Crime

Paola is a young, beautiful woman married to a wealthy entrepreneur. She meets her former lover Guido after seven years, but their relationship is marked by tragic events.Read More »

Synopsis:
Everything’s going right for Mike Donovan (Barry Sullivan). He came home after the war, married his gal, got a regular job as a bank teller in Hollywood, makes payments on a house in the ‘burbs. But, as the voice-over narrator of this on-edge Film-Noir notes, “One day the world’s all right. The next, it’s nowhere.”Read More »

Quote:
If a little pearl-handled .38 goes off in the middle of the night and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Blood Simple invites such sardonic musings from the viewer. This is a film compelled by minutia, but housed within big questions encircling philosophy and geopolitics. An opening voiceover on the difference between Russia and Texas introduces audiences to Visser (M. Emmet Walsh), a private investigator fitted with a zippo and cowboy hat. He’s a sloth who’s also a sleuth, hired by Marty (Dan Hedeya), a barkeep who wants to know the man that his wife, Abby (Frances McDormand), has “been sluicing.” Across the desk from Marty, Visser tells him it’s Ray (John Getz), one of Marty’s defective employees. Marty tells him that, in Greece, they would cut off the head of a messenger bringing bad news just to make themselves feel better. Visser, more amused than frightened, retorts: “Give me a call whenever you want to cut off my head. I can always crawl around without it.” One wonders: Does that make Visser a chicken or a snake?Read More »

Synopsis:
“A near-fatal collision between a car and a motorcycle brings about the happy reunion of Lise Tanquerelle, a busy career woman, and Antoine Lemercier, a professor of Greek at the Sorbonne. Although it has been many years since they last saw each other, in the halcyon summer of their college days, Lise and Antoine still have fond feelings for one another. Unfortunately, Antoine loathes the police with the passion of a red-blooded anarchist and Lise isn’t sure how to break the news to him that she is a police commissioner. Before she can resolve this dilemma, Lise is drawn into an investigation into the brutal killing of a former minister…”
– Films de FranceRead More »

After an extended stay in England, Sophie Lang returns to America. She is beautiful, sophisticated–and a notorious jewel thief. A New York police detective who’s been trying to nail her finally comes up with what seems a foolproof scheme–to catch her off guard by having her fall for a handsome and suave jewel thief who happens to be in the U.S. traveling under an assumed nameRead 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 »

Quote:
Theo, Marite, and Franz cannot make any money selling magazines door to door, so they try a little robbery.Read More »

Plot Synopsis: Though he doesn’t speak his first line of dialogue until the film’s final ten minutes, Peter Lorre spiritually dominates the fascinating RKO melodrama Stranger on the Third Floor. The plotline is carried by John McGuire, playing Ward, a newspaper reporter whose courtroom testimony sends the hapless Briggs (Elisha Cook Jr). to the death house. Ward is certain that he saw Briggs leaving the scene of a murder, but as the days pass, he is tortured by guilt and doubt — especially during the film’s surrealistic knockout of a nightmare sequence. When another murder is committed, Ward finds himself as much a victim of circumstantial evidence as the unfortunate Briggs. The reporter’s girlfriend (Margaret Tallichet) tries to clear Ward….and that’s when she first makes the acquaintance of Lorre, who is heard ordering a pound of raw meat! Stranger on the Third Floor was a “film noir” long prior to the genesis of that cinematic movement. Long ignored or trivialized by film historians, this 7-reel quickie has in recent years graduated to classic status.
— Hal Erickson, AMGRead More »

An ex-magistrate (Michel Piccoli) intent on justice joins the police force, then sets up a prostitute (Romy Schneider) and her small-time criminal boyfriend (Bernard Fresson).Read More »