A publisher insinuates himself into the mouldering mansion of the centenarian lover of a renowned but long-dead poet to find his lost love letters.

The.Lost.Moment.1947.BDRIP.576p.x264.AC3.AFKI.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 29 min
Size: 	2.74 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	788x576 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	3 958 kb/s
BPP: 	0.364
Audio
#1:  	English 1.0ch AC-3 @ 448 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/CED98DB7BCFD023/The.Lost.Moment.1947.BDRIP.576p.x264.AC3.AFKI.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/98EA1527A1D46E6/The.Lost.Moment.1947.BDRIP.576p.x264.AC3.AFKI.srt

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Martin Gabel – The Lost Moment (1947) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
Pregnant nineteen-year old Marie Allen (Eleanor Parker) is sentenced to prison as an accessory to robbery. The warden, Ruth Benton (Agnes Moorehead), dedicated to reforming even the most hardened of the prisoners, deals fairly with Marie, even upon learning of her condition. The naïve Marie comes up against tough block matron Evelyn Harper (Hope Emerson) and must decide whether accepting the friendship of the toughest prisoners will rub off on her and affect the future of her unborn child.

Caged.1950.576p.4KR.BluRay.x264-PTP.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 36 min
Size: 	2.89 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	790x576 
Aspect ratio:  	1.372
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	3 822 kb/s
BPP: 	0.350
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 448 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/BCD2DF4757A90A2/Caged.1950.576p.4KR.BluRay.x264-PTP.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post John Cromwell – Caged (1950) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
Mystery writer Cornelia Van Gorder has rented a country house called “The Oaks”, which not long ago had been the scene of some murders committed by a strange and violent criminal known as “The Bat”. Meanwhile, the house’s owner, bank president John Fleming, has recently embezzled one million dollars in securities, and has hidden the proceeds in the house, but he is killed before he can retrieve the money. Thus the lonely country house soon becomes the site of many mysterious and dangerous activities.

2.38GB | 1h 20mn | 1024×552 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/B8DE73F1A478A77/The.Bat.1959.576p.BDRip.x264.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English (Muxed)

The post Crane Wilbur – The Bat (1959) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
A wealthy young wastrel, Bob Merrick, cracks up his speedboat and almost dies, to be saved at the last minute by a resuscitator borrowed from the home of a famous surgeon who lives nearby. In the meantime the surgeon himself has suffered an attack, and, with his equipment out on loan, dies before he can be revived. The guilt-ridden Bob clumsily tries to make amends by romancing the surgeon’s young widow, Helen, but only causes further tragedy…

Dave Kehr wrote:
[…] The plot of “Magnificent Obsession,” a 1929 best seller by Lloyd C. Douglas inspired two successful films: a 1935 version starring Robert Taylor as Bob, and Irene Dunne as Helen, and directed by John M. Stahl, and a more celebrated 1954 remake featuring Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman, under the direction of Douglas Sirk.

Dave Kehr wrote:
(…) As a story, it contains almost all the elements of the classic “women’s picture,” raised to a delirious degree: outrageous coincidences that turn out to reveal the hand of a benevolent fate; a love so pure and chaste that it transforms a scoundrel into a saint; a man who is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice — putting the life of the woman he loves at risk —to save her. (…)

2.85GB | 1h 47mn | 1024×512 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/D76E1F2A1BB2CD9/Magnificent_Obsession_-_Douglas_Sirk_(1954).mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English, Spanish, French, Portuguese

The post Douglas Sirk – Magnificent Obsession (1954) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Douglas Sirk once said: “This is the dialectic—there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.” When All That Heaven Allows was released by Universal Pictures in 1955, it was just another critically unnoticed Hollywood genre product, designed to appeal to the trashy “women’s weepie” audience. Now, in retrospect, it is considered to be closer to the art side of Sirk’s dialectic, and one of his key films. But this is part of a wider process of critical reevaluation in which his entire body of work has been rediscovered and reappraised by successive generations of filmmakers and historians.

No one seeing the film at the time of its release would have imagined its director to be an elegant, extremely erudite European whose career started in the theater of Weimar Germany and who was an early director of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. After a short but successful career at UFA studios in the vacuum left by the massive emigration of Jewish talent after the Nazis came to power in 1933, Sirk made his way to Hollywood, directing his first film there in 1942. Following an unsuccessful attempt to return to Germany in 1949–50, he signed a contract with Universal. His movie career then culminated with his highest-profile films, the melodramas of 1952–58. By 1959, he was Universal’s most successful director. At that very moment, he left moviemaking and America. Until his death in 1987, he and his wife, Hilde, lived in Lugano, Switzerland.

