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Soledad, a maid born in Argentina, works at a Mexican farm. The son of her employer will deceive her, pretending to marry her and leaving her pregnant. When she finds out that she has been tricked, she runs away from the farm. During her flight she meets a group of artists that’ll change her life. [Synopsis translated from spanish.]Read More »
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An idealistic schoolteacher leaves his wife and family behind in 1930s Shanghai to join the Red Cross in the fight against the Japanese invasion. After he is captured, he escapes to Chongqing, where he marries a high-society hostess and establishes a new bourgeois life for himself. Meanwhile, his family lives a life of poverty in a squatter’s camp in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. Director Zheng and veteran filmmaker Cai (who focused mainly on the screenplay for fear of reprimand from the ruling Kuomintang Government) successfully intercut between the parallel narratives, which reflect the contradictory social conditions of prerevolutionary China and bring an epic scale to the life of the Chinese everyman. Considered the country’s equivalent of Gone with the Wind, this sweeping melodrama gave rise to a “romantic family epic” craze in 1940s China.Read More »
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Claude Autant-Lara’s literally haunting romantic tale Sylvia and the Phantom stars Odette Joyeaux as Sylvia, an imaginative young girl who lives in an old French castle. Fascinated by a portrait of the lover of her deceased grandmother, Sylvia fantasizes about having a romance with the lover’s ghost. On Sylvia’s 16th birthday, her father decides to amuse the girl by having the “ghost” make an appearance, and to that end engages the services of three men–a valet, a ham actor and a burglar–to impersonate the wraith. Though confused by the fact that the ghost seemingly has three distinct personalities, Sylvia nonetheless falls in love with the burglar, the most handsome of the trio. Disillusioned upon learning of her father’s subterfuge, Sylvia is unfortunately unresponsive when the real ghost (poignantly enacted by comedian Jacques Tati) makes a surprise appearance. Unfairly lambasted by American critics as “worthless,” Sylvia and the Phantom has since taken its place in cinema history as one of Claude Autant-Lara’s most beguiling works. The film was adapted from a play by Alfred Adam.Read More »
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A movie director is approached by his old math teacher with a great movie idea: the Devil declares that the Earth is hell. The director rejects the idea, but subsequent events in the life of a writer, a friend of the director’s, and a young prostitute he loves seem to prove the math teacher’s idea.Read More »
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Sentimental egalitarianism in a love story that crosses class barriers. A lower-class entrepreneur on his way up is proposed a match wth a lovely girl of an aristocratic family. He soon learns her household is bankrupt and hoping he will bail them out, and he feels he has none of the refined culture this girl enjoys. But in the end the girl herself realizes she is really in love with this boorish but charmingly frank and devoted young man…Read More »
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Secret Service agents make a deal with a counterfeiting inmate to be released on early parole if he will help them recover some bogus moneymaking plates, but he plans to double cross them.Read More »
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On the beach one night, Christine Faber, two years a widow, thinks she hears her late husband Paul calling out of the surf…then meets a tall dark man, Alexis, who seems to know all about such things. After more ghostly manifestations, Christine and younger sister Janet become enmeshed in the eerie artifices of Alexis; but he in turn finds himself manipulated into deeper deviltry than he had in mind…Read More »
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Pride of the Marines is a stirring, powerful, hard-hitting World War II drama. Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say it’s a post-War drama, as the real meat of the picture concerns a wounded soldier’s return to civilian life. While Pride is undeniably patriotic, it also is not afraid to ask some serious, hard questions or to present war as less than a grand adventure. It really features only one battle sequence, which lasts some ten minutes; it’s an amazing, gripping sequence, but it doesn’t glorify battle as many similar films do. The men involved are fighting for their lives, and they react exactly as people really do react in such a situation. Similarly, the discussion about what life will be like when they return home dares to present the possibility that things will not be all roses, a rather bold suggestion for a 1945 film. Finally, the anguish, torment, and bitterness that the lead character experiences is striking and affecting. Read More »
The Shadow battles a villain known as The Black Tiger, who has the power to make himself invisible and is trying to take over the world with his death ray.Read More »