(Basil Dearden, 1954, 99 mins)
Release date: 19 August 2025
Limited Edition Blu-ray (US premiere)
Robert Morley (Hammer Films’ The Old Dark House), Kay Walsh (David Lean’s Oliver Twist), Bill Owen (The Ship That Died of Shame), and Honor Blackman (Jason and the Argonauts) lead the cast of The Rainbow Jacket, a thrilling exposé of the horse racing world from Ealing Studios.
Disgraced champion jockey Sam (Owen) takes eager young racing enthusiast Georgie (Fella Edmonds) under his wing. As Georgie’s talent becomes evident, Sam sees a chance of redemption... if he can resist temptation.
From the celebrated director-producer team of Basil Dearden and Michael Relph (The Gentle Gunman, Saraband for Dead Lovers), and scripted by T E B Clarke (Passport to Pimlico, The Blue Lamp), The Rainbow Jacket is a thrilling tale of ambition and integrity.
INDICATOR LIMITED EDITION BLU-RAY SPECIAL FEATURES
• High Definition remaster
• Original mono audio
• Sweet Redemption (2025): director and screenwriter James Dearden introduces his father’s work
• Racing at Ealing (2021): a look at the film’s production, featuring interviews with various Ealing crew members
• Jockey of the Jacket (2021): actor Fella Edmonds recalls his experience of making the film
• Original theatrical trailer
• Image galleries: promotional and publicity material, and dialogue continuity script
• New and improved English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• Limited edition exclusive booklet with a new essay by Robert Murphy, archival profiles of Honor Blackman, Bill Owen, and Fella Edmonds, an archival production report, extracts from the film’s pressbook, and full film credits.
• US premiere on Blu-ray
• Limited edition of 3,000 copies for the US
• All features subject to change
On a technical level, this is a good example of a Technicolor film that's merely been remastered, versus one that's had a full-blown restoration from the original three-strip negatives. This looks pretty decent, but Saraband for Dead Lovers is an absolute revelation in every sense.
Sadly, if unsurprisingly, the gargantuan cost of full-scale three-strip Technicolor restoration (which doesn't just involve three times as much cleanup as for a normal feature but also the painstaking challenge of matching up negatives that will almost certainly have shrunk over time, but at different rates) means that we're never realistically going to get that treatment applied to most Technicolor films, and it's unlikely that something like The Rainbow Jacket would ever make the grade. But it certainly looks as good as it realistically can do on home video.
