over which one of these experimental directors were the best, think of how sad and pathetic you all actually sound...the answer is none of them!

Worth Winning is definitely a product of its time. If it was made today there would most likely be uproar, especially in our post #metoo society,

The ever watchable Mark Harmon (the worlds greatest actor) plays Taylor Worth, a rich, successful and impossibly handsome TV weatherman whose success with the ladies is legendary amongst his social circle. He is cocky and confident and knows all he has to do is flash his impossibly handsome smile at any woman he so chooses and she'll be cooking him breakfast the next morning.

His best friend Ned, who thinks it will pull Taylor down a peg or two and humanise him if he failed from time to time, makes him a bet which seems on the surface unwinable.

The Bet :- Taylor must within 90 days, start relationships with three women, make three marriage proposals and videotape three 'yeses'

The Stake:- Taylor's rustic Fishing Cabin against Ned's Wife's original Picasso.

The Catch :- Ned will choose the three women which will be three very difficult nuts to crack..even for Taylor.

Taylor despite his misgivings accepts the bet.

Woman 1 is Erin, a young (a little too young if you ask me) blonde bombshell, constantly surrounded by very jealous and very ripped football players.

Woman 2 a no nonsense, man hating , progressive thinking intellectual who looks upon the Taylor Worth's of this world with both vile contempt and disdain.

Woman 3, a middle aged woman who's ALREADY MARRIED to the local millionaire businessman.

What follows after is a further 90mins of fun and games, where Taylor pulls out all the stops and all the charm to get the selected women to fall in love with him and accept his secretly recorded marriage proposals. However, what Taylor didn't expect is to genuinely fall in love with one of them himself.

I watched this film with my wife and boooooy were we coming to the finish line backing two very different horses? I think it's a gender thing. I wanted Taylor to win and was rooting for him all the way...GOOOO ON PLAYER!! My wife however thought he should fry in a puddle of his own goo!

For instance, she literally jumped for joy and clapped at the scenes where he was found out and his three spurned fiancés all joined forces to extract their little revenge.

I on the other hand, felt sorry for him. Put it down to the Bro Code and my testosterone fuelled instinct to offer him some kind of fraternal support. But I have to be honest, although characters like Taylor were big in the 80's here in the 2020's I'm afraid they just don't fly and just come across as cheesy.

Other things that seem very dated now are the fashions (of course) the soundtrack (of course) and the cringeworthy gimmick of having the central character talk to the audience which at the time was very 80's comedy thing to do.

Give this one a go, but do so with your wife or girlfriend.. it makes for some very interesting debates believe me.

Me:- "you've got to admire his technique... it's amazing, I wish I had tried it when I was younger'

Wife:- "yeah but look at you.. you're not exactly Mark Harmon are you?'

I guess that's a fair point!!!

I do not mean to disrespect or disparage this film in anyway. I know it has a hard core fanbase and I can certainly see why. It is well acted and executed and it certainly one of the most romantic of all romance movies.

I did enjoy the film but it did make me feel rather uneasy in places. Read on an I'll explain why.

If you haven't seen it, the basic plot is a young play-write with writers block in 1980 (Christopher Reeve) sees a portrait of a beautiful actress from 1912 (Jane Seymour) and falls madly in love with her. (And let's face it who wouldn't? She was and IS incredibly beautiful)

His obsession leads to the discovery that the actress is the old woman who 8 yrs previously had once appeared out of nowhere, gave him an ornate pocket watch and begged him to "come back to me" a mystery not resolved until now.

Knowing somehow he has an overwhelming connection with this woman, he literally wills himself back to 1912 to be with her.

The romantic aspect of this film is very touching. For two people to have such a strong and unbreakable connection and attraction that it breaks down the barrier of time itself will be enough to win over most romantics I'm sure, but I think on the whole we as an audience are expected to suspend disbelief a little too far with this movie.

The time travel aspect is of course fantasy. All time travel is so I don't want to put too much stock into it, but in this film there is no time machine or time portal, he merely wills himself back to 1912 by the power of suggestion. I mean if we could really do that I think we would all have dumped the 2020's long ago and we would all be living in the past. It's just too much of a nonsense for a viewer to believably accept..fantasy or not.

Then we have the first meeting of our two time crossed lovers. These were the scenes that made me feel the most uneasy. You have the beautiful Ms Seymour innocently strolling near some woodland and all of a sudden a man she has never seen before slowly walks towards her through the thicket with a look of pure desire on his face. I'd defy any woman not to have run a mile..even if it was the incredibly handsome Christopher Reeve.

