Plot:
A tough lady gangster learns that she will be totally blind within a week. She seeks help from the one eye surgeon who may be able to save her sight. In the process, he also causes her to have a change of heart. Written by Daniel Bubbeo Read More »
Plot Synopsis [AMG]
Completed in mid-1930, Scarface, based on Armitage Trail’s novel of the same name, might have been the first of the great talkie gangster flicks, but it was held up for release until after that honor was jointly usurped by Little Caesar and Public Enemy. Paul Muni stars as prohibition-era mobster Tony Camonte, a character obviously patterned on Al Capone (whose nickname was “Scarface”). The homicidal Camonte ruthlessly wrests control of the bootlegging racket from his boss, Johnny Lovo (Osgood Perkins), and claims Lovo’s mistress, Poppy (Karen Morley), in the bargain. But while Poppy satisfies him sexually, Tony has a soft spot in his heart only for his sister Cesca (Ann Dvorak). The film’s finale is one of the longest and bloodiest of the 1930s, maintaining suspense and concern for the characters involved even though Muni has deliberately done nothing to make Tony likeable to audience.Read More »
SYNOPSIS:
Dan Evans is a farmer struggling to hold onto his land and livelihood during a severe drought. He finds a financial solution for himself and his family when he is offered a large sum of money to secretly escort Ben Wade, the captured leader of an outlaw gang, to a nearby town and place him on board a train that will carry him to trial in Yuma. The two men hole up in a hotel near the station where the smooth-talking Wade tries to mentally and emotionally manipulate his captor into letting him go. Meanwhile, Wade’s gang is fast approaching the town where a final showdown between Evans and the outlaws is imminent.Read More »
Criterion Synopsis
Legendary French star Gérard Philipe swashbuckled his way into film history as the peasant soldier Fanfan in Christian-Jaque’s devil-may-care romantic action-comedy. In eighteenth-century France, Fanfan joins King Louis XV’s army to avoid a forced marriage to a local lass and gets himself into close scrapes and tight squeezes with Gina Lollobrigida’s impostor fortune-teller, Adeline, on his way to fighting in the Seven Years’ War. Filled to the brim with dazzling stunts and randy innuendo, Fanfan la Tulipe, which won the best director prize at Cannes and was a smash hit upon its initial release, remains one of France’s all-time most beloved films.Read More »
Synopsis
The first box-office hit for Ozu in Japan, “The Brothers And Sisters Of The Toda Family” anticipates the later masterpieces such as “Tokyo Story” and “The End Of Summer”.
After the death of the father of an upper-class family, his wife and daughter have to struggle to survive. Tensions arise when they moved in with a married son, so they continue to move around from one household to the next, but they are always unwelcomed. When her youngest son returns from work in Tianjin, he scolds his siblings for their selfishness.
AWARDs
WON:
Kinema Junpo Awards – 1942 – Best FilmRead More »
Quote:
A fishing union depends on two brothers to make up the losses caused by the dishonest captains they replaced.
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Quote:
The Night of the Hunter—incredibly, the only film the great actor Charles Laughton ever directed—is truly a stand-alone masterwork. A horror movie with qualities of a Grimm fairy tale, it stars a sublimely sinister Robert Mitchum as a traveling preacher named Harry Powell (he of the tattooed knuckles), whose nefarious motives for marrying a fragile widow, played by Shelley Winters, are uncovered by her terrified young children. Graced by images of eerie beauty and a sneaky sense of humor, this ethereal, expressionistic American classic—also featuring the contributions of actress Lillian Gish and writer James Agee—is cinema’s most eccentric rendering of the battle between good and evil.Read More »
In 1945, during a 48-hour leave, a soldier accidentally meets a girl at Pennsylvania Station and spends his leave with her, eventually falling in love with the lovely New Yorker.Read More »
Quote:
Marnie Edgar is a habitual liar and a thief who gets jobs as a secretary and after a few months robs the firms in question, usually of several thousand dollars. When she gets a job at Rutland’s, she also catches the eye of the handsome owner, Mark Rutland. He prevents her from stealing and running off, as is her usual pattern, but also forces her to marry him. Their honeymoon is a disaster and she cannot stand to have a man touch her and on their return home, Mark has a private detective look into her past. When he has the details of what happened in her childhood to make her what she is, he arranges a confrontation with her mother realizing that reliving the terrible events that occurred in her childhood and bringing out those repressed memories is the only way to save her.Read More »