1931-1940

Frank S. Nugent wrote:
THE SCREEN; At the Paramount

Carole Lombard and Fred MacMurray skip through the formular devices of “Swing High, Swing Low” (née “Burlesque”) with their usual ease at the Paramount, raising a routine story to a routine-plus picture. The plus is extremely small, sometimes being almost invisible. We recall being impressed by the photography of the Panama locks, by a shot of Mr. MacMurray with a beard, by Charles Butterworth’s tropical wardrobe of overcoat and muffler. The rest is so much surplusage: a thin excuse for a film that requires an hour and thirty-five minutes to trace the rise, the fall and the potential ascendancy of a trumpet king.Read More »

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Henrik Ibsen’s 1877 play Samfundets Stotter (Pillars of Society) was the source for this German drama. The plot centers upon a flagrant case of municipal corruption, carried out by the town’s “finest” people. The selfishness of the elite results in widespread tragedy, yet still the perpetrators hypocritically blame everyone but themselves. The director of Stutzen der Gesellschaft was Detlef Sierck, who as “Douglas Sirk” would later expose the peccadilloes of the rich and powerful in such American films as Written on the Wind. The Ibsen original was earlier adapted to the screen in 1915, with H. B. Walthall in the lead.Read More »

A rookie reporter receives bribes from gangsters to suspend negative press.Read More »

An early short film by Douglas Sirk (Detlef Sierck) which takes a satirical look at dubious business practices during the Weimar Republic.Read More »

Practically a template for post-war Ozu — by Ozu’s (slightly) senior colleague at Shochiku. Shimazu’s millieu here (reasonably well off middle class) and domestic dilemmas presented are closer to late Ozu than pre-war Ozu is. Shin Saburi is a salaryman married to Kuniko Miyake (an Ozu mainstay from the 40s through the 60s), with a younger sister (Michiko Kuwano). Saburi has job problems — and has to worry about marriage prospects of his sister (who is a westernized office girl). Whenever the family runs into problems, they turn to family friend Chishu Ryu (playing a part very like that he plays in Ozu’s Early Spring). The solution to the family’s woes, however, betrays its era — a move to Japanese-occupied Manchuria as colonists.Read More »

Adaptation of Molière’s comedy “The Imaginary Invalid”, about a hypochondriac, his doctor, his daughter and her lover.Read More »

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Essentially a drama about the lives of the Hungarian Hortobagy plains horsemen and peasants, with a slight fictional storyline to hang it all on. The coming of ‘machines’ threatens the way of life of these peoples, and most of them want no contact with tractors or even bicycles. But not everyone agrees.Read More »

A couple goes to file for divorce after they argue about two guests at their house.Read More »

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In the second half, we discover that Toyomi is pregnant and while Shintaro and Yurie are on their extended honeymoon, she bears his child, a girl named Kiyoko.Read More »