1930s

If one were to gather the hundreds of books written about Ludwig van Beethoven, sift through each with a fine-tooth comb, and extract every simple mistake, wild speculation, and outright falsehood, the result would still be nowhere near as fabulous and artificial as this 1936 biopic, which rewrites the composer’s life story into a throbbingly melodramatic tale of genius ignored and love unrequited. Director Abel Gance, best known for his expansive silent classic Napoleon, wasn’t interested in the truth of Beethoven’s life, but instead the romantic ideal of a great man tormented by history; Gance’s Beethoven is merely a variation of the filmmaker’s beloved Bonaparte, triumphant yet scorned by his inferiors in the artistic realm rather than the political. (Needless to say, among the film’s many omissions is Beethoven’s bitter rededication of the “Eroica” Symphony.)Read More »

A man has the knack for finding stolen items. Then returns them to the insurance company. Finds some fake jewels and turns them in. Antics ensue.Read More »

Synopsis:
Once a Lady is a 1931 American Pre-Code drama film directed by Guthrie McClintic and starring Ruth Chatterton, Ivor Novello and Jill Esmond. The film, produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures, is a remake of the Pola Negri silent film Three Sinners (1928). The film was the final attempt by British matinée idol Novello to establish himself in Hollywood. Anna Keremazoff, a Russian living in Paris, leaves her beloved city and her bohemian lifestyle to marry Briton Jimmy Fenwick after she becomes pregnant by him. When the couple arrives at the Fenwick estate in Kent, Anna candidly tells Jimmy’s snobbish family she is pregnant. Shocked by Anna’s lack of decorum, Jimmy’s priggish aunt and mother begin a slow campaign against her free spirit.Read More »

The Yagyu family’s elder son sends an old and cheap looking pot to his young brother, ignoring that the pot contains a map showing where it was hidden a treasure of a million ryo. He tries to recover it but his brother’s wife has sold it to some junk dealers. Finally the pot ends up in Yasu’s hands, a kid whose father was killed although Tange Sazen was supposed to protect him from in his way to home, so Tange Sazen will look after Yasu.Read More »

Judy Bloch, Pacific Film Archive wrote:
Aubignac, a village situated high upon a crag in Provence, suffers the common fate of such enclaves, reduced and abandoned over time. Only three people remain: an old blacksmith, a withered crone, and a middle-aged poacher, Panturle (Gabriel Gabrio). And finally, it is Panturle, alone. Enter Arsule (Orane Demazis), a down-at-the-heels cabaret singer, and Gédémus (Fernandel), an itinerant knife-grinder who has picked her up; now she pulls his cart, like something out of La Strada. Arsule and Panturle team up to revitalize her existence and his land, the welcoming soil of Aubignac. Harvest, based on Jean Giono’s novel, is at once Pagnol’s crudest and clearest statement about humans and the earth: both will decay if left alone. But there is darkness, too—like the grinder whose comic ruses are edged with threat—against which the simple humanity of Arsule and Panturle becomes rather more complex.Read More »

Quote:
History of the legal scandal involving the French Captain Alfred Dreyfus who was convicted of treason and sent to the penal colony at Devil’s Island in 1894 because of an anti-Semitic conspiracy in the war ministry. Supported by the writer Emile Zola Dreyfus’s wife Lucie fights for his release. In 1899, the verdict against Dreyfus was repealed and shortly after, Dreyfus was pardoned. But it took another six years until Dreyfus was fully exonerated. (filmportal.de)Read More »

Peter is an aviator who dreams of a life in wealth and luxury. He meets the banker’s daughter Dodo.Read More »

Quote:
This major rediscovery creates a bridge between the social realism of G. W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street and the dark lyricism of F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise. The extraordinary Ita Rina (Erotikon) is the title character, a prostitute whose act of pity—keeping chaste company with a condemned man through the night before he is to be hung—returns to threaten her unexpected chance of happiness, as the bride of a young farmer from her native village.Read More »

European tourists on holiday in Morocco are threatened by a native sorcerer who predicts five of them will die, one by one, before the full moon.Read More »