Dr. Strangelove, Or: H...
Best Price: $2.29
Buy New $6.54
(as of 08:45 UTC - Details)
For some 50 years, the reels of film lay forgotten in a London garage. Now a cache of more than 30 has been discovered, showing the first performances by young actors who would go on to become some of Britain’s greatest comedians, including Peter Sellers, Prunella Scales and Ronnie Corbett.
The movies, all shot in the early 1950s when Britain was trying to turn its film industry into a mini-Hollywood, have now been given to the British Film Institute (BFI) to restore.
Few of them have been seen in cinemas since their original release.
Those being screened soon include Penny Points to Paradise and Let’s Go Crazy, both starring the then 26-year-old Peter Sellers. They will be shown at the end of July at the BFI’s cinema on London’s South Bank before being released on DVD in early August. The BFI hopes to restore and release the rest of the films over the next 15 years if funding is available.
The films were all either made or distributed by Adelphi, a family-run company set up in 1939 by Arthur Dent who, like so many American movie bosses, had an east European Jewish background. Dent, who had at one time been the British representative of Sam Goldwyn, the Hollywood mogul, stored the prints of the films in his garage in Highgate, north London.
His company did not make any more films after 1956 although short clips from a few were sold by his children over the following decades.
The negatives and prints were left in cans in the garage of the family home until Dent’s granddaughter, Kate Lees, stumbled upon them and realised their significance as a “missing” chapter of the British film industry.
“They’re a snapshot of a particularly prolific period of British film-making,” said Lees, who donated them to the BFI.
One reason the first two films to be restored are those starring Sellers is that the institute is being given money by Laura Camuti, an American fan of the comedian. “[Sellers’s] vocal skills are mind-boggling,” said Camuti.
June 15, 2009
