Classics

Charley Varrick is a small-time stick-up man who, in tandem with his partner Harman Sullivan (Andrew Robinson), makes plans to rob a small bank in New Mexico. Varrick and Sullivan are expecting a modest payday for a simple heist, but to their surprise they walk away with $750,000 in cash. But it turns out this isn’t entirely good news; the bank was flush with cash because a number of well-connected Mafia chieftains have been using the bank to launder their ill-gotten gains, and they’re determined to get their money back. Before Varrick can figure out a way to return the money, sadistic hired killer Molly (Joe Don Baker) is on his trail, forcing Varrick to outwit both the cops and the robbers if he is to stay alive.

from allmovie.comRead More »

Fuller admitted that he was obsessed by war and that he wouldn’t have made war movies unless he’d seen combat (he did, with distinction). This movie plays like a gutsy draft of his cherished project, The Big Red One, and looks as if it could have influenced Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (compare the steady destruction of the entrenched Japanese as the men advance on them). Merrill’s men are in Burma on a pitiless mission that we are dragged into emotionally, then almost physically, by Fuller’s up-front direction, as we gradually realize its suicidal nature.Read More »

PLOT:
Ayako becomes the mistress of her boss so she can pay her father’s debt and prevent him from going to prison for embezzlement.Read More »

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A bit like The Downfall of Osen (Orizuru Osen, 1935), this film centers on a woman who’s a cat’s paw for a gang involved in shady dealings. Okichi, played by Yamada Isuzu, is pulling scams for the sake of her lover. But she falls out with the gang and takes pity on one of the young men whom she victimizes.

I can’t comment on the film after only one viewing, and the fact that Mizoguchi is credited after Takashima suggests that he may have had little input. Still, it’s another tale of a woman who sacrifices herself for more or less unworthy men. Miss Okichi also has some typically Mizoguchian scenes that dwell on chiaroscuro melancholy. Much of the film takes place at night, and this strategy reinforces the somber atmosphere. There are some remarkably opaque long shots and one moment that includes Okichi turning toward the camera in a sort of plaintive challenge.Read More »

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Thorne Smith is a name one hardly ever hears these days, and that’s a shame. In the 1920s and early ’30s, he was the popular author of a genre-defining series of novels in which mortal men broke out of their humdrum lives to embark on comic-erotic, supernaturally tinged adventures in the company of an exciting woman (or women). The most popular of these, Topper, was filmed in 1937, three years after Smith’s death. (Smith’s novel The Passionate Witch also became the basis for a classic film comedy, I Married a Witch (1942), and later the TV series Bewitched.)Read More »

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What happens when we die? Probably nothing, and we damn sure can’t take anything with us. But just try telling that to Pharaoh Khufu (Jack Hawkins), who has amassed an ungodly amount of wealth in Howard Hawks’ soapy historical drama Land of the Pharaohs and wants nothing more than to buried with it. Enlisting the help of aging architect/slave Vashtar (James Robertson Justice) to design an intricate robber-proof tomb, Pharaoh Khufu spares no expense — and by that I mean “works thousands of slaves to death and raises taxes” — to ensure that it’s built exactly to spec and will preserve his body and treasures for all eternity. But when his second wife Princess Nellifer (Joan Collins) secretly plots to separate the two of them, a chain of lies and deceit as big as the Great Pyramid itself is set in motion.Read More »

PLOT: A story that explores family conflict between 2 sisters and their painter father before the World War 2, in Intramuros, Old Manila.Read More »

An Italian adaptation of The Sea Gull by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov.
A young writer is trapped between his awful actress mother (Laura Betti) and the knowledge that he has only a mediocre talent as a playwright and almost no force of character. After the young man in this story suffers the loss of his mistress to his self-satisfied novelist stepfather, his self-respect is so shattered that he commits suicide.Read More »

The U.S. Cavalry knows that traveling the unmapped Arizona Territory canyons and trails in search of a woman kidnapped by Apaches could mean riding into a trap. So they ask the help of Ward Kinman, a prospector and scout who knows both the terrain and the ways of the warring tribesmen. Nearly a decade after Billy the Kid, Robert Taylor saddled up a second time and portrayed Kinman in Ambush, the film that began his steady string of work in a genre that suited him like a Colt .45 tucked easy into hip leather. Marguerite Roberts (True Grit) offers a script filled with blazing action and romantic subplots. Among the co-stars: Chief Thundercloud (Tonto in The Lone Ranger serials of 1938 and 1939). From Warner Brothers!Read More »