USA

A suicide attempt is investigated by a pair of female police rookies.

Peggy Knudsen … Dale Kent
Lynne Roberts … Madge Walker
Charles Russell … Lt. Rod Brooks
Paul Langton … Ed PoRead More »

Two gamblers must leave New York City after one loses a lot of money. Doing what all gamblers in trouble would do, they hurry to the gambling capital Las Vegas to turn their luck around.

Unlike his previous film (ugly, awful Second-Hand Hearts), this is an interesting one from Hal Ashby, where he successfully does a Cassavetes-style direction. A number of scenes look more like bloopers that usually get cut out, but that’s where improvisation can take you every now and then, and Ashby was willing to take that road, especially considering the fact that extended version is the one that probably saved all those bloopers. A successful mess that owes most of its charm to Burt Young, who is just amazing and swims in this mess like a fish.Read More »

From nytimes.com

Brash, handsome, ruthless, reckless, ambitious, brilliant and corrupt: these are the thrillingly paper thin qualities undoubtedly possessed by Father John Flaherty in the novel upon which ”Monsignor” is based. As played by a more or less real person (Christopher Reeve), Father Flaherty cannot help but lose some of his two-dimensional luster.Read More »

Barbara Harris (Nashville) cons Robert Blake (Baretta) into a marriage of inconvenience in this offbeat romantic comedy from Oscar®-winning* director Hal Ashby (Coming Home). A honkytonk waitress in Texas, Dinette Dusty (Harris) desperately misses her children. Forced to board them with her late husband’s parents, she finds the means to get them back when Loyal Muke (Blake) stumbles into the bar. Plying the boozy drifter with drinks, Dinette suggests they get hitched and become the children’s new guardians. Sobering up to a wife and three kids, Loyal drives them west in search of an exit, while Dinette keeps her eyes on the road ahead to make sure they don’t get ditched. *Film Editing, In the Heat of the Night, 1967Read More »

Plot : While Paris Sleeps is a grim expose of the European white slave trade. To save his daughter Manon (Helen Mack) from falling into the hands of a vicious gang of pimps, convict Jacques Costard (Victor McLaglen) escapes from jail. Jacques’ problems are twofold: he must keep Manon from being abducted into a life of prostitution, and he must also hide his true identity from the girl, who has been raised to believe that Jacques died a hero in WWI. The film’s gruesome “money scene” finds the white slavers disposing of a stool pigeon by incinerating him in a huge bakery oven! ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie GuideRead More »

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A documentary following the lives of motorcycle racers and racing enthusiasts, including actor Steve McQueen. First asking the question “Why do they do it?” this film looks at the people who devote (and sometimes risk) their lives to racing on tracks and off-road courses around the world.Read More »

From the files of Jerry Blake:
THE MASKED MARVEL.

Republic, 12 Chapters, 1943. Starring William Forrest, Louise Currie, Johnny Arthur, Richard Clarke, Rod Bacon, Anthony Warde, David Bacon, Bill Healy, and TOM STEELE as the Marvel.

THE MASKED MARVEL is almost universally recognized as one of Republic’s best. The action alone would be enough to place it in the top ten. The story deals with a wave of sabotage unleashed by Mura Sakima, a Japanese super-spy who employs former racketeer Killer Mace and other no-good turncoats in his evil schemes to destroy the American war effort. The World-Wide Insurance Company, principal insurer of the war materials, sends its four of its top investigators to stop the sinister sabotage. The Masked Marvel, mysterious foe of crime, aids the quartet in their battle, and it becomes evident that he is secretly one of the foursome. The Marvel is aided by Alice Hamilton, daughter of Warren Hamilton, the murdered head of World-Wide, and hindered by Hamilton’s partner, Martin Crane, who is actually in league with Sakima.Read More »

One of the best serials ever made, Spy Smasher has managed to find favor even among non-serial aficionados. Like his fellow masked avenger, Batman, Spy Smasher possessed no super-human powers but was a mere mortal of flesh and blood.

In brief, Spy Smasher, alias Alan Armstrong (Kane Richmond, and his twin brother Jack (also Richmond) pursue a nefarious German agent known only as The Mask (Hans Schumm). Witney and screenwriters Ronald Davidson, Norman S. Hall, Joseph Poland, William Lively and Joseph O’Donnell imbued their hero with a dark uniform very similar to the one he wore in the comics, but added a fancy belt decorated with a large “V” for “Victory” and the morse code symbol for the letter, three dots and a dash. The coup de grace, so to speak, was Mort Glickman’s signature score adapted from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.Read More »

When two American sisters travel north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history. Lynne and Dana Sachs’ travel diary of their trip to Vietnam is a collection of tourism, city life, culture clash, and historic inquiry that’s put together with the warmth of a quilt. Which Way Is East starts as a road trip and flowers into a political discourse. It combines Vietnamese parables, history and memories of the people the sisters met, as well as their own childhood memories of the war on TV.Read More »