Friends, firstly apologies for not keeping the updates coming. 

The last two and a bit years have been turbulent and distressing for everyone and I hope this message finds you all well. While Brexit, Covid and the war in Ukraine have surely impacted on us all, I have been keeping myself busy working on several freelance commissions and thought it was time for an update.

THE BLACK ARCHIVE: KINDA (Obverse Books - forthcoming. Due December 2022)

Just as Covid restricted us all to working from home or furlough or no job at all, I was in the middle of researching and writing for the forthcoming Obverse Books Black Archive on Kinda. It's a particular favourite of mine from Season 19 of Doctor Who. After publishing the book about Warriors' Gate in 2019, I fancied the challenge of writing about what has come to be regarded, despite its flaws, as one of the most intriguing stories in the canon. At this stage, I don't want to say much about the book. The research at BBC Written Archives, after much delay because of Covid, was completed in August last year but that was the icing on a particular cake in terms of where this book led me and the new insights I've been provided with. 

With Obverse switching back to a bi-monthly publication schedule after the book was commissioned, I had a generous amount of time to write and I hope the results will have been worth it. The current manuscript is now with my editor at Obverse and I have no doubt we'll be going through that in due course as we hit the run-up to publication this year. I'm quietly excited for this one.

ROBIN HOOD AT HAMMER: Two Tales From Sherwood Forest (Due for release in August 2022)

I'm currently putting the final touches to an essay for the book that will accompany Indicator's forthcoming Blu-ray release of Hammer's Sword of Sherwood Forest and A Challenge for Robin Hood, the two films featuring the quintessentially British character that the studio made in the 1960s.

From Indicator's site:

"For 1960’s Sword of Sherwood Forest, Richard Greene (The Blood of Fu Manchu, The Castle of Fu Manchu) reprises the role he made famous in the classic television series The Adventures of Robin Hood. Directed by Terence Fisher (The Gorgon, The Revenge of Frankenstein), and starring Peter Cushing (The Devil’s Men, Corruption) as the dastardly Sheriff of Nottingham, the film sees Robin Hood thwart a plot to assassinate the Archbishop of Canterbury (Jack Gwillm, Jason and the Argonauts, The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb). The film also boasts an uncredited early role for Oliver Reed (The System, The Damned).

In 1967’s A Challenge for Robin Hood, Barrie Ingham (The Day of the Jackal) dons the Lincoln green as he and his merrie men hide out in Sherwood Forest after his cousin (Peter Blythe, Frankenstein Created Woman) frames him for murder. This action-packed adventure features acting support from Gay Hamilton (Barry Lyndon, The Duellists) and Leon Greene (Adventures of a Private Eye, Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate).

This 2-disc Limited Edition set contains a double-sided poster, an 80-page book, and extensive new and archival extra features, including the much-loved Children’s Film Foundation film Robin Hood Junior (1975), starring Keith Chegwin (Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, Cheggers Plays Pop) as the diminutive hero."

DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

Back in September 2021 it was also a pleasure to be asked to review BBC Studios Blu-ray release of the animated The Evil of the Daleks for DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE issue 570, which hit the stands last October. 

My thanks to the team for asking me to contribute to a magazine I've been reading since it first appeared as a Marvel weekly in 1979. The Evil of the Daleks is also a firm favourite so it was serendipitous that my first contribution was an opportunity to review its animated reincarnation.

HAMMER VOLUME SIX: Night Shadows - Limited Edition (Released June 2021)

I completed a further commission for Indicator's box set release last summer and wrote the essay for the booklet accompanying the Blu-ray edition of Hammer's Captain Clegg for this release. It was a great opportunity to write about a Hammer film I had such a soft spot for and I spent some time researching the life and times of Russell Thorndyke, the author of the original books that Hammer's Captain Clegg was inspired by and to understand where the character of Clegg originated.

"Hammer Volume Six: Night Shadows revives four consummate Hammer classics from the early sixties, exemplifying some of Hammer's best work in the horror and thriller genres. Edgar Allan Poe looms large in The Shadow of the Cat, a macabre ‘old dark house’ tale of feline revenge, starring André Morell (Cash on Demand) and Barbara Shelley (The Camp on Blood Island); Peter Cushing (The Gorgon, Corruption) and Oliver Reed (The Scarlet Blade) star in Captain Clegg, which sees Hammer fuse horror and adventure in an eighteenth-century-set tale of smugglers and marsh phantoms; Herbert Lom (Mysterious Island) stars as The Phantom of the Opera in Hammer’s acclaimed production of Gaston Leroux’s Gothic classic, whilst Freddie Francis (Torture Garden) directs Nightmare, a spooky psychological thriller in the Les Diaboliques vein, which benefits from full-blooded central performances by Moira Redmond (Jigsaw) and Jennie Linden (A Severed Head). 

