The best film adaptations can capture the mood of the original or completely reimagine the stories in their transition to the big screen. Enthralling literary works by Agatha Christie Joseph Conrad, Alexandre Dumas, Graham Greene and more inspired these great films.
Carol Reed followed the success of Odd Man Out (1947) with this adaptation of Graham Greene’s short story, The Basement Room. Young Felipe (a revelatory Bobby Henrey) is a son of a diplomat who is never around, who instead forms a friendship with his butler Baines (Ralph Richardson). Baines impre...
When a Hollywood movie company arrives, stars in tow, to make a picture, the village of St Mary Mead is delighted. However, when a local woman is murdered, and the poison seems to have been intended for a visiting movie star, local detective Inspector Craddock (Edward Fox) turns to his Auntie, Mi...
In a remote corner of England's Peak District, a mysterious skull is unearthed. But even weirder is that Lady Sylvia steals the skull for use in worshipping - very erotically - her pagan god, The White Worm, who hungers for the taste of virginal flesh. Ken Russell has great fun revelling in the d...
Mr. Jeremy Fisher, Mrs. Tiggy-winkle, Jemima Puddle-duck, Squirrel Nutkin, Pigling Bland – indeed all the delightful and famous Beatrix Potter characters – come to life in this colourful and imaginative musical interpretation of her tales, choreographed by Sir Frederick Ashton, composed and score...
During the English civil war, Lord Dawlish (George Baker), a spruce nobleman, leads a double life as the Moonraker, a royalist highwayman who causes nothing but trouble for the Roundheads. However, when Oliver Cromwell wins at the final battle of Worcester, the Moonraker must help Charles the Fir...
Despite Harold Pinter's fear that Joseph Losey would turn his play into 'a completely homosexual picture', The Servant stands as one of the great critiques of British social and sexual mores. As power relationships between the classes fuel a sexual subtext about dominance and submission which goe...
Richard Attenborough is unforgettable as ‘Pinkie’, the brutal gangster who seduces and grooms a simple waitress, Rose (Carol Marsh) in the belief that she could incriminate him in a murder.
Ken Russell returns to the author of one of his greatest triumphs, D.H Lawrence, for a prequel to Women in Love that showcases the singular director’s flair for romantic flamboyance and erotic power. Ursula (Sammi Davis) finds herself falling for her swimming and gym teacher Winifred (Amanda Dona...
Hollywood legend John Huston's extraordinary career culminated in a return to his ancestral homeland for this elegiac 1987 adaptation of James Joyce’s short story. This warm reverie of old Dublin, and the Irish heritage Huston treasured, was directed from his wheelchair, with the 80-year-old vete...
Peter Ustinov stars as Agatha Christie's immortal detective, Hercule Poirot, in this star-studded murder-mystery. Poirot is tying up some loose ends on a shimmeringly beautiful Adriatic island when he's dragged into the case of an actress' strangling. In typical Christie style, everyone on the be...
D'Artagnan (Michael York), a young swordsman, arrives in Paris with one dream: becoming a Musketeer. He meets and quarrels with Athos (Oliver Reed), Porthos (Frank Finlay), and Aramis (Richard Chamberlain), three Musketeers, who invite him to join them in fighting the evil Cardinal Richelieu (Cha...
A sequel to the 1973 adaptation of The Three Musketeers, The Four Musketeers covers the second half of Dumas' classic novel. Cardinal Richelieu (Charlton Heston) has another evil plot, this time ordering the kidnap of Constance de Bonancieux (Racquel Welch), dressmaker of the Queen of France. The...
When he is arrested for embezzlement and exiled from Singapore, Willems (Trevor Howard) looks to Captain Lingard (Ralph Richardson), a merchant who took him in as a child, to help him. The Captain takes Willems to a secret trading point, where Willems becomes enamoured by Aissa (Kerima), the daug...
Henry Jekyll (Michael Caine) is a melancholy man. His wife died of pneumonia, and he seeks the comfort of his sister-in-law, despite her father's refusal. Jekyll throws himself into his work, developing a personality-splitting drug that allows him to wreak brutish havoc as his alter-ego, Hyde. Ho...
Jack Clayton’s 1959 romantic drama tells the story of Joe (Laurence Harvey), a young and ambitious man who has just moved to Yorkshire to work for the Borough Treasurer’s Department. He instead becomes romantically involved with Alice (Simone Signoret in an Oscar-winning performance), and what en...
David Bowie cemented his unearthly persona in Nicolas Roeg’s startling cult film; playing an alien stranded on Earth while on a mission to find water for his own world, he initiates a plan to amass a fortune to help save his home planet.
A distinguished physiologist Professor Shapey commits suicide and Hall a security officer then reveals evidence of treason against him. He has been experimenting with Isolation, the study of what happens to a man when all sensation-touch, taste, sight, smell and hearing - is removed. A colleague,...
Inspired by the tragic life and death of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed in the UK, this was the Siren from Swindon's bid for a serious acting career. Desperate to shake off her buxom dumb-blonde image, Dors brought compassion and sensitivity to the role, but this didnít stop the studio...
The distinguished British film director Thorold Dickinson (1903-1984), made only nine features in a chequered but remarkable film-making career which began in 1936 and ended in 1955. He subsequently became Britainís first Professor of Film at the Slade School of Art and wrote the much re-printed ...