Then as she is walking back to the Hotel, he's following her, matching her pace just a few steps behind. I'm not going to lie to you reader, this all seemed pretty creepy!

Yet despite this, love does bloom between the two leads and it is very heartwarming to watch and the film redeems itself as a result.

I was however a bit disappointed with the ending. Lovers of romance always wish for a happy ending. I feel in this case the ending was more disturbing than happy. It again made Reeve's character seem like he was harbouring an extremely unhealthy obsession driving him to insanity rather than true love.

In my opinion a better ending would have been for Seymour's character to have found a way back to him in the 1980's where they could live their lives together in a much more liberated era, one where she could inspire him to write again and resume her own career.

However, as in the case of Wuthering Heights (another book/film touching on a theme of an unhealthy romantic obsession) a large hot steaming bowl of death was served for our dessert instead. Such a shame!

Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour make a great cinematic paring and their chemistry really shines, but the great Christopher Plummer almost steals the film as Seymour's manager/mentor/Svengali/would-be-lover who is literally Von Trapping his pants at the thought of losing her to the taller, younger, much more physically handsome Reeve. He plays his role with a sinister charm that has you loathing him and in a way sympathising with him in equal measure.

Another thing that was in danger of nearly stealing the film from its two leads was John Barry's beautiful score. It really is so beautiful and an unusual departure from Barry's usual fayre. It's a shame he never wrote more softer offerings.

All in all, it's a good film built around a great idea but it could have been so much better.

British Comedy has featured some giant names over the years; Names that have come to define what British Comedy is. You have the comedians themselves, Will Hay, George Formby, Arthur Askey, Alastair Sim, Norman Wisdom, Peter Sellars to name but a few.

You also have the brand names or the studio names famous for their comedies, for instance ATP/Ealing studios and the wonderful 'Carry On' brand that between them churned out classic British Comedy from the 30's through to the late 1970's

However when it came to British TV sitcoms one name stands above all others and that is the late, great David Croft.

For over 30 years starting in the late 1960's, David Croft (a prolific writer and producer) along with frequent collaborator Jimmy Perry brought us many of our most beloved sitcoms including 'Dads Army' (1968-1977) 'It Ain't Half Hot Mum' (1974-1981) and this one 'Hi-de-Hi' (1980-1988)

If you are of a certain age, you will remember with fondness (or not) they heyday of the British holiday camp. It's basic accommodation with uncomfortable mattresses, the camp shop, the bar, the ballroom or nightclub, the awful Cabaret acts, the endless competitions, like the glamorous granny or the knobbly knees, the beauty contests, the talent competitions, the children's entertainers and the entertainment staff always ready to pull the most sedate of us onto the dance floor to ensure we have a good time.

I used to go to one every year myself down in Weymouth from the early to late 1980's and have many fond teenage memories, so if you remember them as I do, then you will relate to and enjoy the Hijinks featured in Hi-De Hi.

Set in a fictitious Holiday Camp at a fictitious English seaside resort over the 1959 and 1960 holiday seasons, it features a wonderful array of delightful comic characters that form up the entertainment staff, charged with making sure the 'campers' have a fun filled week.

Firstly we have Jeffrey Fairbrother (Simon Cadell) a Cambridge archeology professor who's self realisation that he is bland and boring, leads him to radically change his lifestyle by gaining employment as the camps entertainments manager, the big joke here being he's an entertainments manager that knows nothing about entertaining and often fails abysmally when he tries with hilarious results. His mild manner and good nature means he is never fully in control of the mayhem around him and the more nefarious of his staff use this to their advantage.

We have Ted Bovis (Paul Shane) the stereotypical fat northern beer swigging (sometimes blue) comedian who is the Camp Host. He compères most of the events in the camp (mainly to get his hands on the kitty and cream a bit off the top for himself) He often ends up at loggerheads with Jeffrey because a) Ted wanted the entertainments managers job himself and b) Jefferey (most of the time) stops Ted working his money making scams on the campers.

Then there's Spike Dixon (Jefferey Holland) camp comedian and Ted's protege. His running gag is that he is seldom very funny and often has to resort to wearing funny costumes every week in his attempts to raise a smile from the campers. Yet with all he is a kind and extremely honest man who often falls out with Ted over his attempts to dishonestly cheat the campers out of their money.

Gladys Pugh (Ruth Madoc) is the entertainment managers assistant, sports organiser, radio announcer and Chief Yellowcoat (Yellowcoat being the name given to the entertainments staff derived from the golden blue trimmed blazers they are required to wear) Her exaggerated thick Welsh accent over the radio gives the series its main catchphrase of 'Hello Campers' she is also madly in love with Jeff and practically (although not literally) throws herself at him in each episode but to no avail.

