1960s

In 1944, a German colonel loads a train with French art treasures to send to Germany. The Resistance must stop it without damaging the cargo.Read More »

Synopsis:
Norman is the assistant helping to run a small, old fashioned dairy which is threatened by a larger, modern organisation. Norman does his best to save the dairy (and his horse) and the usual chaos ensues.Read More »

Quote:
Directed by Ko Nakahira. With Mariko Kaga, Akira Nakao, Takeshi Kato. Yuka is a “good-time girl” from Yokohama who is persuaded by her papa to sleep with a foreign business executive so that he can close an important deal. Nakahira presents a shrewdly observed portrait of a modern, sexually assertive woman—an unsettling character for a changing but still patriarchal society. 93 min. – MoMA note: this film played under the title of Monday Girl for the MoMA’s Japanese film retrospective in 2005Read More »

A love triangle through the four seasons. A young woman, living in a relationship, falls in love with a married man. If someone had told her that she in a few months should be the man’s mistress, she would become aggrieved and indignant. She was certainly not a woman who would mess with married men.Read More »

Set during the 1920s, two English cousins, Samuel (Wisdom) and Eustace (Briers), are returning home from New York aboard a transatlantic liner. Whilst a seasick Eustace is laid-up ill in bed, Samuel falls in love with his cousin’s ex-fiancée Billie (Martin), and attempts to woo her into accepting his marriage proposal. Complications on the journey ensue further when Eustace becomes the target of Jane’s (Hancock) affections; a plain woman who is also coincidently Billie’s cabin mate. When Samuel lands back in Southampton, he mimics his Aunt Hignett’s (Athene Seyler) voice on the phone and manages to deceive Billie, her latest fiancé Bream (Philip Locke) and his father J.P Mortimer, into believing they can rent his aunt’s empty cottage for the summer. Read More »

“A movie about the life and activities of the civil war hero Sergey Lazo (1894-1920), a poet, a publicist, a war strategist, a party activist, a diplomat fluent in several languages, a direct descendant of a noble Moldavian family, the son of a land-owner, a former student of the Moscow University and an officer of the tsarist army who determinately crossed over to the revolutionaries and headed the partisan movement during the struggle against the Japanese intervention in the Far East. At the age of 26 Lazo literally burnt in the revolutionary fire. The enemies threw him into the boiler of a steam locomotive and burnt him alive.Read More »

Quote:
This brooding, operatic movie about Nazism makes Cabaret look like wholesome family fare. The family in The Damned is a symbol of German society circa 1934. The Krupp-like steel magnate Baron von Essenbeck represents the spineless establishment. The Nazis kill the baron, then frame one heir apparent, a socialist (married to the stunning Charlotte Rampling). A bearish, boorish Essenbeck representing the SA, the Nazis’ early goon squad, takes the reins. But Hitler murdered the SA in the 1934 “Night of the Long Knives,” providing The Damned with its bravura action scene, a Nazi massacre at a gay SA orgy. The winning Essenbeck is the murderous, pedophilic, transvestite, mother-rapist Martin (sharp-featured Helmut Berger), who represents Nazism. Though he’s better in director Luchino Visconti’s 1971 Death in Venice, Dirk Bogarde is classy as Martin’s stepdad. The Damned got an Oscar screenplay nomination, and Vincent Canby called Berger’s Martin “the performance of the year.”Read More »

Synopsis:
While looking for a stolen diamond necklace,the private investigator Bob Martin uncovers a smart serial killer.

Review:
DEATH KNOCKS TWICE is an excellent vehicle for both leading man Dean Reed (in this film he reminds me of a cross between James Franciscus, Tab Hunter, and the pre-burnout Jan-Michael Vincent), who plays a detective out to solve a murder and robbery while stumbling across other corrupt activities, and for leading hunk Fabio Testi, who opens the film with a semi-nude outdoor love scene and seems to play half the film without his shirt on.Read More »

If ever there was a role that Anthony Quinn was born to play, it was the lusty, life-affirming title character in Zorba the Greek. The scene is the isle of Crete, where English writer Alan Bates arrives in the hopes of realigning his own values and outlook on life. He is “adopted” by the flamboyant Zorba, who determines to educate Bates in the ways of the world-or, to be more precise, Zorba’s world. Along the way, Bates is introduced to widow Irene Papas, the unrequited love object of everyone on the island, who comes to a tragic end when she is accused of adultery.Read More »