Parky at the Pictures (DVD 20/3/2014)

Launching the new format is Lotte Reiniger's sublime fantasy, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), whose complex plot begins when a wicked African magician sends Achmed into the clouds on a flying horse after he objects to his caliph father agreeing to the magician's marriage to his sister, Dinarsade. Landing in the realm of Wak Wak, Achmed becomes enamoured of its ruler, Peri Banu, when he sees her bathing in the lake and they forge an alliance when the kingdom's demons plot to kill him. Meanwhile, the magician has escaped the caliph's dungeon disguised as a bat and he abducts Peri Banu and sells her to the Emperor of China. However, Achmed is aided in his bid to rescue his beloved by the Witch of the Flaming Mountain and by a simple tailor named Aladdin, who was pressing his suit with Dinarsade when he was trapped by a monster in Wak Wak and forced to hand over a genie-hosting lamp to the malevolent magician.

Among the earliest animated features ever produced, this Arabian Nights fable is quite simply a joy to behold. Three years in the making and comprising some 300,000 individual frames, Reiniger's silhouette masterpiece remains unchallenged in terms of its exquisite beauty and experimental audacity. The expressive figures, balletic movements, masterly contrasts of light and shade, and dramatic backdrops are rendered all the more impressive by the fact that Reiniger was only 23 at the time. Furthermore, this was also a technically significant picture, as it witnessed the invention of the multi-plane camera stand, which Walt Disney's studio later claimed as its own invention.

The estimable Network label is currently issuing a slew of old British pictures on DVD, many of which had been lost in the mists of time. Produced at Elstree Studios, Cecil Lewis's Gipsy Blood (1931) is the earliest of the most recent batch. Drawing on both Prosper Mérimée's novella and Georges Bizet's opera, this is cinema's first musical version of the Carmen story and stars American soprano Marguerite Namara as the Sevillann cigarette factory wildcat who torments dragoon Don José (Thomas Burke), corporal Zuniga (Lester Matthews) and toreador Escamillo (Lance Fairfax). Conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent, the score largely overcomes the limitations of early sound recording, but Lewis (who had played a prominent role in early BBC radio drama) directs with an arty earnestness that frequently forces his leads to over-emote. Cinematographer Jimmy Wilson does well to generate a sense of heat and passion from the perfunctory studio sets and, while this may not be up to the standard of American or German musicals of the same period, it merits a more vaunted place in the British history of the genre.

The part of Dancairo the smuggler is taken by Dennis Wyndham, who would go on to become a dependable stooge for Will Hay, who headlines American William Beaudine's loose 1935 adaptation of the 1887 Arthur Wing Pinero play, Dandy Dick. Produced by British International Pictures, this was Hay's second starring vehicle (and the first of four collaborations with `One Take' Beaudine) and bears traces of the scheming, blustering persona that would become his trademark at Gainsborough Pictures.

Here, however, Hay is a dotty vicar whose bid to raise money to repair the church steeple nearly goes disastrously wrong when he stages a garden fete and takes an aeroplane ride with brewery heir Esmond Knight. He is smitten with Hay's daughter, Nancy Burne, and co-owns a racehorse with Hay's sister, Mignon O'Doherty. Desperate to donate £250, Hay is tempted into putting church funds on Dandy Dick at 10-1 in a big race. He is even party to feeding the beast with a tonic to boost its performance. But a fire at the stables results in him spending a night in the cells and it is only with the connivance of the local bobby's wife that Hay is able to escape and expose valet Syd Crossley as the villain who has been trying to fix the race in favour of his fancy, Bonny Betsy.

Moore Marriott (who would later grace many a Hay vehicle as the toothless Harbottle) finds himself among the supporting cast, alongside Robert Nainby, who manages to upstage the star as a deaf member of the church committee disrupting a vicarage luncheon. But Hay aficionados will relish the chance to see this rediscovered gem, which is joined in the equine stakes by Red Wagon (1934), which was adapted from a novel by Lady Eleanor Smith and teamed exiled Austrian director Paul L. Stein with American character actor Charles Bickford, Mexican spitfire Raquel Torres, Norwegian silent siren Greta Nissen and longtime Oxford resident, Anthony Bushell.

A debuting Jimmy Hanley plays the orphaned son of murdered trapeze artists who runs away from his cruel foster parents and is taken in by circus owners Paul Graetz and Amy Veness. By the time Graetz dies, the fresh-faced Hanley has morphed into the scowling Bickford, whose trick riding act has won him the admiration of both gypsy dancer Torres and tiger trainer Nissen. Bickford's heart belongs to the latter, but he is duped into thinking she doesn't care for him and he marries Torres out of spite. As time passes, rival circus owner Francis L. Sullivan seeks to put Bickford out of business and warns him that best pal Bushell is secretly in love with Torres. She shows her true colours when she runs away with Bushell and the petty cash and it takes a flip of Frank Pettingell's double-tailed coin to allow Bickford a second chance at making good, this time with Nissen by his side.

