greatest-ever-made's - Favourites List

Show moreShow less

Feature is a classic of screen history and as uproariously funny today as it was seventy years ago. This film introduced Groucho's African lecture ("One morning I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. How he got into my pyjamas, I don't know...

") and the card game which Harpo and Chico play with the wealthy society woman Mrs. Rittenhouse (Margaret Dumont).

Show moreShow less

Nastassia Kinski stars as Irena, a beautiful young woman on the bridge of sexuality; she discovers love for the first time only to find that the explosive experience brings with it tragic consequences.

The tremendous passion of this girl's first romantic love is so strong, however, it by-passes the chaos around her-including her brother's (Malcom McDowell) extraordinary demands - as it pushes her on to her own bizarre destiny. With a style as timeless as myth, Cat People is an erotic fantasy of the passion and terror that surround this girl's first love. Desire... passion... blood, her lust transforms her into one of the Cat People.

Show moreShow less

From the legendary filmmaking duo Powell and Pressburger, 'The Small Back Room' is the story of the troubled love affair between a tormented back room scientist and a beautiful secretary, told against a background of ministerial intrigue and empire building.

Sammy Rice (David Farrar) was the army's finest bomb disposal officer until he was injured in the war and left with a false foot. Now part of a specialist 'back room' team, he dismantles the booby-trapped devices being dropped by Nazi bombers. He falls in love with Susan (Kathleen Byron), a colleague, and the two begin a secret affair. However, embittered by life, he feels inferior; inferior as a lover, inferior as a man unable to wear uniform; inferior in his work for, although a brilliant scientist, he allows himself to be exploited by his power-hungry boss. Haunted by his past, he drowns his sorrows in whiskey. Sammy's life is descending into disarray when the news comes; a bomb has exploded with catastrophic consequences, and another has been found. Faced with the biggest challenge of his career, Sammy must confront his demons and take his own life in his hands to solve the mystery of the bomb's lethal mechanism.

Show moreShow less

Wendy Hiller stars in Powell and Pressburger's classic romantic comedy about a young woman who discovers the true meaning of wealth. Joan Webster has her life mapped out, beginning with marriage to a rich industrialist.

Her plans go wrong when she finds herself stranded on the way to a remote Scottish island and falls in love with a penniless young sailor.

Show moreShow less

Following a prison term he served for manslaughter, Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) returns to find his family homestead overwhelmed by the weather and the greed of the banking industry.

With little work potential on the horizon of Oklahoma dust bowls, the entire family packs up heads for the promised land - California. But the arduous trip and harsh living conditions they encounter offer little hope, and family unity proves as daunting a challenge as any other they face.

Set in 1905 Kentucky, Judge Priest (Charles Winninger) is fighting for re-election against a Yankee prosecutor (Milburn Stone). Despite the Judge's popularity, his generosity and sense of justice may cost him the election.

Sixty-year-old Huw Morgan looks back on his life as a boy (Roddy McDowall) in a small Welsh mining town. His reminiscences reveal the disintegration of the closely knit Morgans, and his devoted parents (Donald Crisp, Sara Allgood), while capturing the sentiments and issues of their time.

Show moreShow less

Jean (Jean Gabin), a deserter, arrives in Le Havre and looks for a shelter before leaving the French territory. Housed in a shed on the harbour, at the end of the docks, he meets an eccentric painter and a mysterious and beautiful girl called Nelly (Michèle Morgan)...

From then on he will be trapped in a tragic destiny, in spite of his passion for Nelly and his will to live...

Show moreShow less

It's the legendary James Stewart at his leading-man finest in this timeless western that set the standard for all that followed.

Frontiersman Lin McAdam (Stewart) is attempting to track down both his father's murderer and his one-of-a-kind rifle, the 'Winchester '73', as it passes among a diverse group of desperate characters, including a crazed highwayman (Dan Duryea), an immoral gunrunner (John Mclntire), a savage young Indian chief (Rock Hudson) and McAdam's own murderous brother (Stephen McNally). Featuring Shelley Winters as the rifle's only rival for McAdam's interest and Tony Curtis in one of his first screen performances, the gripping tale of the men (and gun) who won the West is one of Stewart's most memorable films and one of the genre's most enduring classics.

Show moreShow less

Based on the Ed McBain novel, 'High and Low' is a gripping police thriller starring Toshiro Mifune.

Wealthy industrialist Kingo Gondo (Mifune) faces an agonising choice when a ruthless kidnapper, aiming to snatch his young son, takes the chauffeur's boy by mistake - but still demands the ransom, leaving Gondo facing ruin if he pays up. An anatomy of the inequalities in modern Japanese society, High and Low is a complex film noir, where the intense police hunt for the kidnapper is accompanied by penetrating insight into the kidnappers state of mind. Kurosawa's virtuoso direction provides no easy answers, and in short, intense sequences, he portrays the businessman, the police and the criminal as equally brutal but nonetheless human.

Lights flicker and dim. Footsteps sound from a sealed-off attic. Mysterious events only vulnerable young Paula (Ingrid Bergman) sees and hears make her fear she's losing her mind - exactly what treacherous spouse Gregory (Charles Boyer) hopes.

Show moreShow less

Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) a naive writer of pulp westerns, arrives in Vienna to meet his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) but finds that Lime has apparently been killed in a suspicious accident.

Martins, too, curious for his own good, hears contradictory stories about the circumstances of Limes' death and as witnesses disappear he finds himself chased by unknown assailants. Complicating matters are the sardonic Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), head of the British forces, and Limes' stage actress mistress, Anna (Alida Valli). Will Martin's curiosity lead him to discover things about his old friend that he'd rather not know?

Show moreShow less

Rudolf Klein-Rogge plays Dr. Mabuse, the criminal mastermind whose nefarious machinations provide the cover for - or describe the result of - the economic upheaval and social bacchanalia at the heart of Weimar-era Berlin.

Initiated with the arch-villain's diabolical manipulation of the stock-market, and passing through a series of dramatic events based around hypnotism, charlatanism, hallucinations, Chinese incantations, cold-blooded murder, opiate narcosis and cocaine anxiety, Lang's film maintains an unrelenting power all the way to the final act...which culminates in the terrifying question: "Where is Mabuse?!"

Show moreShow less

Set amidst the glittering theatre world of 19th century Paris, the story revoles around the beautiful and free-spirted courtesan, Garanace, and the four men who compete for her affections; a mime-artist, an actor, an aristocrat and a criminal.

As the melodrama unfolds, we are treated to one of cinema's greatest love stories, a captivating tale of passion, deception and murder.