NEW FILM ONLINE: "Ferry Cross the Mersey"

Year: 1965

Stars: Gerry Marsden, Freddie Marsden, Leslie Maguire, Les Chadwick (Gerry and the Pacemakers), Julie Samuel, T P McKenna, Deryk Guyler

Director: Jeremy Summers

Locations: Liverpool, Birkenhead

Plot: Gerry and Fred Marsden, Les McGuire, and Les "Chad" Chadwick portray themselves in a romp through the early 1960's Liverpool Beat Scene. Art students by day and musicians by night the boy's big break comes by winning a local talent contest. But first, they must retrieve their instruments which have been mistakenly carried to the airport.

Number of Stills: 26
Number of 'Now' Shots: 5

Pamela Green

Pamela Green, who has died aged 81, was postwar Britain's best-known pin-up girl and the first woman to appear naked in a British feature film.


Karl Bohm and Pamela Green in a scene from Michael Powell's 1960 film Peeping Tom
Photo: ANGLO AMALGAMATED/KOBAL COLLECTION

She was reckoned the most beautiful nude model of her day. In the 1950s there was scarcely a barrack-room locker, mess deck or grimy garage workshop unadorned by one of the thousands of cheesecake pictures of her, topless and often stark naked, her hourglass figure inspiring the accolade "Queen of Curves".
For "glamour" shots, she would model under her own name, or as one of her two alter egos – a flame-haired nightclub singer named Rita Landré, or the dusky Princess Sonmar, for which she applied Max Factor's Pancake Negro, boot polish and baby oil.
Her career in films began with 8mm black and white glamour shorts designed for home projection by men in grubby raincoats. These led to a cameo part, for which she stripped down to a G-string, in Michael Powell's notorious classic Peeping Tom (1960). Pamela Green played one of the victims of a murderous photographer (Karl Böhm) who impales young women on the leg of his camera tripod.
Powell, famous as the director of The Red Shoes, had spotted Pamela Green in the pages of Kamera, a discreet little publication launched in 1957 by George Harrison Marks, one half of a clapped-out comedy act who had taken up photography and who, in 1953, had become her Svengali. Having been cast by Powell as a model called Millie, Pamela Green turned up at Pinewood to shoot her two short nude scenes for Peeping Tom to find the studio suddenly thronged with lookers-on, including the entire ogling cast of a Carry On film being shot next door.
Her naked appearances in Peeping Tom were the first to be included in a full-length British feature film. She followed it the next year as the star of Naked As Nature Intended, one of Britain's first "sexploitation" films, directed by Marks, which managed to avoid being censored for indecency on the strength of his entirely spurious claim that it was "a genuine film about British naturism".
Shot in 35mm on locations no more exotic than a gravel pit at Gerrard's Cross, the film featured Pamela Green and four other girls scampering heroically for the camera, waving to each other and playing with a large beachball, which kept being blown away by the wind. There was no script. The single line of dialogue was: "Hello, do you come here often?"
In 1964 she appeared in an obscenity trial, charged with corrupting a schoolboy in Alloa through her performance in her short film The Window Dresser.
The youngster had confessed to his father: "I cannot tell a lie. I am a ruined boy forever." But after thrice viewing the film, the judge dismissed the case and asked for a copy of the film to take home for his own son.
Pamela Green was born on March 28 1929 at Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey, into a family in which nakedness bore no shame. Her father was an enthusiastic artist who liked drawing nudes, and who later carved a naked figure of his daughter in wood. During the Second World War her parents moved so frequently that by the time she was 14 Pamela had attended as many schools and refused to start at another. So in 1945 she enrolled at the Gloucester School of Art, shedding any adolescent inhibitions by drawing her first nude from life.
Back in London in 1947, when she enrolled at the St Martin's School of Art, Pamela began earning her rent by working as an artist's model. By night she appeared semi-nude in Norman Wisdom's comedy revue Paris To Piccadilly, London's answer to the Folies Bergère, at the Prince of Wales Theatre. She was still only 17 when she got a start as a photographic model.
In Greek Street, Soho, she knocked at the studio of a photographer (and former Dambuster), Douglas Webb, telling him she was looking for glamour work. This led to work with Webb and other leading photographers such as Bertram Park, Bill Brandt, the American, Weegee, and Angus McBean, who cast her in a conch shell to recreate Botticelli's Birth of Venus.
At night she performed in nude revues, including some at the famous Windmill Theatre, where the girls appeared in motionless tableaux. "Nudes were not allowed to move on stage," she noted. "Move, and they closed the show." Nightly at 10.30, she caught the last train home from Marylebone to her mother at West Wycombe.
After a brief failed marriage, Pamela Green fell in with Marks, a chronic alcoholic and failing theatrical photographer with a beatnik's beard, showing him how to pose and light shots of nude women, setting up the backgrounds and retouching the prints. She also became his business manager, and encouraged him to sell postcards of herself nude, in sets of five, discreetly wrapped, in local bookshops and under the counters of Soho newsagents.
Friends admired her dedication: she dieted strictly; took care not to wear tight underclothes, thus avoiding unsightly pressure marks; and joined a nudist camp to get an even tan, topping it up on the roof of Marks's studio in Gerrard Street to applause from men at the neighbouring post office.
After the negatives of Pamela Green's back catalogue were lost in the wake of a studio bankruptcy, Douglas Webb spent 15 years re- photographing her in her most famous poses. Hoping to raise enough money to publish a selection of the images in book form, the veteran of the Dambuster raids auctioned his Distinguished Flying Medal for £5,600 at Christies, but it proved insufficient to cover his costs.
A full-length video feature Never Knowingly Overdressed, chronicling Pamela Green's career in front of the camera, includes some of her 8mm strip films and more than 500 still photographs. "I can't understand why a woman should be embarrassed or degraded by looking at a nude body," she once told the BBC's Woman's Hour. "We've all got one."
Pamela Green, who died on May 7, married, in 1951, Guy Hillier, a stagehand she met while working as a dancer, but divorced him a month later. She lived with George Harrison Marks for eight years until 1961, and with Douglas Webb, with whom she shared a modest Victorian villa on the Isle of Wight (where she was a member of Yarmouth Women's Institute) until his death in 1995. There were no children.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/film-obituaries/7734345/Pamela-Green.html

