StudioCanal Adds 2 More Ealing Studios Films To Vintage Classics

It’s been a busy few weeks for fans of Studiocanal’s Vintage Classics Collection when it comes to new releases. Today things got busier as Studiocanal have announced 2 more, Frieda and The Divided Heart. Two moving melodramas that tackle the personal cost of war, particularly for women, in the aftermath of World War II.

FRIEDA, produced by Michael Balcon for Ealing Studios and directed by Basil Dearden (Victim, The Blue Lamp), stars Mai Zetterling (Torment), David Farrar (Went The Day Well), Glynis Johns (Mary Poppins), Flora Robson (Fire Over England), Albert Lieven (The Life And Death of Colonel Blimp).

Frieda (Mai Zetterling), a German girl, helps English Robert (David Farrar) to escape from a German prisoner-of-war camp and in return he marries her so she can obtain a British passport even though he does not love her. When returning to Robert’s small English hometown, Frieda is met with hostile anti-German sentiment which is only worsened when her brother (Albert Lieven), a former Nazi and now Polish soldier arrives. What follows is a terrible awakening for Frieda who, deeply in love with her husband, cannot accept when Robert turns against her.

Extras
–NEW Strength And Weakness: Matthew Sweet On Frieda
–NEW Looking Back at Frieda
-Behind the Scenes Stills Gallery

Frieda is released on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital from 4th July and is available to pre-order HERE

THE DIVIDED HEART is directed by Charles Crichton (The Lavender Hill Mob, The Avengers, A Fish Called Wanda) and stars Cornell Borchers (Never Say Goodbye), Yvonne Mitchell (Woman in a Dressing Gown, The Queen of Spades), Michel Ray (Lawrence of Arabia) and Armin Dahlen.

Franz and Inga Hartl (Armin Dahlen, Cornell Borchers) have brought up Toni (Michel Ray), who they believe to be a war orphan, as their own child; he is ten years old when two officials from the International Refugee Organization visit them with the news that his actual mother Sonja (Yvonne Mitchell), a Yugoslavian woman, is alive and desperately wants him back. This heart-breaking drama between two women that both call Toni their son is based on a true story of a child, whose mother was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp and, like 300 other babies and young children from Slovenia who were deemed “racially worthy”, was sent to Germany and adopted in a Nazi program known as Lebensborn. Widely admired on its release THE DIVIDED HEART won three British Academy Film Awards.