A jolly French film, with a rich vein of satire, is at the little Acme Theatre on Union Square under the name of “Mirages de Paris.”
In this fast-moving fantasy of the unsophisticated student (Mlle. Francell) who escapes from a boarding school to become, after many trials and tribulations, the “toast of Paris,” Fedor Ozep has managed to combine much of the technic of his native Russia with the flair for the ridiculous supposed to belong to all true Parisians.Read More »
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The horror of the faces: That is the overwhelming image that remains from a recent viewing of the restored version of “M,” Fritz Lang’s famous 1931 film about a child murderer in Germany. In my memory it was a film that centered on the killer, the creepy little Franz Becker, played by Peter Lorre. But Becker has relatively limited screen time, and only one consequential speech–although it’s a haunting one. Most of the film is devoted to the search for Becker, by both the police and the underworld, and many of these scenes are played in closeup. In searching for words to describe the faces of the actors, I fall hopelessly upon “piglike.”Read More »
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Bob (Leslie Banks) and Jill Lawrence (Edna Best) are on a winter sports holiday with their teenage daughter. When their friend Louis Bernard is shot whilst dancing with Jill, he tells Bob of an assassination about to take place in London.
Fearing that their plot will be revealed, the assassins kidnap their daughter in order to keep the Lawrence’s quiet.
Bob and Jill return to London and take matters into their own hands.
In this movie we can beside Leslie Banks and Edna Best also see Peter Lorre.Read More »
This is an anti-Fascist short Rossellini made in 1940.
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La vispa Teresa was rejected and, although Ferrara said that Il tacchino was distributed by Scalera under its working title, “La perfida Albione,” there were no press notices, and no one outside of Scalera is known to have seen it. According to Ferrara, Rossellini told him it was a satire in which “Perfidious Albion,” a big turkey representing England, goes around pecking at the hens representing the nations of Europe, until defied by a rooster representing Italy. “Rossellini detested it,” said Ferrara, “[though his] genius was such that he could achieve extraordinary effects out of nothing. He used to tell me, ‘It’s the only time that, through my weakness, I made a work of propaganda.’”Read More »
The third and definitive film adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s fantasy, this musical adventure is a genuine family classic that made Judy Garland a star for her heartfelt performance as Dorothy Gale, an orphaned young girl unhappy with her drab black-and-white existence on her aunt and uncle’s dusty Kansas farm.
Dorothy yearns to travel “over the rainbow” to a different world, and she gets her wish when a tornado whisks her and her little dog, Toto, to the Technicolorful land of Oz. Having offended the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton), Dorothy is protected from the old crone’s wrath by the ruby slippers that she wears.Read More »
Gary Cooper and George Raft play a couple of seafaring buddies in this moral adventure
saga set during the 1840s, when the slave-trade had been outlawed by the British
Empire but was still a reality on the high seas. In its depiction of the friendship between
two men, one of questionable character, the film bears some similarities to Hathaway’s
Spawn of the North, made the following year.Read More »
RKO Pictures launched what could have been one of the great detective series in 1932, when Edna May Oliver starred in “The Penguin Pool Murder”. As Stuart Palmer’s elderly schoolteacher turned sleuth Hildegarde Withers, Oliver was one of the screen’s most liberated women, defying Police Inspector Oscar Piper (James Gleason) to track down killers with little regard for his pride or her own safety. Although Oliver left the series after only two more installments, leading to a serious decline in quality for the films, her first two outings in particular were years ahead of their time, thanks to director George Archainbaud’s uniquely visual narrative skills and for the films’ depiction of an older, independent woman.
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David Huxley is waiting to get a bone he needs for his museum collection. Through a series of strange circumstances, he meets Susan Vance, and the duo have a series of misadventures which include a leopard called Baby.
Rob Nixon, Kerryn Sherrod & Jeff Stafford wrote:
Why BRINGING UP BABY is Essential
In the eyes of many critics, Bringing Up Baby is the quintessentialscrewball comedy, incorporating all the standard elements of the genre such as themadcap heiress, a hapless leading man virtually victimized by herattentions and a group of stuffed shirts whose pomposity is deflated by thefarcical goings on. It also stands as a prime example of the liberatinginfluence of eccentricity (and the female) in the screwballcomedy.Read More »
The Great Consoler is Lev Kuleshov’s most personal film reflecting both the facts of his life and his thoughts about the place of the artist in contemporary reality. It was the only film in the Soviet cinema of those years that raised the question of what role a creative person played in society.
The film takes place in America in 1899, and in its principal plot depicts Bill Porter, who is the great consoler of the title, in prison. His writing skills earn him privileges from the governor and he is spared the inhumane treatment meted out to other prisoners. Porter is very much aware of the brutality around him but, mindful of his better conditions, refuses to write about prison life. He prefers to console his less-well-treated friends, and indeed all his readers, with excessively romantic fantasies in which good invariably triumphs.Read More »