This collection contains a wealth of new and archival extra features, including documentaries and appreciations, interviews with actors and crew members, audio commentaries, and extensive booklets. Strictly limited to 6,000 numbered units." 

Due for release by Indicator on 19 April 2021, this limited edition Blu-Ray of Ken Loach's Fatherland(1986) features my new essay on the film in the booklet that accompanies the first pressing.

Loach's film, which was released after a period in the late 1970s and early 1980s where he found it difficult to get work commissioned and financed, is all the more intriguing in that it was his only collaboration, to date, with the much admired writer Trevor Griffiths. Griffiths a successful theatre playwright had, like Loach, moved from television and into cinema. Both had a formidable creative and political sensibility running throughout their work and my essay, 'Third Man', chronicles their interweaving, parallel careers through to the development and writing of Fatherland.

My own interest in Loach's and Griffiths' work has grown since I first watched Fatherland on Channel 4 (who had co-funded the film) in the late 1980s. I was happy to revisit their careers to fulfil the essay brief to contextualise their work and its political drive. With a particular focus on Griffiths, the essay discusses each of Fatherland's collaborators, their shared politics of the left, their work for theatre, television and cinema and the way each has developed their own voice through their respective techniques in directing and writing. It also underlines their differences, coming into sharp relief in the many compromises that both had to make during the making of Fatherland. Each had something to say in the film, often from different perspectives, about media, culture and history, Europe and political struggle in a decade where the left was in retreat, particularly in Britain.

As this essay was researched and written last summer, during the lockdown in May and June 2020, it was a challenge to complete it while voluntarily shielding and on furlough. The impact of the coronavirus also prevented me from looking through Loach's and Griffiths' papers held at the BFI national archive. This was particularly upsetting as it would have been very rewarding to look more closely at the development of Fatherland's script and the correspondence between Loach and Griffiths. Fortunately, David Archibald's article on Loach's approach to acting, written for The Drouth in 2018, offered some of those insights from the archive.

I also had some familiarity with Griffiths' television work when I had first researched and reviewed his superb political drama Bill Brand, made for Thames in 1976 and released on DVD in 2011. The material gathered for that review was then extended through a deep read of several texts on Griffiths and Loach as well as newspaper and magazine research (thanks to the access provided by Manchester Central Library's online newspaper archives and to Film Comment's invaluable online archive during the first lockdown) to uncover contemporary interviews with Loach and Griffiths when Fatherland was released in 1986. 

I am particularly indebted to the work, published since the 1980s, of Graham Fuller, Stanton B. Garner, John Hill, Stephen Lacey, Jacob Leigh and John Tulloch whose chapters and books on the work of Loach, Griffiths and producer Tony Garnett were extremely helpful in the writing of the essay. 

The initial draft originally came in at 3600 words and through about three further drafts this came down to 3185 (still over the word count) in the final edit. Although a large chunk of about 145 words was cut without too much consequence during that last edit, the loss of an extended section on Barry Hines' two-part television play The Price of Coal (1977) was somewhat unfortunate. It was a pleasure writing this essay while re-visiting the politically prescient Fatherland, a somewhat neglected Loach film. I hope it offers the relevant context to those who may be unfamiliar with much of Griffiths' work in theatre, television and film prior to his collaboration with Loach.

FATHERLAND - INDICATOR LIMITED EDITION BLU-RAY SPECIAL FEATURES

• High Definition remaster
  
• Original mono audio
  
• Language Barriers (2021): new interview with editor Jonathan Morris
  
• Talk About Work (1971): Ken Loach’s documentary for the Central Office of Information, photographed by Chris Menges, interviewing young people about their work
  
• Right to Work March (1972): documentary film of a five-week protest march from Glasgow to London that saw the participation of a number of cultural figures, including Loach and other filmmakers
  
• Image gallery: publicity and promotional material
  
• New and improved English subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing
  
• Limited edition exclusive booklet with a new essay by Frank Collins, an archival interview with Ken Loach, an extract from Loach on Loach, an overview of contemporary critical responses, new writing on the short films, and film credits
  
• UK premiere on Blu-ray
  
• Limited edition of 3,000 copies
   

#PHILTD136
BBFC cert: 15
REGION FREE
EAN: 5060697920192

It's good to see some of Loach's less regarded work on Blu-ray with Indicator's release of Fatherland alongside their limited edition of Loach's Carla's Song (1996) in April 2021. Both are available to pre-order from their website.

Due for release on 28 October 2019 by Indicator, this limited edition Blu-Ray of Alan Parker's film Birdy (1984) features my new essay on the film in the booklet that accompanies the first pressing.

