Acting
Kenneth Griffith (12 October 1921 – 25 June 2006) was a Welsh actor and documentary filmmaker.
Can there be a bleaker portrait of a life half-lived? Cinematic treatment of poet R.S. Thomas's story of Twm, the "shy soul" who lives and dies alone in the "grim house nailed to the mountainside", oblivious to the interest shown in him by young girls in the village and to his own isolation as he scratches a living from the farm.
When an English cartographer arrives in Wales to tell the residents of the Welsh village of Ffynnon Garw that their 'mountain' is only a hill, the offended community sets out to remedy the situation.
The sinking of the Titanic is presented in a highly realistic fashion in this tense British drama. The disaster is portrayed largely from the perspective of the ocean liner's second officer, Charles Lightoller. Despite numerous warnings about ice, the ship sails on, with Capt. Edward John Smith keeping it going at a steady clip. When the doomed vessel finally hits an iceberg, the crew and passengers discover that they lack enough lifeboats, and tragedy follows.
Eden Philpotts' "provincial" comic novel and play The Farmer's Wife was first filmed in the silent era by Alfred Hitchcock. The 1940 talkie version was directed by Leslie Arliss, son of stage star George Arliss. The story remained the same: A middle-aged widower attempts to select a wife from his rural district's eligible females (Basil Sydney). Three unsuccessful dalliances later, the farmer settles for his housekeeper, whom the audience has been rooting for all along. The Farmer's Wife is a prime example of the sort of fare that struck a proper chord with British filmgoers, but whose appeal would be lost to any other nationality.
A British multinational company seeks to overthrow a vicious dictator in central Africa. It hires a band of (largely aged) mercenaries in London and sends them in to save the virtuous but imprisoned opposition leader who is also critically ill and due for execution. Just when the team has performed a perfect rescue, the multinational does a deal with the vicious dictator leaving the mercenary band to escape under their own steam and exact revenge.
A plastic surgeon and his nurse join a bizarre circus to escape from the police. Here he befriends deformed women and transforms them for his "Temple of Beauty". However, when they threaten to leave, they meet with mysterious accidents.
Naive Stanley Windrush looks for a career in a family business. Much to his dismay, he finds work at a munitions factory where he has to start from the bottom, while both the management and the labor union use him as a tool in their fight for power.
Two CIA bunglers botch a Soviet defection, then both sides mark them for termination.
A vicious gang of crooks plan to steal the wages of a local factory, but their carefully laid plans go wrong, when the factory employs an armoured van to carry the cash. The gang still go ahead with the robbery, but when the driver of the armoured van is killed in the raid, his wife plans revenge, and with the police closing in, the gang start to turn on each other.
Set in the fictional village of "Ogw" in the valleys of south-east Wales. After her father Jack suffers a stroke Annie Mary Pugh is forced to take care of him but uses the circumstances to emancipate herself and find the courage to sing once again.
When in 1776 the United States of America broke away from Britain, a country without a written constitution, with an established Church and an unelected House of Lords, Thomas Paine, an artisan from Thetford in Norfolk, England, made a call for freedom that is still reverberating around the world today.
An account of two battles between Zulus and the British at Isandhlwana and Rorke's Drift, from the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War, written and presented by Kenneth Griffith. Mr. Griffith, a Welshman, presents the history of British politics and policies which led to the confrontation between the British Army and the Zulus, reading letters from the soldiers, diary entries from the officers, as well as observations from the Zulu warriors and their king.
A documentary in which Kenneth Griffith, actor and filmmaker, endeavors to find the truth behind the banning of two of his films, one on the life of Michael Collins and the other on Badon Powell. Featuring interviews with the legendary 60 Minutes journalist Morley Safer, actor Peter O'Toole, Jeremy Isaacs, Benny Green, and William Deedes.
The 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin was an armed rebellion by Irish republicans against British rule in their country. Sixty years later, Kenneth Griffith interviews nine of those who took part in that historic event. This documentary was filmed in 1976 and completed in 1978. However, it was suppressed from being shown on television.
A documentary on the Boer War presented by Kenneth Griffith who assumes the roles of the protagonists in the struggle. He tells how gold-diggers were drawn to South Africa, and in a scathing critique of British involvement in the war, Griffith describes key moments in the conflict and assesses the war's influence on South Africa's future. The actions of Neville Chamberlain and British army commanders come under close scrutiny, and the film also includes footage of interviews with veterans of the Boer War conducted by Griffith himself.