Tripwire Reviews StudioCanal’s Two-Way Stretch And Heavens Above 4K Restorations

Breaking Out

Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows reviews StudioCanal’s Two-Way Stretch and Heavens Above 4K Restoration out now…

Two-Way Stretch 4K

Director: Robert Day
Stars: Peter Sellers, David Lodge, Bernard Cribbins, Wilfred Hyde White

Heavens Above 4K

Directors: John Boulting/ Roy Boulting
Stars: Peter Sellers, Cecil Parker, Isabel Jeans

2025 marks the centenary of the birth of Peter Sellers, arguably the biggest comedy star to come out of England after the war. So StudioCanal has decided to reissue two of his most notable earlier films: Two-Way Stretch (1960) and  Heavens Above (1963) saw him playing two very different characters, displaying his onscreen versatility and adaptability.

In Two-Way Stretch, he plays lag Dodger Lane, a criminal who has learnt how to play the system, in a cell with all mod cons. With fellow convicts Jelly Knight (Lodge) and Lennie Price (Bernard Cribbins), he cooks up a plot with Soapy Stevens (Hyde-White pretending to be a member of the clergy) to break out of prison for one night and steal a haul of valuable diamonds. Of course, nothing goes quite to plan. Two-way Stretch is a film with a fairly simple conceit but thanks to the quality of the cast that also includes Lionel Jeffries as the malevolent but incompetent chief prison officer Crout and Maurice Denham as the prison’s soft touch prison governor just called The Governor here, it is a far better film that it should have been. Sellers is magnificent as ever, offering a sleazy louche performance that makes it impossible to dislike Lane despite his criminal leanings. Hyde White is also fantastically questionable as Soapy Stevens, a man who hides his disreputability behind his posh demeanour and his smarmy fake piety.

The extras here are decent enough, with an excerpted version of a 1992 Channel 4 documentary about Sellers and a production documentary which does shed a little extra light on the film’s making. The 4K restoration does give us a sharper picture quality and an enhanced experience. Two-Way Stretch shows just why Sellers was a bigscreen superstar.

Jumping ahead three years to Heavens Above, a Boulting Brothers film about Brummie vicar Rev John Smallwood (Sellers) who through a case of mistaken identity is sent to a very posh parish, the town of Orbiston Parva. Once there, he attempts to improve the lot of the town’s poor through a series of well-meaning but misguided schemes with the assistance of Lady Despard (Jeans), the wealthiest woman in the town.

Whereas Two-Way Stretch is a broad comedy, this is very much a satire. Heavens Above is a film which takes a gentle pop at humanity as well as the church of England and like Two-Way Stretch, it is Sellers as its protagonist that acts as its focal point. It also displays his versatility as an actor as his portrayal of the naïve vicar here engages with viewers the same way that rogue Lane did in the other film. The supporting cast from the likes of Cecil Parker as the Archdeacon, Ian Carmichael as the rather hapless other Rev Smallwood and Eric Sykes as patriarch of the gypsy family Harry Smith lends Heavens Above some extra gravitas as well. There’s even a small role from Black US actor Brock Peters here who went on to have a long career in film. The film does become more and more outlandish when Smallwood is forced out of the town and into a new role as a face-saving exercise from the church. But it is Sellers that keeps the viewer engaged although the direction here from the Boulting Brothers is more sophisticated than on Two-Way Stretch.

The 4K restoration really brings this film to life on the small screen too with details that may have been missed before really coming to the fore here.

The extras add a little bit to proceedings with a documentary offering a little bit of extra insight into its making and a short documentary taken from a longer one made in the 1990s about its production, offering a few intriguing snippets about Sellers and his working methods.

Both Two-Way Stretch and Heavens Above 4K are worth watching for fans of Sellers and of quality British cinema.

JOEL MEADOWS