Classics

Stunning photography and Don Siegel’s direction make the most of an unusual overly melodramatic story starring Ronald Reagan as a scientist with epilepsy who goes to south Florida on doctor’s orders and meets a young woman, (Viveca Lindfors) recently widowed, who is haunted by the voice of her dead husband. Reagan rents her slightly dilapidated beach mansion and experiences several epileptic episodes, but tries his best to keep his condition a secret. Broderick Crawford’s role as an artist who lives close by verges on annoying as he goes on and on about art and life. Ossa Massen gives the film a boost as Lindfor’s scheming, jealous sister who tries seducing Reagan and later drunkenly blurts out his secret when she realizes that she can’t have him. The concluding hurricane arrives just in time, with all the main characters assembled for dinner in the creaky old mansion, and Reagan pushed to verge of suicide by the shame of his medical condition, while Lindfors begs him to reconsider.Read More »

One of 1941’s trio of great satires about filmmaking in Hollywood (along with Sullivan’s Travels and Hellzapoppin’) and probably the craziest of the lot. W. C. Fields wrote the story himself (under the pseudonym Otis Criblecoblis) and the film, which is coincidentally about W. C. Fields peddling a script he wrote himself to a frustrated studio boss (Franklin Pangborn), is probably the purest expression of his comic sensibility, starting with the iconic title.Read More »

Synopsis:
Paris, 1865. Octave Mouret is a young man filled with great ambitions. He is also a consummate Don Juan and it his talent for seducing members of the opposite sex which he intends using to make a rapid ascent of the social scale. He finds work as a salesman in an upmarket drapers’ shop, Au Bonheur des Dames, and soon makes a positive impression on his employer, Madame Hédouin. When the latter repels his amorous advances, Octave resigns and finds work with a rival shop managed by Auguste Vabre, the weak-willed son of his landlord. When Auguste discovers that Octave is having an affair with his wife, Berthe, he challenges him to a duel…
— James TraversRead More »

Synopsis:
In a small spanish town, a group of old ladies decide to celebrate Christmas Eve with a “Sit a poor man at your table” dinner: each wealthy household of the town will have a homeless person dining with them that night. The celebrations also include a parade, and in it we find Plácido, the humble owner of a three-wheeler, whose family is forced to live in a public lavatory because of the lack of money to pay the rent, and who has to pay the second bill of his vehicle before midnight or else he will loseRead More »

Quote:
Based on the moving true story of a senior high school student named Michiko (Sayuri Yoshinaga) who contracted a terminal illness and spent the following three years exchanging over 400 letters with her boyfriend Makoto (Mitsuo Hamada).Read More »

Zoltan Fabri’s 1956 Hungarian feature about the persecution of an educator (played for both laughs and great pathos by Ernö Szabó) whose essay about Hannibal and the Punic Wars in a school bulletin is deemed unflattering to the Mussolini regime. A beautifully shot, modest masterpiece which is, as the cliche goes, as timely today as ever.Read More »

The saga of adolescents living on their own as adults was treated as early as 1961 by Triguerinho Neto in this film set in Salvador, Bahia, under the Vargas dictatorship. Tonio has left home, unable to identify with his parents’ community centered around their African-derived religion. But he finds that, as a mulatto, in the outside world he is rejected by whites who see him as black and by blacks who see him as white. Tonio, who prefers the company of marginals who are as indefinable as himself, settles into the protection of a woman old enough to be his mother and befriends local dockworkers who are on strike. Betraying the former to help the latter, he finds himself alone. In his inability to commit, Tonio may be a proletarian version of the rootless character central to early sixties Cinema Novo in such films as São Paulo S/A.Read More »

Plot : While Paris Sleeps is a grim expose of the European white slave trade. To save his daughter Manon (Helen Mack) from falling into the hands of a vicious gang of pimps, convict Jacques Costard (Victor McLaglen) escapes from jail. Jacques’ problems are twofold: he must keep Manon from being abducted into a life of prostitution, and he must also hide his true identity from the girl, who has been raised to believe that Jacques died a hero in WWI. The film’s gruesome “money scene” finds the white slavers disposing of a stool pigeon by incinerating him in a huge bakery oven! ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie GuideRead More »

A mad scientist turns a man into an electrically-controlled monster to do his bidding.Read More »