1931-1940

Ankara – serdtse Turtsii aka Ankara-The heart of Turkey is a Soviet documentary made for the 10th anniversary of the new Turkish Republic in the year 1934.

The story starts over a pastoral view of Turkey, we see some country people going to the new capital : Ankara. Same time, there is Soviet ships passing thru Bosphorus, Istanbul. Soviet military and diplomatic people reach Ankara by train as young turks and scooters. We watch the city by the air… Some archeological views… The new city, the young people, some folkloric plays, modern buildings, gymnasium, modern art school, university studies and finally 10th anniversary stadium ceremony…Read More »

Synopsis
Widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, Jean Renoir’s masterpiece The Rules of the Game is a scathing critique of corrupt French society cloaked in a comedy of manners. At a weekend hunting party, amorous escapades abound among the aristocratic guests and are mirrored by the activities of the servants downstairs. The refusal of one of the guests to play by society’s rules sets off a chain of events that ends in tragedy. Poorly received upon its release in 1939, the film was severely re-edited, and the original negative was destroyed during World War II. Only in 1959 was the film fully reconstructed and embraced by audiences and critics who now see the film as a timeless representation of a vanishing way of life.Read More »

Bette Davis’ famous walk-out from her home studio of Warner Bros. may have hurt her financially, but in the long run it paid off with bigger parts in better films. Like many Warners films of the period, Marked Woman was “torn from today’s headlines.” Specifically, it was inspired by the recent downfall of gangster Lucky Luciano, who at one time controlled all prostitution activities in New York.

The ladies herein are euphemistically characterized as “night club hostesses,” but when Luciano look-alike Johnny Vanning (Eduardo Cianelli) shows up at a fancy clip-joint to give the girls their marching orders, the audience can tell exactly what’s going on.Read More »

The film, made prior to the full enforcement of the Hays code, is remembered today for its strong sexual content, embodied mostly in the character of the prostitute, Ivy, played by Miriam Hopkins.

The secret of the astonishing transformation scenes was not revealed until decades later (Mamoulian himself revealed it in a volume of interviews with Hollywood directors published under the title The Celluloid Muse).
Hyde enjoys the rain.
Hyde enjoys the rain.

A series of rotating filters matching the make-up was used on the lenses, enabling the make-up to be gradually exposed or made invisible, depending upon the scene.

Wally Westmore’s make-up for Hyde, simian and hairy with tusks influenced greatly the popular image of Hyde in media and comic books (the American Classics Illustrated edition of Jekyll and Hyde clearly based its design of Hyde on the Fredric March movie, although it is more toned down); in part this reflected the novella’s implication of Hyde as embodying repressed evil and hence being semi-evolved or simian in appearance.Read More »

Otona no miru ehon – Umarete wa mita keredo / 大人の見る繪本 生れてはみたけれど

PLOT: Two young brothers become the leaders of a gang of kids in their neighborhood. Ozu’s charming film is a social satire that draws from the antics of childhood as well as the tragedy of maturity.Read More »

Fejos’s Spring Shower is one of the key Hungarian films of the 1930s and 1940s to explore the miserable lives led by maidservants. It tells the story of Mari, an austerely beautiful young peasant girl played by the French star, Annabella. Mari is seduced beneath a flowering tree by the admirer of one of the daughters of the prosperous family for whom she works, becomes pregnant and is cast out.Read More »

Quote:
Bresson’s first film is, totally uncharacteristically, a slapstick comedy, centred around two neighbouring republics, Crogandia and Miremia, and the various disasters that befall the ceremonial unveiling of a statue, the launching of a ship, and the crash-landing of a Miremian pilot in Crogandian territory.Read More »

Quote:
This Russian sci-fi film, an adaptation of the Czech classic novel that gave the world the term “robot,” tells the tale of an idealistic inventor who designs strong and intelligent robots to do human work. Unfortunately, the machines are utterly soulless. When factory bosses begin attempting to replace all people with the new robots, the displaced workers revolt. allmovie.comRead More »

Beyond Caligari: The Films of Robert Wiene (Uli Jung, Walter Schatzberg), pp 166 ff.
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Panik in Chicago was an enormous success in all major cities in Germany, as reported in the press. “The D.L.S. branches in Düsseldorf and Frankfurt a.M. had such record bookings for the film Panik in Chicago during the following two weeks that several new copies had to be distributed in these districts because the available subsidiary copies could not fulfill the demand for screenings. Other reports refer to the unusual popular acclaim the film enjoyed in Leipzig, Halle, Munich, and Stuttgart.Read More »