Quote:
In the carefree days before World War I, introverted Austrian author Jules strikes up a friendship with the exuberant Frenchman Jim and both men fall for the impulsive and beautiful Catherine.

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When François Truffaut was a twenty-three-year-old film critic, in 1955, he read an autobiographical first novel by a seventy-four-year-old writer, Henri-Pierre Roché. “The book overwhelmed me,” he later recalled, “and I wrote: If I ever succeed in making films, I will make Jules and Jim.” Six years later—after constantly rereading and even partly memorizing Roché’s novel—he more than redeemed that promise. Sixties audiences didn’t merely see his movie. They wanted to live it.

Jules and Jim begins in Paris before World War I and introduces us to two aspiring writers. Jules is a shy, diminutive Austrian (Oskar Werner is all pained charm), a born onlooker who masks his aggressiveness as passivity. He can’t get the girls, but his friend Jim can. A lanky, not-quite-dashing Frenchman (played with melting standoffishness by Henri Serre), Jim is a Left Bank Don Quixote to Jules’s Sancho Panza. When we first meet them, they are living out a genial but somewhat lackluster bohemianism, brimming with talk about writing and women. But for all their love of books, these pals come alive only when they meet the magnificently desirable and dangerous Catherine (Jeanne Moreau). She marries the stolid Jules, who’s too low-key and dull to keep her, and becomes the lover of Jim, who refuses to subject himself to her will.

Although the film is named for the men, its animating force is Catherine, a creature both utterly timeless (Jules and Jim first see her visage in a photo of a Greek statue) and forever changing: at different points, she plays the roles of Charlie Chaplin and street tough, vamp and doting mother. Passionate and iconoclastic, she is, in fact, the only true free spirit among them. Just as the men put their talent into their art, so she puts her genius into living—or perhaps into claiming for herself the reckless male freedoms that women have been traditionally denied. Time and again, she literally dresses herself in the garb of masculinity.

On paper, the mercurial Catherine seems an implausibly grandiose con­ception, a woman both giddy and tragic, protofeminist and male-dominated, driven by Eros and Thanatos. But as played by Moreau, a pop-eyed siren with the ferocity of Bette Davis and the kitty-cat wiles of Tuesday Weld, Catherine becomes one of the modern movies’ triumphant characterizations—the anima as autocrat. Whether playing with vitriol or jumping into the Seine, she elevates capriciousness to an existential principle. When Jim says he understands her, she replies, “I don’t want to be understood.” And this is absolutely true. The movie lives in the shuddering distance between Catherine’s imperious, doomed physicality and the two men’s shifting perceptions of her, perceptions that rearrange but never destroy their glowing friendship.

Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote that the greatest art is about the passing of time. Jules and Jim flies by like a dream, suffused with a sense of life’s evanes­cence. As the characters grow older, and perhaps wiser, we become aware of how much has been lost—loss of love, loss of innocence, loss of the marvelously lamplit bohemian past to the searchlight horror of Nazism. An intimate melan­choly pervades the movie’s voice-over narration, which adores the characters’ brave inquiry into love’s possibilities but is also wryly aware of the relief that accompanies the end of such inquiries. As critic Andrew Sarris once wrote, Jules and Jim celebrates “the sweet pain of the impossible and the magnificent failure of an ideal.”

From the beginning, the film itself was treated as a magnificent success, with Truffaut winning praise from such personal heroes as Jean Cocteau and Jean Renoir; he even received a gushing letter from the seventy-five-year-old Helen Hessel, the real-life, Seine-jumping model for Catherine, who told him he’d captured “the essence of our intimate emotions.” Such accolades, however, didn’t keep France’s Commission de contrôle des films from forbidding viewers under the age of eighteen from seeing Jules and Jim because of its “immoral character”—a decision that would be replicated in many other countries. From our present-day vantage point, when nudie sex scenes are de rigueur on cable TV, such a decision may seem incredible. But this was 1962, and while the New Wave may have been reinventing cinema, French censors weren’t ready to reinvent bourgeois morality.

