Kurosawa’s lost masterpiece has finally come to light. Filmed in 1970 and aired on Japanese television “Song Of The Horse” is his visual poem for the horse, the creature that he loved the most. Told through narration by an old man speaking with his grandson while the visual mastery of one of the greatest filmmakers of all time expands before one’s eyes. Kurosawa ordinarily avoided television work and this is the only time that he had any involvement with the small screen. A rare and beautiful ode to the most gallant member of the animal kingdom!Read More »
As with LIPSTICK ON YOUR COLLAR, the later re-working of this play, most of the action is set within the 1956 War Office in the midst of the Cold War and just prior to and contemporaneous with the Suez Crisis. Private Robert Hawk is the newly-arrived Russian language clerk. He is the son of a Yorkshire coalminer and a graduate of grammar school and of Oxford. He is doing his two years of national service. His job at the War Office is to assist the MI3 section in the translation of intercepted Russian documents on troop movements. Hawk is caught between his own working class roots and the upper middle class values and behaviours of the officers he works with. They mock him for his background, his immaturity and his intellectualism. He is also caught between his almost adolescent romantic idealisation of women as he sees them portrayed, for example, in his visit to the theatre to see Chekhov’s The Seagull and his equally adolescent sexual drives which lead him to consort with a prostitute for sexual release. He survives all this by inventing personalities for himself so that, in a pub and surrounded by football fanatics, he asserts his status by pretending to be (and convincing the fans that he actually is) the Russian national team goalkeeper. His deception fails when an old friend, Pete, comes into the pub and inadvertently unmasks him. To impress Pete that he holds an important position at the War Office, Hawk sets out to obtain a classified document but Pete fails to arrive at the rendezvous and the document is discarded.Read More »
In this 1980 documentary, originally in three parts but presented here in its entirety, Vittorio De Seta presents the drama of the Vietnamese refugees who arrived in the great Asian metropolis.Read More »
After an accident causes an ugly duckling girl to undergo reconstructive surgery, she emerges from behind the bandages a ravishing beauty. It’s payback time when she uses her new attractiveness to exact revenge on those who wronged her.Read More »
Moonlight on the Highway is a television play by Dennis Potter, first broadcast on 12 April 1969 as part of ITV’s Saturday Night Theatre strand. The tale of a young Al Bowlly obsessive attempting to blot out memories of sexual abuse via his fixation with the singer, the play was the first of Potter’s works to use popular music as a dramatic device and strongly anticipated Potter’s later ‘serials with songs’ Pennies from Heaven (1978), The Singing Detective (1986) and Lipstick on Your Collar (1993).Read More »
Quote:
A woman is executed in front of her daughter in a remote parking lot. For Nadja, the detective chief inspector Hanns von Meuffels as a dedicated assistant, the case seems obvious. A family drama about sex, blackmail and custody. But von Meuffels is not a fan of hasty theories. Too many inconsistencies that don’t make sense. He is looking for an exchange with Constanze, his former colleague from Hamburg, who has already assisted him twice in solving cases. Von Meuffels has an ambivalent relationship with her that goes beyond the professional level. And so in his last case he is fighting on two fronts.Read More »
Quote:
Originally broadcast on television over four suspenseful weeks in 1965, BELPHEGOR: PHANTOM OF THE LOUVRE was an unprecedented pop sensation that captivated and terrified all of France.
The sinister, ghostly presence of the mysterious Belphegor is haunting the Louvre, seeking the Treasure of the Kings of France. Against him are pitted the indomitable Commissioner Menadier and an intrepid young student, André Bellegarde, who has his own reasons for wanting to catch this eerie apparition. A duel to the death begins between the murderous Phantom of the Louvre and his enemies throughout the City of Lights.Read More »
