Synopsis:
Before their divorce becomes final, Jerry and Lucy Warriner both do their best to ruin each other’s plans for remarriage, Jerry to haughty socialite Barbara Vance, she to oil-rich bumpkin Daniel Leeson. Among their strategies: Jerry’s court-decreed visitation rights with Mr. Smith, their pet fox terrier, and Lucy doing her most flamboyant Dixie Belle Lee impersonation as Jerry’s brassy “sister” before his prospective bride’s scandalized family.Read More »
Agostina is a maid turned prostitute during World War II. She sends all the money she makes to the local priest in her home village for safekeeping. After the war is over, Agostina and her friend plan to open a clothing store so they return to her home island to collect the money from the priest. But after arriving there, Agostina learns in shock that the priest has been dead for more than a year and that his eccentric successor mistook the received money for donations and spent all of it on building a new orphanage for war orphans. To make matters worse, other islanders think that Agostina is now a millionaire and beg her to help them financially.Read More »
Bára, the daughter of a communal herdsman, is pursued by all the young men from the village. The parents of the village boys are not pleased with this at all, because they believe the superstitious old women who claim that Bára is a daughter of a noonday-witch. The beautiful girl has one friend, Eliška, foster-daughter of the parish priest. The priest also likes Bára and always takes her side. The manorial administrator Sláma is trying to win Eliška, but Eliška loves a student from Prague. Bára decides to frighten Sláma away from his courtship. She disguises herself as a ghost, scares Sláma to death near the graveyard and makes him promise to leave Eliška in peace. But Sláma’s coachman alarms the entire village and they recognize Bára in the ghost.Read More »
In this drama, a Korean war veteran, a victim of brainwashing while he was a POW, finally goes back to his home in Washington, DC, where he resumes his job at a public relations-opinion research firm. He soon discovers that his company is being run by communists after his partner mysteriously died. Now pro-communist propaganda seems to be their primary business. To stop them, the vet begins cooperating in a full-scale Senate investigation.Read More »
Synopsis:
Laurence Olivier’s adaptation of Henry V is one of the finest Shakespeare films ever made, full of rousing action, beautiful colors and passionate performances. Henry V is the story of the newly crowned king of England who fights the French for possession of Normandy. Olivier’s direction is inventive, beginning the film as if it were a performance at the Globe Theatre, and having it slowly expand so the final battle scenes take place in realistic settings. Released in 1944 during the height of World War II, Henry V didn’t receive an American release until 1946, upon which Olivier won a special Academy Award for “his outstanding achievement as actor, producer and director in bringing Henry V to the screen.”
— Stephen ErlewineRead More »
[The Red Lantern] tells the story of a Eurasian, Joan of Arc-like heroine, Mahlee, who forsakes her own people to live among white Europeans, until political tumult draws her back across the color line to foment anti-imperialist uprising in China’s 1900 Boxer Rebellion. While Mahlee literally “hears voices” (à la Joan of Arc) that compel her to revolutionary action, star actress Alla Nazimova doubles in this role as Mahlee and as her estranged white [half]-sister, Blanche Sackville. Blanche’s sister from another mother (i.e., their white British father’s Chinese mistress), Mahlee struggles with her simultaneous attraction and repulsion towards her kinfolk colonizers — and more pointedly with the politics of British colonialism in fin-de-siècle China.Read More »
Synopsis:
On his way to Africa, Don Pietro, a young missionary priest has his suitcase stolen in the station of Naples. While making every effort to retrieve his baggage he finds out how devastated and miserable the city of Naples is. Learning that he has been the victim of gang of local street urchins, he decides that is mission is here in Naples, not under distant skies. He creates a home for poor kids, assisted by Maddalena, the cook, with a view to putting the “scugnizzi” back on the right track. He is very successful with Peppinello, who shows gratitude for what the priest is doing and feels good in his new secure home. But other kids do not play by the rules and find the home a convenient place for hiding the product of their thefts…Read More »
Synopsis:
Pinky, a light skinned black woman, returns to her grandmother’s house in the South after graduating from a Northern nursing school. Pinky tells her grandmother that she has been “passing” for white while at school in the North. In addition, Pinky has fallen in love with a young white doctor, Dr. Thomas Adams, who knows nothing about her black heritage. Pinky says that she will return to the North, but Granny Johnson convinces her to stay and treat an ailing white woman, Miss Em. Meanwhile, Dr. Canady, a black physician from another part of the state, visits Pinky and asks her to train some African American students, but she declines. Read More »
