Quote:
They said it couldn’t be done, but they did it: Kathleen Winsor’s “notorious”, bestselling bodice-ripper Forever Amber actually made it to the screen in 1947 with full censorial approval. Of course, it was necessary to tone down the more erotic passages of Winsor’s novel, but the end result pleased fans of the book and bluenosed nonfans alike. A last-minute replacement for British import Peggy Cummins, Linda Darnell steps into the role of 17th century blonde bed-hopper Amber as though she’d been born to play it. Feeling suppressed by her Puritan upbringing, Amber heads to London, finding considerable success as a courtesan (that’s the polite word for it). The first real love of her life is dashing soldier Bruce Carlton, who leaves her pregnant and penniless when he marches off to war. Subsequent amours include the sadistic Earl of Radcliffe (a superbly loathsome performance by comic actor Richard Haydn), handsome highwayman Black Jack Mallard (John Russell) and privateer Captain Rex Morgan (Glenn Langan). Surviving the Plague and the Great London Fire with nary a hair out of place, Amber ends up in the arms of no less than King Charles II (wittily portrayed by George Sanders), but true love, as personified by Bruce Carlton, will always elude her.

Taking no chances, 20th Century-Fox sent out Forever Amber with a spoken prologue, heard over the opening credits, which explained that the film in no way endorsed its heroine’s libertine behavior, and that she would be amply punished for her sins before fadeout time (that prologue has thankfully been removed from current prints). A model of restraint by today’s standards, Forever Amber was sufficiently titillating in 1947 to post an enormous profit, far in excess of its $4 million budget.

Otto Preminger & John M. Stahl - (1947) Forever Amber.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2h 18mn
Size: 	2.24 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	768x576 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 118 Kbps
BPP: 	0.200
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/90699B8F3AF46A9/Otto_Preminger_&_John_M._Stahl_-_(1947)_Forever_Amber.mkv

Language(s):English, French, Italian
Subtitles:None

The post Otto Preminger & John M. Stahl – Forever Amber (1947) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A one-night fling during World War I results in a young girl getting pregnant. Years later, she meets him again. Now a successful businessman, he doesn’t even remember her, but tries to seduce her.

Only.Yesterday.1933.mp4

General
Container:	MPEG-4
Runtime:	1h 45mn
Size:	1.20 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Not met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	640x480
Aspect ratio:	4:3
Frame rate:	29.970 fps
Bit rate:	1 500 Kbps
Audio
2.0ch AAC @ 128 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/93B5ACF2D8ED909/Only.Yesterday.1933.mp4

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post John M. Stahl – Only Yesterday (1933) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

The Criterion Channel writes:
The first of three film adaptations Universal made of Fannie Hurst’s tear-jerking novel chronicles the fate-battered relationship of Ray (Irene Dunne) and Walter (John Boles), two star-crossed lovers seemingly thwarted from being together by circumstances and time. Tracing their relationship across decades—as the married Walter ascends to prominence as a wealthy financier while Ray remains in the background as the perpetual “other woman”—BACK STREET offers a beautifully restrained and deeply affecting vision of self-sacrifice in the name of love.

Back.Street.1932.1080p.WEB-DL.AAC.2.0.x264-SHR.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 29 min
Size: 	3.50 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1480x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	1.370
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	5 456 kb/s
BPP: 	0.142
Audio
#1:  	English 1.0ch AAC LC @ 157 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/FABBB3625E866BE/Back.Street.1932.1080p.WEB-DL.AAC.2.0.x264-SHR.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:none

The post John M. Stahl – Back Street (1932) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Summary by All Movie Guide:
A man trying to leave his fame behind discovers the perils of choosing to be the wrong unknown person in this farcical British comedy. Priam Farli (Monty Woolley) is an eccentric but famous and well-respected artist who prefers to work in total seclusion — so much so that he’s spent the last 20 years creating his paintings while living on an isolated island in the Pacific, with only his valet, Henry Leek (Eric Blore), for company. When word reaches Farli that he is to be knighted by King Edward VII (Edwin Maxwell), the artist reluctantly sails back to Great Britain with Leek, but en route, his devoted servant dies. Seeing a perfect opportunity to once again escape the public eye, Farli poses as Leek and claims that the great painter was the one who passed away. Farli is not allowed to attend his own funeral, but things get more complicated when Alice Challice (Gracie Fields) appears with a letter in which Leek proposes marriage to her. Wanting to maintain his cover, Farli goes through with the wedding, only to find that Leek was already married, and his first wife (Una O’Connor) would like some explanations as to why her Henry has taken another wife, not to mention wondering where he’s been for the past two decades. Laird Cregar, Alan Mowbray, and Fritz Feld highlight the supporting cast.

Holy.Matrimony.1943.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 27mn
Size:	1.29 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	706x480 ~> 706x529
Aspect ratio:	4:3
Frame rate:	23.976 fps
Bit rate:	1 930 Kbps
Audio
English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/65F85D703A0E2F9/Holy.Matrimony.1943.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post John M. Stahl – Holy Matrimony (1943) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A concert pianist unhappily married to a mentally ill woman falls in love with a waitress.