Once you've seen one circus story, you've seen them all and this one is stuffed with anti-carny prejudice, as well as all the clichés and caricatures you could fit under the big top. Yet it is not without interest. Fresh from co-starring with the Marx Brothers in Leo McCarey's Duck Soup (1933), Torres is the only weak link in a cast that plays this hoary melodrama for all its worth. Future director Arthur B. Woods and Kismet creator Edward Knoblock were among those responsible for the strained dialogue, which Bickford delivers with a gnashing cynicism that contrasts with the doting simpering of Nissen, who will forever be known as the actress Howard Hughes replaced with Jean Harlow in his 1930 flying saga, Hell's Angels, because her accent was too thick.

Eight decades ago, Gordon Harker was such a favourite with British audiences that directors like Alfred Hitchcock queued to have him in their pictures, while such lauded novelists as Edgar Wallace used to tailor material specially for them. Adapted from a 1920 play, Henry Edwards's comedy thriller, The Lad (1935), is a case in point, as Harker dominates the action as a crook trying to go straight who finds himself being mistaken for a detective when he calls at the country mansion of Gerald Barry and Betty Stockfeld. When a priceless necklace is stolen, Harker and Inspector John Turnbull are called upon to find the culprit. However, Harker also finds himself involved in heiress Geraldine Fitzgerald's bid to convince her parents to let her marry the impecunious Michael Shepley.

Picking his way through the embezzlement, blackmail and deception, Harker not only recovers the jewellery, but also plays matchmaker. But there is nothing so frivolous at issue in Karl Grune's Abdul the Damned (1935), which plays fast and loose with history in recreating events from the rule of Turkish sultan Abdul Hamid II. Even back in the 1930s, this was an unusual subject for a British feature and it's hardly surprising that the co-production's cast and crew contained so many continental émigrés. The most notable craft contributions come from cinematographer Otto Kanturek and production designers Clarence Elder and John Mead, as the court looks remarkably opulent considering that the budget only ran to £50,000. Indeed, the use of light and shade within the mise-en-scène recalls the efforts of Bert Glennon and Hans Dreier in Josef von Sternberg's The Scarlet Empress (1934).

Moreover, Fritz Kortner more than matches compatriot Marlene Dietrich in her depiction of Catherine the Great by making Abdul a creature of cruelty whose paranoia renders him all the more vicious and unpredictable. Given that so many of those involved in the picture had fled Nazism, it's worth noting the allusions to the mistreatment of the Armenians in a script that included uncredited contributions by Emeric Pressburger and Curt Siodmak. However, the growing prominence given to the fictional subplot diminishes the credibility of the action, which opens intriguingly in 1908 with the sultan inviting Young Turks leader Hilmi Pasha (Charles Carson) back to the Ottoman Empire in order to form a constitutional government.

Soon after Hilmi's return, however, Hassan Bey (Walter Rilla), the leader of the Old Turks opposition, is assassinated and Abdul and chief of police Kadar Pasha (Nils Asther) frame Hilmi and his acolytes for the crime. Yet, while his country teeters on the brink of civil war, Abdul becomes obsessed with Austrian dancer, Therese Alder (Adrienne Ames). But she rejects his advances and, so, when Abdul discovers that her lover, Talak Bey (John Stuart), has rumbled his conspiracy, he uses his incarceration to lure Therese into his harem.

Although Kortner stands head and shoulders above his co-stars (particularly as he also plays Abdul's terrified body double, Kelar, and, at one, point appears six-fold thanks to split-screen technology and some archy placed mirrors), Esmé Percy gives him a run for his money as the Grand Eunuch, while Aster (who was so photogenic that he used to be billed as `the male Greta Garbo') is eminently hissable as the factotum pandering to the wickedness of a neurotic whose fear of assassination prompts him to sleep in a different room each night. Sadly, Kortner only made two more films in Britain before relocating to the United States, where he devoted more of his time to theatre than cinema. But, while he will always be best remembered for a string of exceptional pictures in Weimar Germany, including GW Pabst's Pandora's Box (1929), this little-heralded performance ranks among his best.

Speaking of things that ought to be much better known - even if they are, in all honesty, not very good - The Mysterious Mr Davis (1939) was the second feature and sole English-language offering of the undervalued French director Claude Autant-Lara. What makes this take on Chilean Jenaro Prieto's 1928 novel all the more intriguing is that it was scripted by Jacques Prévert, who was then in a rich vein of poetic realist form with Marcel Carné. Such is the appeal of Prieto's droll fable that it has been filmed several times since this lacklustre version, with Italian Roberto Roberti's Il Socio invisibile (1939) being followed by Mexican Roberto Gavaldón's El Socio, Spaniard Pío Ballesteros's Consultaré a Mister Brown (both 1946), René Gainville's L'Associé (1979) and Donald Petrie's The Associate (1996), which reworked the material for Whoopi Goldberg.

