All things, good and bad, must come to an end, and now this dire truth includes one of the best shows on British television, Foyle’s War. Recently aired on PBS, the final three episodes of the series, which take Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle of Hastings to the very end point of WWII, whence he started out in May of 1940, 18 episodes and seven years earlier, the conclusion has recently been released on DVD by AcornMedia (AcornMedia, $49.99, street date, Tuesday, August 5). The three discs of Foyle’s War: Set 5 are a valediction and a celebration, as well as a long goodbye.

In case you haven’t heard of it, Foyle’s War is a nifty series about a socially reserved investigator in the south coast of England during the war years, but with the crimes he takes on at first seemingly pallid in comparison with the looming war. Michael Kitchen has an Anthony Hopkins-like reticence as Christopher Foyle, as he chews his lip and ruminates quietly over small details. His team is fairly stable: Honeysuckle Weeks as his batman, and Anthony Howell as his assistant. Foyle is widowed, but has a grown son in the RAF.

The first season of four movie-length episodes aired beginning in October of 2002 on Britain’s ITV, and the show was conceived from scratch by Anthony Horowitz, who had just come off of Midsomer Murders. Foyle’s War from the start beautifully recreated wartime England, was superbly photographed, and most important, offered interesting points of information about the times and an unvarnished portrayal of differing British reactions to the conflict, including such now near-forgotten aspects of the Home Front such as the looting of bombed out houses. For example two of the episodes in the second season reveal how some industrialists profited from the war. The series also reveals peculiarities of war time, such as “trekkers,” people who sleep in their cars far outside urban areas in order to avoid being bombed, and a term that sounded to me like “funcourts” (the set isn’t subtitled), which refers to well off Britishers who hide from the war in London by renting digs in B&Bs in obscure places. Curiously, the series has an interestingly bleak view of marriage, nearly each episode portraying a particularly harsh or violent union of one kind or another. The first four episodes covered stories set from May 1940 through summer. Season two covered September 1940 to October. Season three starts in February 1941 and goes to June. America’s season four (different from Britain’s) went from April 1942 to March, 1943. Finally, the last episodes take us from April 1944 to May 1945.

But what was best about Foyle’s War was that the mysteries were damned clever. I have never figured out a single one of them before the denouement, while the narrative journey of getting there was fascinating and entertaining.

I don’t know if there was a huge British bear hug that surrounded Foyle’s War, but there should have been There is a shot in the middle of the second episode in season three of fly-fishing that is so beautifully pastoral I had to believe that English viewers swooned over it. The series takes place in Hastings, location of the Battle of Hastings between King Harold II of England and Duke William of Normandy, a site that looms large in the British lexicon.

Foyle’s War does traffic in certain cliches about England and its emotional stillness and stiff upper lip, but might be the element that would attract more middlebrow English viewers. But creator Anthony Horowitz’s real achievement is to ransack the history of the era to find unusual yet highly indicative subject matter as plot premises.

Fans will recall that in the previous box set ends with Foyle resigning his post. Of course, we knew he would be hired back, and one of the main tasks of “Plan of Attack,” the first of the last three eps, is to reassemble the team, which requires that Foyle be summoned from the task of dictating his memoirs to find out who killed a highly strung and religious aerial map analyst. “Broken Souls” tracks two stories that intersect, one about the problems of returning vets, the other concerning a murder in a psychiatric institution. Finally, “All Clear” deals with a community attempting to adapt back to a non-war world, with a character from a previous episode returning to reveal that the wounds of war are not so easily healed.

Horowitz is a children’s author turned TV-movie writer and from the evidence of his own website, he is a very busy chap. His wife, Jill Green, produces the show and has written a book of her own about Foyle’s War that may appear someday as part of a complete series box set. That the makers of DVDs realize the rising esteem in which Foyle’s War is held finds evidence in the increasing number of supplements that appear on Acorn’s DVDs. Set five includes a 12-minute making-of documentary, along with text-based statements by two key cast members reflecting on the conclusion of the series, and a text-based account of a “real life” Foyle, plus, finally, cast filmographies. They are all indeed helpful but the first thing to do is simply watch the show, let the characters grow on you, and marvel at the cleverness of the mysteries. To that end, I highly recommend starting with Season 1 and going on from there. And, though I don’t usually say this, avoid spoilers at all costs.

