Powell’s amiable ‘Quickie’ comedy stars music hall veteran Jerry Verno as a lowly clerk who inherits a hotel, but gets more than he bargained for when various guests turn out to be crooks. (Watch out for the cameo from Powell himself). The production’s limitations are undeniable, but Powell directs it all with charm, and there are flashes of the cinematic invention to come.
Up Next in BFI Restorations
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Distant Voices, Still Lives
Set in a world before Elvis, a Liverpool before the Beatles, Terence Davies' debut feature is a remarkable evocation of working-class family life in the 40s and 50s and a visionary exploration of memory. In a powerful succession of searing vignettes, Davies paints an autobiographical picture of a...
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Slade in Flame
Gritty rather than glam, this incendiary, cult classic both confounded and delighted audiences upon its release in 1975, at the height of the legendary glam-rock band’s success. Charting the rise of fictional rock group Flame, with Slade themselves playing the band, it offers a witty, sublimely...
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Went the Day Well?
In the middle of World War II Cavalcanti provocatively imagined a postwar England in which the failure of the threatened German invasion could be safely seen in flashback, thanks to the resourceful villagers of Bramley End. Once the ostensibly British troops in their village are revealed as Nazis...
