H. Fowler Mear

Ebenezer Scrooge, the ultimate Victorian miser, hasn't a good word for Christmas, though his impoverished clerk Cratchit and nephew Fred are full of holiday spirit. In the night, Scrooge is visited by spirits of the past, present, and future.

A group of people in an old dark house are terrorized by a mysterious hooded figure dressed in black who proceeds to kill them off one by one.

Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot investigates a mysterious suicide at a country house.

'Colonel thinks he has killed superior while hunting ghost.' (British Film Catalogue)

Black Coffee is a 1931 British detective film directed by Leslie S. Hiscott. Based on the 1930 play Black Coffee by Agatha Christie featuring her famous private detective Hercule Poirot, it stars Austin Trevor as Poirot with Richard Cooper playing his companion Captain Hastings. A famous but hated scientist, Sir Amory, is killed during a house party, and some of his valuable papers are missing. Poirot rapidly determines the cause of death and the motive, then narrows down the suspects to the most likely culprit.

A talented American actress enlists the help of the famed Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, to negotiate a divorce from her husband, Lord Edgware, only to find him the next day stabbed to death in his library. Who would want him dead?

That old theatrical war-horse Bella Donna (previously filmed in America by Alla Nazimova) was resurrected by Britain's Twickenham Studios in 1934. Conrad Veidt stars as sinister Egyptian Mahmoud Baroundi, who even before the film gets under way has left a long trail of ruined women behind him. His latest victim is American girl Mona Chepstow (Mary Ellis), whom Baroundi treats like dirt and makes her like it. The plot centers around a murder by poison, as evidenced by the film's deliberately exotic title. Critics in 1934 praised newcomer Mary Ellis for underplaying her role, but many film fans preferred Nazimova's arm-waving histrionics in the earlier version.

Old Jerusalem: Matathias, spiteful over his lover's illness, spits on Jesus along the road to Calvary, and is cursed to live endlessly until His return. The Crusades, 1150: Matathias, now an anonymous knight, competes for glory in combat and for the wife of a soldier. Palermo, 1290: Matteos Battadios witnesses the death of his young son, leading to conflict with his wife over whether to take comfort in Christianity. Seville, 1560: Dr Matteos Battadios dedicates himself to the treatment and comfort of the poor, but his life and work are endangered by the arrival of the Spanish Inquisition.

A lawyer plans to murder an aristocrat and steal his inheritance.

A framed captain breaks jail and saves his ex-fiancée from blackmail.

A young married couple try to impress a rich relation by posing as maid and butler of the household.

The members of the Popinot family of French champagne tycoons suspect that the widowed head of the family Charles Popinot is keeping a mistress in Rome and generally living a wild life. Unbeknownst to them he has happily re-married and had a son with a much younger woman. She believes he is twenty years younger than he really is and is shocked when his relatives including his mother, grown-up sons and granddaughter arrive in Italy.

An evil doctor and the greedy wife of a rich man plot to poison him so they can get their hands on his money.

A condemned man uses hypnotism on a judge. After the man's death, the judge finds himself acting like the condemned man.

An elderly couple's lodger, a British musician (Ivor Novello), becomes the suspect in a series of killings.

Major John Peel returns to England, following Napoleon's Waterloo defeat, and renews his acquaintance with Lucy Merrall, but she tells him she is engaged to be married. He later learns that, Cravens, the man she is to marry already has a wife. He also learns that Craven cleaned out Lucy's father in a crooked gambling game, and Lucy is paying the price to hold the family home together.

Holmes, retired to Sussex, is drawn into a last case when his arch enemy Moriarty arranges with an American gang to kill one John Douglas, a country gentleman with a mysterious past. Holmes' methods baffle Watson and Lestrade, but his results astonish them. In a long flashback, the victim's wife tells the story of the sinister Vermissa Valley.

At a firm of contractors, a partner is accused of murdering his brother following a takeover bid.

A British comedy film directed by Leslie S. Hiscott

A murder at a country house centres around the whereabouts of a horde of stolen diamonds and the unmasking of people who are not as they at first seem.