Quote:
Gorky Park, in both the original novel by Martin Cruz Smith and the movie adaptation scripted by the legendary Dennis Potter (Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective), introduced one of the most intriguing fictional detectives of the last half century: Chief Investigator Arkady Renko of the Moscow police force in the former Soviet Union. Like all great detectives, Renko is committed to truth and justice, but he has to pursue them in a system that owes its very existence to secrecy, lies and concealment. This fundamental conflict runs through all of Renko’s cases, along with a conflict-ridden family history, including a famous general of a father who disapproved of his son’s choice to pursue a career in law enforcement.

The first of eight Renko novels, Gorky Park, became an international bestseller in 1981. The film was released two years later by the now-defunct Orion Pictures. Director Michael Apted may have directed a Bond film (The World Is Not Enough), but, as he says in the 2014 interview included on this Blu-ray edition, he is a documentary filmmaker at heart, whose most enduring work may turn out to be the Up Series biographies begun in 1964, of which the most recent installment is 56 Up. When Apted was denied permission to film in the Soviet Union (which claimed that no crime existed in its perfect society), he and his production designer did their best to recreate Russia in Finland and Moscow in Helsinki, but Apted always felt frustrated that he wasn’t able to show the “real” Moscow.

Still, those limitations may have worked in Gorky Park’s favor over the long run. Later films from The Russia House (1990) to Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol have shown us such sights as the Kremlin and Red Square often enough that the cinematic novelty has worn off. Gorky Park is about the work of a meticulous, thoughtful cop, who pores over files and follows leads into parts of town that are not featured in the guidebook. The generic quality of the film’s locations suits both the subject matter and the film’s hero, who describes himself as “a plodding investigator, no style”. Of course, the same was true of Lieutenant Columbo, and criminals never got past him either.

Renko (William Hurt) and his reliable lieutenant, Pasha (Michael Elphick), have a case that they really don’t want. In fact, Renko’s friend, the chief pathologist (Henry Woolf) tells him so, while performing a post mortem the next morning. Three bodies have been found buried in the snow in Moscow’s Gorky Park with all identifying features removed, including their faces. Everything about the case reeks of professional intrigue, including the fact that the KGB arrive on the scene almost as quickly as the police, led by Renko’s personal nemesis, Major Pribluda (Rikki Fulton). It’s as if Pribluda knew the bodies were there, and Renko would be all too happy to let Pribluda and his goons have the case so they can bury it again.

But Renko’s boss and patron, Chief Prosecutor Iamskoy (Ian Bannen), urges him to continue investigating. Things are changing, says Iamskoy. The KGB is getting weaker, while the civilian authorities are gaining power. Iamskoy will back the Chief Investigator, wherever his inquiry may lead.

And Renko’s inquiry does indeed lead to unexpected and perilous places. One of the victims wore ice skates belonging to a Siberian university student, Irina Asanova (Joanna Pacula), who was expelled for radical activities and now works as a seamstress for the movies. Not surprisingly, she is unwilling to talk to the police. But Irina can also be found in the company of a wealthy American businessman, Jack Osborne (Lee Marvin, who was ailing at the time, but you’d never know it from his confidently focused performance). Osborne is involved in the fur trade for prized Russian sables, and he is so well connected that he seems to glide easily through the highest levels of Soviet society. He’s clearly a villain, but are his crimes purely economic? (He barely meets Renko before he’s offering the policeman a bribe.)

Other mysterious characters hover around the edges of the investigation. One furtive figure turns out to be an American of Russian extraction named Kirwill (Brian Dennehy), who tails Renko for reasons unknown. Another is a used car dealer named Golodkin (British comedian Alexei Sayle), who has a few other businesses on the side. And there’s the eccentric Prof. Andreev (Ian McDiarmid, best known as Emperor Palpatine in the Star Wars prequels), who is strictly an academic but has a gift for reconstructing the faces of historical figures from archaeological evidence. Despite the professor’s reluctance, Renko persuades him to undertake a painstaking facial reconstruction of two of the Gorky Park victims, with startling results. Meanwhile, shadowy assassins do their best to add to the body count, as someone tries to tie up loose ends. From the methods, Renko is certain the KGB is involved, but what are they covering up?

Apted effectively creates the paranoid atmosphere of a society in which anyone may be a spy or an informer. In groups of people, he will pick out someone who is staring at Renko, his men or anyone appearing to cooperate. Perhaps the person is curious; perhaps they are momentarily distracted; or perhaps they are preparing a report for a KGB handler. In this world, you never know, and much of the “plodding” investigator’s success results from his ability to size up people, to separate the dissemblers from the trustworthy. The latter include Pasha and Renko’s close friend, a lawyer named Anton (played by the late Richard Griffiths, best known as Harry Potter’s unpleasant Uncle Vernon). If Renko doesn’t always get it exactly right, it’s because he has learned the hard way that sometimes one must make deals with the devil in order to achieve as much justice as possible in a system that routinely deducts justice from the equation.