Birdy remains one of my favourite films of the 1980s and the commission to write the new essay from Powerhouse was an opportunity to not only revisit a film I had seen on release and revisited on VHS and DVD but also to return to the original novel by William Wharton.

The essay, ‘In a dream, I'm trying to decide what I am’, attempts to track the development of the script prior to Parker's involvement and how Wharton's strange, often abstract, narrative about the transformation of two friends in the aftermath of the Second World War (it was altered to the Vietnam conflict for the film) was brought to the screen by Parker.

Birdy is another iteration of Wharton's personality, one forged through his participation in the War, his relatively poor background and his childhood obsessions.Tracing the numerous avatars of Wharton involved a close re-reading of the novel Birdy and Wharton's posthumous war biography Shrapnel, tracing Wharton's double life - as abstract painter and author - through numerous interviews, in documents on Parker's own website, and then trying to tie those in with a delve through Parker's papers, donated to the BFI archives.

The papers at the BFI provided a fascinating insight into how Parker shaped Sandy Kroopf and Jack Behr’s script and attempted to retain as much of the ‘the “one person” schizophrenia of the book’ and remain true to the author's identity or identities.

Thanks to Nigel Good and Carolyne Bevan of the BFI Special Collections team I was able to access the draft scripts, Parker's letters and memos about the script, the notes on use of Garrett Brown's Skycam to shoot some of the flying sequences, technical notes about canaries, and his correspondence with Michael Reidenback. Reidenback, hoping to secure a role in the film, eventually provided Parker with a lot of research into army psychiatric units and their treatments of mental patients in the post-Vietnam era. This material left the impression that Parker clearly wanted to get the details right about what we eventually saw on screen. It also shed some further light on Wharton's own elusive personality and reclusive life.

The original draft of the essay was approximately 4600 words by November 2017. By the time I delivered the final draft, in December 2017, this had been reshaped and edited to approximately 3000 words. Finally, this release of Birdy has been a little while coming but it is heartening to know that this was not only down to Indicator's desire to secure Parker for a commentary and produce a number of relevant special features but also to go the extra mile and commission a new 2K remaster of the film.

But here it is at last. Enjoy.

INDICATOR LIMITED EDITION BLU-RAY SPECIAL FEATURES:

• New 2K remaster supervised and approved by director Alan Parker
• Original stereo audio
• New and exclusive audio commentary with director Alan Parker and the BFI’s Justin Johnson
• Learning to Fly (2019): new and exclusive interview with screenwriters Jack Behr and Sandy Kroopf
• Keith Gordon on William Wharton (2019): the actor and filmmaker shares his experiences of adapting Wharton for the screen
• No Hard Feelings (1974): Alan Parker’s early film is an unsentimental view of wartime London through the eyes of a troubled young man
• Original theatrical trailer
• Image gallery: on-set and promotional photography
• New and improved English subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing
• Limited edition exclusive booklet with a new essay by Frank Collins, an overview of contemporary critical responses, archival articles, and film credits
• Limited Edition of 5,000 copies
• All extras subject to change

#PHILTD028
BBFC cert: 15
REGION FREE
EAN: 5037899071083

Purchase directly from the Powerhouse website.

Yes, my lovely readers I am still here. I know the Cathode Ray Tube site has been silent for well over a year but I just thought you might like to know that I haven't been idle. I've just been out and about writing for other sites and publications in the brief pauses I can find during my full-time job.

I'd love to write more and, in fact, I'd like nothing better than to write every day and earn a living from it but my job is all-consuming of my time and energy at the moment. However, more paid work would be lovely and I remain, as always, a writer for hire.

So... by way of promoting my wares here's a brief run down of where you can find my latest keyboard twiddlings.

Doctor Who - Series 9 and Christmas Special: The Husbands of River Song
Click above for ALL of the Series 9 episode and 2015's festive special coverage at the splendid film and television review site Frame Rated posted between September and December 2015. Plus there's a three-part overview of Series 8 too! More Doctor Who soon.

Other television reviews at Frame Rated
Outlander Seasons One and Two, Penny Dreadful Seasons Two and Three and The Man in the High Castle Season One and Sherlock: The Abominable Bride are just some of the other shows I've covered in the last year. Latest The Man in the High Castle and Sherlock reviews are forthcoming. 

Film reviews at Frame Rated
You'll also find my reviews (including Blu-ray releases) of Spectre (2015), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), One Million Years B.C. (1966) and Kes (1969). Plus you can also read a brief tribute article about David Bowie and his work on screens big and small: Cracked Actor

For those avid Blu-ray watchers out there I was also commissioned to write essays for a number of Arrow Film and Video releases this year, including:

The Count Yorga Collection
For the first pressing of the Blu-ray of Count Yorga, Vampire and The Return of Count Yorga, released in August 2016, the enclosed booklet featured my essay about the films: A Tale of Unspeakable Cravings.

