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

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Runtime:	1h 47mn
Size:	1.37 GiB
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The post Irving Rapper – The Glass Menagerie (1950) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Three loosely connected love stories. The first story: Paula is a talented dancer who cannot truly live unless she dances. But has a heart condition, which means she cannot live if she does. The second story: Tommy despises his French tutor, and hates being a child. He wants to be an adult so he can do what he wants. He gets his wish, being transformed into a handsome young man for one evening, and learns about whole new side of his French tutor. Third story: Pierre Narval is trapeze artist who gave it up when his partner died doing a dangerous stunt at his bidding. He rescues Nina, a beautiful young woman, after she throws herself into the Seine, and convinces her to become his new aerial partner. Her husband had been killed by the Nazis during the war, and she blames herself. They fall in love, which is tested when Nina must perform the stunt which killed Pierre’s former partner.

The Story of Three Loves - (1953) - Flipper.mkv

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Runtime: 	2 h 1 min
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Language(s):English, French
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The post Vincente Minnelli & Gottfried Reinhardt – The Story of Three Loves (1953) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A high school teacher separated from his son plots revenge on his ex-wife.

Mousey.AKA.Cat.and.Mouse.1974.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

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https://nitro.download/view/46870226A749660/Mousey.AKA.Cat.and.Mouse.1974.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:italian

The post Daniel Petrie – Mousey AKA Cat and Mouse (1974) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
KIRK DOUGLAS was worried. It was 1961, and this actor-producer had recently gambled on a big history picture, “Spartacus.” He had fired the director — Anthony Mann — after a week of shooting, replacing him with Stanley Kubrick. Mr. Douglas thought the picture had turned out well, but it still hadn’t been released. Meanwhile he had encountered a paperback novel — “The Brave Cowboy,” by Edward Abbey — and optioned it through his production company, Byrna. And Byrna, which had a production deal with Universal, commissioned a screenplay, by Dalton Trumbo.

Mr. Douglas was gambling again, but playing a good hand. The material — the story of a modern-day cowboy who breaks into jail to rescue his best friend — is original for a western, and gets better as it goes along. Its screenwriter was talented and hard working. (Blacklisted and jailed after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Trumbo had for 10 years written scripts under assumed names, winning an Oscar for one of them as Robert Rich. Mr. Douglas went to bat for Trumbo on “Spartacus,” promising him a screen credit with his real name.) And Trumbo had solved the story’s two biggest problems: Why was the hero’s best friend in jail in the first place? And why wouldn’t he leave?

Abbey’s novel, published in 1956, is set a decade earlier, following the introduction of the military draft. Paul, the hero’s friend, has refused to register, not because he is a pacifist (he isn’t) but because he considers a draft unconstitutional. Like Abbey, Paul is an incipient libertarian or a patriotic anarchist. He has written the government and local authorities about his resistance to unjust authority and been given a year in jail. So it’s a moral imperative for Paul — when his old compadre John W. Burns shows up with two files and a plan to ride for Mexico — to turn him down.

Fifty years after the release of that film, “Lonely Are the Brave,” westerns may not be much in evidence at the multiplex. But on the small screen this summer, complex takes on the genre like “Hell on Wheels” (returning Aug. 12 to AMC) and “Longmire” (which has drawn big ratings for A&E) are in vogue again, and it’s worth taking another look at one of the bleakest westerns ever to grace the big screen.

In 1961, when Trumbo wrote the first version of the screenplay, it was unthinkable in Hollywood to feature a draft resister. It would be years before the Vietnam War made the draft an issue — so Trumbo, at his most sardonic, thought of an alternative crime for Paul: associating with parrot smugglers. This lasted one round of what is otherwise an excellent screenplay. In the next version, titled “The Last Hero,” Trumbo came up with another solution: Paul is in jail for assisting illegal immigrants find food and work. It was a prescient choice, anticipating the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s and our current turmoil over undocumented workers.

Having addressed Paul’s “crime of principle,” Trumbo follows Abbey’s novel closely: Burns gets locked up then busts himself and two Indians out of jail, heading for the hills on his coquettish horse, Whiskey. The film’s second half tracks Burns’s evasion of his pursuers and his encounter with a nemesis both inevitable and ludicrous. Trumbo shows a clear sense of location and landscape, including as his title page a hand-drawn map of the cowboy’s intended route, via the Sangre de Cristo and Manzano Mountains, into Mexico.