Was there any film director who was at the same time both more British and yet more international in spirit than Michael Powell? On the one hand, he made the most bucolic, most pastoral of British films, celebrating the landscape, the character, and ambition of Britain, yet often took on exotic subjects and locations. Only Powell would have made Black Narcissus, or set a war movie in Holland or Canada. He often blended both elements in one film, to the ire of contemporaneous critics. Take The Small Back Room, a petite black and white drama which comes within the midst of several expansive color exocticisms, such as The Red Shoes (1948) and The Elusive Pimpernel (1950). There is hardly a more “British” film than this somber character study set during WWII. Yet Powell interrupts the proceedings at one point to entertain an expressionistic sequence that shows its hero grappling with alcoholism, a sequence with giant Scotch bottles and long shadows that comes across, as many others have pointed out, like the Dali sequence in Spellbound and the DTs in The Lost Weekend.

Of course there wasn’t only Powell, there also Emeric Pressburger, yet it wasn’t this Hungarian emigre who brought continentalism to the films, but Powell himself who was impatient with the stodginess of British cinema. They were one of the great partnerships brought together by an intuitive third party, like Laurel and Hardy and Wilder and Brackett. Pressburger is pegged as the writer half of the partnership, but as Charles Barr asserts convincingly in his audio commentary track for The Small Back Room, Pressburger was also important in the post-production stage, supervising the editing and helping to shape the final film. Pressburger anchored the film front end and back while Powell embarked on flights of fancy.

Powell seems simultaneously British and un-British. His films dwell on proper yet eccentric characters, yet veer toward the exotic. He embraced color, sparkling, smashing color, as an antidote to British grayness, and his films aren’t “smooth” and commercial; for that turn to Hitchcock, or compare Powell’s Contraband to Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent to see the difference between English oddity and a highly attuned commercial sense and vision. Contraband’s scrambled egg story makes it less predictable in a commercial sense but also interesting for all that, since it reflects a sensibility that refutes gross commercialism. As a storyteller, Powell is interested in process, procedures, details, mechanics, of the times and dates of things. In this he is a little like David Lean, whose career interests mirror Powell, going from intimate “small” films to elaborate international tales, though Lean, a location masochist, really went to difficult locales whereas Powell like to construct them on a set. Powell was also interested in “the arts” as a general, uplifting enterprise, like any well-meaning social engineer from the 1950s, and his films can be as “meaningful” or politically pointed as those of Stanley Kramer. Still, Powell’s films represent a stimulating blast from the past yet with a thoroughly modern sensibility, and they are a tonic to anyone feeling bogged down by the sameness and anonymity of modern films.

Based on a recent survey, I’ll guess that Powell is attracting among the best film criticism and writers, or at least was during a phase in the late 1990s. Though the scholars don’t seem to be much interested in Powell’s notion of “the composed film,” which goes unmentioned, for example, in Ian Christie’s excellent, fun Arrows of Desire, you can feel the excitement of the scholars that surges though their prose style and ideas and their attention to details. This wasn’t always the case, as is well known from the critical literature. Movie, my favorite film magazine, placed him in the fifth tier of directors, as part of a general antipathy toward British filmmakers in favor of the more vigorous American artists (with the exception, it appears, of the late Seth Holt). As a youth I inherited this prejudice, which I was recently able to trace back to questions and remarks that Truffaut made to Hitchcock in their interview book. All an aesthetic bigot needs, however, is a dose of Powell films to see that at least in this one filmmaker British filmmaking was in good hands.

To that end, there is an agreeable influx of Powell on DVD, not as much as presumably is available in R2, but enough to help fill out the collection or introduce Powell to newcomers. The earliest films offered up chronologically are two that are part of a package called Classic British Thrillers, from MPI. The offerings are two Powell quota quickies, of which Powell did about 15 in seven years, in this case Red Ensign from 1935, and The Phantom Light, from the same year. Red Ensign concerns a Scots industrialist impeded in his vision for implementing a new ship design by a recalcitrant board and a ruthless competitor. It’s curious how similar the Powell QQs, made without Pressburger, are to the films later made in collaboration with him. Red Ensign features a dynamic brash manipulator who is like a rough sketch of The Red Shoes’s Lemontov, who also steals another guy’s girl. The Phantom Light rhymes with Canterbury Tale. Like it, Light concerns a trio of new visitors to a town where they set forth to solve a local mystery (in this case a haunted lighthouse beam that lures ships to wreckage), whose progenitor has a watchful, though here dire, supervisory view over the village. Red Ensign is also filled with in jokes and quirky passages that appear to reflect attitudes on Powell’s mind about some of his employers and other people. The Phantom Light reveals that Powell is something of a leg man, with its insistent tendency to expose Binnie Hale’s gams through much of the running time.