Woody Allen: Seven Films 1986 to 1991
Due out in February 2017, this Blu-ray box set containing Hannah and Her Sisters, Radio Days, September, Another Woman, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Alice and Shadows and Fog features a book of new writing about the films. I've completed an essay 'The air is full of electricity' about September (1987), which will also gain a standalone Blu-ray release in March 2017.

Cathode Ray Tube remains blessed with visitors even though nothing new has been posted for some time and I remain ever grateful many of you still enjoy the material archived here. If I can overcome a few personal obstacles I hope I can be back here with new posts in 2017. Until then, I wish all readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

After successfully adapting the three Quatermass television stories of the 1950s and with the box office tills ringing from the well-received cinema version of Quatermass and the Pit (1967), Hammer Films approached creator-writer Nigel 'Tom' Kneale for an original film script featuring the titular scientist with a view to continuing the franchise.

The studio announced another film but nothing developed beyond an outline and preliminary discussions with Kneale. Hammer had faced delays getting Quatermass and the Pit to the screen after their partnership with Columbia faltered and it was perhaps disinterest from distributors, Hammer's struggle to adapt to changing audience tastes and the slow decline of the industry as a whole that stalled their fourth Quatermass outing.

Kneale remained busy. His relationship with the BBC strengthened in the late 1960s and early 1970s and he succeeded in getting several key plays to the screen in this period. This was after he had refused overtures from the BBC to contribute a one-off drama to their Theatre 625 strand on BBC2. He felt he had never really been properly recompensed for the Quatermass serials he had made in the 1950s, something he made quite clear to the BBC's Director General Hugh Carleton Greene. A one off payment was duly agreed and Kneale undertook his new assignment. This would become 1968's celebrated play about television's Orwellian future potential, The Year of the Sex Olympics. (1)

He followed this with 1970's 'Wine of India' for The Wednesday Play, which centred on a 100-year old couple who must make plans for their funeral in a future where advances in medicine have resulted in a need for population control and where those reaching the age of 100 must submit to a government controlled euthanasia program. He contributed 'The Chopper' to Out of the Unknown in 1971, a ghost story about a dead motorcyclist haunting his wrecked machine, and followed this in 1972 with The Stone Tape, in which scientists researching new recording technologies at an old mansion investigate a haunting.

Leslie Megahey's extraordinary television film Schalcken the Painter finally arrives on Blu-Ray and DVD this month courtesy of the BFI. As with many of the home entertainment releases in their Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film season, Schalcken the Painter has such a reputation it has been on the 'most wanted' lists of many fans of British telefantasy for decades. Here it is and remastered in high definition from the 16mm interpositive held in the BFI Archive and released in the Flipside range of obscure British films.

Writer, director and producer Megahey's career began in BBC radio where, after he graduated from his traineeship, he wrote and produced radio plays for a year. He joined the BBC's Music and Arts department and in 1967, along with other television trainees Tony Palmer, Alan Yentob and Nigel Williams, began making films about painters and writers under the auspices of pioneering television executive Stephen Hearst.

Megahey was as much an inspirational figure himself as Yentob, then a raw recruit, professed: 'Leslie was a little older than me and had arrived at the BBC by much the same route two years earlier. We became close friends and colleagues in the Music and Arts department of the BBC. Leslie's enthusiasm and commitment were infectious. Leslie was endlessly curious and was a great believer in finding inventive ways to tell stories.' (1)

The 40th Anniversary of The Wicker Man is upon us. To herald this landmark achievement, for a film originally cursed by its production company to languish in obscurity, a restored 'final cut' has recently enjoyed a lap of honour on cinema screens nationwide. StudioCanal have also this month released a three-disc anniversary Blu-Ray edition containing all three cuts of the film.

We'll get to the 'final cut' business later but let's begin by going back all the way to 1973, and the film's inception, to try and understand just what writer Anthony Shaffer and director Robin Hardy put onto celluloid, how they captured those strange, elemental forces that ensured The Wicker Man's triumph over farcical adversity.

As Allan Brown ascribes: 'The triumph of The Wicker Man is not that it is an often silly film resolutely rooted in the barren sod of the early 1970s, and therefore dismissable as a period piece or curate's egg; the point is that despite being occasionally unintentionally comic, intermittently gauche and often over ambitious, The Wicker Man is possessed of some force, some voodoo that has lifted it from its humble origins.' (1)

Director Robin Hardy and writer Anthony Shaffer were indeed not strangers to each other prior to the birth of The Wicker Man. In the 1960s they'd run Hardy, Shaffer and Associates, a film and television commercials agency where Shaffer wrote the scripts and Hardy directed them. In 1969 Shaffer decided to leave the company to go solo as a writer, penning the screenplay for Mr Forbush And The Penguins, a co-production between EMI, British Lion and the National Film Finance Corporation which was eventually released in 1971.