Armed with a map, a great script, and a first-rate cast — he was playing Burns himself — Mr. Douglas seemingly had nothing to worry about. Yet on May 4, 1961, from the Western Skies Hotel in Albuquerque, with production already under way, he wrote a troubled letter. It was addressed to Mr. Gary Cooper, Beverly Hills.

“Dear Coop,” he wrote. “When for years you’ve had affection for a guy and you find it suddenly turning to resentment, you begin to think it deserves some comment.” He went on to say, “Put yourself in my spot. I’m doing a picture that should have been done by only one guy. I know it — my entire company knows it. Start with the title — The Last Hero. Now whom does that fit — me? Hell, no!”

Mr. Douglas complained to Cooper that his director, David Miller, was uncommunicative and focused on realism. The only direction Miller had given was, “try and play this the way Gary Cooper would.” Even worse had been Abbey’s arrival on set. Mr. Douglas reported that he’d driven to meet Abbey at the Albuquerque airport: “Fifty guys step off the plane but I spot him immediately — why? He looks like Gary Cooper. To make matters worse, when I meet him, he talks like Cooper!”

For a moment it sounds as if Mr. Douglas the producer was angling for Cooper to take over the lead. But this was impossible. Cooper was terminally ill and would die nine days later. Certainly Mr. Douglas knew this when he wrote he wanted to follow in Cooper’s footsteps throughout the shoot: “I know now that at best I will come remotely close. But more important — I do know also that just trying to be you will make a better me.”

Such heartfelt words acknowledged that outside help would not be forthcoming. It is the message of the film as well. Abbey’s presence looms over the film — both Burns and Paul contain aspects of his character — but did he really look like Cooper? To a certain extent. Did he really visit the set? Recalling Abbey after his death in 1989, Mr. Douglas wrote, “I never met Mr. Abbey, but we wrote to each other several times.”

Which was it? Does it matter? Either way, the story of Abbey’s visit gave Mr. Douglas an opportunity to write a fan letter, and to prepare for a role he felt his mentor could have better played. As the pressmen conclude in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” the other great western made that year: If confronted with two conflicting versions, “print the legend.”

Before the shoot Byrna put out a release emphasizing Miller’s realism: nonactors would be cast, a genuine painter would play Paul’s wife, the sets would showcase her work. It was all for naught: professional actors — Gena Rowlands, Walter Matthau, George Kennedy — were used instead. “The Brave Cowboy,” shot as “The Last Hero,” was released in 1962 as “Lonely Are the Brave” — elegantly photographed, theatrical rather than “natural,” exuberantly acted, deftly paced. There is no greater western, and certainly no more tragic one. Despite his doubts Mr. Douglas personified Burns, flouting cinematic rules by doing his own stunts and co-starring with an animal, a high spot of his career.

It’s hard to imagine a film so radical, or so pessimistic, being made today. Though a Korean War hero, Burns refuses to carry ID or listen to reason. He disrespects the power company by cutting its barbed-wire fences; the county jail, by breaking out; the sheriff, whose manhunt he eludes; the military-industrial complex, whose helicopter he shoots down; and us, the viewers, who — when the lights go up or the DVD ends — return to a life played mainly by the rules. Remarkable for a low-budget western, “Lonely Are the Brave” poses uneasy questions about the idea, and value, of heroism. Do Paul’s principles justify abandoning his wife and child? Where does Burns’s extraordinary journey lead?

David Miller - (1962) Lonely Are the Brave.mkv

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https://nitro.download/view/07CF903785584CF/David_Miller_-_(1962)_Lonely_Are_the_Brave.mkv

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Subtitles:English

The post David Miller – Lonely Are the Brave (1962) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
It’s not unusual for pre-production publicity on a new film to revolve around the star or the director but it’s particularly rare when it focuses on a construction site. In the case of the glossy 1960 soap opera, Strangers When We Meet, directed by Richard Quine, the real star of the movie was the cliff top Bel Air home that was constructed especially for the film by architect Carl Anderson and art director Ross Bellah. Central to the storyline, the house with the ocean view is the vision of architect Larry Coe (Kirk Douglas) who is building it for a successful novelist, Roger Altar (Ernie Kovacs), who wants something different and unique. In the course of construction, Coe, who is bored with his marriage to Eve (Barbara Rush), meets and ardently pursues Maggie Gault (Kim Novak), a sexy, blonde housewife he first encounters at his son’s elementary school when they are dropping off their children. Coe’s advances are rebuffed by Maggie until she finally gives in, unable to bear any longer the strain and frustrations of a loveless marriage. As Altar’s architectural wonder takes shape so do new conflicts: Larry and Maggie are torn between abandoning their marriages and family and running away together; Altar experiences mid-career panic and has second thoughts about his brilliant architect; Larry’s neighbor, Felix (Walter Matthau), detects Larry’s affair and attempts to seduce Eve when she’s alone at home. Practically every relationship in Strangers When We Meet is a lost cause, but the one thing to emerge unscathed at the end is Coe’s ultra-modern dream home, perched high up in the Santa Monica mountains and glistening in the sun.

