Sidney Gilliat

Ask a Policeman -- A Will Hay comedy classic

Ask a Policeman -- The mirthful adventures of Police-Sergeant Samuel Dudfoot and his two constables, Albert Brown and Jeremias Harbottle, who stage a fabricated crime-wave to save their jobs---and then find themselves involved in the real thing.

Peter Sellers stars in this comedic caper as criminal mastermind Dodger Lane, who, while serving the last couple weeks of a prison sentence, hatches a plan for the perfect robbery with his two cellmates. With the help of a bogus clergyman named Soapy Stevens, the trio plan to skip out prison, steal a maharajah's jewels and sneak back behind bars just before they're due to be released. Easier said than done!

Jean and Bill are a struggling married couple with Bill trying to scrape a living as a writer. Out of the blue they receive a telegram informing them that Bill's long-lost uncle has died and left them his cinema in the town of Sloughborough. They travel to Sloughborough expecting to sell the cinema to gain a huge inheritance. However, they discover the cinema is falling apart and is run by a comically incompetent. They set out with a plan to sell it but things don't quite go to plan.

Based on real events, this historical drama is set in 19th-century Ireland, when poverty-stricken tenants dispossessed by greedy landowner Capt. Boycott (Cecil Parker) band together to assert their rights. Patriotic farmer Hugh Davin (Stewart Granger) leads the rebels. Choosing nonviolent resistance, the villagers ostracize their nemesis, who squanders his fortune to repair his ruined reputation and wagers what's left on a horse race.

Green For Danger

Green For Danger

In the midst of Nazi air raids, a postman dies on the operating table at a rural English hospital. But was the death accidental? A delightful and wholly unexpected murder mystery, British writer/director Sidney Gilliat’sGreen for Danger features Trevor Howard and Sally Gray as suspected doctors and Alastair Sim in a marvelous turn as Scotland Yard’s insouciant Inspector Cockrill. A screenwriter who had worked with Hitchcock on such films as The Lady Vanishes and Jamaica Inn, Gilliat slyly upends whodunit conventions with wit and style.

Amid the instability of World War II, shy single girl Celia (Patricia Roc) joins the assembly line at an aircraft parts factory, forms unbreakable bonds with her new rooming-house friends and falls in love with a pilot (Gordon Jackson), who marries her before leaving for battle. This heartwarming wartime drama illustrates the importance of working together and boosting each other's morale in times of hopelessness.

A Will Hay comedy classic

A Will Hay comedy classic

An heiress and a photographer become convinced that an elderly nanny has disappeared from their train through the Alps.