Classics

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This film is a hard one to assess. It is like a Western taken out of context, replacing the cowboys and Indians with coal miners and steel impresarios.

Ostensibly two coal miners, Pittsburgh Markham and Cash Evans, best friends, chance upon Josie “Hunky” Winters a high-class “countess” and both men fall in love with her. She persuades them that they need to take chances if they are to get anywhere and they do, by shaving three cents off the price of coke and persuading a steel company owner, Morgan Prentiss to sign a contract with them to provide it.Read More »

Synopsis:
A family in route to New Guinea is shipwrecked on a deserted tropical island. They are forced to remain on the island because of the damage to the ship and the pirates that are roaming the islands. They create a home on the island (centering around a huge tree house) and explore the island and its wildlife. Plenty of adventure ensues as the family deals with issues of survival and pirates, and the brothers must learn how to live on the island with an uncertain future.Read More »

Synopsis:
As Pandit Shyam Sunder prayed in Bhagwan Shivji’s temple on the occasion of Janamashtami, his wife gives birth to a daughter, Rupa, and passes away, leaving her child to bear the brunt of being an ill-omen. Years later, Rupa burns her face from a frying pot, thus disfiguring the right side of her face completely, so much so that when she matures, the scar being so hideous, that no one in the village nor surrounding area wants to marry her. Then an Engineer named Rajeev arrives from Bombay, he approaches Shyam Sunder to seek his permission and blessings, so that he can marry Rupa. Read More »

Synopsis:
In meeting in Kansas, ex-cons Perry Smith and Dick Hickock are breaking several conditions of their respective paroles. The meeting, initiated by Dick, is to plan and eventually carry out a robbery based on information he had received from a fellow inmate about $10,000 cash being locked in a hidden safe in the home of the farming Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas. After the robbery, they plan on going to Mexico permanently to elude capture by the police. Each brings a necessary personality to the partnership to carry out the plan, Dick who is the brash manipulator, Perry the outwardly more sensitive but unrealistic dreamer with a violent streak under the surface.Read More »

Synopsis:
“The title character (Tatiana Samojlova) is a dutiful wife to Karenin (Nikolai Gritsenko), a minor political functionary, and mother to a young son, when she meets a dashing young military man, Count Vronsky (Vassily Lanovoy). Something sparks between them, and soon they are madly and passionately in love. But such an illicit relationship is very much frowned upon in polite Russian society, and there are numerous consequences to their love. But by the same token they find themselves unable to live without each other, and so their relationship is subject to severe stresses as they try to live their lives in peace.”Read More »

Synopsis:
Mrs. Anna Leonowens and her son Louis arrive in Bangkok, where she has been contracted to teach English to the children of the royal household. She threatens to leave when the house she had been promised is not available, but falls in love with the children. A new slave, a gift of a vassal king, translates “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” into a Siamese ballet. After expressing her unhappiness at being with the King, the slave decides to make an attempt to escape with her lover. Anna and the King start to fall in love, but her headstrong upbringing inhibits her from joining his harem. She is just about to leave Siam but something important she finds out makes her think about changing her mind.Read More »

Synopsis:
In Twilight Saloon a cast of diverse characters spend an eventful evening in a cheap beer hall filled with music, dance, drunkenness, and self-reflection. Witty and lively, it also has a confessional quality: Uchida cast his regular prewar star Isamu Kosugi as an artist lamenting his art’s use for propagandistic purposes during the war….Read More »

Synopsis:
Meg Fairfield (Billie Burke) is set to marry Gray Meredith (Paul Cavanagh), pending a divorce from her first husband, Hilary (John Barrymore), who has spent nearly 20 years in an insane asylum. On Christmas morning, while Meg and Gray are attending church, Hilary returns home, having snapped out of his illness. He is met by his daughter, Sydney (Katharine Hepburn), who is worried she will inherit his mental problems. The Fairfields must decide how Hilary’s arrival will change their plans.Read More »

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Most of French director Albert Lamorisse’s films celebrate the miracle of flight, but few were as landmark as his 1956 short subject The Red Balloon. The story, told with a minimum of dialogue, concerns a little boy (played by the director’s son Pascal) who comes across a helium-filled balloon. As he plays with his new acquisition, the boy discovers that the balloon seemingly has a mind of its own. The little red orb follows its new “master” all through the streets of Paris, then dogs the boy’s trail into the schoolroom, which drives the teacher to comic distraction. Towards the end, it seems as though boy and balloon will be parted forever….but director Lamorisse has a delightful surprise in store for us. In an unusual move, The Red Balloon in its American TV premiere was introduced by Ronald Reagan as an episode of the CBS anthology G.E. Theater on April 2, 1961.Read More »