Rounding off the leading cast we have Su Pollard as Peggy Ollerenshaw, a much put upon, slightly 'potty' chalet maid who yearns to be a Yellowcoat. It's her attempts to be in on all the fun and the hash she makes if it when she is, that gives the show many of its laughs.

Supporting we have Barry Howard and Diane Holland as Barry and Yvonne Stewart-Hargreaves, 'champion' ballroom dancers who have seen better days and whose routines are hilariously terrible. Their snobby superior attitude towards the camp, the campers and their fellow staff lends itself to some great comedy especially when they are forced to degrade themselves in some of the more vulgar competitions likes 'That's your Bum!' The two often quarrel and make cutting (although extremely amusing) jibes at each other.

Nikki Kelly plays Sylvia Garnsey, a blonde, busty long legged Yellowcoat who is overly flirty with campers and with Jeff, making her a potential threat to Gladys, which is why they are often very bitchy and catty to each other.

Felix Bowness plays Fred Quilley a disgraced jockey, now forced to give 'horsey rides' for the kids along the sands.

Finally we have Leslie Dwyer as Mr Partridge, the drunken children's entertainer and Punch and Judy Man, who dislikes children intensely...what can go wrong there...right?

Although Hi-de-HI' enjoyed an impressive 8 year run and spanned 58 episodes, and despite numerous cast changes throughout the years, it never lost its initial charm, it remained very funny right to the very last episode.

This accomplishment I lay at the feet of David Croft himself, an accomplishment made all the more impressive by the fact that whilst working on Hi-De Hi he was also simultaneously writing and producing the equally funny 'Are You Being Served?" (1972-1985) and 'Allo' Allo!' (1982-1992) with his other frequent collaborator Jeremy Lloyd,

Just Imagine how many episodes all of these sitcoms ran to combined and just think of how many original jokes, gags, quips, one liners, double entendres and scenarios he was able to cook up for each one.

There was more to come from Croft of course with 'You Rang M'Lord' (1988-1993) and 'Oh Doctor Beeching!' (1995-1997) which both happily reused many of the talented performers from Hi-de-Hi and all his other renowned sitcoms.

Now that's what I call a productive and fertile comedy brain and why David Croft will always be remembered as one of Britain's comedy greats.

It seems in the ensuing 15 years since the original smash hit movie 'Enchanted', people have become such cynics and have forgotten how to enjoy a great Disney fantasy with great music and great performances.

The premise is slightly different sure, but the basic concept of a Disney princess living in the real world and the two worlds, animate and animated colliding, has been expanded on somewhat, with a misjudged spell threatening the existence of both worlds and Giselle's warm heart into the bargain.

There are more songs in this offering and every single one of them are memorable and perfectly executed by many of the original cast, including Amy Adams, Patrick Dempsey, James Marsden (who if I had one criticism is criminally underused) and the fantastic Idina Menzel who gives the musical performance of the movie with 'Love Power'

Newcomers are Maya Rudolph who's well known comic ability lends gravitas to her evil Queen role and her inept sidekicks played by Yvette Nicole Brown and Jayma Mays but special mention to Gabriella Baldacchino who takes over the role of an older Morgan and really rubs with it. I think she is destined for great things.

Let's enjoy this movie for the fun adventure it is, as it contains the perfect balance of comic parody, music, suspense, tears and laughter.

Stop being a bunch of miserable cynics who have lost your innocence. Search deep, it's still there.

Noel Coward was known as the Master. A Master wit, a Master playwright, A Master songwriter, a Master Director, a Master Raconteur and a Master Impresario. Needless to say, I've always been a big fan.

Although Cowards heyday was in the 1920's and 1930's Relative Values was one of Cowards later plays which was not released until 1951, and although set in the 50's it still maintains a very 1930's art deco feel to it.

Set in an English country house, it's a comedy of manners (and class) that tells the story of an American movie star, treading on the stuffy toes of the British aristocracy as she prepares to marry an English Earl. Straight forward stuff......or is it?

Nothing in a Coward comedy was ever that straight forward.

It turns out our American Movie star is a working class English girl who ran off to America years before. Not only that, she is the long lost sister of her future mother in laws maid.

When the maid confides this nugget of information to the Countess prior to her sister's visit, and offers her resignation, so it doesn't cause embarrassment the Countess (who loves her maid dearly) offers her a way out.

Rather than be reunited with her glamorous sister as a lowly maid, the Countess makes her up to be an equal, a rich socialite who is a close friend of the family. But how long can such a deception last?

