Comedy

Japan Society wrote:
The closest Japanese cinema ever came to the full-blown Broadway style musical, with singing and dancing on the streets of Tokyo, music by avant-garde composer and jazzman Toshiro Mayuzumi, lyrics by renowned poet Shuntaro Tanikawa, and direction by one of Toho’s most prominent “new wave” directors, Eizo Sugawa. Popular jazz drummer and actor Frankie Sakai stars in this comic version of the “industrial competition” genre: two tourism companies compete for foreign clients in the run up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Highlighting the coming internationalization of Japan, the film dramatizes the felt tensions between tradition and modernity, the pressures of the “economic animal” lifestyle, and the energy of high economic growth.Read More »

Synopsis:
David Lean brings to vivid emotional life Noël Coward’s epic chronicle of a working-class family in the London suburbs over the course of two decades. Robert Newton and Celia Johnson are surpassingly affecting as Frank and Ethel Gibbons, a couple with three children whose modest household is touched by joy and tragedy from the tail end of the First World War to the beginning of the Second. With its mix of politics and melodrama, This Happy Breed is a quintessential British domestic drama, featuring subtly expressive Technicolor cinematography by Ronald Neame and a remarkable supporting cast including John Mills, Stanley Holloway, and Kay Walsh.Read More »

Synopsis: Playboy Charly is picking up a young woman on the freeway – she is only wearing an orange overall and wants to go to Washington. Charly takes her with him to Munich, introducing her to his friend author Evers. Since Evers is negotiating with a US film producer about the rights to his novel, the mysterious woman stays with Evers. Soon, they get closer…Read More »

Synopsis
A woman has a fine life with rewarding work, a nice house, and a serious boyfriend in the lowlands of Japan. In walks her long lost husband who years ago disappeared and abandoned her. The wife allows her lost husband to secretly live in her house. More specifically, he lives in the wife’s closet. The closet has a peep hole, so he does nothing day and night but watch his wife live her life.Read More »

Synopsis:
Amelie is a Cocotte (=a tart); she trades on her charms,abetted by her father who plays a role generally delegated to mothers (Gremillon’s “Gueule d’amour” or Allegret’s “Maneges” ). She is wooed by every Tom, Dick and Harry passing by. She’s currently supported by a military man, courted by a foreign prince – who gives the equivalent of the French Legion d’honneur to dad, – and, besides, she is to marry a young lad who covets his wealthy uncle’s heritage: the necessary and sufficient condition for getting the dough is getting married.Read More »

Jenny Blake (Blondell) is the beautiful owner of a riverboat casino, but she aspires to a life in high society. Jack Morgan (Wayne) is her business partner and influential political boss – the two are in love, but Jenny decides to leave him and the business so she could marry socialite Alan Alderson (Ray Middleton) for prestige and in return she forgives Alan’s gambling debts and pays off the back taxes of his family’s once-grand mansion and plantation. Her new in-laws are infuriated by this marriage of convenience, and do everything in their power to ruin Jenny in the eyes of society.Read More »

Monsieur Hulot, Jacques Tati’s endearing clown, takes a holiday at a seaside resort, where his presence provokes one catastrophe after another. Tati’s masterpiece of gentle slapstick is a series of effortlessly well-choreographed sight gags involving dogs, boats, and firecrackers; it was the first entry in the Hulot series and the film that launched its maker to international stardom.Read More »

Lively comedy sending up British stiff-upper-lip prisoner-of-war dramas, starring James Robertson Justice as Sir Ernest Pease, a bombastic scientist who ends up in a German PoW camp during World War II. The inmates, led by Jimmy Cooper and Jock Everett, are forced to help him escape.Read More »

Synopsis:
Captain Henri Rochard is a French officer assigned to work with Lieut. Catherine Gates. Through a wacky series of misadventures, they fall in love and marry. When the war ends, Capt. Rochard tries to return to America with the other female war brides. Zany gender-confusing antics followRead More »