I bought my first ever video recorder on 27 October 1990. How can I be so certain of the date? Because I was in Edinburgh on my placement year, I’d just moved into a new flat, discovered that I needed a new TV aerial fitted, and Twin Peaks was starting on BBC2 which I knew was going to be a classic and wanted to record. It aired on Tuesday nights with a repeat on Saturday, and it was the Saturday night repeat that I wanted to watch. I bought a second-hand “Orion” video which didn’t come with a remote, and cost around a hundred pounds. I still have my tapes, although the DVD set of season one is enormously tempting.
But the other reason I know exactly when I got this video was because having bought the video in the morning, I needed something to watch on it in the afternoon, as well as some blank tapes for Twin Peaks later that night. And you know what the first tape I bought was? Ice Cold In Alex.
It’s some time since I last watched my tape (I’d say at least ten years – which does beg the question, why do I buy so many tapes and DVDs), but it’s still a fine film. A few years earlier than my video copy, footage from the film was used in a couple of TV ads. In the mid-eighties there were a series of Holsten Pils adverts in which Griff Rhys Jones was “placed” into old black and white films, one of which was Ice Cold in Alex (one of these ads came in at no. 54 in the top 100 UK ads of all time). Someone from Carlsberg went back to the original film, and saw that when our protagonists eventually arrive in Alex[andria] in the last reel they enter a bar to have the fabled “best lager in the Middle East” promised by John Mills. But in the original film, the lager they are drinking is quite clearly Carlsberg – even served in Carlsberg glasses. The resulting Carlsberg ad was basically untinkered clips of the film. Sylvia Syms said on Wogan that it couldn’t possibly have been a German beer that they were seen to drink at the end. (See my original 1991 post on this subject).
It’s interesting to see that the recently republished novel on which the film was set, details the beer as being a very German Rheingeld beer. I must read this book.
That’s all very nice, but it takes us back to the DVD that I’ve just been watching. Ice Cold in Alex was at first only available as part of a WWII Warners box-set which was full of fine films, but I don’t especially want them all. Just before Christmas I saw it for 7.99 in the HMV sale on its own and snapped it up at that price.
The DVD is disappointing in that it doesn’t have any extras beyond the trailer, but it seems to be presented in a nice wide aspect ratio (the box says 1.66:1, but I don’t think that’s right – I’d need to check to be certain). The struggle is well paced and you could easily see this film being much longer if remade today. I really enjoyed watching it again after so long. And wasn’t Syms attractive in 1958? Just worked out that she was my current age back then, so maybe that explains it a bit.