Also add to the party, the movies stars spurned Hollywood heartthrob ex-lover who gatecrashes the house party determined to win back his lost love.

Coward was an original, but I can't help but feel this offering borrowed more than just a little from Cowards contemporary and rival wit P. G Wodehouse.

This seems to be such a typical 'Blandings' style farce, and as we have Stephen Fry playing the butler, the Wodehousian feel is emphasised even further by his revival of 'Jeeves' in all but name.

Although there are great performance from Dane Julie Andrew's and Colin Firth (as a very Cowardesque character blessed with typical dry Englishness) the film does fail to hit the mark.

Although the play itself was a big hit at the time, the film fails in several areas. The build up goes on for far too long that the moments where the sparks could really fly and the excitement could really build is drastically cut short. It seems the contrasting characters finally all get together and the film comes to an end.

It is NOT the perfect way to introduce Coward (or Wodehouse to that matter) to new and appreciative audiences. It is a very poor adaptation of a very good play. If it's 1930's English societal farce you want, then I suggest watching Fry and Laurie's 'Jeeves and Wooster' or Richard Briers in 'Heavy Weather' or some of Cowards earlier film adaptations like Blythe Spirit or Private Lives, Those adaptations will quench your thirst. Unfortunately Relative Values will only whet your appetite and leave you thirsty for more.

Based on a true story (with the name changed to protect the innocent) The Winslow Boy is a celluloid testament to the importance of justice no matter what the cost and a nod to long lost attitudes and conventions.

Set (and made) in a much more deferential and class ridden era, it tells the story of a young 12yr old Naval Cadet wrongly expelled from college having been falsely accused of stealing and cashing a five shilling postal order.

His father brilliantly and wryly played by Sir Cedric Hardwicke, is convinced of his sons innocence and sets out to clear their family's good name and have his son reinstated.

At first he clashes head on with an establishment quickly closing ranks all refusing to acknowledge that any miscarriage of justice has occurred, and that the boy was given a fair hearing.

However when the family engage the services of Sir Robert Moreton, one of England's top barristers, (Robert Donat) it becomes less of simple case of theft, but a vital struggle to uphold the very basic laws of the land enshrined by Magna Carta, a struggle that becomes front page news across the country especially as it is rocking the boat of the very highest echelons of the British establishment.

Along the way we see the emotional sacrifices and the financial hardships the family have to make to ensure that justice be done and that 'right is heard'

The Winslow family is depicted as being middle class, living in a suburban terraced house with a housemaid. It would be interesting to see how it would have played out and how much justice The Winslow Boy would have actually gotten if he was a lower working class boy, especially as the moral of the story is that the Kings justice should be available to everybody down to even the lowest subject.

A working class family of the day could never have taken it as far as the Winslow's did as they wouldn't have had the funds, they definitely wouldn't have been able to afford Sir Roberts fees, the reality being therefore that sadly the case would have most likely gone unheard before the days of legal aid.

Robert Donat has always been one of my favourite actors and this is perhaps his best performance before the camera since his Oscar winning turn in Goodbye Mr Chips nine years earlier.

A great movie to watch with a great message.....(in principle)

Watch Your Stern is a brilliant little nautical comedy and although it was made by the Producer, Director, most of the production crew and many of the stars of the Carry On films, it feels more akin to an extended movie version of The Navy Lark than anything in the Carry On series....we even have Leslie Phillips!!!

What sets this film apart from the Carry Ons is that this is far less of an ensemble piece but a clearly defined starring vehicle for the amazing and versatile Kenneth Connor.

Connor plays a national service rating in the Royal Navy assigned to HMS Terrier. He's an electrical boffin who knows all the theory inside and out, but pretty much fouls up everything he touches when it comes to putting his knowledge into practice.

When he accidentally (and rather stupidly) sets fire to the ships only set of Top Secret plans for a new torpedo currently undergoing testing, he and his commanding officers have to lie, cheat and improvise as many ways as possible to conceal the loss from their cantankerous old Admiral until their back up copy is returned.

Kenneth Connor shows us what a rare talent and a consummate character actor he was as he dons various disguises and effects various accents to help throw the suspicious Admiral of the scent.

It is clear however that this screenplay was not written by the then regular Carry On writer Norman Hudis, or even the great Talbot Rothwell who went on to replace him. It was instead an adaptation of a play by Earle Couttie called 'Something about a Sailor' and it shows. It does have stage adaptation written all over it.

However as I've mentioned before it does have that Laurie Wyman Navy Lark feel to it.