At the same time, he wrote the celebrated play Sleuth which made its debut at Brighton Theatre Royal in January 1970, opened in the West End a month later and by November had conquered Broadway. As Sleuth's success was consolidated with Tony Awards and the play was adapted as a film, Hitchcock commissioned him for the screenplay of Frenzy (1972). As Frenzy went before the cameras in the summer and autumn of 1971, Shaffer's collaboration with Hardy on The Wicker Man was also taking shape.

This month Arrow unleashes Squirm (1976), Jeff Lieberman's fondly regarded contribution to the 1970s exploitation 'revenge-of-nature' cycle of films.  

Apocalyptic destruction was manifested on screen in very diverse forms during that decade. Star-studded epics like The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1974) and Earthquake (1974) all seemed to be saying something about the destabilisation of American society and economic power, as projections of a psychological despair brought about by the failed Vietnam War, the oil crisis and the political corruption manifested in Watergate.

Simultaneously, nature's revenge in the form of Willard (1971), Night of the Lepus (1972), Ben (1972), Frogs (1972) and Bug (1975), taking their inspiration from the 'giant monster mutated by radiation' genre of the 1950s, all tapped into anxieties about the environment, reflecting the ascendency of the ecology movement and even the advent of vegetarianism.

They were a popular cultural acknowledgement of mankind's irresponsible treatment of other species and the exploitation of the planet through corporate greed. Squirm occupied the same territory and, of itself, also provided inspiration for the 'ecology strikes back' themed The Food of the Gods (1976), Kingdom of the Spiders (1977) and Empire of the Ants (1977) which followed.

Roger Corman is quite rightly regarded as something of a legend in independent cinema. He is often attributed with creating the horror-comedy genre with A Bucket of Blood (1959) and The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), the former made for a thrifty $35,000 and the latter shot in just two days, and is renowned for the cycle of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations he directed and produced for American International Pictures throughout the 1960s. Something of a trailblazer, Corman was equally enthusiastic about using cinema as social commentary, to voice counter-culture and civil rights concerns.

He explored these diverse subjects in the first Hell's Angels biker film, The Wild Angels (1966); in an examination of segregation with an early lead role for William Shatner in The Intruder (1960); by depicting the downside of psychedelic drug culture in The Trip (1967) and the death of Hollywood and celebrity in Targets (1968). In 1970, he established his own independent film production and distribution company, New World Pictures and was responsible for a number of cult films, including Boxcar Bertha (1972), Caged Heat (1974), Death Race 2000 (1975), Piranha (1978), Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) and Galaxy of Terror (1981). The 'Roger Corman Film School', as it was fondly known, gave early career breaks to the likes of Coppola, Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Demme, Hellman and Dante.

Following the review of Dr. Who and the Daleks our celebration of the centenary of Peter Cushing's birth and the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who continues with the second of the 1960s Dalek films being re-released and restored in high definition by StudioCanal, Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.

Roberta Tovey, who played Susan, remembers having conversations with producer Milton Subotsky about Aaru greenlighting a second Doctor Who film as they were completing the filming of Dr. Who and the Daleks in April 1965. Peter Cushing had also indicated he was willing to return to play Dr. Who but, with his usual charm, suggested this would only be possible if Tovey was invited too.

After the box office success of the first film, producer Joe Vegoda was keen to capitalise on 'Dalekmania' and, despite Subotsky briefly contemplating a cinema version of Terry Nation's The Keys of Marinus serial as a sequel, Aaru swiftly announced their second to feature the Daleks, The Daleks Invade Earth, in December of the same year.

Based on the Terry Nation six-part serial The Dalek Invasion of Earth, Subotsky again worked with the series' story-editor David Whitaker to shape the material into a feature length script. Whitaker, who this time would receive an on-screen credit, provided notes and suggestions to a script Subtosky had planned using a series of wall charts.

To celebrate two anniversaries this year StudioCanal are this month releasing the two 1960s Dalek films - Dr. Who and the Daleks and Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. in honour of the centenary of their star Peter Cushing's birth and the 50th anniversary of the Doctor Who BBC series which spawned the two films. Both films have been extensively restored for their Blu-ray high definition debut.

