Best five films from British Directors (Part One A to J)

Thanks, Sostie. Some good films there not in my poll and one or two names of English directors not yet mentioned.

Ken Adams was the set designer for the early Bond films. Monte Carlo or Bust was by Ken Annakin.

Yes, the camp cult horror Theatre of Blood is Douglas Hickox's best full-length film. He also directed Sitting Target, a Brit gangster movie, which attempts to do for South London what Get Carter (1971) had done for Newcastle the previous year, and Zulu Dawn (1979), a somewhat botched attempt at a prequel to Zulu (1964) which overran its already huge budget and ended his career in features.

My favorite by him is Les Bicyclettes de Belsize (1969), a short which poetically encapsulates in its 29 minutes the all too brief magic of London (the Hampstead area to be more precise) in the Swinging Sixties before drugs and the Vietnam War f*cked everything up. Hickox had started in advertising and maybe he was more at ease with short films than trying to emulate better directors' hits.

Robert Day's first feature was the black comedy The Green Man (1956) featuring Alastair Sim at his best. The screenplay was by Launder and Gilliatt adapted from their own play, and they did not leave the novice director to his own devices. Apparently Basil Dearden took a hand as well. Too many cooks? Apparently not because it was very successful and launched Day on a long career in television.

His few cinema films included Two Way Stretch (1960), a Peter Sellers vehicle, and The Rebel (1961) a failed attempt to turn TV comic Anthony Hancock (then very popular in the UK) into a film star for the US market.

His only cinematic feature from 1974 until his retirement in 1991 was The Man with Bogart's Face (1980). I await mikef6's report on this one.