+Commentary by author/film historian Lee Gambin and costume historian Elissa Rose

1.82GB | 1h 31m | 792×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/789EC64EC875900/When.Tomorrow.Comes.1939.576p.BluRay.AAC.2.0.x264-KG.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English,English SDH,French

The post John M. Stahl – When Tomorrow Comes (1939) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

After County Attorney Dave Connors helps Julian Norman with her shiftless father, Jefferson Norman, she leaves Jericho, Kansas to college to study for a law degree.A few years later, Algeria Wedge, the new bride of Dave’s best friend, Tucker Wedge, makes overtures and plays for Dave, much to the displeasure of Dave’s hard-drinking wife Belle. Angered by Dave’s rebuffs, Algeria induces the state political boss to back Tucker for a Congress race against Dave. Meanwhile, Julia has returned to Jericho, with her law degree, and she and Dave fall in love. But when Dave announces he won’t run for Congress, she feels she is the reason and she takes a job in Kansas City. Tucker wins the election and he and Algeria go to Washington. Later, Tucker announces a run for the Senate and Dave decides to run against him. When Marjorie Ransome kills a drunk in self-defense, Julia returns to Jericho to work with Dave, now in private practice,on Marjorie’s defense. The still-resentful Algeria moves to kill Dave’s senate bid when Tucker’s newspaper announces that Dave is being sued for divorce, with Julia named as correspondent.

1.74GB | 1h 45mn | 785×556 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/72189D1165FBB5E/The_Walls_of_Jericho_(1948)_–_John_M._Stahl.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English, Spanish, Russian (muxed)

The post John M. Stahl – The Walls of Jericho (1948) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A fevered yet clinical study of jealousy, Leave Her to Heaven is probably John M. Stahl’s best-known film. In many ways, it is far removed from the sober, intense concentration of Stahl’s major and underseen ’30s soap operas; his early movies were deliberately plain and spare, while Leave Her to Heaven is overpoweringly artificial and rococo, with intimations of neurotic fantasies churning away underneath its lacquered, rotogravure images. Immediately pulsing with the thumping drums of Alfred Newman’s stormy score, the film proceeds very slowly at first, as Stahl builds a dreamlike Technicolor atmosphere around his three leads, Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde, and Jeanne Crain. These actors are eerily one-dimensional, and Stahl uses their limitations as performers to his advantage, making them look like sleepwalkers in a sort of Life magazine nightmare.

At the center of the movie is Tierney’s Ellen, a monstrous amalgam of Hedda Gabler, Jackie O, and a zombie; she wants to have her husband Richard (Wilde) all to herself, at any price. Aside from some obscure daddy issues, we never find out any really suggestive reasons for Ellen’s psychic unrest, but Stahl creates several fabled set pieces that express the will of his anti-heroine. Set Piece Number One: Ellen rides ’round and ’round a hillside, her face frozen with unreadable hauteur, stiffly disposing of her beloved father’s ashes as if she were following a metronome ticking in her head. Set Piece Number Two: Ellen sits in a rowboat, her eyes hidden behind ’40s sunglasses, and calmly watches her crippled brother-in-law Danny (Darryl Hickman) drown (Stahl implicates us in her sociopathic behavior by making Danny a fairly unbearable boy of the “gosh golly swell!” variety). Surely many women can identify with a pregnant Ellen when she cries, “This baby is making a prisoner out of me!” Her initial, recognizable, stir-crazy feeling thus informs our guilty pleasure at Ellen’s audacity when she dives down a steep staircase to abort her baby, Set Piece Number Three, which is certainly the most shocking of her big scenes. It is Leave Her to Heaven’s signal achievement that Stahl is able to make Ellen both mysteriously unstoppable and poignantly trapped.

There are visual motifs here that keep returning like bits of recapitulated music, especially the image of water surrounded by trees, people moving in and out of silhouette, and the cool Technicolor greens slashed by the red of Ellen’s fire-engine lips. Stahl uses dissolves for this dream work, of course, but he also takes a big chance by fading to black after an important episode and holding the black out for a beat or two, as if our eyes were involuntarily closing in sleep every once in a while. When we get the image back, everything seems unsettled, disoriented; the bric-a-brac and green cactuses cluttering the sets start to feel suffocating. These black outs last three or four beats as the film goes on, then cease for the last 15 minutes, a perfunctory climax where Vincent Price shatters the mood with his overacting as a prosecuting attorney. In the midst of this courtroom letdown, Stahl focuses our attention on an ostentatious window above the witnesses’ heads that is surely meant to be Ellen’s Cyclops-like eye watching over her own diabolical handiwork. This is a film that exists in some floating subconscious state where any behavior is allowed, where fear and helplessness are inevitable. If Stahl seems close to Carl Dreyer in his ’30s work, with Leave Her to Heaven he plunges headfirst into a sort of cruel, thin Daliesque landscape where an inscrutable beauty’s liberating vengeance has no limit whatsoever.
©Dan Callahan
September 13, 2007

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/144606BD5999673/leave-her-to-heaven.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English Spanish

The post John M. Stahl – Leave Her to Heaven [+Commentary] (1945) first appeared on Cinema of the World.