The two films, produced by Aaru Productions, emerged out of the 'Dalekmania' created by the BBC transmission of Terry Nation's seven-part Doctor Who story The Mutants (aka The Daleks) in December 1963 and its sequel The Dalek Invasion of Earth almost a year later in November 1964. The Daleks were an overnight success in 1963 and ´Dalekmania´, as it was known, was one of the first commercial merchandise booms generated by a TV series. At its peak in 1964, it incorporated everything from sweet cigarettes, games, play suits, clockwork and battery operated toys to the Dalek and Dalek World books co-written by Terry Nation and David Whitaker, soap, slippers, wallpaper and the Go-Go's Christmas 1964 novelty record single, the prophetic 'I'm Gonna Spend My Christmas With A Dalek'.

Aaru Productions was formed by Joe Vegoda's Regal International Films to produce films in association with Milton Subotsky and Max J. Rosenberg's company Amicus. New Yorkers Subotsky and Rosenberg had originally established their own partnership with the production of Junior Science educational films made for American television and they had been involved with Eliot Hyman in the first negotiations with Hammer to remake Frankenstein from Subotsky's own script. While Subotsky was a hands on producer, writer and editor, Rosenberg, a financier and lawyer, was very much the silent partner in the company which would eventually become Amicus.

Mario Bava's first horror film in colour, I tre volti della paura (The Three Faces of Fear aka Black Sabbath, 1963), followed the making of La ragazza che sappeva troppo (aka The Girl Who Knew Too Much) in 1962 and was shot at Cinecitta and Titanus Studios. An anthology consisting of three tales, Bava's film joined an impressive tradition of earlier films utilising a sequence of stories, written either by a single or multiple authors, which were often individually handled by name directors.

In 1932, Edmund Goulding's Grand Hotel and Paramount's anthology If I Had a Million, a portmanteau film helmed by seven directors, provided early Hollywood examples of this format and it continued into the late 1940s with Tales of Manhattan (1942) and Flesh and Fantasy (1943). European directors popularised it in the 1950s. Roberto Rossellini directed segments in several anthology films, including L'Amore (1948), Les Sept péchés capitaux (1952), Siamo donne (1953), and Amori di mezzo secolo (1954). I tre volti della paura or Black Sabbath emerged just after Boccaccio '70 (1962) the Italian anthology film directed by Mario Monicelli, Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica.

British studios, such as Gainsborough and Ealing, had followed suit. W. Somerset Maugham's short stories provided material for a trilogy of anthologies, Quartet (1948) and the two sequels Trio (1950) and Encore (1951). Ealing's Dead of Night (1945) is also regarded as one of the first significant examples of the horror portmanteau film, although this tradition had a long track record, starting with Richard Oswald's silent Unheimliche Geschichten (1919). It was British company Amicus who really put the horror anthology on the map with a string of successful films in the 1960s and 1970s, including Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1964), Torture Garden (1967), The House That Dripped Blood (1970), Tales from the Crypt (1972), Asylum (1972), Vault of Horror (1973) and From Beyond the Grave (1974).

Baron Blood (1972) marked the true beginning of Mario Bava's fruitful partnership with producer Alfred Leone. Leone, who was a successful self-made business man through his real estate deals and investments, moved into television production in the mid-1950s and steadily invested in and produced television series and films in Italy and internationally.

As B&L productions, he snapped up the rights to Italian films and then sold them to other distributors, including American International Pictures, but would also keep his hand in real estate development, later investing in properties in North Beach, Florida with prominent financier turned film producer David. B Putnam. AIP would have a greater influence over Bava and Leone's work in the early 1960s and through into the mid-1970s but it was during Putnam's ill-feted production of 1968's Four Times That Night (AKA Quante Volte... quella notte) that Leone was first impressed by Bava.

The production of the film was in difficulty and Putnam asked Leone to step in and resolve the issues with the Italian film company Delfino Films. Leone was persuaded to take over production on the Rashomon-inspired sex farce and hired Bava, of whose reputation he had limited knowledge at the time. He particularly admired the way the director managed to boost the production values of a film made on a very small budget. 'Bava and I became good friends by the end of the production of Four Times. Earning his respect did not come easily, however; having proved myself on the set and off was the result. Bava was not excited about Baron Blood or other projects at the time, and it took a great deal of time and patience to convince him to do Baron Blood.' (1)

'You call this a screenplay? I don't know who these people are, I don't know what their background is, I don't know what they're doing, I don't know who's doing what and why, I don't know what they want, I have absolutely no idea what is going on, how can you call this a screenplay?' said perplexed producer Sam Spiegel to Harold Pinter and Joseph Losey when he called them into his office to discuss the script for 1967's Accident.

