Quote:
A woman you will never forget!
A young woman is on trial for murder. In flashback, we learn of her struggles to overcome poverty as a teenager – a mistaken arrest and prison term for shoplifting and lack of employment lead to involvement with gangsters. In a brothel, she meets a young lawyer, scion of a wealthy and prestigious family, who falls for her and helps her turn around her life. But her past catches up with her, and she must face the music rather than cause him scandal.

Midnight.Mary.1933.1080p.WEB-DL.x264.AAC-PTerWEB.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 14 min
Size: 	2.97 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1480x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	1.370
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	5 525 kb/s
BPP: 	0.144
Audio
#1:  	English 2 AAC LC @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/AA584EA51B602DF/Midnight.Mary.1933.1080p.WEB-DL.x264.AAC-PTerWEB.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post William A. Wellman – Midnight Mary (1933) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Voice From IMDb wrote:

Every Girl Has Her Price – And Joan’s is High

Well-made Clarence Brown pre-Code soaper with Joan Crawford (Brown directs Joan 5 times) costumed by Adrian (he does this a total of 28 times) and photographed by Oliver T. Marsh (he did a total of 15 films with Joan). First class production crew yields a first class film.

Joan plays a `shopgirl’ character that could have had no heart (Barbara Stanwyck would have excelled at such an interpretation) but the writers gave her an innate goodness that warms Sadie McKee to her audience. Edward Arnold stands out as the drunken millionaire that must have served as a role model for Dudley Moore years later in `Arthur.’ His sock in the jaw to Joan is unexpected and looks very real. Gene Raymond does well as the love interest and if that was he singing – he did it well. His final scene is very good and somewhat unusual. Franchot Tone does not appear to have had the opportunity to develop his character sufficiently to make him more effective. It must have been good enough, because he got Joan after the film was completed. A somewhat zaftig Esther Ralston still manages to demonstrate why she was `The American Venus’ and why Raymond spent so much of his time smiling. Why her character does not react to Raymond singing a love song to Joan in the Apollo Theater is beyond me. Leo G. Carroll does a superb job as the butler – his distain for the lower class Joan is great.

Joan’s character has many choices in this film and she generally comes out ahead with some short deviations into taking what she can get when she can get it. She gives great looks at Arnold when she realizes she must be his lover now that they are married and later to her friend when she exclaims, `So I’ve got everything, huh?’ and while reflecting what she has done after throwing Tone out of her house. Arnold also has choices and responds well to the outcome of the marriage. Although the two policemen in the film do not take the `tip’ offered by Joan, they run out after the taxicab man who gets their share presumably to get their cut out outside the presence of Joan.

This is excellent movie making and a must see for Joan Crawford fans (or anyone else that wants to see a good movie). Highly recommended.

Sadie.McKee.1934.1080p.BluRay.DD1.0.x264-PTer.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 32 min
Size: 	12.1 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1480x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	1.370
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	18.4 Mb/s
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Audio
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https://nitro.download/view/3F50787E763A250/Sadie.McKee.1934.1080p.BluRay.DD1.0.x264-PTer.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English, Chinese, French

The post Clarence Brown – Sadie McKee (1934) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A beautiful Austrian refugee in England–who is also a Nazi agent–marries a scholarly English pacifist. He lives near a secret military base she needs to get information about so she can help in Hitler’s planned invasion of England.

The Hour Before the Dawn.1944.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 14 min
Size: 	1.53 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	790x576 
Aspect ratio:  	1.372
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 500 kb/s
BPP: 	0.229
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 224 kb/s
#2:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Commentary by Film Historian Paul Talbot)

https://nitro.download/view/C2AE621E23C69A1/The_Hour_Before_the_Dawn.1944.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/9F35699C8A2CD98/The_Hour_Before_the_Dawn.1944.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.srt

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Frank Tuttle – The Hour Before the Dawn (1944) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Richard Girard is part of a New Orleans family working closely with the English Warburtons. When Richard meets Mary Warburton she is engaged to Erik von Gerardt. He does wed Mary but their time in America is financially difficult.

The.World.Moves.On.1934.WEBRIP.576p.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 44 min
Size: 	2.35 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	762x576 
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https://nitro.download/view/AE87E8FCE4D0E78/The.World.Moves.On.1934.WEBRIP.576p.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post John Ford – The World Moves On (1934) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Joel and Garda Sloan, a husband and wife detective team, who also sell rare books in New York, take a vacation to Seaside City. At Seaside, Joel’s pal, Mike Stevens is managing and preparing for their beauty pageant.