The careworn anti-hero at the centre of this sly satire is Henry Kendall, who runs a brokerage firm in the City of London and cannot understand why he is doing so badly when he is perfectly competent at his job and, in many cases, is far more reliable than his competitors. Then it dawns on him that his rivals all have associates whom they consult in moments of brinkmanship or crisis. So, Kendall invents Mr Davis, whose low profile provokes instant speculation and bigwigs like Morris Harvey, A. Bromley Davenport and Alastair Sim begin snooping around to find out more about him. When Kendall's suggested investments turn a handsome profit, the entire financial community comes to rely on the recommendations of his reclusive partner. However, Kendall soon grows tired of doing all the work and receiving none of the credit. But he realises that he cannot simply bump Davis off, as he may well cause a run on the markets.

Admirers of Hal Ashby's Being There (1979) will warm to this exposure of the idiocy of the ignorant and greedy, which co-stars Kathleen Kelly as Kendall's beloved. But Autant-Lara (who would later be one of the exponents of the `cinéma du papa' that so exasperated the iconoclasts of the nouvelle vague) is too inexperienced and unfamiliar with the workings of the British bourgeoisie for the picture to work. Prévert's screenplay is also prone to slow patches and sentimentality. But nothing featuring Alastair Sim should be overlooked and the morale of the story still holds true in our own recessional times.

Another original that was supposedly surpassed by its remake was Thorold Dickinson's Gaslight (1940). However, it says much for the quality of this riveting adaptation of Patrick Hamilton's somewhat creaky stage play that MGM tried to destroy all existing prints prior to the release of George Cukor's 1944 version with Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman, which earned the latter an Academy Award. Comparisons always will be odious, but Bergman is superior to Diana Wynyard as the rich wife who suspects that her husband is trying to send her mad. But Anton Walbrook is much more sinister than Boyer and there's not much to choose between Cedric Gibbons's Oscar-winning production design and Joseph Ruttenberg's nominated cinematography and the unsung British efforts of Duncan Sutherland and Bernard Knowles.

Some years after Marie Wright is garrotted in her London home, Walbrook and Wynyard move in and decide to close off the upper storey where the murder was committed. No sooner have they settled in, however, than Wynyard's mind begins playing tricks on her. She appears to become forgetful and even starts stealing. But, most worryingly, she begins to hear noises in the house late at night and notices a dimming in the gaslighting that seems not to bother her husband. Her distress even extends to a concert hall and it is only when retired Scotland Yard inspector Frank Pettingell meets the couple socially that Walbrook is recognised as Wright's nephew. With the help of her kindly cousin, Robert Newton, Pettingell convinces Wynyard that she is not going insane because her husband is searching the rooms above the parlour each evening to find the stash of rubies that he had not been able to find when he killed his aunt.

For all its disconcerting atmospherics, this Edwardian thriller is surprisingly suspense-free, as Dickinson decides against showing Walbrook turning the screw on his tormented wife and concentrates, instead, on her deliverance and her spouse's entrapment. This still makes for fascinating viewing, but audiences tend to identify more with the victim and seek to share in their distress rather than have to focus on the villain's demented machinations or the detective's counter-manipulation. Thus, this feels more like clockwork Gothic than Cukor's slicker, chillier interpretation.

It's been a while since we checked in on Networ's excellent Ealing Rarities collection and we begin a bumper round-up with Volume Four, which returns to the dawn of sound with Basil Dean's Birds of Prey (1930), which was adapted from the AA Milne play The Fourth Wall and typifies the kind of literate drama that allowed directors and actors to became accustomed to the new talkie technology. Also known as The Perfect Alibi, this is a creaky, but still intriguing murder story that sees ex-policemen C. Aubrey Smith bumped off by a couple of vengeful crooks from his time in South Africa. A piece of blotting paper holds the key to the mystery that is briskly solved by Frank Lawton and Dorothy Boyd on studio sets that keep the performers nice and close to the microphones hidden about the décor.

The admirable underwater photography of Eric Cross and some lovely Highland views suggest how much equipment had improved by the time Milton Rosmer made The Secret of the Loch (1934), an early example of a British creature feature that sees professor Seymour Hicks attempt to prove the presence of a Diplodocus in the depths of Loch Ness. But, while this is fun, it is primarily of interest because its editor was a young David Lean.

A score by Ralph Vaughan Williams is one of the pleasures of Charles Frend's The Loves of Joanna Godden (1947), which was adapted by HE Bates from a novel by Sheila Kaye-Smith. Boasting sublime location photography by Douglas Slocombe, this gave studio chief Michael Balcon a chance to show provincial life as it was lived and the docudramatic detail certainly adds authenticity to Googie Withers's bid to defy her doubting male neighbours by introducing new methods on her Romney Marsh farm. This was one of the few Ealing pictures with a feminist subtext, but the perennial theme of the family recurs in Michael Relph's Davy (1957), in which Harry Secombe debates whether to leave the vaudeville act, The Mad Morgans, to take his chance in opera. Musically rousing, this is fascinating for the wealth of familiar faces in the supporting cast.

