In this year of celebration of all things British, the Independent Cinema Office and Studiocanal serve up a cracking summer season of theatrical screenings of some of the finest, most entertaining and quirkiest cinema that this sceptred isle has ever produced. Shun the ballyhoo around the Olympics; instead celebrate British accomplishment by charging your glass with Pimm’s and hunkering down in your cinema seats in front of this Made In Britain season of films. Jingoism, Lexi-style! And only £7…
A national screening event every Tuesday from 5 June to 3 July inclusive will see each film screen digitally in cinemas across the country. Up next, June 12th, one of Hammer’s most underrated films, The Plague of the Zombies, a fantastically off-the-wall zombie thriller set in Cornwall, starring Jacqueline Pearce and André Morell. Week after that, 19th June, it’s David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth. This is the Director’s Cut (that is, +20 minutes over the original release!) of this adult version of ET: the Extraterrestrial. Romantic comedy Hobson’s Choice (26th June) is an enduring gem from David Lean, better loved even than his classic Great Expectations. This has Charles Laughton as a tyrannical father who is outwitted by his daughters when they defy his injunction against marriage. (Also with a young John Mills, and an even younger Prunella Scales!) The season finishes July 3rd with another Hammer classic: Quatermass and the Pit. On a miniscule budget (£250), and pre-CGI, the film evokes a powerful sense of Evil when London – Mankind, even! – is threatened by the discovery of a long-buried Martian spacecraft.