HMS Terrier can so easily be HMS Troutbridge and Leslie Phillips' Lieutenant Commander Fanshawe could so easily be Leslie Phillips' Sub Lieutenant Phillips (although in this film Fanshawe is a lot more competent) Sydney James plays a Chief Petty Officer that could so easily have been CPO Pertwee and even Connor's Ordinary Seaman Blissworth could have been Ronnie Barker's Able Seaman 'Fatso' Johnson. This was also exactly the kind of plot that made The Navy Lark so great and so funny.

In fact this movie is more like The Navy Lark, than the film they actually made of it the year before which was on the whole pretty poor.

Aside from Connor, Sid James and Leslie Phillips, other regular Carry On alumni along for the ride are Eric Barker, Joan Sims, Hattie Jacques, David Lodge and Victor Madden and guest appearances by Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes keep the laughs coming.

If I have one criticism of this movie though, is that all of the above mentioned acting talent, with the exception of Kenneth Connor are criminally underused and their characters underdeveloped, but they all do well with the screen time they have.

Special mention to Noel Purcell, who shines as the no nonsense short tempered Admiral.

My advice is don't try and compare it to the Carry On's despite the familiar faces you'll see, just go into it expecting something different, and you will not be disappointed.

I came to this movie a total City Hunter virgin, I'm not into anime all that much, I'm not a huge Jackie Chan fan so I missed his adaptation completely, and I'm not French, so it's history as French 90's TV show is frankly redundant to me. I did not recognise the characters, the nods to the overall franchise or the French topical or cultural jokes.

What I do recognise however is a perfectly crafted comedy when I see one, and this is simply one of the funniest films I've seen in many years. I laughed and I laughed hard.

Like me, anybody should be able to view this film without any prior knowledge of the source material and enjoy it as a stand alone movie.

Yes, It's a bit smutty in places, but no smuttier than say a Carry on movie employing the same kind of bawdy humour. The action sequences are exaggerated to an almost cartoonish degree and some of scenarios and action tends to fall on the side of good old fashion slapstick, but this is WHY it's a good film. It doesn't take itself too seriously and it's supposed to be laughed at. It why a film like this transcends language and culture. It's fun for everybody.

Even the plot is a little corny, a private eye, is hired to track down a dangerous perfume, that has fallen into the wrong hands that makes the wearer sexually irresistible to all who smell it.

Well done however to Director, writer and leading man Philippe Lacheau, who could have taken such a premise into the realms of soft porn or more explicit vulgarity but chose not to, instead finding the right balance between, comedy, action, suggestive innuendo and romance.

I'm sure there are some aspects of the story that would tweak the nose of a few of our more 'woke' campaign groups, but seeing that these peoples main purpose is to hoover the fun out of pretty much everything, who cares about them? Nicky Larson is such fun, such a non stop laugh fest, they couldn't suck the fun out of it with 1000 hoovers.

Highly recommended.

In 1974, in the movie That's Entertainment, Elizabeth Taylor dubiously declared this move as 'Everybody's favourite high school musical'

Who knows, at that time perhaps it was..The movie version of Grease was still 4 years away and the cinema going audience had had little served up in this genre in the ensuing 27 years.

Don't get me wrong. It's a good musical, There are some great songs by accomplished songsmiths like Henderson, DeSylva, and Brown from the original stage show and additional Oscar nominated material by long time MGM composer and arranger Roger Edens in conjunction with Adolph Green, Betty Camden, Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin. Chuck Walters does an amazing job with his directorial debut, and solid performances are given by the entire cast, especially June Allyson, Joan McCracken and Ray McDonald, with Mel 'Velvet Fog' Torme appears in a small role proving that he was at the very peak of his singing excellence.

The weak point of this movie is in my opinion Peter Lawford. I'm not talking about his obvious lack of singing and dancing ability...he does the same charming and inoffensive competent job he did in It Happened in Brooklyn, and which he would go on to do in Easter Parade. My issue with Lawford in this movie is that he is such an unlikable character.

He plays a good looking and dapper jock, the most popular guy in school who knows he can make it with any girl on campus. He spends most of the movie strutting around like a peacock in full plumage which is bad enough, but when he starts to use his cock sure arrogance to string along and ultimately breaks the heart of June Allyson's character, then we pretty much lose all respect for the guy,

You can already size up June Allyson's Connie from the first scene she appears in. Despite being the sweetest thing since the invention of the sugar cube, you immediately sympathise with her as she is the only student not having any fun out of college life. She's the poor girl having to work her way through college, missing out in all the dances, all the dating and only seems to exist to be the shoulder everyone seems to cry on, despite any problems she might have herself.

