Last Holiday

The Alec Guinness Collection (Kind Hearts and Coronets / The Lavender Hill Mob / The Ladykillers / The Man in the White Suit / The Captain's Paradise) Five of the British film industry's best-loved comedies in one boxed set makes The Alec Guinness Collection absolutely essential for anyone who has any passion at all for movies. It contains Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), The Man in the White Suit ...	The Heiress (Universal Cinema Classics) Olivia de Havilland's Oscar®-winning performance in The Heiress is so good that even hard-to-please critic Pauline Kael hailed it as de Havilland's "finest work ever." Like director William Wyler's previous masterpiece The Best Years of Our Lives, this tightly controlled drama i...	Kind Hearts and Coronets Set in Victorian England, Robert Hamer's 1949 masterpiece Kind Hearts and Coronets remains the most gracefully mordant of the Ealing comedies. Dennis Price plays Louis D'Ascoyne, the would-be Duke of Chalfont whose mother was spurned by her noble family for marrying an Italian si...	Mutiny on the Bounty The highlight of Mutiny on the Bounty is undoubtedly Charles Laughton's bracingly evil performance as Captain Bligh, a man so mean that he insists on having a dead sailor flogged. Bligh pushes his men beyond physical endurance, slashes their rations for his own profit, and drasti...	The Horse's Mouth - Criterion Collection Alec Guinness was in the full bloom of his stardom when he suggested, scripted, and starred in this wonderfully odd 1958 adaptation of Joyce Cary's novel. As Gulley Jimson, a gravel-voiced, antisocial painter, whose artistic drive is as single-minded (and as self-absorbed) as a t...
Midsomer Murders - Set Eight Idyllic Midsomer county has an alarmingly high mortality rate--at least on television. As actor John Nettles comments in a charming interview, after several series of the murder mystery program Midsomer Murders only a handful of villagers would be left alive. The show's writers t...	Green for Danger - Criterion Collection Writer-director Sidney Gilliat isn't the household name he deserves to be, so his film Green for Danger--once an art-house perennial--qualifies as one of the major, and surely most delightful, (re)discoveries of the season. Its cunning blend of character-driven mystery, gothic dr...	The Ladykillers In English comedy at its blackest (and funniest) pitch, this droll 1955 farce finds Alec Guinness in one of his typically deft, chameleon turns as would-be criminal mastermind Professor Marcus. When Marcus's grand plan to pull off a train heist leads him to a strategically situat...	The King and I (50th Anniversary Edition) Studio: Tcfhe Release Date: 11/04/2008 Run time: 133 minutes Rating: Nr	Ben-Hur A jewish nobleman in palestine is drawn into a heroic odyssey that includes enslavement by the romans a bold escape from an embattled slave gallery vengeance against his tormentors during a furious arena chariot and fateful encounters with jesus christ. Studio: Warner Home Video...

Haunting, penetrating and meditative reflection about the human condition!
Poignant and meditative story about a failed salesman plans to quietly live the last months of his life in a resort. And this unexpected place will ironically become of special significance for all the guests who spent their holydays there. Alec Guiness is superb in this role. Beatrice Campbell is lovable to watch. We are expecting its next release on DVD format.

Brilliant graveyard humor
When I think about films that have mattered in my life, "Last Holiday" is on the short list -- an ironic British comedy written by J.B. Priestly and released in 1950. Alec Guinness plays George Bird, a salesman as cautious as a civil servant. One guesses he has never married because what women see in his face is dread of life, not an attractive quality. A persistent headache has made him consult a doctor. After medical tests, Bird has been told to come back the next day for the diagnosis, but by the time he returns the files have been mixed up. The doctor has someone else's results in Bird's folder and so informs him that he has an untreatable illness and will be dead in six weeks. In fact, all Bird needs is an aspirin and perhaps a pint of beer. The doctor's clerical error transforms Bird's life. He quits his job, empties his bank account (no need to save for old age), and books a room in a coastal resort for the affluent. He had never imagined setting foot in such a place until he spotted the graveyard racing toward him. A day later he begins his last holiday. No longer needing to play it safe, Bird can say and do things he previously would never have dared -- there is nothing left to fear. For the first time in his life women find him attractive. Bankers, corporate executives, and government ministers are soon lining up for his advice, offering partnerships and vice-presidencies. Everyone senses in him a mysterious quality, a detachment and freedom that make him a figure to be reckoned with. The viewer alone knows just what that mysterious quality is: Bird's death sentence has been his liberation. He is no longer a prisoner of the terrifying future. The people in the hotel are far from a happy group. In many ways their holiday hotel is a well-appointed purgatory. George Bird becomes something of a Saint Francis in his efforts to help his fellow guests become less selfish people. The J.B. Priestly script includes a surprise ending -- probably not the one Hollywood in the 50s would have allowed....

Where's the DVD of this?
Why hasn't this terrific film come out on DVD? I keep waiting for it to go with all my other Alec Guinness comedies & dramas on DVD, and I'm getting impatient! Is there a copyright problem or something? What's holding this up?

A dark, superior British comedy
A young Alec Guinness stars in this clever story of a mild-mannered, average sort of fellow who is told by his doctor that he has only days, perhaps weeks left to life. On medical advice, Guinness quits his job, liquidates his life savings, and goes off to a posh country resort on one last, luxuriously bittersweet holiday. Naturally, once he's given up all hope, everything in his life starts coming up roses: mistaken as a man of means by the hotel's inquisitive clientele, Guinness finds all sorts of new creative, financial and romantic opportunities arising out of nowhere. J. B. Priestley's script is in part a wry, piercing comment on Great Britain's class-bound society, where initiative and imagination were stifled by prejudice and regimentation... Only because he feels he has nothing left to lose does Guinness's George Bird work up the nerve to give business tycoons and Lords of Parliament a piece of his mind; once he does they recognize him as a man of great standing. Politics aside, though, this is also a very entertaining and somewhat sad little comedy, with an twist ending that happy, happy Hollywood wouldnt touch with a ten-foot pole. Recommended.

Low-key, touching masterpiece
George Bird is an unimportant cog in the merchant machine when he learns that he has Lampington's Disease--invariably fatal. Through luck--meeting a beneficent salesman looking for the perfect man for an estate-sale bounty--and fatalism--losing any inhibition against speaking his true thoughts--the down-to-earth, plain-spoken words of Bird strike a spark in a broad range of characters at a posh resort and change the course of more than a few lives. Guinness is real, honest, and touching in his best role ever, in my mind. If the ending is sentimental and cutting at the same time, well, good for these old black-and-white movies. Bird is a prince among men in his triumph of substance over style and appearance.