All That Heaven Allows marks the final turning point in Sirk’s strange and varied career. On the back of Magnificent Obsession’s success the previous year, Universal gave him a budget and freedom that enabled his mature style to blossom. All That Heaven Allows contains all the elements of characteristically Sirkian composition: light, shade, color, and camera angles combine with his trademark use of mirrors to break up the surface of the screen. Here are all the components of the “melodramatic” style on which Sirk’s critical reputation is based and that has made him the favorite of later generations of filmmakers, from Rainer Werner Fassbinder to Quentin Tarantino, from John Waters to Pedro Almodóvar.

But at the time, Universal was just anxious to repeat its successful pairing of Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson in a romance between an older woman and an extremely handsome younger man. Wyman was still a big star but, by then, past her prime. Recently divorced from Ronald Reagan, and aware that her future lay with the soap-­opera audience, she was pleased to be teamed with Hudson again. At the time, he was the new Hollywood heartthrob, who, although “out of the closet” in his personal life, had to be continually shut back in publicly and professionally by an anxious studio.

The All That Heaven Allows version of the May-September romance formula has Wyman playing Cary Scott, a well-to-do widow with two college-age children and a dull social life at the country club. The emptiness at the heart of her existence is filled when she meets Ron Kirby, the young gardener–turned–tree farmer who prunes the trees that line her all-American suburban yard—and then comes back to court her. This simple love story is disrupted by the vicious snobbery of her children and high-society acquaintances. Early in the film, Cary is at her dressing table, preparing for an evening with the Stoningham “elite.” To one side stands a vase containing the branches Ron cut for her earlier, so that Cary’s awakening interest in him carries over from the previous sequence. In a beautifully composed shot, the children first appear reflected in the mirror, coming between Cary and the vase, and then, as the camera pulls away, she is taken back into the room and toward the children. This one shot tells the story of the dilemma that Cary will face for the rest of the film and is typical of Sirk’s emblematic, economical use of cinema. His stars’ performances mesh well with this style. He gives them the screen space appropriate for their status, but the sexual charge between Cary and Ron is articulated through looks and gestures, and the roller-coaster highs and lows of their love are displaced onto the things that surround them.

Objects play their own significant part in expressing the emotions blocked by convention in small-town, middle-class 1950s America. Sirk creates a cinema in which the screen itself speaks more articulately than the protagonists, tongue-tied as they are by the codes of their fictional setting, the powers of censorship in Hollywood at the time, and the norms of the family melodrama genre. Out of these constraints, Sirk builds his film, while also using a typically melodramatic score to punctuate points and to accompany the tones and textures of the actors’ voices.

Years after their initial dismissal (and sometimes derision) by reviewers, Sirk’s successful string of big-budget soapers (and the director himself) have acquired a rich and complex critical afterlife, as different aspects and facets of the films have been reclaimed by successive phases of film criticism. For the auteurists and structuralists of the 1960s, Sirk’s mastery of cinematic language transcended the working conditions of the Hollywood studio system; feminists reclaimed him as a director of melodrama, with his women protagonists and dramas of interiority, domestic space, and sexual desire; gay critics today see a camp subtext in his films with Hudson, in which ambiguous situations can be read as double entendre.

The gap between the contemporary perception of All That Heaven Allows and that of the later critics is closed by Sirk himself, who once explained the conditions of work at the studio: “At least I was allowed to work on the material—so that I restructured to some extent some of the rather impossible scripts of the films I had to direct. Of course, I had to go by the rules, avoid experiments, stick to family fare, have ‘happy endings,’ and so on. Universal didn’t interfere with either my camera work or my cutting—which meant a lot to me.” Although All That Heaven Allows does, on the face of it, have a happy ending, its “happiness” is twisted with more than a touch of Sirkian irony.

http://nitroflare.com/view/6F2079968B4A58F/Douglas_Sirk_-_%281955%29_All_That_Heaven_Allows.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Douglas Sirk – All That Heaven Allows [+commentary] (1955) first appeared on Cinema of the World.