Then along comes Peter 'Bluebeard' Lawford, using all his charm to use her for his own ends, gets her to fall in love with him, asks her to the prom (which for poor Connie, who is usually left on the shelf in most things, is a huge deal) and then drops her flat and takes somebody else.

What a cad!

The movie was not a big success on release and actually lost MGM money. My guess is because of how mean Lawford comes off, I'm sure cinema audiences of the day were also appalled by the character, played by the usually likeable Lawford. It was one of MGM's few missteps of the era to cast him in such a role, regardless of how repentant and genuine his feelings for Connie finally become.

I feel sorry for Ray McDonald. Despite being an excellent little singer and dancer, he was also there as the comic relief. Imagine trying to put the smile back on the audiences faces when Peter Lawford had pretty much cheesed them off. Such a tough job.

Still a good musical with great routines and width a watch on a quite Sunday afternoon.

Sam, (Matthew Broderick) is a small town astrologer who has been hopelessly in love and besotted with his girlfriend Linda (Kelly Preston) since they were kids.

When Linda, a grade school teacher, gets the chance to spread her wings and teach in New York for a few months, Sam rather reluctantly accepts the situation and sadly sees her off.

Yet when Linda fails to return after her secondment ends and instead sends around her father with a 'Dear John' letter, Sam journeys to New York to find out why the love of his life has unceremoniously dumped him.

It turns out she has fallen in love and shacked up with a handsome French restauranteur named Anton (Tchéky Karyo)

Unlike most blokes who would just go to the pub, cry into a few beers, lament their lost love for a few weeks, go through a period of readjustment and healing, before moving on with their life, Sam breaks into the derelict apartment building across the street and spends his days spying on his ex girlfriend and her lover.

Using a camera obscura he has full view of their apartment, and using his talent for data analysis he plans to mathematically work out the peak and eventual demise of her new relationship and he is determined to be the one who's shoulder she will cry on and to whom she will eventually return. He is willing to forgive her temporary lapse and resume their relationship as if nothing had happened.

Enter Maggie (Meg Ryan) a leather clad biker chick and Anton's spurned lover, who is also stalking her former partner, however reconciliation does not feature in her plans at all. She is purely out for revenge and wants to destroy Anton's life. Anton had shamelessly used her just to get a green card and now suspects Linda is his next victim.

Sam wants nothing to do with Maggie's scheme of destroying Anton, he only wants back what he 'stole' from him and the two get off to an acrimonious start.

What makes Sam agree to letting Maggie stay is that she has placed some strategic state of the art bugging equipment around Anton and Linda's apartment so wheras Sam has provided the window into Linda and Anton's life, Maggie has provided the soundtrack.

When Sam finally hears his true love and her French paramour having wild and passionate sex it riles him so much, that he join forces with Maggie to ruin Anton's life and claim back his sweetheart.

They do this by rousing Linda's suspicions of an affair using several ingenious and humorous schemes, they ruin Anton's budding restaurant business and steal his credit card to leave him with astronomical debts.

Obviously as this is a Romcom, you know where this is going to lead. Maggie and Sam slowly start to fall in love themselves. Sam realises that he no longer wants what he thought he did, and for Maggie, revenge becomes less and less important.

They also both come to realise that Anton and Linda are genuinely in love with each other, and that their previous relationships fell apart because they were not with the right person to begin with.

Anton had used Maggie to get a green card, but it turns out he was guilt ridden over being so dishonest with her, he desperately wanted to fall in love with Maggie to make things right, but it just didn't happen. He let her go because he couldn't lie to her or himself anymore. Turns out he's not such a bad chap after all.

I think it was a master stoke in bringing a great bit of reverse psychology to film, . The more we see of our supposed love cheats, the more we sympathise with them and realise we've judged them to harshly without knowing the full story. We actually start to feel sort for what is maliciously being done to them.

Of course the flip side of that is we lose sympathy with our main protagonists (or rather antagonists) who are supposed to be the leading man and leading lady of the whole show..the people we should be rooting for. Of course they are stalkers pure and simple and were never worthy of much sympathy to begin with.

It's still an entertaining film however and we never truly abandon sympathy for the spurned lovers, even if we do gain a lot more for those that did the original spurning.

Final comment :- Meg Ryan was always beautiful, but in my opinion in this movie she is just downright sexy. If Meg looked sexier in any other film then I sure as hell haven't seen it.