When news of the Bel Air home’s construction was first covered by the press, Columbia studio publicists revealed that it was being built in stages for the movie Strangers When We Meet and that it would be sold after the film was completed. The more persistent rumor, however, was that the house was the future love nest for Kim Novak and her director Richard Quine, who had tried to keep their affair private for years. Gossip columnist Louella Parsons had often intimated that Novak and Quine were an item but New York Times reporter Joe Hyams out-scooped her when he dropped in unexpectedly on the set of Strangers When We Meet and asked Novak point blank, “Your honeymoon home?” Novak replied, “Stop reading the papers, Mr. Hyams. Stop listening to gossip. Richard Quine and I are having a romance; it’s as simple as that. Marriage is another matter entirely…I’m not sure I want to get married and I’m not sure it would work out for Dick and me. We have always been bothered by the undercurrent of work running through our long relationship. You know how hard that makes it, very hard.” (from Kim Novak: Reluctant Goddess by Peter Harry Brown).

There had always been speculation about the love life of the notoriously press-shy Novak with rumors of past affairs with Columbia studio boss Harry Cohn, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Ram Trujillo. The romance with Quine, however, was now public knowledge but on the set it had different ramifications. In her earlier years in Hollywood Novak had been a reclusive, passive presence on movie sets such as Pal Joey (1957) but now she had gained more self-confidence and was flexing her power as one of Columbia’s biggest stars. According to biographer Peter Harry Brown in Kim Novak: Reluctant Goddess, “Her experience on Middle of the Night [1959] convinced her that she was an actress to be reckoned with. Unfortunately, she picked the wrong director (Quine) and the wrong star (Kirk Douglas) upon whom to vent her spleen. Technicians laughed behind their hands one afternoon when Kim seriously tried to give acting instructions to Douglas, who listened with a deadpan face. Off camera, he referred to her as the ‘broad Harry Cohn built.’ Within days, relations between the two stars became frosty and threatened to divide the company into armed camps. Kirk, usually a model of patience, began complaining about the time it took to photograph Novak from just the right angle, in just the proper light, and during just the right mood. The inference was that Quine was tilting the production heavily in favor of Kim.”

In his autobiography, The Ragman’s Son, Douglas recalled some of the difficulties in making Strangers When We Meet: “One morning, we were shooting a scene down at the beach. Obviously, Kim and Dick had been discussing the scene, and she was excited about a wonderful idea she had come up with. Apparently, Dick had agreed with her wholeheartedly. I listened to her argument, told her exactly why it was impossible to do the scene that way. She looked at Dick. He looked at me and said, ‘You know, Kim, he’s right.’ Kim went berserk. She ripped up the pages, started to make incoherent sounds, screamed, went nuts. It was impossible to shoot with her for the rest of the day. The next day we shot the scene the way it was written. We got through the picture, and I enjoyed working with her, although I do think that she convinced Richard to give the picture the wrong ending. The original ending in the book, very powerful, was that after our love affair had ended, Walter Matthau, who was playing a heavy, comes to pick her up in a car, and she decides what the hell, and goes off with him. Life goes on. Instead, she preferred to spurn him, pull her trench coat up around her neck, and walk off like Charlie Chaplin. I didn’t think that was the right ending, but those are the hazards of working with someone who’s romantically involved with the director.”

Douglas’s recollection of the original ending isn’t entirely accurate because HIS character is the one that calls off the affair and tries to make a go of it with his wife and family in Hawaii where an ambitious five-year project awaits him. The ending from Evan Hunter’s novel (he also wrote the screenplay) wouldn’t make much sense either since the Walter Matthau character was a boring lecher and completely inconceivable as the sort of man Maggie would gravitate toward to fulfill her emotional and sexual needs. The present ending of Strangers When We Meet actually rings true since none of the characters are able to escape their own private hells. So, Novak was right to sway Quine’s opinion on the film’s conclusion. Novak “would always refer to Strangers When We Meet as ‘that great lost weekend.’ (Several years later Kim reaped revenge on the actor in Boys’ Night Out [1962] by having James Garner chastise a smiling friend with the lines: ‘Stop showing off your teeth. Who do you think you are? Kirk Douglas?’).”

