Women love handsome Antonio because they think of him as the perfect lover. But he has problems to fullfill this ideal and Barbara only notices his failures when they are married. When the town learns about his trouble they start laughing at him…Read More »
Girl with a Pistol, directed in 1968 by Mario Monicelli and starring Monica Vitti, Stanley Baker and Carlo Giuffrè, is one of the most successful Italian comedies. Monica Vitti is Assunta, a Sicilian girl seduced and abandoned by Vincenzo (Carlo Giuffrè) who then escapes to London in order to avoid a shotgun wedding. Assunta’s only chance to restore her lost honour is to find and kill her seducer.Read More »
Pleasure-seekers deal with the official closing of French bordellos after the passing of the 1949 legislation outlawing the houses of ill repute. Part two finds a former prostitute who is besieged by former associates after she pulls off a successful robbery attempt. The final segment has a wealthy but sanctimonious patron offering a joy girl a place to stay. His house becomes a popular meeting place when his friends and the prostitute’s friends get together for fun and games.Read More »
Quote:
Le Petit Soldat is an early Jean-Luc Godard film that was made on a shoestring budget. Michel Subor (who would surface years later in Claire Denis’ Beau Travail [1999] to great critical acclaim), stars here as Bruno Forestier, a young revolutionary living in Geneva who is fighting against French involvement in the war in Algeria. He meets and falls in love with rival revolutionary Veronica Dreyer (Anna Karina, soon to be Godard’s wife), and the mutual recriminations begin. Shot like a newsreel, much of the film is photographed with a hand-held camera, with sound post-synchronized; a “film noir” narration holds the film together, but the narrative, as is usual with Godard, is slight.Read More »
Synopsis:
Film screenwriter Jake Armitage and his wife Jo Armitage live in London with six of Jo’s eight children, with the two eldest boys at boarding school. The children are spread over Jo’s three marriages, with only the youngest being Jake’s biological child, although he treats them all as his own. Jo left her second husband Giles after meeting Giles’ friend Jake, the two who were immediately attracted to each other. Their upper middle class life is much different than Giles and Jo’s, who lived in a barn in the English countryside. But Jo is ruminating about her strained marriage to Jake, with issues on both sides.Read More »
Classic short British comedy, full of stars. In this slapstick comedy two bumbling workmen attempt to take a long wooden plank through a London suburb to a building site. Mayhem ensues. This is done with music and a sort of “wordless dialogue” which consists of a few mumbled sounds to convey the appropriate emotion.Read More »
An aristocrat, short of the readies, has turned his desirable mansion into a textile workshop, where he works with his wife, his son and his mother-in-law. He’s grumpy, stingy and unkind. In the village, the wealthy solicitor wants his ugliest daughter to marry his half-witted young son, so she’ll become a countess. But saint Francis Assisi appears and the count changes overnight; he does not want his family to kill the spiders (your sister, the spider) and he begins to ignore the social conventions: his son will marry “La Langouste” (the lobster), the local hooker who keeps a strong clientele among the billeted troops. Now, the aristocrat, imitating our Lord’s apostles, divests himself of all possessions of the material world and intends to hit the road in a horse-drawn caravan.Read More »
Quote:
In a Prague shop, an assistant has been carrying on an affair with the dishonest, married manager. An emotionally repressed auditor with domestic problems of his own uncovers serious stock discrepancies. A test of loyalties and a questioning of values concludes in tragedy.Read More »
Jockey Jack has a bill open with a gangster just released from jail. He somehow manages to parry the gangster’s knife attack backstage at a theatre and the latter ends up dead being put into a double bass case. A day later the gangster mysteriously has disappeared, but it turns out that he was carrying a bet ticket for a horse race now worth over a million. A turbulent run for the money begins.Read More »