In the second half of the 1960s, Dearden and Relph worked together on a series of big-budget films aimed at the world market and made for Hollywood companies operating in Britain. They were all in colour, extensively used exotic foreign locations and featured international stars. With the single exception of the imperial epic Khartoum, none of the films has attracted critical attention. Alexander Walker's weighty treatment of the cinema in Britain in the 1960s, Hollywood England, has nothing at all to say about Dearden and Relph after their black-and-white social dramas of the early 1960s; Robert Murphy's more scholarly examination, Sixties British Cinema, acknowledges the existence of the films, but shows no particular interest in them beyond their ‘glossy cosmopolitanism’ (1992: 43); while the official post-war history of United Artists (UA) by Tino Balio (1987) ignores the three films Dearden and Relph made for the company between 1964 and 1966, despite a careful examination of UA's production policy in Europe in the period.