Films with: Harwood, Ronald

Dresser

Film adaptation of Harwood's play about an aging English actor/manager, his dresser, and their theatre company touring England during WWII. Both the leader of the company and his dresser are essential to each other. However, the devoted dresser struggles to support the unreasonable demands of the tyrannical head of the company, during the London blitz.

DVD 4468

Love in the time of cholera

Florentino is a poetry-writing telegraph operator who lives in a Central American city. He spots the graceful Fermina while making his rounds, and finds himself in love. While Florentino's mother encourages the courtship, Fermina's father absolutely forbids it. Years pass, and the well-born Dr. Urbino treats Fermina for a case of cholera. When Urbino proposes, Fermina accepts. A distraught Florentino decides to wait. With the help of his uncle, he amasses wealth of his own. All the while, he drifts from woman to woman, never really finding what he is looking for in a woman. After five decades of waiting, he gets a second chance to win Fermina's heart.

DVD 5482

Oliver Twist

A slightly darker version of the classic Charles Dickens tale. After living in poor conditions, Oliver runs away to the streets of London. There he meets a gang of pickpockets and soon Oliver's life is changed forever.

DVD 4501

Pianist

Based on the memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew, who was a brilliant pianist. He watched as his family was shipped off to Nazi labor camps. He managed to escape and lived for years in the ruins of Warsaw, hiding from the Nazis.

DVD 1780

Quartet

The rumor circling the halls is that Beecham House (the home for retired musicians) is soon to play host to a new resident. Word is, it's a star. Reginald, Wilfred and Cecily are in for a special shock when the new arrival turns out to be none other than their former singing partner, Jean. Her subsequent career as a star soloist, and the ego that accompanied it, split up their long friendship and ended her marriage to Reggie, who takes the news of her arrival particularly hard.

DVD 9662

Ronald Harwood's The dresser

One fateful night in a small English regional theatre during World War II, a troupe of touring actors stage a production of Shakespeare's "King Lear." Bombs are falling, sirens are wailing, the curtain is up in an hour but the actor/manager "Sir" who is playing Lear is nowhere to be seen. His dresser "Norman" must scramble to keep the production alive but will Sir turn up in time? And if he does, will he be able to perform that night?

DVD 12252

Scaphandre et le papillon Diving bell and the butterfly/

The French editor of Elle magazine, Jean-Dominique Bauby, who, in 1995 at the age of 43, suffered a stroke that paralyzed his entire body, except his left eye. Using that eye to blink out his memoir, Bauby eloquently described the aspects of his interior world, from the psychological torment of being trapped inside his body to his imagined stories from lands he'd only visited in his mind.

DVD 5512

Taking sides

After Hitler took over power in 1933, many Jewish artists were forced to leave Germany. Wilhelm Furtwängler choose to stay. Though never a member of the party, he was a receipient of honors associated with party membership. However, the conductor often used his position and contacts to save hundreds of Jewish musicians from concentration camps. When U.S. Major Steve Arnold is tasked with the pre-trial investigations, his aim is to prove that the conductor's genius contributed to the Nazi propaganda, while Furtwängler insisted he stayed to bring comfort to the German people with his music.

DVD 3036