General
Container:  	AVI
Runtime: 	1h 13mn
Size: 	1.05 GiB
Video
Codec: 	XviD
Resolution: 	640x480 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	1 844 Kbps
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Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/6E042FD4B348612/Fast_and_Furious_(1939)_WAC_DVDRip_BBM__CG_.avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Busby Berkeley – Fast and Furious (1939) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Phantom Lady (1944) is one of the high points of ’40s film noir, the title alone evoking a potent mythology of this era. At the center of its narrative is the seemingly hopeless search for the title character who potentially serves as the only reliable witness in the murder trial for Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis), falsely accused of killing his wife. But the search is frustrated by Henderson’s inability to remember any details about the woman outside of a flamboyant hat she wore during the night they spent together, an unlikely memory lapse that only intensifies his apparent guilt. Furthermore, no one else who saw Henderson and the woman together will admit to the police that they had seen her. It is up to his assistant, Carol (Ella Raines), to initiate an investigation of her own. This implausible journey takes her on a tour of a decaying 1940s New York, during which Carol undergoes some implausible transformations of her own before the true murderer is revealed: in a complicated twist, Henderson’s close friend, Marlowe (Franchot Tone), performed the deed.

Perhaps what is most interesting about Phantom Lady is its relationship to a strain of ’40s cinema in which traditional narrative logic is subservient to a primarily poetic or lyrical approach. In this regard, the film is not simply of its moment but also anticipates certain aspects of post-war modernist cinema, in particular narratives revolving around the search for an elusive figure who may be alive or dead and who may have existed in reality or be a figment of someone’s imagination. Here we find narratives built less around traditional cause-and-effect, character driven investigations than narratives dominated by an obsessive form of stalking and trailing (see, for example the work of Antonioni, Resnais, Duras and Robbe-Grillet). Two creative figures behind Phantom Lady are central here: its director, Robert Siodmak, and the author of the novel upon which the film was based, Cornell Woolrich.

Woolrich’s crime novels consistently challenge the fetish for plausibility and pull us into a nightmarish world which follows its own internal drives, with the protagonists at the mercy of irrational forces. The construction of a Woolrich novel constitutes a ruin of classical detective fiction in which traditional explanations and resolutions are offered but almost invariably seem insufficient in relation to what has preceded it. Furthermore, the appeal of the novels has to do not simply with their intoxicating illogic but also their phenomenological detail and descriptions of urban spaces in a state of sweltering decay. Siodmak is an ideal candidate for this kind of story material and Phantom Lady is the film that established his Hollywood reputation. His origins in Weimar cinema (and the six years after this spent in France) allowed him to develop his superb and sensuously textured attention to details in mise en scène. But it also allowed him to absorb certain lessons from Expressionist and Surrealist cinema. Specifically, we see an approach to filmmaking concerned less with creating a fluid and organic environment than with one that obeys a poetic logic of its own. In this regard, the urban spaces of Phantom Lady resemble both the claustrophobic Weimar street film and the seductively decaying urban space of chance encounters beloved by the Surrealists. (Henderson’s meeting with the phantom lady suggests a fumbled version of this type of encounter.) In Siodmak, the characters are torn between irrational, repressive social forces and their own strong physical and romantic desires which pose a threat to that social order. In one of the major set pieces of the film, Carol attempts to stare down a bartender who refuses to remember seeing the ‘phantom lady’ and then stalks him through wet, humid streets and an elevated railway station. But nothing we see of Carol prior to this could prepare us for the shift from the modern working woman we see early in the film to this Medusa (Woolrich employs the name directly), as immobile as a statue sitting at the bar, vengefully attempting to break down this man through the sheer power of her gaze. Carol’s transformation here (as well as in the second set piece, when she becomes a sluttish hep-cat, attempting to seduce a drummer in the midst of a frenzied, erotic jam session) makes little conventional psychological sense. However, her function in the film is almost entirely symbolic, by turns Henderson’s gal Friday, a fairy tale princess (Henderson’s nickname for her, Kansas, suggests that her story may be read as a variation on The Wizard of Oz in which Carol undergoes a form of fairy-tale descent marked by bizarre metamorphoses) and a Surrealist heroine, mysteriously wandering city streets, alternately still and sensuously mobile, and disregarding any kind of logic outside of those of her own desires. But these transformations (and the bartender sequence as a whole) tap into something else.

