Merchant marine officer Tom Wingfield reminisces about his life in St. Louis where he had lived with his nagging mother Amanda and crippled shy sister Laura.

The glass menagerie.avi

General
Container:	AVI
Runtime:	1h 47mn
Size:	1.37 GiB
Video
Codec:	XviD
Resolution:	640x480
Aspect ratio:	4:3
Frame rate:	23.976 fps
Bit rate:	1 432 Kbps
Audio
2.0ch AC-3 @ 384 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/7C89F84127B0403/The_glass_menagerie.avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:No

The post Irving Rapper – The Glass Menagerie (1950) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A 1950 British crime film directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock starring Jane Wyman, Marlene Dietrich, Michael Wilding and Richard Todd. Others in the cast include Alastair Sim, Sybil Thorndike, Kay Walsh, Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia Hitchcock in her movie debut and Joyce Grenfell in a humorous vignette.
The story was adapted for the screen by Whitfield Cook, Ranald MacDougall and Alma Reville (the director’s wife), with additional dialogue by James Bridie, based on the novel Man Running by Selwyn Jepson.

3.31GB | 1h 49m | 982×720 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/937397652AF2AFD/Stage_Fright_1950_720p_WEB-DL_AAC2.0_H.264-brento.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English

The post Alfred Hitchcock – Stage Fright (1950) 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.

Don Birnam, long-time alcoholic, has been “on the wagon” for ten days and seems to be over the worst; but his craving has just become more insidious. Evading a country weekend planned by his brother Wick and girlfriend Helen, he begins a four-day bender. In flashbacks we see past events, all gone wrong because of the bottle. But this bout looks like being his last…one way or the other.

Fifty-six years have seen many advances in the level of realism portrayed on film, but it is safe to say that The Lost Weekend remains the benchmark against which all other films on alcoholism are measured. Its view is uncompromising yet it manages to present that view in a manner that does not require resorting to tasteless violence or nihilism to make its point (unlike, for example, a more recent film such as Leaving Las Vegas [1995], well-acted as it may be). The film’s realism is enhanced by extensive location shooting in New York, somewhat of a rarity for the time.

In keeping with the traditional functional style that Billy Wilder’s films typically had, The Lost Weekend follows a fairly straight-ahead narrative approach. The exception is the use of flashbacks to recount Birnam’s first meeting with his girlfriend. Otherwise we see the weekend unfold linearly as Birnam does. There is nothing in the way of intricate camerawork or particularly ingenious composition. There are, however—as is often the case with Wilder’s films—several sequences in the film that are particularly memorable.

The first is Birnam’s initially optimistic but soon increasingly desperate trek along New York’s Third Avenue, clutching his typewriter to him as he searches fruitlessly for an open pawnshop in which to exchange it for the price of a few drinks. Like a thirsty man searching unsuccessfully for an oasis in the desert and finally prevailing on passing strangers to give him directions, he finally happens on two pawnshop owners on the sidewalk who inform him that all pawnshops are closed for Yom Kippur. Birnam still possesses enough awareness to ask why then the stores run by the Irish are also closed. The answer is simple. There’s an informal agreement that the Irish-owned pawnshops remain closed on Yom Kippur in return for the Jewish-owned ones doing likewise on St. Patrick’s Day. Defeated, the penniless Birnam must seek out his local bar and beg for the needed drink. The second sequence is the oft-cited scene in Birnam’s apartment when he suffers from the DTs. In today’s era of elaborate special effects, the sequence with the bat and the rat is at times crude, yet the bat’s sudden attack on the rat, the dribble of blood on the wall that results, and Birnam’s terrified yells are still chilling to behold and hear.

Little in Ray Milland’s résumé suggested he had the acting capability needed for the role of Don Birnam. Essentially a light-comedy actor, Milland was Paramount’s choice as the company felt a matinee-idol type was needed to sell the picture given its content. Wilder acquiesced once it was clear there was no chance his choice of José Ferrer would be accepted. Milland himself had doubts, not just about the film’s subject matter, but also about his own ability to be able to do the part justice. With some trepidation, but with the urging of his wife, he accepted the role. His preparation included spending one night in the psychiatric ward at New York’s Bellevue Hospital as well as going on a diet so as to accentuate the look of a drinker who habitually forgets to eat. Milland’s performance is astonishingly good. As Milland grew older, he increasingly had a hint of desperation in his demeanor and this worked to good effect in playing Don Birnam. Milland allows that slight hint to gradually blossom in Birnam during the course of the film until it completely overpowers him in the DTs sequence. With the exception of one or two brief lapses, there is none of the stereotypical Hollywood-drunk behaviour about Milland’s portrayal. His Don Birnam is a man deeply troubled and deeply in trouble, and we are left in no doubt whatsoever about his problems.

Nor does the list of supporting actors and actresses promise, on the surface, anything particularly special. Yet the fact that it draws from that seemingly inexhaustible supply of character performers from Hollywood’s Golden Age should be enough to tell you that they will be uniformly excellent. And so they are—from a young yet experienced Jane Wyman as Birnam’s girlfriend, to Howard da Silva as the bartender, to Frank Faylen as Bim the male-nurse with the slight suggestion of gayness, to Phillip Terry as Birnam’s long-suffering brother. Even newcomer Doris Dowling as the woman in the bar who is interested in Birnam delivers a memorable performance with her wisecracking exchanges with him.

[Possible Spoiler Alert!!!] The ending of The Lost Weekend has been criticized as being too pat—that it suggests that Birnam can stop drinking almost on a whim. Yet I see no such suggestion in the ending. All we have is one more Birnam declaration that he won’t take that next drink. But dropping a cigarette into his glass doesn’t prove anything. He’s just one more stressful moment away from another drink, and there’s nothing that happens at the film’s end to suggest that anything has yet really changed in that sense. Being resolute for five minutes doesn’t cure alcoholism. If the film is hinting that a positive ending is possible, well what’s wrong with that? We all want a positive outcome for Birnam, but that doesn’t alter the fact that a great deal of work and will-power on his part and care and work on his girlfriend’s part are going to be needed in order to change anything.

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 40 min
Size: 	2.03 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	768x576 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 692 kb/s
BPP: 	0.254
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/87B49205E57E8E6/Billy_Wilder_-_(1945)_The_Lost_Weekend.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Billy Wilder – The Lost Weekend (1945) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Louise Mason is a young widow who fills her empty life with the task of becoming a children’s nurse.

Quality is not the best but watchable. Hard-to-find movie.

https://nitro.download/view/221E5D8E3747436/The_Blue_Veil_(1951).avi

no pass

The post Curtis Bernhardt – The Blue Veil (1951) first appeared on Cinema of the World.