1940s

Synopsis:
According to a legend, if three strangers gather before an idol of Kwan Yin (the Chinese goddess of fortune and destiny) on the night of the Chinese New Year and make a common wish, Kwan Yin will open her eyes and her heart and grant the wish. In London 1938 on the Chinese New Year, Crystal Shackleford has such an idol and decides to put the legend to the test. She picks two random strangers off the street, and puts the proposition to them. They decide that an ideal wish would be for a sweepstakes ticket they buy equal shares in to be a winner. After all, everyone needs money and a pot is very easy to divide equally, right?Read More »

A reformed thief cracks a ring of art thieves to clear himself of murder charges.Read More »

Silently, a woman wakes on a beach as the tides go in reverse. Her dreamscape unfolds as she tries to locate a chess piece traveling from the beach to a party to a country road and then back.Read More »

A blonde woman drops by her sister’s apartment unexpectedly and discovers her brunette sister having sex. While hiding behind a curtain, the blonde sister is so aroused that she begins to masturbate and is discovered. Angry that their sexual liaison has been disturbed, the man grabs the blonde and proceeds to spank her and then whip her with his belt. When the brunette objects to her sister’s treatment the blonde helps the man bind the brunette’s wrists and string her up from the ceiling and then beaten. The blonde and the man proceed to have sex while the tied-up sister watches. Later the sisters engage in mild lesbian familiarity.Read More »

Small town girl Kitty Traves comes to New York with the idea of getting rich fast. Beginning as a ‘model’ she then becomes a divorce co-respondent in hotel room frame-ups. When her songwriting boyfriend, Dan Barker, runs out of songs and money, she send him back to his loyal, true-blue fiancée, Linda Waring. She moves on to marry a wealth industrialist, with divorce and alimony her only goal.
(from IMDB)Read More »

Synopsis
Black janitor Nicodemus is surprised by the appearance of a man emerging from the Cromwell Finance Corp. office late at night. The man asks Nicodemus for the time and for a light for his cigar, then departs. Nicodemus later finds the president of Cromwell Corp. dead from strangulation. Nicodemus identifies wealthy philanthropist John G. Harrison as the man he saw in the building on the night of the murder. Assistant district attorney Edward Clark unearths information that similar murders were committed in other cities on the evenings that Harrison, a deaf-mute, was attending charity functions. Read More »

Quote:
The huge success of Laura may have done more ill than good to Otto Preminger’s career, not only for setting expectations high early in the game, but also for forcing a “noir mystery master” image onto an artist much more interested in asking questions than in answering them. Fallen Angel, the director’s follow-up to his 1944 classic, is often predictably looked down as a lesser genre venture, yet its subtle analysis of shadowy tropes proves both a continuation and a deepening of Preminger’s use of moral ambiguity as a tool of human insight. Linda Darnell, a provocative bombshell caught behind the counter of a small-town California roadside café, is the flame around which the picture’s male moths circle, though the titular fallen angel is later revealed to be tainted drifter Dana Andrews, who comes to town and becomes quickly smitten with her. Read More »

Former “Henry Aldrich” James Lydon acquits himself nicely in a serious role in Republic’s Out of the Storm. Lydon plays Donald Lewis, a low-paid clerk in a high-profile shipbuilding firm. When the company is robbed in broad daylight, Lewis gathers up $100,000 on his own and skeedaddles, figuring that the lost funds will be attributed to the holdup. Before his girlfriend Ginny (Lois Collier) can persuade him to go straight, the hapless Lewis finds himself hotly pursued by cops and crooks alike. Top-heavy with movie “bad guys” like Marc Lawrence and Roy Barcroft, Out of the Storm is edge-of-the-seat entertainment. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie GuideRead More »

In old Vienna, Count Seebruck (Thomas Gomez) is the impresario for the Royal Theatre. His biggest headache is his soprano diva, Jarmila (Jane Farrar). That’s why he’s more than willing to listen his aide Carl’s nephew, Franz (Turhan Bey), and Franz’s fiance, soprano Angela (Susanna Foster). Her voice sounds remarkably like the Royal Theatre long-lost star, Marcellina (June Vincent), who mysteriously disappeared ten years before.
Her disappearance is no mystery to Dr. Friedrich Hohner (Boris Karloff), the theatre’s physician. Read More »