Woolrich’s work often revolves around the problematic nature of memory, most often in relation to a crime which the protagonist may have committed but which their faulty memories (often aggravated by extreme trauma) cause them to either forget or be uncertain about. However, Henderson’s memory lapse is brought on by simple distraction – his anger at his wife precipitating his difficulty in fastening onto details about the ‘phantom lady.’ This is counterpointed with the unshakable certainty of the witnesses who claim never to have seen her. What, then, does Carol hope to achieve through this stare of hers except to force a memory out of a man who otherwise claims to have no memory for faces, a failure which he attributes solely to the distractions of his profession and which he finally dies for – running in front of a car – rather than confess? The all-powerful male gaze of such archetypal Weimar figures as Nosferatu and Mabuse is here passed on to a protagonist whose concerns could not be more different. In a brilliant reversal of the gender conventions of material of this nature, it is the woman who does the stalking and it is the woman who possesses the most powerful gaze of them all. But this gaze is not one that she possesses in monstrous terms but in order to uncover the truth and bring a memory into the light of day, as though Poe’s Ligeia and Lang’s Mabuse had been crossed with Hildy in Hawks’ His Girl Friday (1940).

While the film retains the novel’s lackluster pickup between Henderson and the ‘phantom lady,’ it adds details strengthening the theme of memory. The ‘phantom lady’ is more melancholic than in the novel and when we first see her in the bar she is playing an instrumental version of “I’ll Remember April” on the jukebox, a song whose lyrics (which we don’t ever hear in the film) testify to the gentle appeal of remembrance: “The fire will dwindle into glowing ashes/For flames of love will live such a little while/I won’t forget but I won’t be lonely/I’ll remember April and I’ll smile.” Throughout the opening, Terry perpetually stares off into space, scarcely making eye contact with Henderson. Henderson attempts to focus that stare onto something specific, drawing her attention to the “typical New York face” of the cab driver and asking Terry if she ever walks down New York streets and looks into people’s faces. Not until they attend the Brazilian revue, where the singer onstage is wearing the same hat as Terry and the two women lock malevolent glances at one another, is this vagueness of Terry’s look temporarily broken. The significance of “I’ll Remember April” and of the ‘phantom lady’s’ behavior is not clarified until near the end of the film. Carol tracks her down (real name: Ann Terry) and finds that the woman has suffered a nervous breakdown brought on by the sudden death of her fiancée the previous April. Terry’s paralysis is the result of the traumatic memory of the revelation of this death. If memories hold too little for Henderson they hold too much for Terry. But in either case, they are typical of a certain type of protagonist for Woolrich and Siodmak, masochistically accepting their fates rather than fighting against them, neither of them able to consistently look at or focus on anything. In a New York marked by individuals who seldom make eye contact or look for very long at anything, Carol’s relentless stare in the bar becomes the nightmarish reversal of the anonymity and averted glances of urban living.

Almost everyone who sees Phantom Lady expresses disappointment with its second half in which (in a departure from the structure of the novel) Marlowe is too quickly revealed to be the murderer and turns out to be a Nietzschean paranoiac madman besides. This structural and stylistic lapse is symptomatic of little more than two undigested side-by-side influences: Hitchcockian suspense (in which the spectator is given more information about the circumstances of a crime than the protagonists in order to increase emotional involvement on the part of the spectator) and Expressionist cinema. With Marlowe’s shadow looming over his victims, it is now he and not Carol who becomes a cross between Nosferatu and Mabuse, complete with over-the-top facial and hand contortions awkwardly imposed on an actor who could not be more American and less comfortable with this type of gestural repertoire. It is also in the second half of Phantom Lady that the film attempts to recuperate itself, to offer explanations and reassuringly resolve its issues. That it does not completely succeed in this regard suggests that the heart of the film lies elsewhere, on that deserted elevated train platform with Carol and the bartender, and in the various other detours the film has taken prior to this.

Robert Siodmak - (1944) Phantom Lady.mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 26 min
Size: 	1.78 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	768x576 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 742 kb/s
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Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/2EC8539409EE580/Robert_Siodmak_-_(1944)_Phantom_Lady.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Robert Siodmak – Phantom Lady (1944) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Plot:
A love story centered around the lives of three young German soldiers in the years following World War I. Their close friendship is strengthened by their shared love for the same woman who is dying of tuberculosis…

1.46GB | 1h 38m | 608×464 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/6CAB4F11E5E510A/Three_Comrades_(1938)_DVDRip_XviD_AC3_Wolfman.avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Frank Borzage – Three Comrades (1938) first appeared on Cinema of the World.