Comedy

Synopsis:
During World War II, an Italian villager (Gina Lollobrigida) befriends three American soldiers. Later, when unsure which of them fathered the daughter she has, she invents a dead captain named Campbell, declares herself his widow and accepts support checks from all three soldiers. Twenty years later, a reunion unexpectedly brings the three veterans — and their wives and children — back to Italy. Mrs. Campbell panics as she endeavors to keep her lively past from her daughter.Read More »

This hilarious movie catapults two youngsters hitting puberty into the opposite sex after a fall from which they recover in each other’s bodies. The timid sensitive girl becomes the effeminate insecure boy, and the unredeeming prankster becomes the loud clumsy girl with a chip on her shoulder. Both lead actors do tremendous jobs portraying the opposite sex, and often do so delivering more than a laugh. It ends in a bittersweet tone, but it is a really cute movie with hilarious moments.Read More »

Quote:
The final film completed by Ernst Lubitsch, this zany, zippy comedy of manners, set in England on the cusp of World War II, is one of the worldly-wise director’s most effervescent creations. Jennifer Jones shines in a rare comedic turn as Cluny Brown, an irrepressible heroine with a zeal for plumbing. Sent to work as a parlormaid at a stuffy country manor, she proceeds to turn the household upside down—with plenty of help from Adam Belinski (Charles Boyer), an eccentric Continental exile who has fled the Nazis but is still worried about where his next meal is coming from. Sending up British class hierarchy with Lubitsch’s famously light touch, Cluny Brown is a topsy-turvy farce that says nuts to the squirrels and squirrels to the nuts.Read More »

Quote:
For his first studio picture, filth maestro John Waters took advantage of his biggest budget yet to allow his muse Divine to sink his teeth into a role unlike any he had played before: Baltimore housewife Francine Fishpaw, a heroine worthy of a Douglas Sirk melodrama. Blessed with a keen sense of smell and cursed with a philandering pornographer husband, a parasitic mother, and a pair of delinquent children, the long-suffering Francine turns to the bottle as her life falls apart—until deliverance appears in the form of a hunk named Todd Tomorrow (vintage heartthrob Tab Hunter). Enhanced with Odorama™ technology that enables you to scratch and sniff along with Francine, Polyester is one of Waters’ most hilarious inventions, replete with stomach-churning smells, sadistic nuns, AA meetings, and foot stomping galore.Read More »

This anthology helmed by four talented filmmakers, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Hiromichi Horikawa, and Roman Polanski, allows viewers to meet and observe four international con artists. Each story is set within a different city. “Amsterdam” follows the attempts of a seductive Dutch woman to entice an elderly man into buying her an expensive necklace in exchange for sex. He does, and she immediately runs away and uses the bauble, not realizing that it is worth a fortune, to purchase a parrot. In “Paris,” a con man sells a tourist rube the Eiffel Tower.Read More »

In the countryside near Normandy’s beaches lives Marie, unhappy. It’s 1944, she’s married to Jérôme, a somewhat fussy milquetoast, diffident to the war around him and unwilling to move his wife to Paris, where she longs to live, shop, and party. A German outfit is bivouacked at Jérôme and Marie’s crumbling château because its commanding officer is pursuing Marie. She’s also eyed by a French spy working with the Allies as they plan D-Day. He woos her (posing to the Germans as her brother) and, in his passion, forgets his mission. Heroics come from an unexpected direction, and Marie makes her choice.Read More »

Synopsis:
Mr. Ogata lives a complicated life: he is a pornographer making two skin flicks per day and trying to stay beneath the radar screen of the local mob; he deeply loves his ailing wife Haru who’s cursed by the restless spirit of her dead first husband; he also has a mistress, a step-son who wants to go to university, and a step-daughter entering adolescence. He lusts after his step-daughter, and when Haru finds out about those sexual advances, she asks him to marry the girl. Haru even signs over her business to him, and a crisis ensues when Ogata uses her nest egg to buy equipment so he and his pals can set up their own film processing lab. Surreal images and events weave their way into Ogata’s life.Read More »

The truthful soldier Stirling didn’t know how to lie about his source of information, the talking army Mule, Francis, so he was treated as a lunatic and led to one after another hilarious situations, where the mule was the only one that appeared in his right mind. In the process of all this, the mule assisted in uncovering a spy, Mareen, who pretended to be lost among the jungles, but was actually…Read More »

This is Willi Forst’s second collaboration with director Géza von Bolvary, made shortly after the far better known “Zwei Herzen im Dreivierteltakt” (in which he didn’t have first billing, though). Again, the script is by Walter Reisch and the music is by Robert Stolz.

In “Ein Tango für Dich”, Forst plays Jimmy Bolt, who is working as a singer and dancer (and occcasionally as a waiter) at a varieté. The man may be talented, but he’s not exactly a big success, and things get complicated when a young orphan girl (Fee Malten) falls in love with the voice of another singer (Oskar Karlweis) but then mistakes Bolt for him…Read More »