NEW FILM ONLINE: "Dad's Army"

Year: 1971

Stars: Arthur Lowe, John Le Mesurier, Clive Dunn, John Laurie, James Beck, Arnold Ridley, Ian Lavender, Liz Fraser, Bill Pertwee

Director: Norman Cohen

Locations: Chalfont St. Giles, Bucks

Plot: The film tells the story of the Home Guard platoon's formation and their subsequent endeavours at a training exercise.

Number of Stills: 26
Number of 'Now' Shots: 26

NEW FILM ONLINE: "Doomwatch"

Year: 1972

Stars: Ian Bannen, Judy Geeson, John Paul, Simon Oates

Director: Peter Sasdy

Locations: London, Cornwall

Plot: Dumped cylinders off the Cornish coast lead to local islanders’ acromelagy.

Number of Stills: 16
Number of 'Now' Shots: 9

CHRISTMAS IN MAY!!!

Just received from a kind enthusiast:

Come Play with Me

Games Lovers Play

Gay Dog

Half a Sixpence

Hindle Wakes (1952)

Hireling

Images

Mayerling

Murder Most Foul

Paratrooper

Quatermass Experiment

Sabotage

Oscar nominated actress Lynn Redgrave dies, aged 67

The actress Lynn Redgrave has died aged 67, it was announced today.

Best known for her role as the free-thinking title character in the film 'Georgy Girl', for which she received an Oscar nomination, Redgrave became a sixties sensation whose career spanned 48 years on stage and screen.

Her death is the third in a year to hit the Redgrave acting dynasty.
A year ago her niece, Natasha Richardson, married to Liam Neeson, died from head injuries sustained in a skiing accident. Just a month ago Redgrave's older brother Corin Redgrave died.

She has been described as an "introspective and independent" player in the family of actors.

Her publicist Rick Mira Montez, speaking on behalf of her children, said Redgrave died last night at her Manhattan apartment.

In 2003, Redgrave had been treated for breast cancer.

The youngest child of Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, Lynn Redgrave never quite managed the acclaim, or notoriety, of elder sibling Vanessa Redgrave.

However Lynn Redgrave received acclaim for performances in 'Gods and Monsters', 'Mrs Warren's Profession', 'Shakespeare for my Father' and 'The Constant Wife'.

In later life, Redgrave dramatised her troubled past in one-woman stage performances.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article7115081.ece

Courtesy of:
Times Online,
Rhoda Buchanan
May 3, 2010

Roman Polanski, statement 02/05/2010

I can remain silent no longer!

Throughout my seven months since September 26, 2009, the date of my

arrest at Zurich Airport, where I had landed with a view to receiving a

lifetime award for my work from the representative of the Swiss Minister of

Culture, I have refrained from making any public statements and have

requested my lawyers to confine their comments to a bare minimum. I

wanted the legal authorities of Switzerland and the United States, as well

as my lawyers, to do their work without any polemics on my part.