Volume 5 in the rarities collection live up to its name with its trio of little-seen curios from the 1930s. Adapted from a novel by William J. Locke, Curtis Bernhardt's The Beloved Vagabond (1936) was made in English and French, as was the case with several Maurice Chevalier vehicles in this period. He oozes melancholic charm as an architect who becomes a hobo in France after becoming embroiled in a financial mess in London and being jilted by boss's daughter Betty Stockfeld. The picture truly comes to life when he forms a minstrel act with gypsy Margaret Lockwood, who holds her own in the musical numbers and proves far more trustworthy than her gold-digging rival.

Also lifted from a novel, this time by Arthur Behrend, Reginald Denham's The House of the Spaniard (1936) was one of the few British films about the Spanish Civil War. Yet a sly streak of humour runs through this topical thriller, as doltish clerk Peter Haddon discovers boss Allan Jeayes is a revolutionary running a counterfeiting ring and has to be rescued by the resourceful Brigitte Horney when her father kidnaps him. Making evocative use of locations on Merseyside and in Spain, this feels like a minor Bob Hope movie, with fewer laughs, but a decent sense of danger.

Robert Stevenson's The Ware Case (1938) revisits a twice-filmed GP Bancroft play, which consistently confounds expectation as the jury looks back on the events that landed profligate baronet Clive Brook in the dock for the murder of his brother-in-law. Crisply played by a fine cast and artfully photographed by Ronald Neame, this is an early example of Ealing's suspicion of the upper classes. But it is also a smartly staged melodrama. The scene shifts Down Under for Leslie Norman's The Shiralee (1957), a rather chauvinist, but touching and seemingly authentic account of swagman Peter Finch's bid to be a father to estranged five year-old daughter, Dana Wilson, after he catches wife Elizabeth Sellars in bed with another man. Finch is suitably bullish and Sid James and Tessie O'Shea provide welcome comic relief, while Paul Beeson's Outback vistas are exceptional.

Romantic triangles abound in Volume 6, with a deception driving the action in Norman Walker's The Fortunate Fool (1933), as wealthy novelist Jack Raine takes pity on penniless Elizabeth Jenns when prim Joan Wyndham frames her for the theft of a valuable miniature painting in order to keep her away from her ex-boxer beau, Hugh Wakefield. Another couple intend pulling a fast one in Leo Mittler's breezy Honeymoon for Three (1935). Having been forced to marry at the insistence of French banker father Dennis Hoey, Aileen Marson intends ditching impecunious playboy Stanley Lupino and marrying long-suffering fiancé, Jack Melford, who has forgiven her little indiscretion. But during the course of a transatlantic voyage, the combination of the sea air and some sprightly musical numbers brings about a change of heart.

The Gallic emphasis continues in André Berthomieu's The Girl in the Taxi (1937), a lively adaptation of a hit stage play that was adapted from a 1910 German operetta. Lawrence Grossmith steals the show as a Parisian baron leading a double life, as not only is he the president of the Society for the Reward of Virtue, but he is also a rascally roué, whose roving eye lands him in hot water when he and son Mackenzie Ward start flirting with married cabaret star Frances Day. A subplot involving daughter Jean Gillie's scheming would-be fiancé Henri Garat also amuses, although the twisting farce is always preferable to the musical interludes.

Changing tack entirely, the doyens of the Ealing problem picture, Basil Dearden and Michael Relph, examine the workings of the probation service in I Believe in You (1952). Viewed 60 years on, this could be mistaken for patronising melodrama that vaunts the bourgeoisie for trying to do the right thing by the plebs. But Cecil Parker's ex-colonial civil servant gains a greater understanding of a rapidly changing society and, while he and saintly colleague Celia Johnson remain on one side of a class gulf, it closes slightly as they try to keep tearaway Harry Fowler and girlfriend Joan Collins (who excels) on the straight and narrow.

The curios keep coming in the Ealing cavalcade and Coronation Street fans will be intrigued to know that theme composer Eric Spear produced the music for Harry Hughes's North-South divide comedy, Play Up the Band (1938), which follows Stanley Holloway and his musical workmates from Yorkshire to the Crystal Palace to play in a prestigious competition. A crisis arises when the splendidly snooty Amy Veness accuses Holloway of stealing a necklace, but all ends well and there's even time for a couple of Stanley's trademark monologues. Sinclair Hill's Take a Chance (1937) is a more modest affair, but there are still smiles to be had as tipster Claude Hulbert attempts to repair the damage when horse owner Henry Kendall's wife, Enid Stamp Taylor, tells lover Guy Middleton too much about their entry for a big race at Goodwood.

Adapted by Sidney Gilliat from an Edgar Wallace novel, Walter Forde's The Gaunt Stranger (1938) has the distinction of being the first film produced at Ealing by Michael Balcon. Forde and Balcon had already collaborated on one version, The Ringer, in 1932, but this is a much tauter take on a disquieting treatise on justifiable homicide that teams John Longden and Alexander Knox as the detective inspector and doctor given just 48 hours to prevent a serial killer carrying out his threat to murder lawyer Wilfrid Lawson. With everyone a suspect, this is a compelling whodunit, with undertones about the deteriorating diplomatic situation in Europe.

