Nigel Patrick plays a suave but dead-serious British narcotics agent in this sporadically exciting crime melodrama. Patrick is determined that the drug traffic will not spread into his territory. He finds an unexpected ally in Joyce Grenfell, an inveterate bird-watcher.
Ms. Grenfell aids Patrick in trapping a brother-sister smuggling team (Elizabeth Sellars and Terence Morgan).Read More »
“In the streets behind the Ginza avenue, the boss of an hairdressing salon is found dead, killed by strangulation. The inspector in charge of the investigation questions one of the residents of the district, being aware at the same time of the rumours. They suspect Yoshio, a cafe employee, who was found at the hairdresser’s place 40 minutes after the crime. The young guy has something against him: he was judged in the past for involuntary homicide.Read More »
Shusei Tokuda’s starkly realistic novel about a poor girl pressed into becoming a geisha was forcefully adapted by Kaneto Shindo (Onibaba). When Ginko (Nobuko Otowa, Shindo’s wife) falls in love with one of her clients, she is handily rebuffed by the young man’s wealthy family, and left to wander from geisha house to geisha house.Read More »
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It was 230 years after the foundation of the temple that a woman killed a pilgrim monk in Dojoji. The accident was recorded in a literature in 11th century and revised into a couple of picture scrolls “Dojoji Engi” in 15th century. Since then, the preachers in Dojoji have repeated ‘etoki’ or picture sermon with an aid of long picturesque scrolls.
The accident became one of the most well-known folklore in Japan. Let’s see the story accordhing to the picture scrolls called “Dojoji Engi”.Read More »
When a plane crashes on a mountaintop Chris wants to plunder the wreckage. His older brother Zachary has given up mountain guide work but goes along rather than letting his brother risk it alone. The only survivor is a Hindu girl who Chris wants to kill. Zachary fights him off. While Chris steals from the dead passengers, Zachary prepares a sled to take the girl down the mountain.Read More »
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His wife dead from poisoning and his chief warrior, Kurbsky, defected to the Poles, Ivan is lonely as he pursues a unified Russia with no foreign occupiers. Needing friendship, he brings to court Kolychev, now Philip the monk, and makes him metropolitan bishop of Moscow. Philip, however, takes his cues from the boyars and tries to bend Ivan to the will of the church. Ivan faces down Philip and lets loose his private force, the Oprichniks, on the boyars. Led by the Tsar’s aunt, Euphrosyne, the boyers plot to assassinate Ivan and enthrone her son, Vladimir. At a banquet, Ivan mockingly crowns Vladimir and sends him in royal robes into the cathedral where the assassin awaits.Read More »
Beyond This Place is a tame murder mystery based on a novel by A. J. Cronin. Van Johnson is cast as an American citizen whose British father has supposedly been dead for years. On a visit to London, Johnson discovers that his father is very much alive, serving a life sentence for murder. Johnson inaugurates his own investigation, retraces the trail of circumstantial evidence, and unearths the real culprit. Director Jack Cardiff was not happy with his work on Beyond This Place, possibly because he was obliged for box office purposes to use an American star in an essentially British story. The film was released in the US as Web of Evidence.Read More »
Dr. Charles Boswell has joined the medical practice of the sleepy village of Evenbridge, as assistant to the ailing Dr. Welling who welcomes him into his home. But the tranquil domesticity is shattered when the Welling’s charming, young wife unexpectedly dies. The cause – arsenic poisoning. Everyone is a suspect, even the dead Mrs Welling, in this crime thriller of mistakes, madness and murder.Read More »
In this action-filled crime drama, a young woman goes out to bring the criminals who robbed and murdered her father, a jeweler, by posing as a crook herself and infiltrating their gang.Read More »