The director and the writer assured Spiegel they knew what the screenplay was about and yet, he blustered in reply, 'You two might know what's going on but what about all the millions of peasants in China?' (1) Spiegel had bought the rights to Nicholas Mosley's 1965 titular novel on the advice of Losey and his fellow Horizon Pictures producer Jud Kinberg. Losey turned to Pinter to undertake the screen adaptation shortly after the writer had completed work on Michael Anderson's The Quiller Memorandum (1966) in the summer of 1965.

While he completed the drafts of the script with Losey's input, a first draft arriving July 1965 followed by a second draft in September, a number of intense meetings between Spiegel, Pinter and Losey took place in Amsterdam and Sicily during Losey's shoot on Modesty Blaise (1966). When Spiegel attempted to isolate Pinter from Losey by inviting him to write on his yacht it became clear to them both that Spiegel wanted to not only interfere with the screenplay but also have his say on other aspects of the film, including casting. (2)

Their early suggestion for Dirk Bogarde as the lead baffled Spiegel: 'What do you want Bogarde for? Who's ever heard of him?' BAFTA begged to differ in the Spring of 1966 when Bogarde picked up a Best Actor gong for his work in John Schlesinger's Darling (1965). Spiegel insisted he could get Richard Burton but that the production would have to wait a year for him. Meanwhile, Bogarde received the script in January 1966 as a courtesy but was so concerned at the suggestion of such an actor for the lead part, he begged them to at least try and get Paul Schofield to play the lead role. (3)

'I'd like you to know how moved and impressed I was by your play, A Night Out, this past Sunday. It has an intensity and inner truth both horrifying and purgative. There are few things, if any, I have seen on British TV that can compare with it. Congratulations.' (1) An extraordinary collaboration between writer Harold Pinter and film director Joseph Losey, one which would eventually stretch across three film projects, was initiated with the above letter sent by Losey to Pinter.

It was despatched after the transmission of the play in ABC's groundbreaking Armchair Theatre series on 24 April 1960, three days before the opening at the Arts Theatre of what was considered Pinter's breakthrough success in the theatre, The Caretaker. Up until that opening, Pinter's reputation for crafting his signature 'comedy of menace' had been formed in a handful of plays including The Room, The Birthday Party and The Dumb Waiter.

It would be two and half years later before Pinter and Losey worked together on The Servant, an adaptation of Robin Maugham's sixty-two page novella published in 1948. The rights to the book had been purchased by director Michael Anderson who then commissioned Pinter to write a screenplay in 1961. Losey had also expressed an interest to Maugham about a stage adaptation as early as 1955. Anderson failed to raise the necessary finance and, in the meantime, Dirk Bogarde had received and read the first Pinter screenplay. Writing in his biography Snakes and Ladders, Bogarde recalls his excitement about Pinter's script, declaring it had 'the precision of a master jeweller... his pauses are merely the time-phases which he gives you so that you may develop the thought behind the line he has written, and to alert your mind itself to the dangerous simplicities of the lines to come'. (2)

As The Curse of Frankenstein opened to huge success, Hammer Films were already looking to secure a number of deals to develop, finance and distribute films, including the sequel to their first Gothic horror in colour, initially titled Blood of Frankenstein. Studio executive James Carreras had already raised the subject of that other Gothic horror franchise-in-waiting, Dracula, with Eliot Hyman at Associated Artists Productions, one of Hammer's existing financial partners. While both men were exchanging their excitement about Frankenstein's transatlantic box office success via telegram in the summer of 1957, Carreras proposed Dracula as their next collaboration.

Carreras was simply reflecting the fact that Hammer had Bram Stoker's Gothic classic already lined up in their sights. During the Autumn of 1956, Hammer's lawyer Edwin Davis had been busily investigating the tangled and complex copyright and ownership of Bram Stoker's character. Some significant clues were included in a document passed to him from Associated Rediffusion Ltd, the Independent Television franchise for London since 1954. Rediffusion had planned a six-part adaptation of Dracula but had subsequently abandoned it because of the difficulty in clearing the rights to the property.

Their investigations had found the rights were currently held with Universal Pictures who had procured them in 1930 from Stoker's widow, Florence, and Hamilton Deane and John Balderston, who had been granted permission by her to write and revise the stage version of Dracula in 1924. Davis therefore began a lengthy negotiation with Universal lasting all the way through Dracula's production and ultimately resolved in an 80-page contract just as Hammer's version went into post production in March 1958. (1)

Mario Bava, a cinematographer of some repute by the mid-1950s and heavily influenced by his father Eugenio's accomplishments as sculptor, set designer, visual effects technician and cinematographer in Italy's silent cinema era, made the transition to directing through uncredited work on several films in the post war period. Bava gained his early directing experience often by stepping in at the eleventh hour to turn round beleaguered productions he was hired to photograph or provide effects for.