Gorky Park.1983.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 8 min
Size: 	2.91 GiB
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https://nitro.download/view/066BEA89516A16F/Gorky_Park.1983.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Michael Apted – Gorky Park (1983) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Point Blank is a 1967 American crime film directed by John Boorman, starring Lee Marvin and featuring Angie Dickinson, adapted from the crime noir pulp novel The Hunter by Donald E. Westlake, writing as Richard Stark. Boorman directed the film at Marvin’s request and Marvin played a central role in the film’s development and staging. The film was not a box office success in 1967 but has since gone on to become a cult classic, eliciting praise from such critics as film historian David Thomson.

Production
Director John Boorman met Lee Marvin while on the set of The Dirty Dozen in London. Boorman and Marvin talked about a script based on the book The Hunter. Both hated the script but loved the main character of Walker. When they agreed to work on the film, Marvin threw the script out the window. Marvin called up a meeting with the head of the studio, the producers, his agent and Boorman. Boorman recalls, “[Marvin] said, ‘I have script approval?’ They said ‘yes’. ‘And I have approval of principal cast?’. ‘Yes’. He said, ‘I defer all those approvals to John [Boorman].’ And he walked out. So on my very first film in Hollywood, I had final cut and I made use of it.”

The unusual structure of the film was due in part to the original script and developments during the course of shooting the film. Rehearsals took place at Marvin’s house in Los Angeles. On the rehearsal day in which Marvin asked Sharon Acker what happened to the money, Marvin had lines which he did not speak and forced Acker to continue the conversation on her own. “I saw right away he was right,” replied Boorman, “Lee never made suggestions. He would just show you.” So Boorman changed the lines in the script so that Acker would essentially ask and answer Marvin’s questions, and the result is in the finished film. “It made a conventional scene something more,” added Boorman.

This was the first film ever to shoot at Alcatraz, the infamous prison which had been shut down since 1963, only three years before the production. Two weeks in the abandoned prison facility required the services of 125 crew members. While Marvin and Wynn enjoyed shooting on location, Wynn was concerned about the weather and the need to loop half the dialogue. During the shoot, Angie Dickinson and Sharon Acker modeled contemporary fashions for a Life magazine exclusive against the backdrop of the prison. Acker was accidentally hurt by the blanks that Vernon used to shoot at Marvin early in the film.

Director Boorman chose locations that were “stark.” For example, the airplane terminal walkway that Marvin walked down originally had flower pots lining the walls. Boorman had the pots taken out to “make it all bare.”

After Boorman showed the finished cut to executives, they were “very perplexed and mumbling about reshoots”. Margaret Booth, a legendarily traditional-minded supervising editor on the picture, told Boorman as the execs filed out, “You touch one frame of this film over my dead body!”
Reception

In her 1967 New Yorker review of Bonnie and Clyde, Pauline Kael wrote: “A brutal new melodrama is called Point Blank, and it is.” Kael later called the film “intermittently dazzling”. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and said “as suspense thrillers go Point Blank is pretty good.” Leonard Maltin gave the film three and a half stars: “Taut thriller, ignored in 1967, but now regarded as a top film of the decade.”

Slant Magazine reviewer Nick Schager notes in a 2003 review: “What makes Point Blank so extraordinary, however, is not its departures from genre conventions, but Boorman’s virtuoso use of such unconventional avant-garde stylistics to saturate the proceedings with a classical noir mood of existential torpor and romanticized fatalism.”

The film has a 97% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Themes
Viewers and critics have often questioned whether or not the film is really a dream that Walker has after he is shot in the very beginning. Director Boorman claims to not have an opinion on the matter. “What it is is what you see,” responded Boorman. Steven Soderbergh has described Point Blank as “memory film” for Marvin. Boorman believes the film is about Lee Marvin’s brutalizing experiences in World War II, which dehumanized him and left him desperately searching for his humanity.

Style
Point Blank combines elements of film noir with stylistic touches of the European nouvelle vague. The film features a fractured time-line, disconcerting narrative rhythms (long slow passages contrasted with sudden outbursts of violence) and a carefully calculated use of film space (stylized compositions of concrete riverbeds, sweeping bridges, empty prison cells). Boorman credits Marvin with coming up with a lot of the visual metaphors in the film. Boorman said that as the film progressed, scenes in the film would be filmed monochromatically around one particular color (the chilly blues and grays of Acker’s apartment, Dickinson’s butter yellow bathrobe, the startling red wall in Vernon’s penthouse) to give the proceedings a “sort of unreality”.