I was a little late getting on the train to Downton Abbey. I never watched it until I experienced the collective national meltdown following Matthew Crawley's death at the end of the Season 3 Christmas Day special, a scene that must have made everyone's Christmas pudding taste a little jaded. Twitter literally exploded with heartbroken viewers venting their grief..and anger! #Christmasruined #howdarethey #bringbackmatthew #arrestjullianfellowes etc..you get the idea.

I realised then that I was missing something pretty big, a televisual phenomenon so colossal that I had to find out what all the fuss was about.

I therefore purchased the first three seasons and all the specials and binged like my life depended on it. By the time season 4 aired here in the UK I was fully up to speed and as hooked as the most ardent fan...in fact I'm not sure whether or not I AM now it's most ardent fan....it's quite probable!

Like all fans I was very sad to see the show end on Christmas Day 2015 (#jullianfellowesruinsyetanotherchristmas) as we witnessed The Crawleys and their much respected servants ring in the new year of 1926 and I lamented it's loss a lot harder than I have lamented the ending of any other programme.

The characters became so familiar and you invested so much of your time and attention to their story lines and development, it hardly seemed real that we would not be seeing them anymore. It was as close to a bereavement as one can get, without actually having a loved one croak on them.

I was therefore over the moon to find out that Downton was set to return in movie form, but I was also a little apprehensive. I've seen successful television series adapted to the big screen before with little or no success, as they always strayed too far from the formula that made the series so good in the first place.

But the big hurdle for me, (and it has to be said it is sadly present in both Downton Abbey films to date) was how to tie up multi character storylines neatly when you're constricted to a 2 hour run time, without making them look too contrived, unbelievable, rushed or just plain silly.

Both Downton Abbey films fall foul of this in some way. Jullian Fellowes is a fantastic writer but with the television series he had the scope to spread plot lines over several episodes to help build up the tension and excitement before bringing things to a satisfactory and natural climax which left his audience fully sated and really on board with what had happened.

Despite the two great storylines of the films, consummate acting from all involved and expert execution, a 2 hour runtime just does not do his storylines the same justice. Subplots are rushed at, relationships not fleshed out properly and sadly the whole Downton experience can be compromised. This however is my ONLY criticism and it can so easily be rectified.

I would very much like to see each new Downton Abbey film from this day forth, be a 3-4 hour sweeping masterpiece which would make a Charlton Heston biblical epic look like a 30 second advert for dog biscuits. The characters deserve it, Fellowes' penmanship deserves it and we the audience deserve it. It's such a large ensemble cast, you need sub plots to give everybody enough to do, you therefore need a longer running time in which for them to do it.

Anyhoooo, onto A NEW ERA

Two main plots dominate the movie. The now dying Dowager Countess of Grantham (wonderfully played by the Great Dame Maggie Smith) inherits a French Villa (stately home more like) from a one time suitor who she hasn't seen in over 60 years, calling into question her hitherto unblemished reputation which in turn raises questions as to which side of the blanket her son Robert was born on...and more importantly who that said blanket belonged to. Is Robert Crawley the REAL legitimate Earl of Grantham or did he start life as a French 'Bundle for Britain?' A Crawley delegation heads off to the south of France to get to the bottom of the mystery.

The other main plot involves a movie company ensconced at Downton Abbey to make a movie, only to find that silent pictures are suddenly out of vogue and that to save the production they have to turn it into a talkie overnight. This is not easily done as the leading lady who is supposed to be playing a titled aristocratic heiress, was most definitely born within the sound of Bow-Bells (a very strong cockney accent for those who do not know the terminology)

If only there was a real aristocratic lady with the proper elocution who could dub for the cockney actress....oh wait a sec! There is!

If you're lucky enough to have seen the wonderful MGM musical 'Singin' in the Rain' then there's nothing new to see here...it's pretty much the same except there are no big musical production numbers and it's Lady Mary Crawley providing the necessary and much more palatable dulcet tones and not Debbie Reynolds.

Sub plots involve:-

Cora Grantham who suspects she too is on deaths door having been suffering from a mysterious ailment, the symptoms of which are never alluded to.

Mary's marriage to Mr. Not-Appearing-in-this-Film-Again, that seems to be going down the crapper faster than one of his own racing cars, (we always knew he was no Matthew.) She begins a harmless flirtation with the movie director, but having learned pretty solid lessons with both Mr Pamuk and indeed Matthew that a romantic entanglement with her most often leads to an early death, she decides to spare the directors life by resisting his advances.

Daisy and Andy who have now moved in with Mr Mason and are planning all manner of ways to get Mr Mason to move out of his own home for the apparent heinous crime of being nice to her all her life and looking after her like a father.

