Quote:
For a small film, Suddenly has a lot of baggage. Even after many years, it remains tainted by its eerie foreshadowing of President Kennedy’s assassination nine years following the film’s release—an association made all the more sinister by the oft-repeated (and now disputed) assertion that Lee Harvey Oswald watched the film shortly before the President was gunned down in Dallas. Then there’s the claim that star Frank Sinatra ordered the film withdrawn from circulation after Kennedy was killed, an order Sinatra had no power to give, although he did protest when a TV station aired the film shortly after the 35th President’s death. In the Nineties, the film was the victim of a botched colorization effort that turned Sinatra into Old Brown Eyes, and the failure to renew the film’s copyright caused it to become available through multiple public domain distributors in inferior versions that were painful to watch.

Sinatra could never have predicted the film’s twisted path when he surprised everyone by choosing an obscure independent production as the follow-up to his Oscar-winning role in Columbia’s big budget From Here to Eternity. But Sinatra had something to prove. After years of playing song-and-dance men, he had been handed an Oscar for a dramatic role, but he still wasn’t taken seriously as an actor. Too many people thought he’d simply played himself as Private Maggio in Eternity. Sinatra wanted something so clearly different that there would be no question he was creating a character. John Baron, the former military man planning to assassinate the President of the United States (and mighty pleased about it), was about as far from Private Maggio as any role could be.

Suddenly was shot on a no-frills budget over four weeks in a small town outside of Los Angeles. The screenplay was the work of Richard Sale, a screenwriter and occasional director, and also a prolific writer of popular fiction, who understood the art of drawing characters in a few bold strokes. The director, Lewis Allen, had already begun the transition to TV, where his efficient craftsmanship would keep him working for the next twenty years on classic shows like Perry Mason, The Detectives and Bonanza. The result was a spare, tightly wound thriller that would have simply been a small town film noir classic, if it hadn’t experienced the good (or possibly bad) fortune of being freighted by history with cultural resonance far beyond anything its creators ever imagined.

Suddenly.1954.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 16 min
Size: 	1.71 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	768x576 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 500 kb/s
BPP: 	0.236
Audio
#1:  	English 1.0ch AC-3 @ 224 kb/s
#2:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Commentary by Frank Sinatra Junior)
#3:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Commentary by Dr Drew Casper)

https://nitro.download/view/0DEFA35D8D89A0E/Suddenly.1954.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Lewis Allen – Suddenly (1954) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Plot Synopsis
Future best-selling novelist Irwin Shaw made his screenwriting bow with the modest RKO Radio sports drama The Big Game. The story revolves around the efforts by a group of crooked gamblers to fix the outcomes of college football games. When star quarterback Clark (Philip Huston) refuses to be bribed, the villains kidnap him on the eve of the titular Big Game. Clark is rescued by his burly teammates just in the nick of time, but the film’s not over yet: there’s a riot on the football field during the final scenes, reportedly inspired by a real-life incident during a 1935 NYU-Fordham game. Adding to the enjoyment of The Big Game is the presence of several genuine members of the 1936 All-American football squad: The University of Chicago’s Jay Berwanger, Notre Dame’s William Shakespeare, Southern Methodist’s Bobby Wilson, NYU’s Irwin “King Kong” Klein, Ohio State’s Gomer Jones, and Stanford’s Robert “Bones” Hamilton, Monk Moscrip and Frank Alustiza.

968MB | 1h 14m | 640×480 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/8E4AF8BCBED5F77/The_Big_Game_(1936).avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post George Nichols Jr. – The Big Game (1936) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

RKO Pictures launched what could have been one of the great detective series in 1932, when Edna May Oliver starred in “The Penguin Pool Murder”. As Stuart Palmer’s elderly schoolteacher turned sleuth Hildegarde Withers, Oliver was one of the screen’s most liberated women, defying Police Inspector Oscar Piper (James Gleason) to track down killers with little regard for his pride or her own safety. Although Oliver left the series after only two more installments, leading to a serious decline in quality for the films, her first two outings in particular were years ahead of their time, thanks to director George Archainbaud’s uniquely visual narrative skills and for the films’ depiction of an older, independent woman.

Withers first appeared in the novel “The Penguin Pool Murder” in 1931, the latest in a long line of elderly female detectives that dates back to Miss Amelia Butterworth, a character created by Anna Katherine Greene in 1898. She would be followed by Rachel Innes in Mary Roberts Rinehart’s “The Circular Staircase” (1908) — better known by its stage and film title, “The Bat” — and Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, who made her first appearance just a year before Withers. Drawing on his background as a private detective, Palmer wrote novels and short stories about the character for more than two decades.

At the time RKO filmed “The Penguin Pool Murder”, they had the perfect Hildegarde Withers under contract, character actress Edna May Oliver, who had won acclaim for her supporting role in the Oscar-winning Western “Cimarron” (1931). As her partner in crime solving they cast another veteran, James Gleason. Their affectionate sparring was so effective the studio even had them get married at the end. Director George Archainbaud kept the action moving briskly, as he would on the Western films and television series he would specialize in decades later. He also added an innovation that would remain unnoticed for years; several of the sets had ceilings prominently featured. In that, he anticipated Orson Welles’ work on “Citizen Kane” (1941) by almost ten years.

