An aging chief’s last stand, lessons for the new, and the education of a young chief-to-be played against harsh Nature in Nepal’s Dolpo. When his son dies returning from Tibet’s salt lakes, Tinle blames Karma, his son’s friend, refuses to give Karma his blessing as the new chief, and organizes a rival caravan to take the salt to lower Nepal to trade for grain. He, a few old men, his son’s widow, his grandson, and his second son, a monk, set out on the arduous journey. Fearing storms, Karma has led his caravan out of the village before the auspicious day ordained by the lamas. Tinle’s group catches Karma’s before the final pass; the two stubborn men lock wills with Tinle’s grandson watching.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 »

Film 1: Fainda no Onna (Woman in the Viewfinder)
Sakura Mizutani, Kenji Mizuhashi, Yoko Kashiwagura

Photographer Suga (Kenji Mizuhashi) aiming to win the photo contest and Lulu (Sakura Mizutani), a girl who works as a model. Two people who are drawn to each other while maintaining the relationship between the photographer and the model. One day, a mysterious woman, Sayoko (Yoko Kashiwagura), appears in the viewfinder of Suga. Eventually, Suga and Lulu win the long-awaited victory.
[24 minutes 49 seconds]Read 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 »

From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
Sexologists, psychologists, and proponents of sexual freedom, the Kronhausens here attempt to induce erotic response in the audience by carefully chosen visual stimuli and juxtapositions (aimed at both conscious and unconscious). Phallic symbols and open orifices, a tongue licking an orange, an unexpected finger entering the frame: almost any object or act, no matter how innocuous, the Kronhausens show, can be made to appear erotic, and reveals our predisposition towards ‘shaping’ visual evidence for purposes of erotic gratification.Read More »

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Back in the 16th Century, a witch is burned by the local Squire but she returns to life to kill him and his wife, and curse all of his descendents. Three hundred years later, a film director, descended from the Squire, has made a film about the curse and is astonished to find that the witch’s hatred is still very much alive. Gradually, people connected with the film begin dying in bizarre circumstances and it begins to look as if no-one in London is safe from the curse.Read More »