1941-1950

Synopsis:
The young, handsome, but somewhat wild Eugene Morgan wants to marry Isabel Amberson, daughter of a rich upper-class family, but she instead marries dull and steady Wilbur Minafer. Their only child, George, grows up a spoiled brat. Years later, Eugene comes back, now a mature widower and a successful automobile maker. After Wilbur dies, Eugene again asks Isabel to marry him, and she is receptive. But George resents the attentions paid to his mother, and he and his whacko aunt Fanny manage to sabotage the romance. A series of disasters befall the Ambersons and George, and he gets his come-uppance in the end. Read More »

Blinded during a wartime training accident, aspiring-musician Bengt Vyldeke (Birger Malmstein) refuses all efforts by well-meaning outsiders to help him. Ingrid (Mai Zetterling) is hired as his companion and ‘eyes’.Read More »

Imdb says:
The life and works of the great artist Michelangelo Buonarroti are shown against the historical background of his time. It begins with his earliest artworks, and follows his life and career as he achieves lasting fame. The documentary includes detailed looks at some of the artist’s most renowned creations. Read More »

Many famous stars began their career in pornography, Marilyn Monroe being one of the greatest examples, who when financially stable declared she no longer had to gratify the sexual demands of studio executives.

A pornographic short film of Hollywood legend Marilyn Monroe recently surfaced in Spain. This grainy black-and-white footage was made in 1947 when Monroe was 21. The American Film Institute, though has denied reports from Spain that it had authenticated the 50-year-old pornographic film purportedly showing Hollywood legend Marilyn Monroe engaging in a sexual act.

As early as 1944 Marilyn Monroe was in Los Angeles modeling and acting and in 1949 posed nude for Tom Kelley in a series of photographs that would later galvanize her image as a sex symbol and fuel her rise to fame. The late 1940’s was a difficult time for Monroe, having lost her 20th Century Fox contract in 1946 she allegedly returned to less reputable means of making money to support herself.Read More »

Lillian Hellman’s play, a prime example of the “well-made” variety, is precisely the kind of successful middle-brow property that appealed to Samuel Goldwyn. He had already produced Hellman’s controversial The Children’s Hour (also directed by William Wyler, with cinematographer Gregg Toland), a play that handsomely survived a title change to These Three and the transformation of the issue of lesbianism into an illicit heterosexual affair. No major alterations were required for The Little Foxes. The film even resists the conventional “opening up” so often applied to theatrical texts, in the mistaken notion that fundamental cinematic values are expansively pictorial ones.Read More »

IMDb comment by niathan:
I saw this film when it was released to the minor cinemas in the UK some 50 years ago; and the memory remains of a great musical score, and the tragedy of the storyline. I saw it again on video recently. The sound track was poor and the picture grainy; but it is one of two films that I saw again the next day, the other being Gladiator. The music theme is intensely tragic, and from the outset one knows that it heralds failure or death. Certainly one of George Sanders best performances; as a man working the black market to get pay back for what he lost in the war, but nemesis waits; Patricia Roc plays a refugee from Eastern Europe eaten with despair. He is attracted to her, selflessly wants to help her, and then falls in love with her, but she is too proud and hurt to accept help. Their love destroys him, and inevetably the girl and the doctor (Herbert Marshall), who brought the nemesis. The storyline is of complex intertwining destinies, where subsidiary characters are not who they appear to be. This is as a film, which diappointed the critics and struggled at the box office; but for the adolescent who saw it, and the retired gentleman who saw it again it is one of the greatest films (taking into account its age)whose story is more akin to an opera.Read More »

The life of Irish tenor Chauncey Olcott is chronicled from his childhood to his days as the toast of New York. In between, his rise to the top is complicated by romances with two women: his true love Rose Donovan and stage star Lillian Russell, who wants to make him a star.Read More »

In 1945, Dutch-born actress Nina Foch had the good fortune to star in a pair of economical, satisfying thrillers. She was a damsel in distress in Joseph H. Lewis’ My Name Is Julia Ross, an updated Gothic set in England. In Budd (then ‘Oscar’) Boettischer’s wartime espionage drama Escape In The Fog, she’s a dame in distress in the city by the bay.

It opens in a nightmare she’s having. Walking one fog-bound night on the Golden Gate Bridge, she sees three men piling out of a taxi trying to kill a fourth. She screams – and the screams bring to her room in Ye Rustic Dell Inn other guests running to her aid. One of them is the intended victim in her dream (William Wright), whom she’s never before laid eyes on. They hit it off, though, and he persuades her to join him for a few days in San Francisco.Read More »

Quote:
The first collaboration between Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman is a devastating portrait of a woman’s existential crisis, set against the beautiful and forbidding backdrop of a volcanic island. After World War II, a Lithuanian refugee (Bergman) marries a simple Italian fisherman (Mario Vitale) she meets in a prisoner of war camp and accompanies him back to his isolated village on an island off the coast of Sicily. Cut off from the world, she finds herself crumbling emotionally, but she is destined for a dramatic epiphany. Balancing the director’s trademark neorealism—exemplified here in a remarkable depiction of the fishermen’s lives and work—with deeply felt melodrama, Stromboli is a revelation.Read More »