Brooklyn Academy of Music writes:
Kurosawa’s Rashomon is transposed to the American Wild West as four participants in a rape and murder—including a Mexican bandit (Newman), the dead man (Harvey), and his wife (Bloom)—give differing accounts of what occurred. Featuring a dynamite supporting cast that includes Edward G. Robinson and William Shatner, The Outrage is lent a haunted, nightmarish atmosphere thanks to James Wong Howe’s psychologically charged camerawork.Read More »
Synopsis:
Four soldiers of fortune are hired by a wealthy rancher to rescue his beautiful young wife who has been kidnapped by a villainous Mexican bandit. When they finally find her, after fighting their way across deserts and mountains, they discover she is not being held against her will. This causes friction within the band as to whether they should honor their agreement.Read More »
Synopsis:
“Uptight” is an updated remake of John Ford’s 1935 film, “The Informer”. Dublin becomes the Cleveland ghetto and the Irish Republicans are replaced by black revolutionary fighters. Days after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Tank Williams (Julian Mayfield) is an unemployed and itinerant steelworker who turns over his militant friend, Johnny Wells (Max Julien) to the police for $1,000 reward, resulting in an underground all-points bulletin to exact vengeance on the squealer. Legendary director, Jules Dassin’s unrelenting directional pace is complemented by the driving score of Booker T. Jones. The stellar cast includes Raymond St. Jacques, Ruby Dee, Roscoe Lee Browne, and Frank Silvera.Read More »
Synopsis:
Engineer Jake Holman arrives aboard the gunboat U.S.S. San Pablo, assigned to patrol a tributary of the Yangtze in the middle of exploited and revolution-torn 1926 China. His iconoclasm and cynical nature soon clash with the “rice-bowl” system which runs the ship and the uneasy symbiosis between Chinese and foreigner on the river. Hostility towards the gunboat’s presence reaches a climax when the boat must crash through a river-boom and rescue missionaries upriver at China Light Mission.Read More »
Synopsis:
In 1930’s Austria, a young woman named Maria is failing miserably in her attempts to become a nun. When the Navy captain Georg Von Trapp writes to the convent asking for a governess that can handle his seven mischievous children, Maria is given the job. The Captain’s wife is dead, and he is often away, and runs the household as strictly as he does the ships he sails on. The children are unhappy and resentful of the governesses that their father keeps hiring, and have managed to run each of them off one by one. When Maria arrives, she is initially met with the same hostility, but her kindness, understanding, and sense of fun soon draws them to her and brings some much-needed joy into all their lives — including the Captain’s.Read More »
Synopsis:
Frustrated by illegal competition from Russians in the seal fur trade, Capt. Jonathan Clark (Gregory Peck) struggles to raise funds to purchase Alaska from Russia. Another competitor, unscrupulous trader Portugee (Anthony Quinn), is hired to transport Russian Countess Mariana Selanova (Ann Blyth) to marry the callous Prince Semyon (Carl Esmond). After Jonathan falls in love with Mariana, he squares off against Portugee, the prince and the Russians to rescue her and restore the trading business.Read More »
Synopsis
Often described as “the first American independent film”, von Sternberg’s The Salvation Hunters is an austere and obscurely naturalist drama about “humans who crawl near the floor.”
“It’s hard now to appreciate the bomb-shell that Sternberg’s first feature must have been in Hollywood at the time: its slow pace, its lyrical pessimism, and its strong emphasis on the psychological over the physical set it far apart from anything that the American cinema had produced” (Tony Rayns, Time Out Film Guide). Shot for less than five thousand dollars in the span of three weeks, the groundbreaking Salvation Hunters announced the emergence of a major new talent, even if audiences of the day didn’t quite know what to make of its grimy settings, glum tone, and overt symbolizing.Read More »
Synopsis:
In Los Angeles, circa 1940, an embittered, once-corrupt cop named Tom Spellacy is investigating two murders: that of a priest found dead in a whorehouse, and that of a mutilated woman in a park. As he searches for the culprits, Spellacy uncovers an immense web of corruption, involving prostitutes, dirty cops and pornography. Even the Roman Catholic Church is implicated, particularly one Monsignor Des Spellacy, Tom’s brother. Although Des is innocent of any wrongdoing, his actions raise moral and religious issues that Tom must deal with, in order to solve these bizarre murders.Read More »
Synopsis:
Sitting out the war as the jailer of a Union prison stockade in Eastern New Mexico, Amos Charles Dundee (Charlton Heston) seizes upon a local Apache massacre to ignore his assignment and launch a search-and-destroy mission into Mexico. Having already lost many troopers to the the Indian chief Sierra Charriba (Michael Pate), Dundee is forced to augment his command with local thieves and drunks, promote his black cavalrymen to active status and make a deal with the leader of his Confederate prisoners, the cavalier Ben Tyreen (Richard Harris). It’s an all-or-nothing gambit; Dundee will either find his Apache quarry and come home a national hero, or return empty-handed and face the wrath of military superiors who already see him as an untrustworthy glory hound. Either way, he’d be wise to avoid the thousands of French troops that are also in Northern Mexico, harshly suppressing the revolution of Benito Juarez.Read More »