Strangers When We Meet was one of the last films Novak made for her home studio Columbia – her final film for them, The Notorious Landlady (1962), was released the following year – and it also heralded the end of her reign as a major star. She never again experienced the earlier career heights of such films as Picnic (1955) or Vertigo (1958). Douglas, of course, was still in the prime of his career and following Strangers When We Meet with the Oscar®-winning epic, Spartacus (1960), in which he served as executive producer and star. Strangers When We Meet might not have been a happy experience for either actor and it certainly wasn’t well received by critics of its era or the public. It didn’t receive any Oscar® nominations either but, regardless of this, the film yields numerous pleasures that were overlooked at the time.

Hipster comedian and innovative television host Ernie Kovacs provides a welcome diversion from the heavy soap opera proceedings as the popular writer who demands a spectacular house for his oversized ego. His character, a borderline lush and habitual womanizer, is a completely improbable character and seems to belong in a different movie but he is nonetheless an amusing and charismatic presence in the film. It’s a shame he didn’t get the opportunity to explore the film medium as he did television; a fatal car wreck in 1962 ended a promising career. The other great scene-stealer in Strangers When We Meet is Walter Matthau as the loathsome Felix who enjoys baiting Coe with unwanted advice about his not-so-private affair with Maggie. He’s rarely been sleazier than the scene in which he corners Eve in her home alone during a rainstorm – “Come on, Eve, I know you want to…” – and the film’s final shot of Felix shows him sharing his “wisdom” with his young son as they walk to school, observing numerous housewives along the way, “Love’em all, Brucie, love’em all!”

The film’s view of life in suburbia is also fascinating for its candor in addressing marital problems and couples who have resigned themselves to a dull existence together because they don’t have the guts or honesty to live the lives they really want. Other films from the same era such as No Down Payment (1957) also explored marital discontent in the suburbs but Strangers When We Meet stands out for its sad truths delivered within a glossy, artificial milieu. It’s no wonder the film fared poorly with moviegoers who expected a romantic fantasy and got a dose of Jean-Paul Sartre, American-style. The film could almost pass as a Douglas Sirk melodrama on the order of All That Heaven Allows (1955) or There’s Always Tomorrow (1956) and the dialogue is just as self-conscious and ironic. In one scene, Kirk Douglas’s character admits, “I’m such a phony. I’ve got a drawer full of manufactured labels. Architect, husband, father, man. I sew them into my clothes. The suits never fit.” The most impressive aspects of the film, however, are Ross Bellah’s stylized art direction, the beautifully framed widescreen Technicolor cinematography of Charles Lang (over 18 Oscar® nominations!) which could be cut up into stills and sold in art galleries, and the Bel Air dream house, which we are privileged to see from the laying of the foundation through its construction to its final completion as an architectural marvel – or monstrosity.

Strangers When We Meet PAL DVD DD2.0 x264-RR.mkv

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https://nitro.download/view/41F4703ADD1E4DA/Strangers_When_We_Meet_PAL_DVD_DD2.0_x264-RR.mkv

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Subtitles:English

The post Richard Quine – Strangers When We Meet (1960) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

The Arrangement tells the story of a seemingly-successful Los Angeles-area advertising executive of Greek-American extraction, “Eddie Anderson” (birth name Evangelos Arness, portrayed by Kirk Douglas) who is miserable in both his job and his marriage to his WASPy wife, Florence (Deborah Kerr) and is having a torrid affair with a co-worker, Gwen (Faye Dunaway). “Anderson” is forced to re-evaluate his life and its priorities after an automobile accident which occurs after he can no longer face what his life has become.

The.Arrangement.1969.720p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP2.0.H.264-ISA.mkv

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Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	2h 5mn
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Subtitles:English

The post Elia Kazan – The Arrangement (1969) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Plot: Hans Muller is a Jewish refugee from Germany. Relocating to Israel after World War II, he can not overcome the psychological effects of the war. After attacking a policeman, Hans becomes a fugitive, traveling through Israel with a teenage boy.

1.19GB | 1h 25m | 640×480 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/E52A86AA04BFAD9/The_Juggler_(1953)_CMOD_DVDRip_BBM.avi

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Subtitles:None

The post Edward Dmytryk – The Juggler (1953) first appeared on Cinema of the World.