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The Killers is a 1956 student film by the Soviet and Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky and his fellow students Marika Beiku and Aleksandr Gordon. The film is based on the short story “The Killers” by Ernest Hemingway, written in 1927. It was Tarkovsky’s first film, produced when he was a student at the State Institute of Cinematography.Read More »
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“All About Eve” is a literate, adult film of the calibre that will do big league, big town business. In addition it has all the elements for the general runs.
The whyfore of the producer’s insistence for “scheduled performances” becomes obvious as the story unfolds from its banquet scene that honors a new Broadway legit great and the flashbacks which deal with the brittle, hard-bitten and frequently bitter saga that tells us “All About Eve.”
Anne Baxter, in the title role, is the radiant newcomer who has attained the thespic heights. And as she mounts the podium to receive the supreme accolade, the intimates who figured in her breathless success story project their own vignettes on what made this hammy glammy run.Read More »
A door to door salesman of dentist’s appliances encounters beautiful well-endowed nude women everywhere he goes.Read More »
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In Italian Libya during the North African campaign of the Second World War, a Royal Armoured Corps squadron of British tanks is destroyed in battle by German Afrika Korps panzers. A tank commanded by American Sgt. David Thatcher (Victor Mature) is hit and he and driver Trooper “Tiger” Noakes (Anthony Newley) bail out. The squadron’s attached reconnaissance vehicle, commanded by Sgt. Kendall (Leo Genn), becomes stuck in the sand and the crew bail out too. The three survivors are quickly captured and transported to an Italian POW camp run by German Army Captain Ritter (Alfred Burke).Read More »
PLOT: A red balloon with a mind of its own follows a little boy around the streets of Paris.Read More »
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Masaki Kobayashi’s six-part magnum opus, The Human Condition, based on Junpei Gomikawa’s postwar novel, bears the imprint of Kobayashi’s tutelage under legendary filmmaker Keisuke Kinoshita at Shochiku’s Ofuna studio, a critical, introspective, and deeply personal account of wartime Japan framed from the perspective of an idealistic everyman (and Kobayashi’s alterego), Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai). Opening to the ironic image of lovers Kaji and Michiko (Michiyo Aratama) meeting under an archway auspiciously called the Southern Gate of Peace in Manchuria as Imperial troops march in the street, Kobayashi presents an incisive image of 1930s Japanese society that is morally consumed—and ravaged—by increasingly extremist values of militarism, occupation, and nationalism.Read More »
A unique film for its time, Anna’s Sin is an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello set in Rome of the early 1950s. In particular, Anna’s Sin stages an interracial relationship at the moment of the rise of the U.S. civil rights movement, Pan-Africanism and anti-colonial struggle. Originally debuting in Italy in 1952, Anna’s Sin was released in the U.S. in 1954 and later re-released in 1961 as an interracial exploitation film. For many years, Anna’s Sin was an out-of-circulation, “lost” film, with The Wisconsin Historical Society Archives in Madison, Wisconsin holding a rare English-dubbed version. In 2017, the UCLA Film & Television Archives digitized a 35mm print of the film held by the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research and are pleased to organize a virtual screening of this rarely seen work.Read More »
Hal Erickson writes:
Despite an ad campaign wherein RKO Radio congratulated itself for its “guts”, this long-delayed film version of Norman Mailer’s bestselling WW2 novel The Naked and the Dead still had to pull most of its punches (especially when it came to four-letter words). Aldo Ray heads the cast as sadistic sergeant Croft, who’d as soon kill one of his own men as he would the Japanese. Sensitive, moralistic Lieutenant Hearn (Cliff Robertson) tries to put a leash on Croft, but he’s ordered to keep out of the situation by psychotic General Cummings (Raymond Massey), who is convinced that soldiers will fight harder the more they hate their superiors.Read More »
A Fortune If They Seal Her Lips!…A Bullet If They Fail!
(Taken from IMDB) Plot-When a mobsters wife decides to testify against his evil deeds she goes undercover to avoid being killed. Now that he’s coming to trial she has to be escorted across country via train in order to testify. Cop Walter Brown and his partner are assigned the task, but the mob are on their trail.
A great low budget film noir with one of the greats, Charles McGraw.Read More »