Director Riccardo Freda hired Bava as cameraman and effects designer on I Vampiri (1956), the first Italian horror film of the sound era, after the two friends had decided it was time to return to the horror genre since horror films had been previously banned by the fascist regime in the 1930s and 1940s. Convincing the film's backers that they could shoot the production in 12 days and get the censor to pass the script, Freda set to work. Only half the film was completed in the allotted schedule and the production company refused to allow him an extension to continue production. He abandoned the project and Bava took up the reins, finishing the film in two days.

After uncredited directing work on La fatiche di Ercole (1957, aka Hercules), Ercole e la Reina di Lydie (1958, aka Hercules Unchained) and La battaglia di Maratona (1959, aka The Giant of Marathon) he once again found himself working with Freda, as cinematographer and effects technician, on Caltiki il mostro immortale (1959, Caltiki the Immortal Monster). After two days, Freda once again vacated the director's chair and Bava replaced him. Freda later claimed this was a deliberate choice because he wanted to give Bava, a man too modest to realise his ambitions, an opportunity to direct.

After pursuing a successful career as a cinematographer, director Mario Bava's relationship with Italian horror films began rather inadvertently with I Vampiri (1956), the first Italian horror film of the sound era, where he replaced the original director Riccardo Freda. After similarly rescuing Jacques Tourneur's The Giant of Marathon (1959), he was offered his own directing assignment and, inspired by Hammer's horror output, elected to make La maschera del demonio (1960, aka as Black Sunday or The Mask of Satan), a black and white horror classic that rivaled the evocative output of the British studio.

His catalogue then embraced horror and thrillers (Black Sabbath, Baron Blood), science fiction (Planet of the Vampires), westerns, spy-fi (Danger: Diabolik) and action films (Hercules at the Center of the Earth). He is also credited with kick starting the 'giallo' thriller sub-genre in 1962 with La ragazza che sapeva troppo (aka The Girl Who Knew Too Much) and Sei donne per l'assasino (aka Blood and Black Lace) in 1964, both of which would have a huge influence on directors such as Dario Argento.

As writer Troy Howarth notes, "No matter what the subject matter, Bava's obsession with key themes like the deceptive nature of appearances and the destructive capacity of human nature shone through, and his wholly distinctive visual style endeared him to a generation of film fanatics."

Along with Robert Hamer, director Alexander Mackendrick established his own style and approach within Ealing and this month StudioCanal celebrate his centenary by screening a fully restored digital print of The Man in the White Suit as part of the BFI Southbank's Mackendrick retrospective. The film also gets its first Blu-Ray release.

Alexander Mackendrick brought his distinctive tone to five Ealing films, Whisky Galore! (1949), The Man in the White Suit (1951), Mandy (1952), The Maggie (1954) and The Ladykillers (1955). He arrived at Ealing in 1946 after the collapse of his Merlin Productions, set up with his cousin Roger MacDougall and which made films for the Ministry of Information.

Prior to this he had worked on Pathe newsreels, propaganda films for the British Army and had written scripts for animated propaganda shorts for Halas and Batchelor. By 1937 he had worked as an artist for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, scripted commercials and co-written the feature film Midnight Menace (1937). He even made stop motion animated commercials for Horlicks with the legendary George Pal. (1)

The re-release of Robert Hamer's It Always Rains on Sunday is very welcome indeed. StudioCanal and the BFI have lavished some attention on the film, remastering and repairing from two nitrate fine grain positives for its outing during the BFI's Ealing: Light and Dark retrospective and for its high-definition release on Blu-ray and DVD.

Most importantly, the re-release champions the work of director Hamer who left behind a small but very distinguished body of work after a career and life tragically marred by alcoholism. His career in cinema began in 1934, working as a cutting room assistant for Gaumont-British before joining Alexander Korda's London Films at Denham. He worked on a number of films for Erich Pommer, who had formed a production compnay with actor Charles Laughton, and edited Vessel of Wrath (1938) and Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn (1939).

He then joined the GPO Film Unit, working with Alberto Cavalcanti, and developed skills as a documentarian that would eventually be evidenced in his work as a director. After Calvalcanti moved to Ealing, he was recruited by him in 1940 to work as an editor on a number of war films and the George Formby picture Turned Out Nice Again (1941). The studio's boss, Michael Balcon, saw potential in Hamer and promoted him to associate producer and he oversaw the production of the Will Hay comedy My Learned Friend in 1943. As Gavin Collinson notes of the film, 'the humour, much of it revolving around a sequence of grisly murders, foreshadows the blackest of Ealing's postwar comedies' and its co-writer John Dighton would collaborate with Hamer on perhaps his best known film, the spiky, bleakly satirical classic Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). (1)