1930s

Plot:
Celebrate the short career (10 Hollywood films and two Oscars®*) and long life (100 years young in 2010 and an honored participant in the TCM Classic Film Festival) of one of the screen’s nonpareil stars with this threesome of the fourth, fifth and sixth films Luise Rainer made in Tinseltown. The Viennese beauty portrays a Czarist Russian spy alongside William Powell in the ornate The Emperor’s Candlesticks. Cabbie Spencer Tracy and his immigrant wife Rainer struggle to make a life for themselves in the Big City while coping with a bitter labor dispute between organized and freelance cab drivers. And Rainer is a reckless Southern belle who marries the man her sister loves but flees to the arms of a wastrel playboy in The Toy Wife. From Warner Brothers!Read More »

this is a fragment of the original 115 minute film.Read More »

Synopsis:
Rosie and Marie are wisecracking Kansas City manicurists. Marie is an unabashed golddigger but Rosie would like to marry her gangster boyfriend Dynamite, who’s given her an expensive ring. When she loses the ring, both friends have to flee Dynamite’s wrath; their adventures include masquerading as girl scouts and taking an ocean voyage to Paris.Read More »

Brisbane, Australia, late 1910s. A man on the run from a murder charge buys a place as a stowaway on a smuggler ship bound for Mexico, by way of a tiny coral reef atoll.

Quote:
Between 1923 and 1952 Maurice Gleize managed to direct twenty two films in France without distinguishing himself. This one, with a screenplay by top French scriptwriter Charles Spaak, had arguably the best cast he ever got to work with (on other occasions he directed Fenandel, Charles Vanel and Marie Bell) from co-stars Jean Gabin and Michele Morgan – hot on the heels of Quai des brumes that same year – to Saturnin Fabre, Gaston Modot and Julien Carrette but for all Gleize extracted from them it might as well have been John Lund and Maria Montez supported by Leo Gorcey and the Bowery Boys.Read More »

Plot Synopsis by Hal Erickson
Most modern-day viewers are familiar with German author Alfred Doeblin’s naturalistic novel Berlin Alexanderplatz from its epic TV miniseries presentation, directed in 1980 by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The Doeblin work was previously filmed on the very brink of the Nazi takeover in 1933, with Heinrich George as the ex-convict protagonist. Yearning for respectability, George finds he cannot escape the influence of his old criminal cohorts. When George refuses to pay “hush money” to the mob, his faithful wife Margarete Schlegel is killed. George resignedly returns to a life of crime, ultimately descending into madness. The 1933 adaptation of Berlin Alexanderplatz ran a brisk 90 minutes; Fassbinder’s 1980 TV version ran ten times longer.Read More »

Hailed as one of the greatest Egyptian comedies of all time, Everything Is Fine stars Egyptian theatre legend Naguib El Rihany as Salama, a humble office clerk whose routine bank-deposit errand quickly evolves into the adventure of a lifetime. After finding the bank closed and the streets seemingly swarming with thieves, Salama decides to place the company money in a safe at the luxurious Nefretiti Palace Hotel. But things go hilariously awry when the hotel manager mistakes him for an eagerly-awaited guest, the wealthy Prince Kandahar of Bloudestan. As in the early films of The Marx Brothers and other timeless screwball comedies of the 1930s, Everything Is Fine pokes fun at society’s elite while taking viewers on a fast-paced comedic romp that will leave audiences of all ages feeling fine.Read More »

Opera singer Enrico Ferraro, tired of his too many engagements, jumps off the train escaping from his manager and changes to another going to the Riviera. He makes a friend and stops at a village, where (it seems) he can at last have some well deserved holidays, with the added interest of meeting a beautiful girl in the surroundings.Read More »

Synopsis:
Two-fisted New York police detective Edward G. Robinson is so volatile that he manages to get himself thrown off the force in disgrace. The local gangsters are delighted, in that Robinson had been breathing down their necks. When Robinson goes to crime boss Barton MacLaine insisting that he’s through with law enforcement and wants to switch to the other side, MacLaine’s chief henchmen Humphrey Bogart doesn’t buy the story, but has to go along since he doesn’t want to incur the wrath of MacLaine.Read More »

Synopsis/Review:
Denise, a young orphan girl who has escaped from a convent, believes that her misfortunes have ended when she meets Paul , a young naval officer upon whose ship she has stowed away. Paul, initially seeks to take advantage of her naivety to seduce her before changing his mind and sending her to live with his mother who works in a cabaret while he returns to sea. But the habits of the girl will push her to the brink of prostitution…Read More »