Love, passion, betrayal and tragedy. Carmen Jones is an adaptation of Bizet’s legendary opera, Carmen. It tells the story of a young, free spirited woman called Carmen Jones whose great beauty is the object of many men’s desires. However, Carmen sets her sights on young army officer Joe, who is engaged to his sweetheart, Cindy Lou. Joe quickly succumbs to Carmen’s charms , forsaking his Cindy Lou, thus beginning the tragic love story.Read More »
Produced and directed by Otto Preminger, Exodus is a 212-minute screen adaptation of the best-selling novel by Leon Uris. The film is concerned with the emergence of Israel as an independent nation in 1947. Its first half focuses on the efforts of 611 holocaust survivors to defy the blockade of the occupying British government and sail to Palestine on the sea vessel Exodus. Paul Newman, a leader of the Hagannah (the Jewish underground), is willing to sacrifice his own life and the lives of the refugees rather than be turned back to war-ravaged Europe, but the British finally relent and allow the Exodus safe passage. Once this victory is assured, 30,000 more Jews, previously interned by the British, flood into the Holy Land.Read More »
This unaired pilot for a series Fuller pitched to CBS about a U.S. infantry troop fighting its way through Nazi-held North Africa offers a fascinating new angle on Fuller’s relationship with the average foot soldier and moral complexity of war.Read More »
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Will Rogers, Jr. tames the Old West with a rope and a grin in this breezy adventure directed by Oscar® winner Michael Curtiz (Casablanca, 1943) and costarring Nancy Olson, Lon Chaney, Jr. and Merv Griffin in a rare screen appearance. Wandering across the New Mexico territory, law student Tom Brewster (Rogers, Jr.) mails his final exam from Bluerock, a corrupt town whose sheriff was recently killed. So when the stagecoach is robbed and the letters stolen, Tom is offered the lawman’s position when it’s learned he won’t carry a gun. Read More »
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Well, what would you do? You’d never go along with this, right? You’re too smart. Me, too. “Compliance” encourages us to feel superior to the employees of a fast-food chicken chain in Ohio, and so we do: Audiences are said to be outraged at what the characters do, and San Francisco-based critic Omar Moore went back to more screenings to confirm that there were walk-outs.
In the case of “Compliance,” the walk-outs aren’t because it’s a bad movie, but because it’s all too effective at exposing the human tendency to cave in to authority. As the film opens, Sandra (Ann Dowd), the restaurant’s manager, is already feeling guilty. An employee left a freezer open and $15,000 in food was spoiled. Almost as bad, somebody didn’t order more pickles and bacon, and the district supervisor is scheduled to make an inspection visit. For Sandra, this is a perfect storm.Read More »
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Stephen Fermoyle has grown up in Boston at the turn of the twentieth century knowing that his destiny lies with the Catholic priesthood. Finally finishing his studies in Rome, he returns to America full of certitude and ambition to one day join the College of Cardinals. But his road to that office is a long one, paved with crises. In Boston, he must decide whether to save the life of his sister or her unborn child, conceived out of wedlock. In Austria, he confronts the question of whether to remain with the priesthood or abandon his oath so that he can be with the woman he loves. In Georgia, he contends with Rome’s indifference in the face of racial bigotry. And in Austria, he finds himself personally involved in the church’s dealings with the Third Reich.Read More »
Brecht said drama should always be performed with the house lights up so that that the spectator never forgot he was watching a play. Rappaport wants to remind us how artificial realism is, and how unreal our lives are. In this house of mirrors of one-size-fits-all, wash-and-wear identities, where is “reality”? In this echo-chamber of recycled one-liners, where is truth? What would it mean to escape from these permanent-press, ready-to-wear straight jackets? What would be left of language, thought, and emotion if we freed ourselves from the systems that we claim limit us? Life may be an elaborately coded charade, but what would expression be without the codes? We’d be invisible men if we took off our imaginative leisure suits. Rappaport takes his place alongside Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, as an all-American explorer of the unreality of reality. It’s fitting that avant-garde theater pioneer Charles Ludlum is featured in one of the leads. —people.bu.edu/rcarneyRead More »
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Alan Parker paints a picture that is rich, dark and dank. While his flashy visual style may seem like sloppy editing, it poetically leaves a viewer with an odd, disorienting series of partial memories that blur in and out of one another. His script is equally as clever, if at times in need of tightening. Many small snippets of dialogue including the metaphorical rhetoric of Cyphre and the constant self-contradiction of Angel are easy to overlook in a single viewing. The dialogue gives lots of clues just like the ones Harry Angel has to work with: some subtle, some glaringly obvious.Read More »
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All George Dunlap (Albert Finney) wants to do is to give his 13-year-old daughter a typewriter for her birthday. It is hardly the impossible dream; it isn’t even an unreasonable request. But George recently walked out on his wife Faith (Diane Keaton) and their four daughters, for all those vague but somehow imperative reasons for which people leave people these days, and Daughter Sherry (Dana Hill) is not buying any of them. Nor is she covering her confusion with forgiveness. Better just not to speak to the creep. When Faith tries to avoid a scene by keeping George out of their handsome old Marin County house, George breaks in and pounds up the stairs to confront his eldest. She fights off his blend of bewildered love and rage. He spanks her. She threatens him with a scissors. They end in a sodden tangle of bodies and emotions on her bed.Read More »