Synopsis:
Norman is working in the stockroom of a large London department store, but he has ambition, he wants to be a window dresser making up the public displays. Whilst trying to fulfill his ambition, he falls in love, with one of the shopgirls. Together they discover a plot to rob the store and, somehow, manage to foil the robbers.Read More »
Synopsis:
In 1858 France, Bernadette, an adolescent peasant girl, has a vision of “a beautiful lady” in the city dump. She never claims it to be anything other than this, but the townspeople all assume it to be the virgin Mary. The pompous government officials think she is nuts, and do their best to suppress the girl and her followers, and the church wants nothing to do with the whole matter. But as Bernadette attracts wider and wider attention, the phenomenon overtakes everyone in the the town, and transforms their lives.Read More »
Synopsis:
A young American serviceman, stationed in Germany after the fall of the Third Reich, jeopardises his position with the Marshall Plan relief effort by breaking the non-fraternisatiom rule and falling in love with a young German woman. He uses his position to obtain food and luxuries for her that are in short supply, and all seems to be going well for the couple. What he doesn’t realise is that the Werewolves, the Nazi guerrilla movement, have plans in which he features heavily.Read More »
This film is a series of letters, photos and video cassettes which women often send in to certain newspapers. By visualizing their story-telling (the name given by the psychologists to their fantasies) the film portrays the confessions, the secret longings, the adventures, recollections, dreams, desires and fantasies of these women. It is an open secret that most women dream of forbidden affairs, secret lovers and hasty encounters but when it comes down to it they lack the courage to pursue their dreams.Read More »
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Directed by Ko Nakahira. With Mariko Kaga, Akira Nakao, Takeshi Kato. Yuka is a “good-time girl” from Yokohama who is persuaded by her papa to sleep with a foreign business executive so that he can close an important deal. Nakahira presents a shrewdly observed portrait of a modern, sexually assertive woman—an unsettling character for a changing but still patriarchal society. 93 min. – MoMA note: this film played under the title of Monday Girl for the MoMA’s Japanese film retrospective in 2005Read More »
Film Review
Georges Franju’s last film for the cinema was to be his second homage to the silent Louis Feuillade crime serials of the 1910s – the first being his inspired remake of Judex in 1963. Nuits rouges is a curious cinematic beast that owes as much to the adolescent American fantasy-thriller serials of the 1940s and 1960s as it does to Feuillade. It is certainly not what you would have expected from a man with a reputation as a serious filmmaker and co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française, France’s national film library.Read More »
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Lord Loam has modern ideas about his household; he believes in treating his servants as his equals – at least sometimes. His butler, Crichton, still believes that members of the serving class should know their place and be happy there. But when the Loam family are shipwrecked on a desert island with the self-reliant Crichton and between maid Tweeny, the class system is put to the test.Read More »
A love triangle through the four seasons. A young woman, living in a relationship, falls in love with a married man. If someone had told her that she in a few months should be the man’s mistress, she would become aggrieved and indignant. She was certainly not a woman who would mess with married men.Read More »
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British theatrical director Peter Glenville made his film directorial debut with 1955’s The Prisoner (Glenville had previous helmed the London stage production of this Bridget Boland play). The film is based on the real-life travails of Hungarian Cardinal Mindszenty, who after suffering under Nazi persecution was imprisoned by the new Communist regime for remaining loyal to his religious convictions. Alec Guinness, his head shaved, plays an unnamed Cardinal in an unspecified Eastern European country who is clapped into jail. Here he is ordered by the politicos to issue a phony statement to his flock, one that will effectively end Catholicism in his country. Jack Hawkins plays the diabolically clever “Interrogator”, who is almost successful in convincing Guinness that his false statement will have a beneficial effect. The Prisoner fared better in its American release than it did in Europe, where it was branded both “pro-Communist” and “anti-Communist” by various single-issue pressure groups.Read More »