“The Penguin Pool Murder” did well enough to inspire a sequel, “Murder on the Blackboard” (1934), with the same stars, director and writer two years later. Deciding that Withers and Piper worked best as friendly antagonists, studio executives decided to disregard their marriage at the end of the previous feature. Oliver would star in one more Withers film, “Murder on a Honeymoon” (1935), with Gleason but without Archainbaud. When she left RKO later that year, the studio would try to keep things going first with Helen Broderick and then Zasu Pitts in the lead. But neither was as perfectly cast as Oliver, and the series died after only six films. That hardly marked the end of the road for Withers, however. MGM adapted Once Upon a Train, co-written by Palmer and Craig Rice to team Withers with Rice’s hard-drinking lawyer detective John Malone, in 1951. But they transformed the schoolteacher sleuth into a Montana housewife played by Marjorie Main for “Mrs. O’Malley and Mr. Malone”. In 1971, ABC would produce “A Very Missing Person”, a pilot for a Hildegarde Withers TV series starring Eve Arden, but decided not to pick up the project. None of these pretenders to the chalkboard could compare to the original, however. Whenever “The Penguin Pool Murder” airs on television, it attracts new members to its devoted cult of fans.

The Aquarium seen in the film was the New York Aquarium in Battery Park on the southern most tip of Manhattan Island. It originally was a fort, Castle Clinton, during the War of 1812. It was later renamed Castle Garden and was an entertainment center, then an immigrant landing depot before becoming the New York Aquarium in 1896. Due to underground construction of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel in 1941, the Aquarium was closed and the animals were moved temporarily to the Bronx Zoo and then eventually to the new and current New York Aquarium in Coney Island in 1947. Saved from demolition in 1946, the Castle was restored to its original look as a fortification and serves not only as a museum, but the ticket office for the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island ferry. The fort built to keep out the British now serves to welcome all to America.

957MB | 1h 5mn | 640×480 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/5EAB33073C8EF71/Penguin_Pool_Murder.avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post George Archainbaud – Penguin Pool Murder (1932) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

From TCM:
When the body of Violet Feverel, who had taken her horse for an evening ride, is discovered in Central Park, Inspector Oscar Piper of the New York police arrives at the crime scene and is joined by his friend, amateur detective and schoolteacher Hildegarde Withers. After Hildegarde locates Violet’s horse and bloodied saddle, Oscar concludes that she was murdered and begins to question suspects, including Latigo Wells, the manager of Violet’s stable. Confronted by Oscar’s suspicions, Wells reveals that Violet had quarreled with Eddie Fry, her sister Barbara Foley’s boyfriend, just before the murder. Hildegarde then finds out from High Pockets, a stable employee, that Violet also had quarreled with Wells just before her death. At Violet’s apartment, Oscar and Hildegarde discover Eddie and Barbara hastily packing and question them. The young couple, who had become engaged in spite of Violet’s objections, defend their innocence and cast suspicion on Don Gregg, Violet’s ex-husband, whom Violet had jailed for nonpayment of alimony.

Oscar and Hildegarde show up at Gregg’s Long Island mansion, where they discover Don’s sickly father Patrick unconscious. Later, while the old man sleeps, Hildegarde inspects his pants’s pockets, finds a handwritten receipt for Don’s alimony payments and deduces that Patrick gambled on horse races. Still suspicious of Don, Oscar calls the jail and learns that he had been released the night of the murder with a forged court order. After Don is arrested for the murder, Oscar and Hildegarde discover that the forger is not Don, but the same person who wrote the alimony receipt. Oscar and Hildegarde return to the Gregg mansion and find Patrick dead, an apparent victim of a heart attack. On a hunch, Hildegarde begins to snoop in the room of Chris Thomas, the butler, and soon stumbles on the gun that killed Violet. During her inspection, Thomas catches Hildegarde and reveals that he killed both Violet and Patrick. Patrick, whose horse had crippled Thomas’ son Joey as a boy, had used all of Thomas’ savings to pay off Violet’s alimony instead of betting the money on a longshot, which if it had won, would have paid for an operation for Joey. Intent on killing Don as well, Thomas also forged the court order. Before a crazed Thomas harms Hildegarde, Oscar rushes in and saves her, then arrests the killer.

https://nitro.download/view/ED9175BBF98DA24/Murder_on_a_Bridle_Path_(1936)_WAC_DVDRip_BBM__CG_.avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post William Hamilton & Edward Killy – Murder on a Bridle Path (1936) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

In 1945, during a 48-hour leave, a soldier accidentally meets a girl at Pennsylvania Station and spends his leave with her, eventually falling in love with the lovely New Yorker.

1.99GB | 1h 30m | 790×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/E4398B896BF5CFE/The.Clock.1945.576p.BluRay.AC3.x264.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Vincente Minnelli – The Clock (1945) first appeared on Cinema of the World.