Balcon also reflected the postwar shift in Britain's relationship with the Empire in Harry Watt's Eureka Stockade (1949), which harks back to the Australian gold rush of the 1850s when the colonial regime met with stern resistance when it tried to force prospectors into returning to more socially crucial tasks. Scripted by Watt and novelist Walter Greenwood and envisaged as something of a national epic, this is certainly an ambitious picture, with Chips Rafferty exuding decency as the leader of the Ballarat Reform League fighting alongside Peter Finch and Gordon Jackson in an heroic rearguard against vastly superior numbers. No lost classic, but stirring all the same.

Volume 8 opens with the big-screen debut of Lord Peter Wimsey in Reginald Denham's The Silent Passenger (1935), which was written specially for the screen by the amateur sleuth's creator, Dorothy L. Sayers. It's hardly a vintage case, with Peter Haddon overdoing the silly ass schtick. But Denham makes solid use of the train-board setting, as Haddon uses suspect John Loder to flush out the real killer of a notorious blackmailer.

Much more intriguing are the 1939 duo of Robert Stevenson's Young Man's Fancy and Pen Tennyson's There Ain't No Justice. The former is a genuine curio that includes a lengthy interlude set in Paris during the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, as toff Griffith Jones debates whether to obey impecunious parents Seymour Hicks and Martita Hall and wed wealthy brewer Felix Aylmer's daughter Merial Forbes or follow his heart and marry Anna Lee, who works as a human cannonball in a music hall. Edward Rigby relishes some spiky lines about class as Lee's father and he returns as aspiring boxer Jimmy Hanley's hard-pressed dad in the 25 year-old Tennyson's feature bow, which was adapted by James Curtis from his own novel. Charting how mechanic Hanley risks losing girlfriend Jill Furse by getting involved with shady promoter Edward Chapman, this anticipates the problem picture style that became Basil Dearden's speciality in the postwar era and finds its echo in Pat Jackson's The Feminine Touch (1956).

Based on Sheila MacKay Russell's novel, A Lamp Is Heavy, this EastmanColour outing marked Jackson's return to the wards after the Rank drama White Corridors (1951) and he makes evocative use of his Guy's Hospital locations. Moreover, he opts for a largely docudramatic approach as he shows how trainee nurses including Belinda Lee, Adrienne Corri and Delphi Lawrence are put through their paces by stern matron Diana Wynyard. Yet, while the medical insight is fascinating (with Mandy Miller and Dorothy Alison standing out among the patients), it is Wynyard's closing lecture on whether Lee can devote herself to her duties and doctor lover George Baker that proves most eye-opening.

Presenting another eclectic mix, the ninth batch begins with Maurice Elvey's A Honeymoon Adventure (1931), an adaptation of a novel by Cecily Fraser-Smith that was known Stateside as Footsteps in the Night. Basil Dean and John Paddy Carstairs were among the writers of a lively romp that has Benita Hume (who married both Ronald Colman and George Sanders) rescuing inventor husband Peter Hannen when he is snatched by crook Harold Huth on their Scottish honeymoon. Dean also showcased new wife Victoria Hopper in Whom the Gods Love (1936), a reverential Mozart biopic that boasts a script by Margaret Kennedy, author of The Constant Nymph, and a naturally wonderful score conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham. However, Stephen Haggard is no Tom Hulce.

Next up is Walter Forde's Cheer Boys Cheer (1939), which shouldn't be a rarity at all, as it provides the template for the postwar Ealing comedy. Given that it was released weeks before the outbreak of the Second World Was, this battle between the traditional Greenleaf brewery and its more corporate Ironside rival  has often been compared to the clash between Britain and Nazi Germany. But it can also be viewed as Ealing's plucky opposition to Hollywood, with Will Hay's regular sidekicks Graham Moffat and Moore Marriott contributing some old-fashioned music-hall knockabout to leaven what is essentially a screwball plot. The humour is less subversive than it would come to be, but, by pitting the underdog against the system, this is an Ealing comedy in all but name.  

The same can't be said of Anthony Pelissier's Meet Mr Lucifer (1953), which reworked Arnold Ridley's play, Beggar My Neighbour, to take a pop at cinema's increasingly potent rival, television. However, being an Ealing picture, it takes a swipe at 3-D, too. Stanley Holloway enjoys himself doubling up as Lucifer and the drunken actor enlisted to use the gogglebox to make people miserable, while Gordon Jackson is touching as the shy bachelor falling for Lonely Hearts siren Kay Kendall and Ernest Thesiger is splendidly cast as a pharmacist who refuses to treat what he deems to be deserved ailments.

A pair of Walter Fordes and little-seen outings by Robert Hamer and Charles Crichton are grouped in the tenth volume of Ealing rarities. Only the third film produced by the studio following the arrival of Michael Balcon, Let's Be Famous (1939) offers some fascinating insights into the radio business, as Irish shopkeeper Jimmy O'Dea's hopes of becoming a singer are deflected by BBC pomposity and the machinations of advertising men Basil Radford, Patrick Barr and Sonnie Hale that results in some studio shenanigans and a parachute jump.

