Jan 26th  
Three Silent Men        
(GB 1940)                                 
New Realm/Butcher's Film Service. 72m. bw

A pacifist surgeon is wrongfully accused of murdering a weapons designer that he has been operating on.
Stock thriller with talky exposition rather than suspense, but with a bright cast.

w: Jack Byrd, Dudleey Leslie, from the novel by E.P. Thorne
p: F.W Baker
d: Thomas Bentley
s: Sebastian Shaw, Derrick De Marney, Patricia Roc, Arthur Hambling, Andre Morell, Charles Oliver, John Turnbull, Cameron Hall
ph: Geoffrey Faithfull

Jan 22nd
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory**
(US 1971)
Paramount. 100m.

A poor luckless child is one of five winners to the magic Wonka chocolate factory, but there are nasty surprises for some the other more selfish kids.
The darkness as well as the sentimentality of the original is surprisingly well maintained in this semi-musical version with variable songs, set for some reason in an international Americanised Everyland (but shot in Munich), with imaginative Lewis Carroll-like designs and performances that complement the novel.

Written by: Roald Dahl (and David Seltzer), from his novel "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory".
Producers: Stan Margulies, David L. Wolper.
Director: Mel Stuart.
Starring: Gene Wilder, Peter Ostrom, Jack Albertson, Roy Kinnear, Julie Dawn Cole, Paris Themmen, Gunther Meisner, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Malcolm Dixon.
Photography: Arthur Ibbetson.
Music: Walter Scharf.
Songs: Leslie Bricusse, Anthony Newley.
Art Direction: Harper Goff.

Jan 12th  
The City of the Dead   
(GB 1960)                                       
Vulcan. 78m

A remote 17th century New England village beset by witchcraft is still very much active in the practice three centuries later. Rather obviously plotted horror with repetitive scenes and cliches as thick as the fog, also pinching its story structure from the same year's Psycho.

w:George Baxt, Milton Subotsky
p: Donald Taylor
d: John Moxey
s: Venetia Stevenson, Christopher Lee, Patricia Jessel, Valentine Dyall, Dennis Lotis, Betta St. John, Tom Naylor, Norman MacOwen, Ann Beach
ph: Desmond Dickinson
m: Douglas Gamley, Ken Jones

Jan 7th
Alexander Nevsky**
(USSR 1938)
Mosfilm. 112m. bw

In 1242 Prince Alexander of Novgorod defies the Swedes and the Mongols and later the Germans in battle.
Ushering in wintry 2021 with this icy epic, with its obvious propaganda allusions to Stalin defying Hitler (yet made just a year before the infamous Nazi-Soviet pact), and some primitive sound and staging, but brilliant stylized sequences that were influential, particularly for Olivier's Henry V.

Written by: Sergei Eisenstein, Pyotr Pavlenkov.
Producer: Igor Vakar.
Directors: Sergei Eisenstein, Dmitri Vasilyev.
Starring: Nikolay Cherkasov, Valentina Ivashova, Nikolay Okhlopov, Andrei Oleksich, Dmitry Orlov.
Photograpahy: Eduard Tisse.
Music: Sergei Prokofiev.

The Empire Strikes Back also borrowed some its ice battle imagery from Alexander Nevsky