Karry Best movie of this year hands down!

Artivels Undescribable Perfection

Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

malcolmgsw No I was not born when this film was made but I was a season ticket holder there between 1961 and 2006.I can confirm that this film faithfully reproduces the dressing room areas of the ground.I would like to correct factual errors by other reviewers.Firstly this was not the last game at the stadium before the outbreak of war.This was the game v Sunderland played on September 1939 when Arsenal beat Sunderland 3-1.However the game does not count in the records as the league season was abandoned with the outbreak of war.Secondly it did not take 25 years for Arsenal return to glory.They won the league in 1947 and 1953 and the cup in 1950.This is an a very enjoyable film,which is very nostalgic for Arsenal supporters who fondly remember Highbury.

kidboots Thorold Dickinson, who directed the much superior 1940 version of "Gaslight", also directed this mystery, which was one of the first films where football played a very central part to the plot. It was Arsenal's last official league fixture before World War 11 and several of their players and staff were featured in the film. The Trojan players on the pitch were from Brentford football club.The film begins with a promotional newsreel that introduces players from both Arsenal and the Trojans - both teams are watching but Trojan's star player is missing. John Doyce (Anthony Bushell) is a "swell head", who is romancing Gwen Lee (Greta Gynt - Britain's closest answer to a sex symbol in the 1940s) - but she is engaged to another player, Phillip.As the game on Saturday progresses it is clear that Doyce wants to be the whole show and is not a team player - he is not popular among the other players. At half time he receives a diamond ring in a box - before the end of the match he is dead.Enter the eccentric detective, Inspector Slade (Leslie Banks), who has been called away from organizing the annual policeman's panto to solve the murder of the philandering footballer. Meanwhile Gwen has gone to Doyce's flat collecting photos, letters and anything that may incriminate her. The police are anxious to find her and their search is made easy as she is a top model and her face is in every newspaper and magazine. They are hampered by Gwen's mysterious flatmate Inga (Liane Linden,a Swedish actress, who surprisingly made only a handful of films) who tries to throw them off the scent. Has she something to hide????Everyone has a grudge against Doyce - he was also blackmailing some of his teammates. When Gwen is found dead, with a bottle of digitalis in her hand, Slade instantly suspects murder!!! With an ambiguous newspaper clipping about a body floating in the river Fosse, Slade feels that she was killed because she knew who murdered Doyce.I thought it was an excellent mystery laced with comedy. I did not guess "who done it" but the person was found out in a very unusual way.Did anyone notice the strange news poster that proclaimed "We Warn Hitler's British Friends"!!!Leslie Banks is my favourite British actor. Even though his first film was the classic American horror film "The Most Dangerous Game", he also appeared to advantage in a couple of Alfred Hitchcock films - "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (1934) and "Jamaica Inn" (1939).Highly Recommended.

Spondonman I probably agree with most comments here: a good not great film but still interesting in so many ways, mainly from the historical perspective. The world depicted was on another planet - even though Britain was at war the lunatics would not start to take over the asylum for another 30 years or so.Professional Arsenal take on the amateur Trojans in special football match attended by millions of blue-chins in macs and hats live on BBC radio, and even commentated by legendary voice E.V.H. Emmett borrowed from Gaumont. One of the Trojans, a bit of a womaniser with a lot of enemies falls down dead at the beginning of the second half and the game is abandoned and is simultaneously on to find out whodunit. Slade of Scotland Yard is on the case, an inspector with eccentric and disconcerting habits played fantastically by Leslie Banks in a variety of appropriate hats. Although thousands of the Arsenal fans who saw todays game at the Emirates probably live in houses built before 1940 the "beautiful game" seems to have changed almost beyond recognition - capitalist business pressures seem to have atrophied everything that was once decent about it. The footballers played and the hordes watched as though it was only a game and didn't matter - the rich thugs who go to work on the pitch today present a completely different picture! Anyone fancy going back and practising heading those leather footballs? Surely they would miss the legalised GBH and sliding about in each others phlegm and spit! The mystery itself was simple but well padded out and entertaining, and the acting abilities veered from adequately professional to woodenly amateur.I never bothered taping or buying this because it's on UK Channel 4 every few years – I assume it's always been bought so regularly mainly as a laugh for hooligans by the schedulers and not just for film fans. Use the chance when they provide it to watch this enjoyable and decent film non-cynically instead.

Oct There are several reasons to relish this curio. It was a prentice work by Thorold Dickinson, the Hitchcock assistant and cutter who would shoot "Gaslight" and "The Queen of Spades" before becoming Britain's first professor of film. It is one of the earliest sports movies to feature real sportsmen- acting very woodenly, as befits stiff-upper-lip soccer stars. It is anchored by a mischievously eccentric performance by Leslie Banks, who a few years later was to be the magnificent Chorus of Olivier's "Henry V".Above all, the film lets us glimpse pre-war Britain's, maybe the world's, leading football club. Arsenal FC, the "Gunners", had been raised to pre-eminence by Herbert Chapman, Britain's first modern soccer manager, until his untimely death in 1934. Five years later his team were still on top, coached by his deputy George Allison, who appears in the movie.Highbury Stadium, the setting for the murder, was state of the art. The scene in the treatment room underlines Chapman's far-sighted, scientific approach to caring for his players. He was an early advocate of floodlights and numbered shirts, and even got the name of the local Tube station altered to advertise the Gunners. The film was a massive plug for them; alas, soon after its release the Second World War meant that the lads had to pick up real guns and compete in a more dangerous game. Afterwards Arsenal did not recover its top-of-the-tree status for 25 years. Unwittingly this production memorialises its greatest era.