There's more of a story in the second Forde, Saloon Bar (1940), a murder mystery that was scripted by Angus Macphail and John Dighton and turns on the efforts of bookie Gordon Harker and the staff and regulars of his local to stop an innocent man going to the gallows. With a trademark comparison between Elizabeth Allan's shabbily snug Cap and Bells and the flashy Shakespeare across the road, this broadly comic tale of bigamy and blackmail is more politically nuanced than Hamer's adaptation of Adrian Alington's novel His Excellency (1952), which betrays some of the more regrettable attitudes of the times in lampooning the twilight of empire. Trade unionist Eric Portman and toff Cecil Parker make chummy adversaries, as the former tries to quell the truculent colonists of Artisa. But the caricatures and contrivances prove problematic, even while revealing a very different side of the director of Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).

Concluding the quartet is Crichton's The Divided Heart (1954), a fact-based drama that bears a passing resemblance to Fred Zinnemann's The Search (1948) and earned BAFTAs for its female leads. Unusually set in Central Europe and assessing the legacy of the war on attitudes towards the newly formed West Germany, the story pulls few punches in chronicling the legal battle fought by Slovenian Auschwitz survivor Yvonne Mitchell for the son adopted by a Wehrmacht veteran and his wife. But Crichton avoids demonising devoted mother Cornell Borchers (who acquired the boy from an orphanage in good faith) and conveys the complexities of reconstruction in a bifurcated continent with clarity and compassion.

Basil Dean's 1934 adaptation of RD Blackmore's Lorna Doone opens Volume 11  Charmingly photographed by Robert Martin in lush Exmoor locations, the story chronicles the rivalry between the Ridds and the Doones, which intensifies when John Ridd (John Loder) discovers that Lorna (Victoria Hopper) is the abducted daughter of an aristocrat and, because he is smitten, he does everything in his power to prevent her from marrying the cruel Carver Doone (Roy Emerton), who not only murdered John's father, but also sees Lorna's inheritance as a means of restoring the fortunes of his brigandish clan. Despite Dean's evident obsession with his wife, Hopper struggles to convey the necessary mix of pluck and vulnerability, while Loder cuts an insufficient dash, as he pleads Lorna's case at the court of James II (George Curzon). Nevertheless, this is notable for affording Margaret Lockwood her debut, as Ridd's sister, Anne.

Another family feud informs Reginald Denham and Thorold Dickinson's Calling the Tune (1936), as Clifford Evans falls for Sally Grey even though her father, Sam Livesey, has made a mint in the gramophone industry by stealing ideas from Evans's inventor pop, Lewis Casson. However, this hackneyed variation on what might be called `the Verona Syndrome' is merely a pretext for conductor Sir Henry Wood (the brains behind the Proms) and eminent thespian Cedric Hardwicke to do guest turns alongside rising musicals star Adele Dixon and such music-hall stalwarts as George Robey and Laughing Policeman, Charles Penrose. While it's always a pleasure to see comic Robb Wilton, the main interest here lies in the technical detail, with Eliot Makeham demonstrating an early process for video recording.

Director Robert Stevenson bade farewell to Ealing with Return to Yesterday (1940), a delightful adaptation of Robert Morley's stage play, Goodness, How Sad, which sees Hollywood icon Clive Brook tire of the limelight and slink off a train at the Devonian seaside resort where he began his career. He soon discovers that the repertory company that gave him his big break has fallen on hard times and goes incognito in the hope of bailing it out. However, in helping Dame May Whitty save the Pier Theatre from scheming marrieds Olga Lindo and Milton Rosmer, Brook also wins the heart of ingenue Anna Lee. But, even though he feels trapped in a loveless marriage,  the older man opts to play the cad to ensure she stays true to playwright David Tree.

Anticipating the `underdog' scenario that would become studio's postwar staple, this finds an amiable companion in Charles Frend's Lease of Life (1954). Scripted by Eric Ambler and shot in EastmanColour by Douglas Slocombe in the East Riding of Yorkshire, the story centres on parson Robert Donat, who learns he has a year to live just as pianist daughter Adrienne Corri is presented with the opportunity to study at a prestigious London music school. Yet, while he needs the money, Donat loses the chance to land a lucrative school chaplaincy by preaching a sermon from his heart rather than his head. Similarly, he chides wife Kay Walsh for being tempted to dip into the fortune that parishioner Beckett Bould had entrusted to their keeping to prevent flighty widow Vida Hope from frittering it away. In his sole Ealing outing (which would transpire to be his penultimate role), Donat draws on his Oscar-winning performance as Mr Chipping to portray another decent cove prepared to put his charges before himself. But, for all its quiet wisdom and cosy advocacy of the Church of England, this is more compelling as a snapshot of its times than as a domestic drama.

