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Combines elements of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story, ‘His Last Bow’ and loosely parallels the real-life activities of Lord Haw-haw. Horror film “scream queen” Evelyn Ankers appears as leading lady.
England, at the start of World War Two. Mysterious wireless broadcasts, apparently from Nazi Germany are heard over the BBC. The warn of acts of terror in England, just before they take place. Baffled, the Defence Committee call in Holmes.Read More »
Tex Avery’s first cartoon with Screwy Squirrel, a psychotic character that he would come to hate and kill off after only five cartoons. The first cartoon is generally considered the best of the bunch.Read More »
Donnie Smith wrote:
What’s Buzzin’ Buzzard follows two starving buzzards who plot to eat one another. Having characters in a desert wanting to eat each other in comical ways has been done countless times, but this short is one of the ones to thank for the trope. The random ways the two buzzards attempt to one-up each other are hilarious and screwy as is typical for an Avery short. Some classic cartoon gags are present, including dressing up as a woman and making a sandwich out of someone’s hand without them knowing. There is even a brief cameo from William Hanna, who provides one of his trademark screams when one of the buzzards is bitten.Read More »
Dressed to Kill, also known as Prelude to Murder (working title) and Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Code (in the UK), is the last of fourteen films starring Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Doctor Watson.
Though not directly based on any of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories, the film features several references to “A Scandal in Bohemia”, with Holmes and Watson discussing the recent publication of the story in The Strand Magazine, and the villain of the film using the same trick on Watson that Holmes uses on Irene Adler in the story. The plot also bears some resemblance to “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons”.Read More »
In rural 19th-century Indiana, the three daughters of a Civil War veteran are courted by three young men–one a sophisticated city slicker who sells phony oil stock, the second a local eccentric and the third a stolid country boy.Read More »
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A brilliant black comedy by Preston Sturges, developed from a script he had written as early as 1932 and tried in vain to get Fox, Universal and Paramount intrested in producing. The script’s early provinence must be the reason that it’s the only one of his four post-Paramount pictures to feature dialogue comparable to (and sometimes surpassing) that found in the eight great comedies he wrote and directed in 1940–44, as well as numerous comedies that he had scripted in 1930s. The studios’ reluctance to make the film at that time is indicative of why it became a critical and a box office failure: the morbid subject matter, combined with the recent suicide of actress Carole Landis (who was suspected of having an affair with Rex Harrison, who plays the lead here), simply drove audiences away from it and for decades gave it a reputation of a film maudit.Read More »
A young woman who has just become engaged has her life completely shattered when she is raped while on her way home from work.Read More »
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After miraculously surviving a jump from his burning plane, RAF pilot Peter Carter (David Niven) encounters the American radio operator (Kim Hunter) to whom he has just delivered his dying wishes, and, face-to-face on a tranquil English beach, the pair fall in love. When a messenger from the hereafter arrives to correct the bureaucratic error that spared his life, Peter must mount a fierce defense for his right to stay on earth—painted by production designer Alfred Junge and cinematographer Jack Cardiff as a rich Technicolor Eden—climbing a wide staircase to stand trial in a starkly beautiful, black-and-white modernist afterlife. Intended to smooth tensions between the wartime allies Britain and America, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s richly humanistic A Matter of Life and Death traverses time and space to make a case for the transcendent value of love.Read More »
Synopsis
Soon after the Great War, the Provence village of Salezes gets a new boys’ teacher: Mr. Pascal, a war hero with a diploma from a teachers’ college. He rejects old methods: boys’ sitting still with arms folded memorizing facts. He uses modern methods: he becomes their guide…Read More »