The Battle of the Sexes – Blu-ray + DVD

Comedy genius Peter Sellers gives one of his greatest performances in this famously subtle, sharp-edged satire on sexual politics in the 1950s workplace, directed by Ealing legend Charles Crichton (The Lavender Hill Mob, A Fish Called Wanda).

The sleepy staff of Macpherson’s traditional Scottish tweed firm get a rude awakening when young Macpherson (Robert Morley, Theatre of Blood) hires feisty American efficiency expert Angela Barrows (Constance Cummings, Blithe Spirit). She advocates new-fangled horrors like automation and – ghastliest of all – ‘synthetic fibres’. Can nothing stop her? Nothing, perhaps but for meek accountant Mr Martin (Sellers). Beneath a placid surface, still waters run deep; to balance the books, he must erase the ‘error’…

Extras
• Presented in High Definition and Standard Definition
• Hancock’s Hard Boiled Eggs: Sellers’ contemporary, the Lad from East Cheam himself, Tony Hancock, appears with The Battle of the Sexes’ Patricia Hayes in this cracking collection of eleven egg-cellent Egg Marketing Board adverts from 1966
• A Ghost of a Chance (1968, 50 mins): bonus feature-length fun for all the family as Sellers’ chum Graham Stark stars with Ronnie Barker, Patricia Hayes, Jimmy Edwards, Bernard Cribbin and Terry Scott in a corking Children’s Film Foundation comedy
• Images of Edinburgh in Archive Film: an atmospheric selection of rarely-seen short films capturing Scotland’s capital in the first half of the twentieth century, from the vaults of the BFI National Archive
• Woolly Wonders: Evocative 1940s archive films of traditional Scottish cloth-making, shot in colour by the great Jack Cardiff
• Image gallery