Another of Britain's major studios took stock of its history in Gilbert Gunn's The Elstree Story (1952), which sees host Richard Todd sweep viewers on a tour of the Hertfordshire complex, while enthusing about the calibre of the stars who had graced its halls. The household names come thick and fast, among them Will Hay, Monty Banks, Jack Buchanan, John Mills, Margaret Lockwood, James Mason, Googie Withers and Laurence Olivier. But the emphasis is very much on showing clips from the studio's greatest flicks. This means nostalgia nuts will be able to wallow in some landmark moments, but the refusal to put the extracts (all but one of which are in monochrome) in an historical or cultural context will frustrate those hoping for an analysis of Elstree's achievement and its place in the evolution of British cinema.

Completists will, of course, need to know what gets namechecked here, so, from the first picture to go before the cameras in Borehamwood, Harley Knoles's The White Sheik (1928), the line-up comprises Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail, EA Dupont's Piccadilly and Titanic, Arthur Robison's The Informer (all 1929), Hitchcock's Murder! (1930) and Number Seventeen (1932), Cecil Lewis's Arms and the Man, Benn W. Levy's Lord Camber's Ladies, Norman Lee's Josser in the Army (all 1932), Paul L. Stein's Red Wagon and Blossom Time, Walter Summers's The Return of Bulldog Drummond, Arthur B. Woods's Radio Parade of 1935 (all 1934), Stein's Mimi, Summers's McGlusky the Sea Rover, Marcel Varnel's I Give My Heart, Thomas Bentley's Music Hath Charms (all 1935), Herbert Brenon's Housemaster, Graham Cutts's Over She Goes (both 1938), Thornton Freeland's The Gang's All Here, Stein's Poison Pen (both 1939), Cutts's Just William (1940), Vincent Sherman's The Hasty Heart (1949), Harold French's The Dancing Years (1950), J. Lee Thompson's Murder Without Crime (1950), and H. Bruce Humberstone's Happy Go Lovely (1951).

Ealing and Elstree tended to handle the more prestigious pictures, but both studios ran into difficulties as the 50s wore on and British films found themselves being squeezed by Hollywood imports and the trickle of foreign-language titles that started to find an audience in the postwar period. In order to produce programmers for the bottom half of a double bill, smaller outfits began churning out crime pictures that were often little more than quota quickies. However, some had a bit more about them and Simply Media has released a number of them in DVD double-headers.

A case in point is John Harlow's The Blue Parrot (1953), a police procedural that turns around the murder of car-hire dealer Victor Lucas, who is found dead in a country lane after leaving the Soho club run by John Le Mesurier in the wee small hours. In Britain to study new methods in detection, American cop Dermot Walsh offers to help out Scotland Yard Superintendent Ballard Berkeley by becoming a member, while policewoman Jacqueline Hill goes undercover as a hostess. They think they have a lead when waiter Edwin Richfield tries to pawn Lucas's fountain pen, but he winds up in hospital when he's involved in a hit-and-run accident. The attention then turns to shady dealer Ferdy Mayne and his mistress June Ashley. But she insists they are being blackmailed by the devious Le Mesurier and, when Ballard and Walsh move in to make an arrest, they find he has absconded with Hill as a hostage.

Based on a story by Daily Express Crime Correspondent Percy Hoskins, this was sponsored by the technicians' union, ACT. It's well enough done, considering its meagre budget, and the support playing of the motorbike-riding Le Mesurier, the plucky Hill and the genial Berkeley is admirable. This trio would later become familiar courtesy of their respective roles in Dad's Army, Doctor Who and Fawlty Towers, but the focus falls mostly on Walsh, a solid, but limited Irish actor whose American accent leaves something to be desired.

Also produced by the union that is now known as BECTU, Daniel Birt's Burnt Evidence (1954) was also derived from a Hoskins storyline. The script was one of the handful produced by Ted Willis, who made it into the Guinness Book of Records as the world's most prolific television writer, thanks to his association with Dixon of Dock Green. It's not one of his finest hours, as there is too much inconsequential chat and the mystery is scarcely impenetrable. Nevertheless, Irene Handl shows to typically good advantage as a nosy, but well-meaning neighbour who pops in to have her hair done by Jane Hylton, who is having a tough time because husband Duncan Lamont's business is on the skids. Knowing he wouldn't approve, Hylton approaches Lamont's old army buddy Donald Grey for a £300 loan that could help her husband land a big contract.

However, the green-eyed Lamont gets hold of the wrong end of the stick when he catches the pair together and a fight breaks out that culminates in a gun going off and a fire breaking out. Convinced he is a murderer, Lamont goes into hiding, leaving Hylton to deal with tea-swilling, pipe-smoking cops Meredith Edwards and Cyril Smith. But their leisurely investigation reaches a convenient conclusion that allows Lamont and Hylton to get on with their lives with renewed optimism. Another wartime buddy proves key to John Harlow's Dangerous Cargo (1954), as Terence Alexander turns up out of the blue at the local dog track to renew acquaintance with Jack Watling, who is now a senior security guard at London Aiport. Wife Susan Stephen has misgivings about Alexander and they soon turn out to be well founded, as he is the chauffeur of criminal mastermind Karel Stepanek, who needs information about the arrival of valuable shipments.

