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'Saint Joan': Constance Cummings as the George Bernard Shaw heroine. Constance Cummings on stage: From sex-change farce and Emma Bovary to Juliet and 'Saint Joan' (See previous post: “Constance Cummings: Frank Capra, Mae West and Columbia Lawsuit.”) In the mid-1930s, Constance Cummings landed the title roles in two of husband Benn W. Levy's stage adaptations: Levy and Hubert Griffith's Young Madame Conti (1936), starring Cummings as a demimondaine who falls in love with a villainous character. She ends up killing him – or does she? Adapted from Bruno Frank's German-language original, Young Madame Conti was presented on both sides of the Atlantic; on Broadway, it had a brief run in spring 1937 at the Music Box Theatre. Based on the Gustave Flaubert novel, the Theatre Guild-produced Madame Bovary (1937) was staged in late fall at Broadway's Broadhurst Theatre. Referring to the London production of Young Madame Conti, The...

Don't panic! Your first look at BBC Two's upcoming Dad's Army origins drama is here.

We're Doomed! The Dad's Army Story tells of the struggles creators Jimmy Perry and David Croft had to endure to get the classic comedy on screen.

The stills show Friday Night Dinner's Paul Ritter and Game of Thrones actor Richard Dormer as Perry and Croft, respectively, and John Sessions as a dead ringer for Arthur Lowe.

EastEnders star Shane Richie will play Bill Pertwee in the one-off film, with the rest of the Dad's Army actors portrayed by Julian Sands (as John Le Mesurier), Mark Heap (as Clive Dunn), Kevin Bishop (as James Beck), Michael Cochrane (as Arnold Ridley) and Ralph Riach (as John Laurie).

Meanwhile, Keith Allen will appear as TV executive Paul Fox and Sally Phillips will play Croft's wife Ann.

The drama has been written by Stephen Russell (Shameless) and...

There's already a Dad's Army movie remake on the horizon, and now there's going to be a drama based around its origins.

EastEnders star Shane Richie will play Bill Pertwee in BBC Two's Making Dad's Army, a one-off film about the classic and beloved British sitcom.

The drama will focus on the show's original idea in 1967 up until its first broadcast in 1968, and the struggles creators Jimmy Perry and David Croft had to endure to get it on screen.

Friday Night Dinner's Paul Ritter will play Perry, while Game of Thrones actor Richard Dormer will portray Croft.

The rest of the Dad's Army actors will be played by John Sessions (as Arthur Lowe), Julian Sands (as John Le Mesurier), Mark Heap (as Clive Dunn), Kevin Bishop (as James Beck), Michael Cochrane (as Arnold Ridley) and Ralph Riach (as John Laurie).

Meanwhile, Keith Allen will play TV executive Paul Fox,...

What good is a canon? It's a question that hovers in endless debate near cinephile culture. The idea of distilling cinema down to its "best" or "most essential" films is like a game or a thought experiment, and whether it be the AFI or Sight & Sound or a group of Young Turks looking to rattle conventional wisdom, canon-making demonstrates nothing so much as a desire to assemble an expansive, fragmented, and still-evolving sense of film history into some sort of definitive order. Canons, each with its own biases, are useful chiefly as a starting point or a basecamp. The best answer is to always be looking, always curious. And cinema has barely more than a century to keep up with. I wonder how bibliophiles cope.One of the virtues of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which begins on May 28th, is how it mixes classics and arcana on a level plane.

The all-star cast for the big-screen reboot of the classic sitcom Dad's Army has been revealed.

Bill Nighy, Toby Jones and Michael Gambon are among the actors to feature in the film, written by Hamish McColl and directed by Oliver Parker.

The BBC One comedy was created by Jimmy Perry and the late David Croft and originally aired between 1968 and 1977.

Here's our guide of who's playing the seven main platoon members below:

Captain George Mainwaring

Marvellous actor Toby Jones takes on the pompous, patriotic bank manager and pillar of the community Captain George Mainwaring, played by Arthur Lowe in the BBC comedy.

Sergeant Arthur Wilson

Bill Nighy will be playing privately educated, former city banker Sergeant Arthur Wilson, who is of a cheerful and carefree disposition yet exudes an aura of mystery. He's at odds with Captain George Mainwaring over his privileged background.

Wilson was originally played by the late British actor John Le Mesurier.

The all-star cast for the big-screen reboot of the classic sitcom Dad's Army has been revealed.

Bill Nighy, Toby Jones and Michael Gambon are among the actors to feature in the film, written by Hamish McColl and directed by Oliver Parker.

The BBC One comedy was created by Jimmy Perry and the late David Croft and originally aired between 1968 and 1977.

Here's our guide of who's playing the seven main platoon members below:

Captain George Mainwaring

Marvellous actor Toby Jones takes on the pompous, patriotic bank manager and pillar of the community Captain George Mainwaring, played by Arthur Lowe in the BBC comedy.

Sergeant Arthur Wilson

Bill Nighy will be playing privately educated, former city banker Sergeant Arthur Wilson, who is of a cheerful and carefree disposition yet exudes an aura of mystery. He's at odds with Captain George Mainwaring over his privileged background.

Wilson was originally played by the late British actor John Le Mesurier.

Above: Spectacular full-scale derailment from the 1931 version of The Ghost Train (and also the 1941 version).

Arnold Ridley is fondly remembered in the UK as one of the stars of seventies sitcom Dad’s Army, about an incompetent and mainly superannuated group of volunteer soldiers in the WWII home guard, a show which made Ridley a national star at age 72 (it continued until he was 81). His sweetly doddering persona made a brilliant foil to the petulant Arthur Lowe, the dithering John Le Mesurier and gloomy Scot John Laurie.

One day, shooting on location in a graveyard, one of Ridley’s younger co-stars mused, “Hardly worth your leaving, is it, Arnold?” A rather harsh bit of humor: if you find it too mean, take comfort in the fact that the young thesp predeceased Ridley by some years, owing to liver failure. What larks!

But looong before Dad’s Army, Arnold Ridley found...

Pete Postlethwaite's autobiography reveals his total commitment to his craft

The hell-for-leather pace of this memoir by the maverick actor Pete Postlethwaite is explained by the fact that death was knocking fairly insistently at the door as he put it together. When, finally, the film star's luminous energy began to wane last year, he invited the writer Andy Richardson to help him finish the project. This means that many of the earlier chapters – those dealing with Postlethwaite's youthful adventures and his career in subsidised theatre – have the speed and sketchy detail of anecdotes remembered in the pub. Undoubtedly, this was a man who spent a lot of time in pubs. But after reading this book, you come away with a sense that, given more time, Postlethwaite would have chosen a more completist approach to his own story.

Certainly, his attitude to acting was always perfectionist, if not obsessive. At one point,...

The autobiography of Pete Postlethwaite, once called 'the best actor in the world' by Steven Spielberg

In the year or so leading up to his death from cancer this year, Pete Postlethwaite had been working on an autobiography, and this has now appeared, sympathetically ghostwritten by Andy Richardson. It is an extrovert, tender, charming and unselfconscious book, with some extraordinary, hell-raising and hair-raising anecdotes. Reading it revived the sadness I had on hearing about his death, particularly the last, remarkable chapter about his final illness, recounted as it was happening, like a sort of liveblog.

I hadn't quite grasped that before he became a screen icon, Postlethwaite was basically the rock'n'roll wild man of 1970s/80s subsidised theatre: a cheerfully uncaged party animal who made Dennis Hopper look like Margaret Rutherford, yet always showed up on time for rehearsals, where a succession of thin-lipped Oxbridgey directors would find every line of their interpretation,...