Nick Wrigley, Masters of Cinema wrote:
At the close of the war in Japan, a widowed mother makes every possible sacrifice to bring up her ungrateful son and daughter who are unimpressed with their poor standard of living at home. They gradually reject her in search of the material comforts that working as a maid cannot provide. The mother’s despair becomes interminable.Read More »
Synopsis:
An idealistic schoolteacher leaves his wife and family behind in 1930s Shanghai to join the Red Cross in the fight against the Japanese invasion. After he is captured, he escapes to Chongqing, where he marries a high-society hostess and establishes a new bourgeois life for himself. Meanwhile, his family lives a life of poverty in a squatter’s camp in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. Director Zheng and veteran filmmaker Cai (who focused mainly on the screenplay for fear of reprimand from the ruling Kuomintang Government) successfully intercut between the parallel narratives, which reflect the contradictory social conditions of prerevolutionary China and bring an epic scale to the life of the Chinese everyman. Considered the country’s equivalent of Gone with the Wind, this sweeping melodrama gave rise to a “romantic family epic” craze in 1940s China.Read More »
Lilly Turner (1933) provided a bravura role for star Ruth Chatterton, and another opportunity to display her versatility. Lilly is a hard-luck dame with lousy taste in men. First she marries a no-good bounder who promises her the world, but instead turns her into a cootch dancer in a carnival. Then she finds out her “husband” already has a wife. Left alone and pregnant, Lilly marries an alcoholic pal (Frank McHugh), and the couple joins a traveling medicine show. Things go from bad to worse when a psychotic strongman in the show develops an obsession for her. When a genuine nice guy, played by Chatterton’s then-husband George Brent, comes into her dreary life, Lilly tries to grab some happiness. But it may be too late.Read More »
Synopsis:
A Women’s Place follows the daily lives of the Ishikawa family who own a general goods store in Tokyo. The film’s opening sees the Ishikawa children rush to the bedside of their father after hearing that he collapsed. As all is well, they go on with their hurried lives. A mystery son later appears out of nowhere to upend the family order and stability.Read More »
Quote:
A deranged writer murders a maid after she resists his advances. The writer engages his brother’s help in hiding the body, causing unexpected problems for both of them.Read More »
IMDB:
In this sequel to “Knock On Any Door”, the residents of a Chicago tenement building band together to insure that the son of Nick Romano does not follow in his father’s footsteps…to the electric chair.Read More »
The setting is Paris under the reign of Louis XIV, the Roi Soleil. Cardillac, a goldsmith, is rightly regarded as a master of his craft. His pieces of jewellery are first-class works of art and so he has great difficulty parting from them, especially because he knows that one precious piece is only the price the beaux and gallants at the royal court have to pay for one amorous night with an aristocratic Lady. Whenever the goldsmith fails to talk a customer out of buying a piece, he waylays him in the dark of night… Cardillac is a merciless killer. The hopes of the lovers dashing off to their rendezvous are thoroughly disappointed: Instead of finding their way into their sweetheart’s arms, they end up stabbed to death by a goldsmith pathologically hankering after his own jewellery. Read More »
Two cowardly palanquin carriers know the culprit of a murder but are too scared to report it to the police. In the mean time, an innocent man is arrested as the murderer and chaos ensues.Read More »
Synopsis
Thérèse de Marsanne (Odette Joyeux) kills her lover Pierre as he is an obstacle to her marriage with the wealthy Count of Vetheuil (Jacques Castelot). To get rid of the corpse, she obtains the assistance of Julien (Roger Blin) a poor young boy madly in love with her by promising him ” une nuit d’amour ” (a night of love, title of the film). After his sinister job done, Julien learns from Thérèse herself that he was part of a sordid crime and runs away terrorized, hence becoming the obvious culprit. Hunted down, he will eventually show at at Thérèse’s wedding to get arrested and accept his fate.Read More »