ITV DVD and Optimum Home Entertainment are teaming up this summer to celebrate the best of British film with a collection of classic movie titles to be made available at great prices from 23rd July 2007. ITV and Optimum boast the largest, and the best, library of classic British cinema titles. A Matter of Life and Death, Billy Liar, Brief Encounter, Great Expectations, Henry V, The Red Shoes, 9 Songs, The Third Man, The Wicker Man and The Dam Busters are just a selection from the fantastic range of 100 films being made available to co-incide with the BBC2’s Summer of British Film. Throughout the summer months, BBC2 will feature seven documentaries and movie showcases, as well as theatrical screenings of digitally-re-mastered movie classics like Brief Encounter and The Dam Busters at more than 200 screens around the UK. From Optimum Home Entertainment are five classic British films, ranging from the much loved The Dam Busters. Classic new-wave comedy with Billy LiaR to Britain’s best Horror Film The Wickerman and more.Billy Liar, one of the few comedies of the British ‘New Wave’ directed by John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy) and starring Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie, explores complex ideas and difficult truths concerning economic hardship and the abandoning of dreams to responsibility.Gently subversive the film marries visual and verbal with and a genuine capacity to entertain with a rather poignant rumination on the futility of dreams.
The controversial 9 Songs, which made headlines as the most sexually explicit film to be awarded an 18 certificate by the BBFC was directed by award-winning director Michael Winterbottom (Wonderland, 24 Hour Party People, Code 46).
A modern-day love story, the movie charts the progress of a couple’s relationship over the course of 9 concerts they go to, also featuring music from Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Von Bondies, Elbow, Primal Scream, The Dandy Warhols, Super Furry Animals, and Franz Ferdinand amongst others.
An all time classic, The Third Man stars Joseph Cotton, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard and Orson Welles in Carol Reed’s film of Graham Greene’s novel.
Set in a bombed out, post-war Vienna, The Third Man features some of cinema’s most memorable set pieces as pulp novelist Holly Martins seeks out the truth about the third man present at the time of his friend Harry Lime’s suspicious death.
Described by Empire as Britain’s Best Horror Film, The Wicker Man was directed by Robin Hardy and stars Edward Woodward, Britt Ekland, Diane Cilento, Christopher Lee and Ingrid Pitt in a unique, and bona-fide horror masterpiece, as a devout Christian policeman travels to a remote Scottish isle to investigate the disappearance of a young girl.
A much-loved British classic, The Dam Busters Michael Anderson’s 1954 drama, captures the tension and bravery of an audacious raid on The Ruhr Valley, the centre of Nazi Germany’s industrial complex, and the quintessentially English combination of inventiveness and dogged determination.
The Dam Busters was Britain’s biggest box-office success of 1955 and was shot in black and white to allow the integration of original footage of the bomb trails, giving the film a ‘gritty’ documentary style.
Also available on DVD as part of the Summer of British film season from ITV DVD comes A Matter Of Life And Death, Brief Encounter, Great Expectations and Henry V