A real anomaly, The Slipper and the Rose - The Story of Cinderella (1976) is a big budget British musical, made during a time when the British film industry was all but collapsing, and large-scale musicals were all but regarded as box office poison. Executive produced by David Frost, with songs by Robert B. and Richard M. Sherman (Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), and featuring an excellent cast of mostly British actors, the film was not a success outside of England, though it's been readapted and revived numerous times for the stage.

The picture has been released numerous times on DVD in the U.K. and in America, though apparently all earlier versions were either 4:3 panned-and-scanned from its original 2.35:1 Panavision, or cropped to 1.78:1 full-frame (for widescreen TVs). This new release, courtesy Inception Media Group and B2MP, is positively glorious. Not only is the f...Read the entire review

I suppose with On Approval (1944) I was expecting some sort of Noël Coward-type, dryly witty drawing room comedy. Partly it is just that, but it's also almost indescribably anarchic at times, like the screwiest of screwball comedies, and there are also purely cinematic sight gags harkening back to Buster Keaton in his prime. It reminds me a lot of several of writer-director Preston Sturges's films, particularly The Palm Beach Story (1942), which has a similar structure and plot, and which is also particularly insane. Mostly though On Approval is a difficult film to describe because it's so one-of-a-kind.

The picture, an adaptation of a 1927 Fred Lonsdale farce, began shooting with another director. Star Clive Brook wasn't satisfied with the results and completely took over the production as producer-writer-director as well as star. It's not clear how much, if any, of the origin...Read the entire review