To establish Walker’s mythic stature, Soderbergh noted in the commentary that the film cuts from a shot of Walker swimming from Alcatraz to a shot of him on a ferry overlooking the same island while a woman on the loudspeaker describes the impossibility of leaving the island. Soderbergh said that this contrast of the character’s ease of escape with the loudspeaker’s monologue makes the Walker character “mythic immediately.”
Legacy

Point Blank is hailed in the book 1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die as “The perfect thriller in both form and vision.” Film historian David Thomson calls the film a masterpiece. Thomson adds, “[…] this is not just a cool, violent pursuit film, it is a wistful dream and one of the great reflections on how movies are fantasies that we are reaching out for all the time—it’s singin’ in the rain again, the white lie that erases night.” Director Steven Soderbergh has said that he used stylistic touches from Point Blank many times in his filmmaking career.

The Hunter was also the basis for Brian Helgeland’s Payback (1999), starring Mel Gibson. Director Boorman has joked that Payback was so bad that Mel Gibson must have taken the original script for Point Blank that Boorman and Marvin had thrown out.

Influence
On March 29, 1968, Point Blank was screened at Cinelândia movie theaters in order to protest the murder of 18-year-old high school student Edson Luís de Lima Souto by the Military Police of Rio de Janeiro. Souto was shot at point-blank range. Phrases such as “Do bullets kill hunger?”, “Old people in power, young people in coffin”, and “They killed a student… what if it was your son?” were written by protesters in the movie posters. The aftermath of Souto’s death was one of the first major public protests against the Brazilian military government.

Point Blank.mkv

General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 1h 31mn
Size: 1.54 GiB
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https://nitro.download/view/F773FDBA2573466/Point_Blank.mkv

https://fikper.com/U9bpvzfcT2/Point_Blank.mkv

Language(s):English, Audio Comm
Subtitles:English French Spanish German Japanese

The post John Boorman – Point Blank (1967) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Third-billed Lee Marvin dominates the proceedings in A Life in the Balance. Marvin plays a psycho killer, whose trail is dogged by inquistive young Jose Perez. Jose’s father, musician Ricardo Montalban, has been accused of a series of murders. The boy is convinced that Marvin is the guilty party, and trails the man in hopes of bringing him to justice. No dummy he, Perez leaves a trail for the authorities to follow–a series of smashed-up police call boxes (a similar plot device was deployed for comic purposes by Harold Lloyd in Professor Beware). A Life in the Balance was filmed on location in Mexico City, with a great deal of screen time devoted to a colorful carnival.
Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

1.12GB | 1h 14m | 720×540 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/B81F5E0E4D2CFD9/A.Life.in.the.Balance.1955.DVDRip.x264.AC3.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English & Spanish (.srt) into MKV

The post Harry Horner & Rafael Portillo – A Life in the Balance (1955) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
A salesman with a sudden passion for reform has an idea to sell to his barfly buddies: throw away your pipe dreams. The drunkards, living in a flophouse above a saloon, resent the idea.

7.06GB | 3h 58mn | 1024×556 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/6EBAD8612486BF3/The.Iceman.Cometh.1973.576p.BDRip.AAC.x264.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post John Frankenheimer – The Iceman Cometh (1973) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
Four soldiers of fortune are hired by a wealthy rancher to rescue his beautiful young wife who has been kidnapped by a villainous Mexican bandit. When they finally find her, after fighting their way across deserts and mountains, they discover she is not being held against her will. This causes friction within the band as to whether they should honor their agreement.

3.13GB | 1 h 57 min | 1024×436 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/5C5166C0D831D1C/The.Professionals.1966.576p.BluRay.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian, Chinese, Korean, Thai (muxed)

The post Richard Brooks – The Professionals (1966) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
When hired gun Tim Strawn (Lee Marvin) kills her rancher father, Cat Ballou (Jane Fonda) becomes an outlaw set on vengeance. Enlisting the help of washed-up gunslinger Kid Shelleen (also Marvin) as well as the handsome bandit Clay Boone (Michael Callan), Cat strikes back at the land-development company that employed Strawn, and eventually targets the assassin himself. Adding to the lively comedic mood of the film are narrative song performances by Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye.

2.22GB | 1 h 36 min | 1024×552 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/F820D705DA1DE3E/Cat.Ballou.1965.576p.BluRay.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):English+commentary
Subtitles: English (muxed)

The post Elliot Silverstein – Cat Ballou (1965) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
Monte Walsh (Lee Marvin ) and his pal Chet Rollins (Jack Palance) are two over the hill cowboys seeking work in the town of Harmony, Arizona in the final days of the Old West. As barbed wire and railways steadily eliminate the need for the cowboy, Monte and his friends are left with fewer and fewer options. New work opportunities are available to them, but the freedom of the open prairie is what they long for. Eventually, they all must say goodbye to the lives they knew, and try to make a new start.

2.05GB | 1 h 39 min | 1024×436 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/DE396062133053F/Monte.Walsh.1970.576p.BluRay.AAC.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English (muxed)

The post William A. Fraker – Monte Walsh (1970) first appeared on Cinema of the World.