A third film on the disc is the James Mason vehicle, The Upturned Glass, which the actor produced and which stars his wife as well. It’s a complex thriller from 1947 that juggles time in a rather modern way, anticipating Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, for example, and in its medical crisis passages and philosophy near the end, offers pallid versions of some of the concerns that preoccupied Powell and Pressburger in A Matter of Life and Death, and others. The film has an excellent score by Muir Mathieson and Bernard Stevens.

MPI’s Classic British Thrillers has no extras to speak of, but good transfers (for a contrast compare the film’s to Kino’s washed out Contraband disc, which came out in 2001), and hit the street, if you can find it, on Tuesday, July 29, 2008.

From the QQs, Powell went on to make The Edge of the World, which brought him to the attention of Alexander Korda, who hooked him up with Pressburger for The Spy in Black and Contraband, before assigning the director to help out with colorful, big budgeted The Thief of Bagdad, the kids film that remakes a Douglas Fairbanks silent. Criterion released a double disc version of the film on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008, and it should be a treat for those who favor “sense of wonder” films.

Personally, I’ve never been much interested in fantasy films, animation, or the sense of wonder, which is a matter of personal taste, though I do note that sense of wonder buffs seem to spend more time looking at blurs along blue screen image edges than expressing interest in stories. Thus, for me, most of contemporary cinema is closed off, of complete uninterest, and Thief of Bagdad is just a movie for children. It has a modicum of interest as a film that filmmakers found influential, and bits of Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma, Spielberg, and Lucas can be entertainingly tracked down in it. For example, in its domineering villain and kidnapping of a princess, and its partnership between a childlike kid and a cocksman, it presages Star Wars, and it anticipates other Powell images, such as the all-seeing eye, which is echoed in Powell from the camera obscura in A Matter of Life and Death and in the eye imagery of Peeping Tom.

Enthusiast Bruce Eder gives background in his audio commentary track, and Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese share another one without overlapping. Curiously, in his commitment to showing how much the film influenced him, Coppola doesn’t mention the horse’s head that sits in the lap of the toy obsessed sultan. SoW boys will be satisfied with the video interviews with special effects experts Craig Barron, Dennis Muren, and Ray Harryhausen (who says he once saw the film’s giant spider lying discarded in a corner at the National General studios). But for Powell buffs, the treat is the war propaganda film that Powell helped make immediately after working on Thief, The Lion has Wings. It is antique and creaky, and was evidently screened as a comedy in Germany at the time, but good to have for completists. The disc also features a stills gallery and the original trailer, plus the usual 22-page booklet with cast and crew, chapter titles, transfer information, and two excellent essays, by Andrew Moor and Ian Christie.

Powell and Pressburger were eager to make The 49th Parallel, which was released in 1941, and became a Criterion two-disc set on Tuesday, February 20th, 2007, but which was, surprisingly, set in Canada, as it follows a team of German sailors on the run from an abandoned U boat who crisscross the nation, proselytize, meet resistance, and finally, as their numbers are reduced, face capture. Again it is a typically weird P&P movie, wholly unexpected in tone, setting, and more nuanced in political import than you expect for its time. P$&P essentially remade it from the other, but more “British” perspective a few years later in “One of Our Aircraft is Missing.”

Bruce Eder provides another informative audio commentary track, and the disc also presents a segment of the British news program Arena on Powell and Pressburger, “A Very British Affair,” supervised by Gavin Millar. Besides the trailer, there is also Powell’s further contribution to the war effort, The Volunteer, a recruitment film made with much input from Ralph Richardson, and a lengthy selection of audio tapes of Powell dictating or reading from his autobiography in process.

