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“Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema 1945-1960” is the theme of this year’s Locarno Film Festival Retrospective, unveiled in London on Monday. It follows the festival’s 2024 look back at Columbia Pictures at 100.

Described as “a tribute” to British cinema from that period promising to be “painting a rich and diverse picture of life in the postwar years as reflected in British popular cinema,” the retrospective will feature more than 40 films and is produced in partnership with the BFI National Archive and the Cinémathèque Suisse, with the support of StudioCanal and curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht.

“After the end of the Second World War — and as its overseas empire began to crumble — Britain embarked on the rocky road to national reconstruction and revival,” Locarno organizers said. “Featuring everything from beloved classics by legendary filmmakers like David Lean, Carol Reed, and Powell and Pressburger (themselves the subject of a major Locarno retrospective...

Stage and screen actor who starred in Malta Story, Reach for the Sky and Doctor at Large

Although her father was a Russian émigré and her mother was Swiss-French, Muriel Pavlow, who has died aged 97, will be remembered as a quintessential British heroine on stage and screen. This meant being well spoken and standing by her man through thick and thin, particularly in the staid England of the 1950s. Not only did she fulfil these requirements admirably, but she established herself as a compelling presence.

As a J Arthur Rank contract player, Pavlow waited bravely for pilots Alec Guinness in Malta Story (1953) and Kenneth More in Reach for the Sky (1956) to return safely from missions during the second world war, and was the steadfast nurse who loves accident-prone Simon Sparrow (Dirk Bogarde), the medical student in Doctor in the House (1954) – the first in the popular series – and Doctor at Large (1957). In the theatre,...

In her new book Rachel Cooke re-examines the 1950s through 10 women who pioneered in their careers. In this extract she tells the stories of sisters-in-law Muriel and Betty Box, two prominent women in the British film industry

Until recently, anyone who wanted to see the film To Dorothy a Son had to lock themselves deep in the bowels of the British Film Institute off Tottenham Court Road, London, and watch it on an old Steenbeck editing machine. A little-known comedy from 1954, To Dorothy is no one's idea of a classic. It has an infuriating star in Shelley Winters, a creaky screenplay by Peter Rogers (later the producer of the Carry On series) and a set that looks as if it is on loan from a local amateur dramatics society.

We are in the home of Tony (John Gregson) and his baby-faced wife, Dorothy (Peggy Cummins). Dorothy is heavily pregnant, and confined to bed.

Dirk Bogarde: ‘Victim’ star took no prisoners in his letters to Dilys Powell Letters exchanged between film critic Dilys Powell and actor Dirk Bogarde — one of the most popular and respected British performers of the twentieth century, and the star of seminal movies such as Victim, The Servant, Darling, and Death in Venice — reveals that Bogarde was considerably more caustic and opinionated in his letters than in his (quite bland) autobiographies. (Photo: Dirk Bogarde ca. 1970.) As found in Dirk Bogarde’s letters acquired a few years ago by the British Library, among the victims of the Victim star (sorry) were Academy Award winner Vanessa Redgrave (Julia), a "ninny" who was “so utterly beastly to [Steaming director Joseph Losey] that he finally threw his script at her face”; and veteran stage and screen actor — and Academy Award winner — John Gielgud (Arthur), who couldn’t "understand half of Shakespeare" despite being renowned for his stage roles in Macbeth,...