Alexander takes Watling back to the greyhounds and cons him into betting more than he can afford with a shady bookie, who hands over his marker to second-in-command John Le Mesurier, who threatens to ruin Watling unless he tips off Stepanek when the next precious cargo is due to arrive. But Stephen senses all is not well and alerts Scotland Yard to intercept the crooks in mid-gold heist. Her feisty loyalty strains the credibility more than a mite, but few will be able to take this plodding programmer seriously after watching Harlow's attempt to invest a little Dr Mabuse-like menace into proceedings by having Stepanek communicate with his underlings via a microphone from an adjoining room fitted with one-way mirror windows.

A Maurice Harrison play provides the inspiration for Final Appointment (1954), which was the 19th feature churned out by Terence Fisher in the first six years of a career that would eventually see him become the principal director at Hammer. The story bears a passing resemblance to Henry Cass's The Hand (1960) in that it turns on a wartime incident with dire consequences. But this is played more like a screwball mystery, as journalists John Bentley and Eleanor Summerfield are forever competing for scoops when not flirting with each other. When they stumble upon the fact that a series of murders committed on successive 10 Julys turns out to be linked to a military court martial, the pair join forces with Inspector Liam Redmond to try and find the sixth and final officer on the panel. But, while they manage to get to solicitor Hubert Gregg in time, they discover that their prime suspect is not the man they expect him to be.

Quite why it takes three supposedly intelligent people so long to reach their inevitable conclusion is baffling. But Fisher keeps the action brisk and makes the most of a colourful supporting cast that includes Arthur Lowe, Meredith Edwards and Sam Kydd. But the real puzzle here is why anyone felt the characters of Mike Billings and Jenny Drew were sufficiently engaging as reprise them in the guise of Bentley and Hy Hazell in Fisher's Stolen Assignment (1955) and Robin Bailey and Susan Shaw in Montgomery Tully's The Diplomatic Corpse (1958), whose only other recurring characters were Redmond's Inspector Corcoran and Charles Farrell's long-suffering editor, Percy Simpson.

Another reporter cracks the case in Douglas Peirce's The Delavine Affair (1955). But no one was ever going to build a franchise around news agency proprietor Rex Banner, who is played with a mischievous glint by Peter Reynolds, a B-movie stalwart who usually cropped up as the kind of shifty crook he pursues so relentlessly here. Adapted from the Robert Chapman novel, Winter Wears a Shroud, the action is sparked by the murder of one of Reynolds's most reliable informants. However, just as he discovers the body, Inspector Peter Neil turns up to instal him as prime suspect. Wife Honor Blackman and loyal aide Michael Balfour are keen to help Reynolds clear his name, however, and their pooled efforts put them on the track of the gang who purloined the Delavine diamonds.

This was a banner year for Katie Johnson, as she landed minor roles in Basil Dearden's Out of the Clouds and William Fairchild's John and Julie, while also winning a BAFTA for her delicious turn as Mrs Wilberforce in Alexander Mackendrick's The Ladykillers. But, while this may not have been her memorable moment of her 1955 assignments, it affords the estimable Gordon Jackson a rare opportunity to play against type opposite femme fatale Valerie Vernon. Moreover, Peirce and cinematographer Jonah Jones make decent use of a remote farmhouse and the picture culminates in the kind of punch-up that film-makers just don't stage anymore. .

Countless American has-beens fetched up in British Bs in thr 1950s and few managed to boost their profiles in the way Steve Reeves did in Italy or Eddie Constantine did in France. Alan Baxter had already been in the business over 20 years when he landed in Blighty to make Charles Saunders's The End of the Line (1957) and, throughout, he wears the resigned look of someone grateful for work in which he has no faith whatsoever.

Baxter essays an American author, who has been asked to assess the prospects of a new play. Producer's daughter Jennifer Jayne finds him lodgings at a country hotel run by Arthur Gomez and Baxter is surprised to find that his host has married his old flame, Barbara Shelley. Pouting provocatively, she soft soaps Baxter by telling him that she made a dreadful mistake in leaving him to find a sugar daddy. Moreover, she turns on the tears to convince him that Gomez mistreats her and puts her in danger with his lucrative sideline as a fence. Against his better judgement, Baxter agrees to steal some jewels in Gomez's possession and Shelley arranges an intricate alibi.

However, Gomez is found dead and Baxter fears that he murdered him in filching the loot. Yet his alibi remains cast iron and Inspector Jack Melford seems more interested in the ultra-smooth Ferdy Mayne than Baxter. But, then, Baxter starts receiving blackmail notes and he starts to suspect that Gomez might not even be dead. However, the truth emerges when he decides to turn himself in and he discovers the true extent of the vampish Shelley's treachery.

Now in her early 80s, Shelley made this serviceable thriller soon after completing Alfred Shaughnessy's Cat Girl (1957), which set her on the path to becoming `The First Lady of British Horror' in such Hammer gems as Terence Fisher's The Gorgon (1964) and Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966), as well as Don Sharp's Rasputin, the Mad Monk (1966) and Roy Ward Baker's Quatermass and the Pit (1967). She certainly makes an alluring femme fatale, but her scheming is the only reason to catch this otherwise predictable time-passer.