1950s

In Venice, a failed and alcoholic musician attends the concert of his teenage son, a precocious conductor who has never met him. Three years after “Prélude à la gloire”, in order to confirm the aura of child star Roberto Benzi, this new film embroiders a fictional story around filial bonds and the father’s remorse. While Roberto Benzi, as impressive as a conductor as he is a poor actor, does what he can, Jean Marais, leaving for the first time his usual part of young leading man, is quite impressive. With the help of excellent supporting actors: Fernand Sardou, Edouard Belmont and Jacqueline Porel, he allows the film to rise above its condition of melodramatic and conventional work. The direction of Georges Lacombe, sober and elegant, does not fail. The film, although less successful than its predecessor, is famous for having generated a good number of musical vocations among the young people of the time.Read More »

Summary:
Broodthaers’s first film, Clef d’Horloge was made using a borrowed camera and some film stock that he had been given. It was shot at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, in 1956, during an exhibition of works by Kurt Schwitters. The film is made in negative and positive and is based on several works that were on display. It premiered on 23 April 1958 at ‘Filmexprmntlfilm’, an experimental film convention in Brussels.

La Clef de l’Horloge, a so-called documentary about the poet, painter and uber-bricoleur Schwitters, is ‘rounded off’ by adding a love poem. The film shows close-ups of Das Sternenbild [The Constellations]. Starry skies and other similar constellations often reappear in later works and also recur in his films.Read More »

“Shetlandsgjengen”, which translates as “the Shetland-gang”, relates the true story of the illegal traffic across the North Sea from German occupied Norway to Shetland during World War II. A small group of Norwegian sailors loosely connected to the British navy take refugees from Norway to Shetland in small fishing-boats, equipped only with low-caliber weapons to protect themselves from German airplanes and patrol-boats. The film is closely based on real events, and many of the members of the gang, including the leader, called “Shetlands-Larsen” play themselves.Read More »

Germany 1934: The Nazi authorities in Hamburg need an executioner to put a group of political prisoners to death, otherwise Hitler won’t visit their town. Teetjen, the butcher, facing bankruptcy, agrees to do the dirty deed.
Adapted from the novel by German-Jewish author Arnold Zweig and co-scripted by Wolfgang Staudte (director of The Murderers Are Among Us, Rotation and The Kaiser’s Lackey) this important classic was directed by a former anti-Nazi resistance fighter, Falk Harnack.
Ironically the film, which starred concentration camp survivor Erwin Geschonneck in the lead role, was withdrawn after its release because its nuanced portrait of a Nazi perpetrator was considered too sympathetic.Read More »

Quote:
Hitchcock’s long-standing fear of the police is what originally attracted him to a newspaper account of a family man wrongly identified as an armed robber. The Wrong Man pays scrupulous attention to such things as the details of police procedure and the eventual apprehension of the real culprit – before the conviction of the wrongly accused man (Fonda), but after the stress has driven his wife (Miles) to mental breakdown. The result is Hitchcock’s most sombre film, unrelieved by his usual macabre humour; the black-and-white photography and the persecuted Fonda’s sharply chiselled features lend an impressive documentary feel. It’s not generally rated among the master’s best works, largely because of the intractability of the source material (or Hitchcock’s unwillingness to dramatise the events). But there’s still plenty here for Hitchcockophiles: a Jesuitical strain (the man happened to be a devout Catholic), a complicity of guilt (as the wife irrationally comes to blame herself); and it’s pure noir.Read More »

Synopsis:
‘It is June 1941 and a company of German soldiers is stationed near the Lithuanian border. While on leave, three soldiers – Wagner, Lick and Paulun – go off on a hunting trip. All is fine until one of them accidentally shoots their captain’s daughter. Out of fear, the three men decide to leave the body and tell no one of the accident. Tensions mount and the soldiers are pushed to the breaking point when accusations and troubled memories collide.’
– DEFA Film LibraryRead More »

During WWII the valet to the British Ambassador to Ankara sells British secrets to the Germans while trying to romance a refugee Polish countess.Read More »

Follow-up to Ed Wood’s “Plan 9 from Outer Space” about the walking dead, It opens in a cemetery. Criswell, the “real” medium, rises from his coffin to tell us of “monsters to be despised.” Dr. Acula (Kenne Duncan) is a phony medium aided by Valda Hansen, a bogus ghost, and big Tor Johnson, wearing rags and horrible scar makeup as Lobo. The doctor swindles people by pretending to contact dead relatives, but then accidentally succeeds in reviving a bunch of corpses that bury him alive! Sat unreleased for 23 years because Wood couldn’t pay the lab bill! Followed by “Sinister Urge” in 1961 (Wood’s last film).Read More »

Synopsis:
With the purpose of using barbasco roots in the production of cortisone, a pharmaceutical company sends a scientist to investigate the possibilities of exploitation in Veracruz, but the man gets lost in the jungle and lives a strange romantic adventure in a remote location called Paradise.Read More »