The most recent Powell film to hit DVDs and the immediate cause for these meditations is the P&P firm’s 1949 film The Small Back Room, one I’d surprisingly never heard of. Based on a novel by Nigel Balchin, one of those numerous British writers who toiled in near obscurity to the rest of the world but whose work enriched Brit Lit all through the 20th Century, the movie essentially tells the story of a man rendered impotent and his eventual achievement of potency. The man is Sammy Rice (Powell regular David Farrar), and fortunately he has the love of a good woman, Susan (the exotic Kathleen Byron) who also works with Sammy in an obscure, non-military science unit during the world (the film is set in 1943, in real time while P&P were making A Canterbury Tale). Sammy’s impotence is symbolized by a “tin foot,” a replacement right out of Maugham for a disablement incurred as a youth. It’s unclear if Sammy and Susan are having sex, though they live together, but she remains steadfast, and also sticks with him through bouts of alcoholism, which helps him forget his foot, and perhaps even his homosexual tendencies, which are hinted at obliquely in a nightclub scene (gay guilt wrestling also played a role in the book on which The Lost Weekend was based). Sammy’s specialty is fuses, and one main plot threat has a young soldier, Capt. Dick Stuart (the once venerable Michael Gough), urging Sammy to help with a series of cunning bombs dropped by the Germans that have been killing children. The extremely tense final movement of the film has Sammy finally coming up against one of the small cunning German explosives (those who recall the television series Danger UXB from 1979 will have a sense of the scene’s flavor). Naturally, a triumph over the phallic shaped device will also restore Sammy’s potency, but leave it to Powell and Pressburger to make even their “happy ending” ambiguous and perplexing.

The Small Back Room is a throwback, in a sense, to the kind of British film that people love and which P&P didn’t really make, set in a rain swept yet cozy world of cramped apartments and bureaucratic jobs, where the spirit of England is kept high despite privation and tormentous neuroses that don’t stop for the war. It’s a Brief Encounter sort of world, but P&P wouldn’t settle for such a thing. For one, they would steam it open like a rancid envelope and find out what’s really inside, and for another, they would find every opportunity to expand its playing field with passages of crazy visual extravagance. Over several viewings The Small Back Room grew to be a rich, nuanced work, and clearly one of Powell and Pressburger’s best films.

Supplements are a tad minimal for this film compared to the other recent Powell discs, but lead off with an excellent audio commentary track by film scholar Charles Barr, for whom Powell is one of several specialities. Barr is the first person I’ve heard mention average shot lengths in a track, and there is a nice moment when he pays tribute to the late Raymond Durgnat, one of my favorite writers and for a long time the lone voice of support for Powell amid critics of the 1960s.

Supplements include again audio tapes of Powell dictating or reading from his autobiography in progress, of which the chapter about a deleted scene is especially interesting, plus a video interview with Chris Challis, the cinematographer. The 16-page insert has an essay by Sight and Sound editor Nick James. The Small Back Room hits the streets on Tuesday, August, 19, 2008.

I’ve always wanted to write Roger Ebert and contribute one of those cliches he collects for his little movie glossary column (professional discretion and the fact that he probably already has my ideas in his list have prevented me). I’ve got two or three but the other day I was reminded of one of them while watching Mongol. In this cliche, whenever there is a blood oath drawn, the initiator takes a knife and attacks his hand like Jack the Ripper leaping upon Mary Jane Kelly, leaving a gash as big as the Joker’s grin on his palm, a cut that would take most of us to the ER for 36 stitches. There is a blood oath in Mongol. There is also a kid who falls through the ice of a frozen lake, a shot of a sunset with the sudden appearance of nomads over there at the right hand side of the frame marching into view, and many, many scenes of somber eating rituals. This is also a movie with repetitive stress syndrome. Every time time you tune back in, the Mongol of the title, Temudjin, the later Genghis Khan, is someone’s prisoner, yoked to a pillory for a few years of humiliation, before he escapes again, finds his family, has a ceremonial bowl of yak milk, and then goes off to unite the Mongols. Mongol is a bore, but it has a useful function as an anthology of all the cliches of modern movies, the sort of filmic affect that we seemingly require from movies these days in order for them to feel like movies to us, from the succession of short, unresolved bio-pic like scenes, to the gross and childish battle scenes with the silent flicker images. Then there is the music, god-awful, inappropriate, always running counter to what the scene seems to say or want, and an added dash of chloroform to an already deadly presentation. Naturally, director and writer Sergei Bodrov promises two more. Mongol is currently playing at the Hollywood Theatre.