Barrow gets his requisite closeted gay storyline, this time involving the male star of the movie being made at Downton. It looks however as if this one will finally work out for him and a happy ending is achievable. Barrow was a great character back in the day when he was a bit of a devious two faced scumbag, but since he learned the error of his ways and became a better person he also became rather dull and bland along with it. Still I'm glad it worked out for him in the end.

Violet, who we all thought would live forever..doesn't.

There you have it in a nutshell. It was a great 2 hours of entertainment and it was good to see old friends back on our screens again, I just wish more time was given to some of these sub plots to flesh them out more, but alas they all seemed so rushed.

I will however wait for the next instalment with baited breath.

Meg Ryan and Tim Robbins light up the screen like Boyd's Comet itself in this delightful romantic Comedy.

Set in the 1950's it tells the story of Ed, an auto mechanic and Catherine a beautiful but academically minded mathematician who fall in love at first sight, but due to her obsession with marrying a genius, she resists all his overtures and her own feelings, until he pretends to be the genius she is looking for.

He is aided in his deception by Catherine's uncle who just happens to be Albert Einstein played brilliantly by Walter Matthau in an Oscar worthy performance.

Einstein knows enough about the universe to know a Big Bang when he sees one, and does everything he can to bring the two love birds together including giving Ed one of his long forgotten disproven theories to pass off as his own.

However when the theory hits the headlines it becomes a national sensation that even has the White House sitting up and taking notice, it's clear that the deception has blown up in their faces.

Wonderful support is given by Stephen Fry as Catherine's stuck up genius of a fiancé and he portrays the loathsome love rival to a tee.

Add to this Gene Saks, Lou Jacobi and Joseph Maher as Einsteins fellow physicists Boris Podolsky, Kurt Godel and Nathan Liebknecht respectively and who act like three impish and mischievous grade school children rather than three world renowned scientists, it really ramps up the level of fun.

A great little family movie and a lovely romantic comedy that is far better than some of the critics will have you believe.

Wow! Tom Cruise's greatest performance. That's quite a statement, considering all the big name blockbusters he has starred in over the last 40 years, but it is none the less completely accurate.

By the time A Few Good Men went into production, Tom Cruise's biggest and most iconic role was as Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell in the action packed octane fuelled 'Top Gun'

But despite this, Tom Cruise was one of the few top drawer actors brave enough to buck the trend of popular action movies, attempt to avoid the trappings of type casting and was really sinking his teeth into some juicy character driven movies, movies where a good script and a solid performance was the key to its success, not CGI special affects, blood, guts, explosions and death defying stunts. (Although he has slipped back into this genre in more recent years with the M:I and Jack Reacher movies)

In the late 80's and early 90's, Tom turned in great performance after great performance in films like Cocktail, The Color or Money and Rain Man (where in that latter two movies he more than held his own alongside movie titans Paul Newman and Dustin Hoffman respectively)

By the time he made 'Born on the Fourth of July' for Oliver Stone in 1989, we were seeing Tom Cruise very much at the top of his game as a fully bona fide and consummate actor.

'A few good Men' a gritty military courtroom drama therefore seemed the next most logical role.

It was a heavy script but not verbose...and Director Rob Reiner needed a troupe of the very best character driven actors to pull it off and when you have the likes of Jack Nicholson, Kevin Bacon, J. T Walsh, Kevin Pollack, Kiefer Sutherland, Christopher Guest, Demi Moore and Tom Cruise batting for your team, he needn't have worried.

Every performance in this movie is worthy of merit, especially that of Cruise as laidback can't-be- bothered Junior grade Navy lawyer Daniel Kaffee finally making a stand by attempting to take down a much senior and highly decorated marine officer he suspects has given an illegal order that has resulted in the death of a soldier.

Kaffee, along with co-defence council Sam Weinberg (Kevin Pollack) and Jo Galloway (Demi Moore) are representing the two young marines who carried out the illegal order and who are now facing a murder charge. Cruise plans to prove that an illegal order was given by their commanding officers Lt. Kendrick (Kiefer Sutherland) and Colonel Jessop (Jack Nicholson in an Oscar nominated performance) in an attempt to clear his clients and see that real culprits are exposed.

Prosecuting the two soldiers is Captain Ross (Kevin Bacon) Kaffee's friend who still has to do his job of prosecuting despite the fact that deep down he probably knows that the illegal order was given.

The film develops into a David and Goliath legal battle which is both exciting to watch and full of epic courtroom exchanges,

This film is not to be missed. It really is a tour de force in acting excellence and everything a classic movie should be.