Synopsis: The head of the Green Manors mental asylum Dr. Murchison is retiring to be replaced by Dr. Edwardes, a famous psychiatrist. Edwardes arrives and is immediately attracted to the beautiful but cold Dr. Constance Petersen. However, it soon becomes apparent that Dr. Edwardes is in fact a paranoid amnesiac impostor. He goes on the run with Constance who tries to help his condition and solve the mystery of what happened to the real Dr. Edwardes.Read More »
Criterion wrote:
A complex exploration of the physical and emotional effects of trauma, Something Wild stars Carroll Baker, in a layered performance, as a college student who attempts suicide after a brutal sexual assault but is stopped by a mechanic (Ralph Meeker)—whose kindness, however, soon takes an unsettling turn. Startlingly modern in its frankness and psychological realism, the film represents one of the purest on-screen expressions of the sensibility of the intimate community of artists around New York’s Actors Studio, which transformed American cinema in the mid-twentieth century. With astonishing location and claustrophobic interior photography by Eugene Schüfftan, an opening-title sequence by the inimitable Saul Bass, and a rhythmic score by Aaron Copland, Jack Garfein’s film is a masterwork of independent cinema.Read More »
Storyline:
Prologue: The murderer “Boss” Huller – after having spent ten years in prison – breaks his silence to tell the warden his story. “Boss”, a former trapeze artist, and his wife own a cheap side-show that displays ”erotic sensations”. But he longs for his former glamorous life in the circus. When he meets the orphan Berta-Marie, he falls under her spell and leaves his wife and young son behind. He makes Berta-Marie his partner in a new trapeze number. One day, the famous trapeze artist Artinelli takes note of them and engages them for his trapeze show in Berlin. Their salto mortale becomes an immediate sensation. Calculatedly and cold, Artinelli seduces Berta-Marie and destroys “Boss'” happiness. Written by Christian TaubeRead More »
Red River is the most legendary of Howard Hawks’ western epics. Less well known is The Big Sky, a Kirk Douglas vehicle which evokes the Western frontier of the 1830s.
In Red River, John Wayne leads the first big cattle drive, thousands of miles north to the railroad. In The Big Sky, French merchant Jourdonnais (Steven Geray) becomes the first keelboat captain to journey up the wild, unexplored Missouri river, to trade for furs with the Blackfeet Indians.
Hawks takes his time, with even a musical number or two helping to develop his characters.Read More »
Plot: Blackstone ‘Blacky’ Gorman, rising service station owner, is blessed with the devotion of supremely sweet and noble Marje Harris, but he meets coquettish and silly debutante Glory Franklyn and, between Glory’s charm and his social ambition, is snared into an upscale marriage that proves to have its downside. Written by Rod Crawford
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Personally, Bolognini did not feel that he was really at home with comedy, yet he was often offered comedies, and in the early stage of his career he accepted some of these assignments. These films were very successful, and the director ascribed the credit for this to the stars he worked with; in this case unquestionably a handful of Italy’s funniest men of the day: Alberto Sordi, Aldo Fabrizzi, Peppino De Filippo, and Gino Cervi.Read More »
Quote:
The horror of the faces: That is the overwhelming image that remains from a recent viewing of the restored version of “M,” Fritz Lang’s famous 1931 film about a child murderer in Germany. In my memory it was a film that centered on the killer, the creepy little Franz Becker, played by Peter Lorre. But Becker has relatively limited screen time, and only one consequential speech–although it’s a haunting one. Most of the film is devoted to the search for Becker, by both the police and the underworld, and many of these scenes are played in closeup. In searching for words to describe the faces of the actors, I fall hopelessly upon “piglike.”Read More »
Plot: Young Raymond Floriot, following in his father Louis Floriot’s professional footsteps, he now France’s attorney general, has just passed the bar exam. Raymond’s first case, appointed to him by the courts, is a murder case. His pitiful and poor Jane Doe client, who refers to herself only as Madame X, admits to killing the scoundrel of a man named Laroque, but won’t disclose why or in turn defend herself in court. Raymond knows nothing of her past, which includes once being a woman of class, married to man of prestige. But that marriage ended because he treated her without love, which resulted in her leaving him for another man, who in turn passed away shortly thereafter. Read More »
From Wikipedia:
Seven Days in May is an American political thriller motion picture directed by John Frankenheimer, starring Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Fredric March, and Ava Gardner, and released in February 1964 with a screenplay by Rod Serling based on the novel of the same name by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, which was published in 1962.Read More »