1950s

In 1854 Mississippi, honest riverboat card gambler Mark Fallon wins young Laurent Dureau’s diamond necklace, a family heirloom which, in the end, will bring him happiness and tragedy alike.Read More »

Based on the famed W.W.II cartoons: Lowbrow G.I.s Willie and Joe, on the Italian front, are good soldiers in combat, but meet the antics of gung-ho Captain Johnson and other military snafus with a barrage of wry comments. On a 3-day pass in Naples, Joe’s penchant for wine and women involves the pair with luscious Emi Rosso and her moonshiner father, whose tangled affairs land them in ever deeper trouble.Read More »

A handsome, suave Toshiro Mifune lights up the screen as painter Ichiro, whose circumstantial meeting with a famous singer (Yoshiko Yamaguchi) is twisted by the tabloid press into a torrid affair. Ichiro files a lawsuit against the seedy gossip magazine, but his lawyer, Hiruta (Kurosawa stalwart Takashi Shimura), is playing both sides. A portrait of cultural moral decline, Scandal is also a compelling courtroom drama and a moving tale of human redemption.Read More »

Synopsis:
A simple act of purchasing a hat unexpectedly unleashes a man’s long suppressed feelings of fear and guilt and plunges him into the world of ever-increasing paranoia.Read More »

Adapted by Samuel W. Taylor from his own novel, The Man with My Face is an acting tour de force for Barry Nelson. The star is cast as an accountant who returns home late one evening, only to discover that a look-alike has taken his place. So persuasive is the phony man that the real one is regarded as an impostor. Even his wife (Lynn Ailey) and business partner (John Harvey) seem to have fallen for the look-alike’s subterfuge. Accused of bank robbery, the poor man must rely on his ex-sweetheart Mary (Carole Mathews) and her brother Walt (Jack Warden in his film debut) to help him clear himself and expose his “evil twin.” The climax borrows a gimmick from an earlier “doppelganger” melodrama, The Black Room (1935). Man with My Face was filmed on location in Puerto Rico. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie GuideRead More »

After finishing what would become his international phenomenon Rashomon, Akira Kurosawa immediately turned to one of the most daring, and problem-plagued, productions of his career. The Idiot, an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s nineteenth-century masterpiece about a wayward, pure soul’s reintegration into society—updated by Kurosawa to capture Japan’s postwar aimlessness—was a victim of studio interference and, finally, public indifference. Today, this “folly” looks ever more fascinating, a stylish, otherworldly evocation of one man’s wintry mindscape.Read More »

Ray Milland plays a safe-cracker sprung from jail when England needs him to crack a Nazi safe containing spy secrets.
(Black and White, 1958)Read More »

Burt Lancaster’s megawatt grin and acrobatic athleticism light up this grandly entertaining swashbuckler. He tumbles, vaults, and swings his way through the role of a Robin Hood-esque rogue who executes dazzling feats of derring-do as he and his rough-and-ready band of mountain men launch a rebellion against the occupying German gentry in 12th-century Italy. The filmmaker’s powers as an aesthetician are on full display in the exquisite Technicolor compositions, including one particularly striking moment of Tourneurian shadow play: a climactic duel in the dark wrought in finely shaded chiaroscuro.Read More »

Orson Welles, on break from filming Othello, relates a tale he heard one spooky Irish midnight not so long ago when, driving through the countryside, he picked up a man with car trouble who told of a strange encounter with two hitchhikers.Read More »