Films with very small casts

[Reed John]

Films with very small casts

Were you not aware of the premise?

[WOM]

Films with very small casts

Yeah. I'm just fukkin' witcha.

[sw2borshch]

Films with very small casts

Hell In The Pacific & Enemy Mine.

[Heliotrope]

Films with very small casts

Oh, that reminds me of one of my mother's favorite movies, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, which has only two cast members: Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum.

[Benjm]

Films with very small casts

Not exactly a film, but my aunt who lives in Australia told me that Dinner For One has a loyal Christmas/New Year audience down under. I had always thought that Germany was alone in this enthusiasm.

[Reed John]

Films with very small casts

Had to look that up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinner_for_One

It's stuff like this that makes other peoples think Germans are weird.

But on that same page I saw that nearly half of Sweden watches this every year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_All_of_Us_to_All_of_You

[Benjm]

Films with very small casts

Donald Duck seems to be a big draw in the Nordic countries. I suppose that after a week stuck indoors with their families, by New Years Eve people relate strongly to his temperament.

[Daze]

Films with very small casts

Sex, Lies and Videotape only has the four main cast members does it not?

Purple Rain is fantastic.

[Pietro Paolo Virdis]

Films with very small casts

Dinner for One has been on Swedish television every New Years Eve since 1976.

[Reed John]

Films with very small casts

Why New Years Eve?

[Pietro Paolo Virdis]

Films with very small casts

I dunno. It has a New Years Eve feel to it with a posh dinner and I reckon it's our It's a wonderful life but on New Years instead.
According to Guinness Book of records it's the single most repeated TV-show around the world.

[Freestyling buck wilding Stijn Stijnen]

Films with very small casts

And the star is an Englishman who has never really been heard of in England.

Freddie Frinton

I was working with a few Danes who mentioned it to me.

It's also shown in Germany every year, and most of Europe, but never in England.

[Wouter D]

Films with very small casts

tactictoe wrote: Freddie Frinton

Fixed.

[Pietro Paolo Virdis]

Films with very small casts

Why not watch it here. It' only ten minutes long. It's an English classic to many people outside UK, on par with Monty Python sketches really as far as exposure goes.

It's claimed that hardly anyone in England has seen it so you can be one of the few if that's true.

[Wouter D]

Films with very small casts

Pietro Paolo Virdis wrote: Why not watch it here.

Because, ironically, here in Germany YouTube tells me "This video is not available in your country".

[salt n shake]

Films with very small casts

I've got Dinner for One - but only because a well-travelled friend brought it back on region-free DVD from a trip to Europe, where everyone had assumed that as an Englishman he would know it.

I quite like it, and we've been giving it a Christmas-time airing.

[Stumpy Pepys]

Films with very small casts

tactictoe wrote: And the star is an Englishman who has never really been heard of in England.

Freddie Frinton

Freddie Frinton was fairly well-known (according to my dad).

It's just this particular film isn't (at least in the UK).

[Amor de Cosmos]

Films with very small casts

He was one of my Mum's favourites. She dragged us to see him in summer gaiety in Bridlington one year. He was always the same character, essentially a one joke clown. Ten minutes, once a year, would be about right.

[Freestyling buck wilding Stijn Stijnen]

Films with very small casts

Stumpy Pepys wrote:

And the star is an Englishman who has never really been heard of in England.

Freddie Frinton

Freddie Frinton was fairly well-known (according to my dad).

It's just this particular film isn't (at least in the UK).

See, for something that's as much of an institution across europe as what dinner for one claerly has become, I find it very surprising that he isn't better known in his homeland, and not just amongst those over the age of seventy is what I should have written.

Hell, if it wasn't for a random conversation with four Danish guys whom I was attending a first-aid course with, I'd never have heard of it either.

[sw2borshch]

Films with very small casts

I've got a dish that can pick up German telly and once watched it three and a half times on Silvester as it seemed to be staggered across a bunch of channels. Now I'll never need to bother again.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Films with very small casts

I find it very surprising that he isn't better known in his homeland, and not just amongst those over the age of seventy is what I should have written.

Eh! Who's over seventy?

[Benjm]

Films with very small casts

Amor de Cosmos wrote: He was one of my Mum's favourites. She dragged us to see him in summer gaiety in Bridlington one year. He was always the same character, essentially a one joke clown. Ten minutes, once a year, would be about right.

Documentaries about music hall and vaudeville often suggest that performers could sustain lengthy careers from one trick or turn for as long as there were enough venues that they didn't have to return anywhere too often. Cinema and TV must have hit those niche acts even harder than they did the circuit as a whole.

Part of me is quite envious of young Amor catching the last holdouts of that world in their seaside redoubts, but it is probably more interesting in retrospect than the reality would have been at the time. My late father-in-law used to enjoy one music hall revival company's shows but, on the occasions that we accompanied him, they were dire.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Films with very small casts

I guess it was exciting because it was a bit of an occasion. We only went to see live productions a couple times a year — Summer on the pier and panto at Christmas. By the time I was twelve or thirteen I'd rather have been haunting the penny arcades or thumbing furtively through McGill postcards. Still there was a buzz about it even then, in a 'roar of the greasepaint smell of the crowd' kind of fashion. I suppose the equivalent today would be being taken to see some minor 70s band by your Mum and Dad.

My late father-in-law used to enjoy one music hall revival company's shows but, on the occasions that we accompanied him, they were dire.

Oh yeah. At least the End of Pier shows weren't emulating anything. They were authentically naff.

[Jon]

Films with very small casts

Saw Buried last week with Ryan Reynolds (and no-one else).

Excellently directed by the Spanish director, Rodrigo Cortes. It's quite Hitchcockian. Reynolds wakes up trapped inside a coffin. Luckily there is a fully charged and working mobile phone in there too or the film would be a lot shorter