Having released DVDs of all the familiar Ealing titles, Optimum is now bringing out largely forgotten ones like this pair that resulted from Ealing boss Michael Balcon hiring documentary film-makers during the Second World War to bring a new realism to the studio's output.

Nine Men, the feature debut of documentarist Harry Watt, director of Night Mail (1936), is a morale-raising propaganda entertainment set in North Africa but shot on a Welsh beach. Character actor Jack Lambert, then serving as an army officer, plays a tough training sergeant inspiring a platoon of recruits by recalling how nine gallant soldiers (a regional cross-section including Ealing stalwart Gordon Jackson) held off a numerically superior Italian force in the Libyan desert.

Charles Crichton's semi-documentary Painted Boats is a quieter affair, both realistic and lyrical, about life on England's canals and a romance between a boy and a girl from rival barge families. Poet Louis MacNeice wrote the eloquent commentary, the graceful photography is by Douglas Slocombe.