Based on the Book...

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.

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  • The Fallen Idol

    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...

  • The Mirror Crack'd

    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...

  • The Servant

    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...

  • Brighton Rock

    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.

  • Evil under the Sun

    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...

  • The Three Musketeers

    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...

  • The Four Musketeers

    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...

  • Outcast of the Islands

    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...

  • Justine

    The directorial debut of illustrator and producer Stewart Mackinnon, Justine is a near-lost example of British avant-garde cinema of the 1970s. Produced by the BFI Production Board in 1976, it has been out of circulation for the entire 40 years since.

  • Room at the Top

    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...

  • The Man Who Fell to Earth

    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.

  • The Mind Benders

    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,...

  • Lucky Jim

    Jim Dixon is a university lecturer who manages to offend his head of department and create various disastrous incidents. When he delivers a lecture drunk, he is forced to resign but is offered a job in London and wins the girl of his dreams.

  • Yield to the Night

    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 Queen of Spades

    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 ...