I have decided to break my silence in order to address myself directly to

you without any intermediaries and in my own words.

I have had my share of dramas and joys, as we all have, and I am not

going to try to ask you to pity my lot in life. I ask only to be treated fairly like

anyone else.

It is true: 33 years ago I pleaded guilty, and I served time at the prison for

common law crimes at Chino, not in a VIP prison. That period was to have

covered the totality of my sentence. By the time I left prison, the judge had

changed his mind and claimed that the time served at Chino did not fulfil

the entire sentence, and it is this reversal that justified my leaving the

United States.

This affair was roused from its slumbers of over three decades by a

documentary film-maker who gathered evidence from persons involved at

the time. I took no part in that project, either directly or indirectly. The

resulting documentary not only highlighted the fact that I left the United

States because I had been treated unjustly; it also drew the ire of the Los

Angeles authorities, who felt that they had been attacked and decided to

request my extradition from Switzerland, a country I have been visiting

regularly for over 30 years without let or hindrance.

I can now remain silent no longer!

I can remain silent no longer because the American authorities have just

decided, in defiance of all the arguments and depositions submitted by third

parties, not to agree to sentence me in absentia even though the same

Court of Appeal recommended the contrary.

I can remain silent no longer because the California court has dismissed

the victim’s numerous requests that proceedings against me be dropped,

once and for all, to spare her from further harassment every time this affair

is raised once more.

I can remain silent no longer because there has just been a new

development of immense significance. On February 26 last, Roger

Gunson, the deputy district attorney in charge of the case in 1977, now

retired, testified under oath before Judge Mary Lou Villar in the presence of

David Walgren, the present deputy district attorney in charge of the case,

who was at liberty to contradict and question him, that on September 16,

1977, Judge Rittenband stated to all the parties concerned that my term of

imprisonment in Chino constituted the totality of the sentence I would have

to serve.

I can remain silent no longer because the request for my extradition

addressed to the Swiss authorities is founded on a lie. In the same

statement, retired deputy district attorney Roger Gunson added that it was

false to claim, as the present district attorney’s office does in their request

300093066.1 3

for my extradition, that the time I spent in Chino was for the purpose of a

diagnostic study.

The said request asserts that I fled in order to escape sentencing by the

U.S. judicial authorities, but under the plea-bargaining process I had

acknowledged the facts and returned to the United States in order to serve

my sentence. All that remained was for the court to confirm this

agreement, but the judge decided to repudiate it in order to gain himself

some publicity at my expense.

I can remain silent no longer because for over 30 years my lawyers have

never ceased to insist that I was betrayed by the judge, that the judge

perjured himself, and that I served my sentence. Today it is the deputy

district attorney who handled the case in the 1970s, a man of

irreproachable reputation, who has confirmed all my statements under

oath, and this has shed a whole new light on the matter.

I can remain silent no longer because the same causes are now

producing the same effects. The new District Attorney, who is handling this

case and has requested my extradition, is himself campaigning for election

and needs media publicity!

I can no longer remain silent because the United States continues to

demand my extradition more to serve me on a platter to the media of the

world than to pronounce a judgment concerning which an agreement was

reached 33 years ago.

I can remain silent no longer because I have been placed under house

arrest in Gstaad and bailed in very large sum of money which I have

managed to raise only by mortgaging the apartment that has been my

home for over 30 years, and because I am far from my family and unable to

work.

Such are the facts I wished to put before you in the hope that Switzerland

will recognize that there are no grounds for extradition, and that I shall be

able to find peace, be reunited with my family, and live in freedom in my native land.

Statement issued by Roman Polanski who directed Repulsion.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/2010/05/02/polanski_speaks_out/

REELSTREETS WALKABOUT - NEXT WEEK

ITALY

5th May, Assisi, Perugia, Todi, Ancona
6th May, Brescello, Firenze, Sienna, Arezzo, San Sepulcro


LONDON

11th May, 10am, East End
2pm, Hammersmith

12th May, 2pm, Bloomsbury

13th May, am, Brixton

14th May, pm, Pimlico

15th May, am, West End

Maybe we'll have the pleasure of your company. What information do you have on films made in the above areas?

Best wishes

John Tunstill

REELSTREETS - HAPPY BIRTHDAY

Alexa has just informed me that our SEVENTH birthday was on the 23rd APRIL. Congratulations and thanks to you all.

Exceedingly well done

John