1950s

Plot Synopsis by Sandra Brennan
In this crime drama, an American loses all his money and finds himself stranded in England. He finds hope when he meets a female smuggler who has brought jewels into the country inside a teddy bear. Just before he talks her into helping him, she is pushed off of a cliff. He becomes the prime suspect and mayhem ensues when he gets the jewels, but then loses them to a gang of thieves. Fortunately, by the story’s end, he proves his innocence, and brings the gang to justice.Read More »

Belgian Congo, 1950s.
Big game hunter Jean de Markisar (Galley) is hired by savage natives to fend off and preferrably kill a mountain gorilla which has mauled a woman. On his travels Markisar picks up gamely Swedish reporter Lena Berg (Petré) who looks upon the whole endeavour as a bit of a holiday. The African jungle will make her think otherwise.Read More »

Synopsis:
The world is destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. Only five Americans survive, including a pregnant woman, a neo-Nazi, a black man and a bank clerk.Read More »

Plot
Summer 1953. Determined to go to Liguria with her little daughter Caterina for a short vacation, Anna Maria Mentorsi (who is in fact a prostitute), on the train that leads to the Riviera, is convinced by a nice gentleman (who later turns out to be the mayor of Pontorno) to not get off at Terrazzi, as she was going to do at first, but to stay indeed in the town of Pontorno.
Believed to be a respectable widow, she’s at first accepted by the good society, by the other guests of the Hotel Palace and its beach-goers, but when turns out her job, the void is created around her.
The mayor Silvio tries to help, but has not enough power to counter the hypocrisy and respectability.
The only solution for Anna Maria seems to be linked to the local billionaire Chiastrino, envied and flattered by all.Read More »

Synopsis:
The children of the maid in the house of an army officer (fathered by him) are forced to live unacknowledged life and develop great anger against their half-brother…

Japanese family relationship melodrama starring Rentaro Mikuni, Kinuyo Tanaka, Choko Iida, Tomo’o Nagai, and Katsuo Nakamura.Read More »

The movie seethes with conflict and bad blood – often unspoken. The conflicts arise over deeply felt divisions in social class, in gender and in generation, and result in unspoken accusations of callousness and cowardice, vanity and selfishness.

In many respects this is a movie of another time – these days, unless a family has a strong military tradition, I can imagine few families now enraged by a son’s expressed wish that a war could be won without his involvement, few families in which an employer would not draft a letter for his decades-long employee’s only child to keep him out of war – and even refuse to write a letter (for which his mother pleads) for his own beloved brother’s draft deferment.Read More »

Quote:
The Last Page was the original British title for the 1952 murder meller Man Bait. Hollywood’s George Brent plays a married bookstore owner who is blackmailed by scheming Diana Dors. The subsequent chain reaction of events leads to the death of Brent’s invalid wife. It gets worse when Dors is killed by her partner-in-crime Peter Reynolds, and Brent is accused of the crime. The bookseller’s faithful secretary Marguerite Chapman comes to the rescue. As with many British programmers of the 1950s which starred American actors, The Last Page was distributed in the U.S. by Lippert Productions. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie GuideRead More »

There is little to nothing written in English about this film, and in fact of the entire Cinemateque Ontario Ichikawa Kon tome the only mention of Goodbye, Hello was in the extensive filmography. This was one of the films Ichikawa made for Daiei that he co-wrote with his wife Wado Natto, the pair being one of world cinema’s great husband and wife collaborations. Ichikawa worked with the cinematographer for Goodbye, Hello, Kobayashi Setsuo, on some of his best looking films: Ten Dark Women, Fires on the Plain, and An Actor’s Revenge. Actress Kyo Machiko was certainly a familiar face in Ichikawa’s films, starring in Odd Obsession and The Pit. Judging by cast and crew alone, this looks like prime Ichikawa, and I personally find this period of his filmmaking (late 50s, early 60s) the most interesting.Read More »

“I dreamed of a new encyclopedia … “. Sacha Guitry attended, “according to his tastes” the greatest personalities of his time. He filmed “in their attitudes the most familiar, whenever that was possible.” We see André Antoine, Sarah Bernhardt, Edgar Degas, Anatole France, Lucien Guitry, Octave Mirbeau, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir at his side with his young son Claude Renoir, Henri-Robert, Auguste Rodin, Edmond Rostand, Camille Saint-Saëns . The silent version of 1915 lasted 22 minutes. This finall version redesigned in 1952, lasts 44 minutes, with plans Guitry in his office, and that this comment, shot by Frederic Rossif.Read More »