A jolly French film, with a rich vein of satire, is at the little Acme Theatre on Union Square under the name of “Mirages de Paris.”
In this fast-moving fantasy of the unsophisticated student (Mlle. Francell) who escapes from a boarding school to become, after many trials and tribulations, the “toast of Paris,” Fedor Ozep has managed to combine much of the technic of his native Russia with the flair for the ridiculous supposed to belong to all true Parisians.Read More »
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The horror of the faces: That is the overwhelming image that remains from a recent viewing of the restored version of “M,” Fritz Lang’s famous 1931 film about a child murderer in Germany. In my memory it was a film that centered on the killer, the creepy little Franz Becker, played by Peter Lorre. But Becker has relatively limited screen time, and only one consequential speech–although it’s a haunting one. Most of the film is devoted to the search for Becker, by both the police and the underworld, and many of these scenes are played in closeup. In searching for words to describe the faces of the actors, I fall hopelessly upon “piglike.”Read More »
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Bob (Leslie Banks) and Jill Lawrence (Edna Best) are on a winter sports holiday with their teenage daughter. When their friend Louis Bernard is shot whilst dancing with Jill, he tells Bob of an assassination about to take place in London.
Fearing that their plot will be revealed, the assassins kidnap their daughter in order to keep the Lawrence’s quiet.
Bob and Jill return to London and take matters into their own hands.
In this movie we can beside Leslie Banks and Edna Best also see Peter Lorre.Read More »
Earh (1930) 59 min.
Poetic cinema story about events related to collectivization in Ukraine at the end of 20th years of the last century, about creation of the first of a collective farm communes, about class enmity on a village.
The best film Dovzhenko and one of the best films in history world to the cinema.
A film “Earth” on the World exhibition in Brussels of 1958 was adopted among the twelve best films of all times and people as a result of questioning, conducted Belgian cinematic among 117 film critics andconnoisseurs of the films from 26 countries of the world. During many subsequent years “Earth” was multiple included in the various lists of the best films of the world of XX century.Read More »
This is an anti-Fascist short Rossellini made in 1940.
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La vispa Teresa was rejected and, although Ferrara said that Il tacchino was distributed by Scalera under its working title, “La perfida Albione,” there were no press notices, and no one outside of Scalera is known to have seen it. According to Ferrara, Rossellini told him it was a satire in which “Perfidious Albion,” a big turkey representing England, goes around pecking at the hens representing the nations of Europe, until defied by a rooster representing Italy. “Rossellini detested it,” said Ferrara, “[though his] genius was such that he could achieve extraordinary effects out of nothing. He used to tell me, ‘It’s the only time that, through my weakness, I made a work of propaganda.’”Read More »
The third and definitive film adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s fantasy, this musical adventure is a genuine family classic that made Judy Garland a star for her heartfelt performance as Dorothy Gale, an orphaned young girl unhappy with her drab black-and-white existence on her aunt and uncle’s dusty Kansas farm.
Dorothy yearns to travel “over the rainbow” to a different world, and she gets her wish when a tornado whisks her and her little dog, Toto, to the Technicolorful land of Oz. Having offended the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton), Dorothy is protected from the old crone’s wrath by the ruby slippers that she wears.Read More »
Gary Cooper and George Raft play a couple of seafaring buddies in this moral adventure
saga set during the 1840s, when the slave-trade had been outlawed by the British
Empire but was still a reality on the high seas. In its depiction of the friendship between
two men, one of questionable character, the film bears some similarities to Hathaway’s
Spawn of the North, made the following year.Read More »
RKO Pictures launched what could have been one of the great detective series in 1932, when Edna May Oliver starred in “The Penguin Pool Murder”. As Stuart Palmer’s elderly schoolteacher turned sleuth Hildegarde Withers, Oliver was one of the screen’s most liberated women, defying Police Inspector Oscar Piper (James Gleason) to track down killers with little regard for his pride or her own safety. Although Oliver left the series after only two more installments, leading to a serious decline in quality for the films, her first two outings in particular were years ahead of their time, thanks to director George Archainbaud’s uniquely visual narrative skills and for the films’ depiction of an older, independent woman.
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Yasujirô Ozu wrote:
One could say this is the flip side of I Graduated, But… The student-protagonist scribbles his crib notes on his shirt sleeve, but the day of his graduation exam, the girl at his boarding house unwittingly takes the shirt to the launderette So naturally, he flunks. However, those who pass and graduate in high spirits cannot land any job, while the ones who flunked can continue to bum around living off their parent’s money. It’s a vignette. Although Ryu Chishu has appeared in my previous films, it was the first time I let him have a go at a more significant role.Read More »