Classics

Plot: Based on a novel by Frederic Dard who also co-scripted with director Jean-Pierre Mocky, this satire on French politics is centered around an official whose earlier rise to power had some sordid aspects that are about to be uncovered by the death of his uncle. While he is trying to contain any potential scandal, the man becomes enamored of the daughter of his uncle’s maid. This new romance inspires him to forget worries about a public image and focus on a new life — not any easy objective when unsavory friends and foes have their own agendas in mind.Read More »

Ambrose Wolfinger wants the afternoon off (his first in twenty-five years) to go to a wrestling match. He tells his boss that he must attend his mother-in-law’s funeral. The afternoon is no joy. He tries to please a policeman, assist a chauffeur, chase a tire, and ends up getting hit by the body of a wrestler thrown from the ring. A series of mishaps leads his boss to send floral tributes to the house and notify the papers of the death (due to poisoned liquor). His shrewish wife, judgmental mother-in-law, and good-for-nothing brother-in-law add to his burdens. In the end he enjoys their fawning loyalty, a raise in pay, and his first vacation.Read More »

Brief synopsis
Mayor Peppone might very well lose the elections and Don Camillo makes sure that the mayor’s delinquent son gets his act together while his own niece makes Peppone think she is pregnant by his son.Read More »

Plot:
Hell’s Kitchen gives the reform school potboiler The Mayor of Hell the full Dead End treatment and brings a tyro Ronald Reagan along for the ride.Read More »

Below is an apt “user comment” from the film’s IMDB page. For my money, LA MATERNELLE is an even greater film than ZERO FOR CONDUCT, which is saying a lot.

“Until I saw this film at a Cinema Conference in Aberdeen in 1995 I was ignorant of the fact that a woman director had produced poetic and social cinema comparable with Vigo’s ZERO DE CONDUITE (certainly one of the greatest films ever). Vigo in 1933 is revolutionary anarchist with modernist poetry at his finger tips; Epstein in 1933 is warm-hearted popular front realism with magnificent performances by nursery school kids, though the main schoolgirl is a little older (and in love with her teacher, like the protagonist in Leontine Sagan’s MAIDENS IN UNIFORM 1931). Read More »

Quote:
A new priest (Claude Laydu) arrives in the French country village of Ambricourt to attend to his first parish. The apathetic and hostile rural congregation rejects him immediately. Through his diary entries, the suffering young man relays a crisis of faith that threatens to drive him away from the village and from God. With his fourth film, Robert Bresson began to implement his stylistic philosophy as a filmmaker, stripping away all inessential elements from his compositions, the dialogue and the music, exacting a purity of image and sound.Read More »

Synopsis:
Susan Applegate, tired of New York after one year and 25 jobs, decides to return to Iowa. Trouble is, when she saved money for the train fare home, she didn’t allow for inflation. So the audacious Susan disguises herself as a 12-year-old (!) and travels for half fare. Found out by the conductors, she hides out in the compartment of Major Philip Kirby, a military school instructor. The growing attraction between Susan and Kirby is complicated by his conniving fiancee…and by the myopic Kirby continuing to think “Su-Su” is only 12!Read More »

The film covers a hundred years in the lives of the Ricordi family, the Milan publishing house of the title, and the various composers and other historic personalities, whose careers intersected with the growth of the Ricordi house. It beautifully draws the parallel between the great music of the composers, the historic and social upheavals of their times, as well as the “smaller stories” of the successive generations of Ricordi.Read More »

Rosalind Russell plays aspiring Ohio journalist Ruth Sherwood, who heads for New York to seek her fortune, accompanied by her sister, Eileen (Janet Blair), an aspiring actress. The girls take a basement apartment in Greenwich Village, which becomes a gathering place for several oddball characters, including a football jock (Gordon Jones), his silly wife (Miss Jeff Donnell) and an eternally drunken fortuneteller (June Havoc). Ruth tries to sell her writing, but is advised by a friendly magazine editor (Brian Aherne) that she’ll never succeed unless she writes from her own experiences. Meanwhile, Eileen is continually getting in trouble due to her ingenuous attractiveness.Read More »