The Rank 70th Anniversary Collection - 8 DVD Box Set (Brief Encounter / The 39 Steps / The Wicked Lady / Genevieve / The Red Shoes / A Matter Of Life And Death / Hamlet / Henry V)

From the 30s and Alfred Hitchcock through to the 50s and the perky comedy Genevieve, this is tremendous value - eight classic British films on DVD for under £15? Here are some of British cinema's finest moments. Hitch's The 39 Steps was rarely bettered, even when he moved to the US and went on to make films like North by Northwest. Robert Donat plays the original wronged man, on the run to prove his innocence, and literally handcuffed to the blonde at one point. Full of memorable scenes: everyone knows the one where Donat takes refuge at the home of an unhappy crofter's wife (a young Peggy Ashcroft), living on the moors, dreaming of the lights of Sauchiehall Street on a Saturday night, and instead married to a miserly John Laurie in one of his many British film roles prior to finding fame in old age playing Private Fraser in Dad's Army. David Lean's Brief Encounter is perhaps THE classic tale of thwarted love, a film which perhaps teeters on the brink of cliche but never falls in to it. Upper lips were never stiffer. Gainsborough Studios made several Regency era bodice-rippers in the 40s. The Wicked Lady essentially reworks the plot and reunites two of the cast from the earlier The Man in Grey: Margaret Lockwood as the eponymous wicked lady-cum-highwaywoman and a pre-Hollywood James Mason as the not-so-wicked Colonel Jackson. Lockwood practically eats the scenery and enjoys every morsel, in a film that had to be reshot for the US audiences, as there was much too much heaving bosum on display. What isn't she capable of? Stealing her best friend's fiance, gambling, robbing... even murder. Two Powell and Pressbergers are here too: Moira Shearer in the ballet melodrama The Red Shoes was never really my cup of tea, but it is equisitely shot and directed, as we have come to expect from P&P. A Matter of Life and Death, on the other hand, sees David Niven's wartime pilot hovering between this world and the next, which are linked by a magnificent cloud-swept stairway, as a celestial court ponders his fate. You see, he should have died along with the rest of his colleagues as his bullet-ridden bomber limped home over the Channel, but due to a celestial clerking error, the angel who should have picked him up and whisked him off to Heaven missed him in the fog. Can he appeal against his sentence and live on beyond his alloted time? Or will that create too much paperwork? Continuing the wartime theme, perhaps there is one too many Shakespeare adaptations here - I would have stuck with Olivier's contribution to the war effort, his stirring Henry V, and paired it with David Lean & Noel Coward's magnificent In Which We Serve myself. And finally we come to Genevieve, which is the original wet Sunday afternoon treat, so dig out the crumpets and put the kettle on. Kenneth More and John Grigsons' rivalry in the London-Brighton vintage car rally is joyous, and from Kay Kendall getting drunk and proving an unexpected virtuoso on the trumpet to Larry Adler's rightly famous harmonica score, there's barely a note wrong here. Grigson, who, like Kendall, died before his time due to cancer, dotes with bruised pride upon the often unreliable Genevieve. Kenny More gives us one of his usual bumptious, over-confident batchelor perfomances (why were British single men so tweedy and old in such 50s films?) as if he had just stepped out of one of the "Doctor" films. Gentle comedy before the term came to mean "not very funny at all". All in all, this is a far better box set than most ones you will come across, which usually contain one good film and more than their fair share of turkeys. Buy it for someone for Christmas - or just treat yourself and replace all those TV-taped vids.

This is a beautifully presented box set of great films - the only one I didn't like was Genevieve (I found it a bit too Last of the Summer Wine). It's good value and would make a lovely present.

The films are good and packaging is OK. There is however no written information about the fims, actors/actresses etc etc.
For such a collection one would have expected a short description and background to the films.The Rank 70th Anniversary Collection - 8 DVD Box Set (Brief Encounter / The 39 Steps / The Wicked Lady / Genevieve / The Red Shoes / A Matter Of Life And Death / Hamlet / Henry V)