Perhaps a bit naively for a Young Turk, Truffaut was shocked by the ban, but he clutched at the nearest straw. The president of the commission, Henry de Ségogne, told him that the board might reconsider if he could gather a series of laudatory statements from luminaries. Truffaut set about doing just that, writing to Cocteau, Renoir, and Alain Resnais requesting their support. Still, despite this illustrious backing, the commission refused to reverse its original decision, condemning itself to a tiny corner in the Pantheon of the Square, while this supposedly immoral movie would one day be shown in high school classes.

Truffaut was not yet thirty when he made this tale of triangular desire, and decades later it’s still astonishing that one so youthful could be so open­hearted, so willing to give everyone’s motives and passions their due. But if Jules and Jim casts a mature eye on the limits of freedom (by the end, everything seems uncannily, but satisfyingly, preordained), it remains indelibly a young man’s movie. It’s a lyrical joyride propelled by leaping, elliptical edits, Georges Delerue’s sublimely evocative score (one of the most memorable in film his­tory), and Raoul Coutard’s ecstatic photography, which helps underscore Truffaut’s visual ideas about the great circle of life. At one point, Coutard’s camera follows a young woman in a bar, does a 360 degree pan, and winds up watching Jules draw another girl’s face on the surface of a round table.

Almost every scene is shot through with such casual stylistic brilliance. Yet what audiences have always loved about this movie isn’t simply its technical brio but its emotional warmth, its embrace of a world in which tragedy is forever playing hopscotch with farce. Jules and Jim is a movie that enters viewers’ lives like a lover—a masterpiece you can really get a crush on.

~Criterion

Jules.and.Jim.1962.1080p.BluRay.FLAC1.0.x264-RO.mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 46 min
Size: 	17.3 GiB
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Aspect ratio:  	2.40:1
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#1:  	French 1.0ch FLAC @ 269 kb/s (BFI Bluray)
#2:  	French 1.0ch FLAC @ 300 kb/s (BIM Distribuzione DVD)
#3:  	English 1.0ch AAC LC @ 64.5 kb/s (Commentary #1 by coscreenwriter Jean Gruault, longtime Truffaut collaborator Suzanne Schiffman, editor Claudine Bouche, and film scholar Annette Insdorf)
#4:  	French 2.0ch AAC LC @ 72.0 kb/s (Commentary #2 by actress Jeanne Moreau and Truffaut biographer Serge Toubiana)
#5:  	French 2.0ch AAC LC @ 73.7 kb/s (Commentary #3 John Player Lecture Francois Truffaut the director discusses his films)
#6:  	English 2.0ch AAC LC @ 74.2 kb/s (Commentary #4 actress Jeanne Moreau talks with Don Allen about her life and career)

https://nitro.download/view/263D3BC03749860/Jules.and.Jim.1962.1080p.BluRay.FLAC1.0.x264-RO.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English, Danish, Dutch, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Romanian, Chinese, Turkish

The post François Truffaut – Jules et Jim AKA Jules and Jim (1962) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Voyage of the Damned is a 1976 war drama film directed by Stuart Rosenberg, with an all-star cast featuring Faye Dunaway, Oskar Werner, Lee Grant, Max von Sydow, James Mason, and Malcolm McDowell.

The story was inspired by actual events concerning the fate of the ocean liner St. Louis carrying Jewish refugees from Germany to Cuba in 1939. It was based on a 1974 nonfiction book of the same title written by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts. The screenplay was written by Steve Shagan and David Butler. The film was produced by ITC Entertainment and released by Rank Film Distributors in the UK and Avco Embassy Pictures in the US.

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Based on historic events, this dramatic film concerns the 1939 voyage of MS St. Louis, which departed from Hamburg carrying 937 Jews from Germany, ostensibly bound for Havana, Cuba. The passengers, having seen and suffered rising antisemitism in Germany, realised this might be their only chance to escape. The film details the emotional journey of the passengers, who gradually become aware that their passage was planned as an exercise in propaganda, and that it had never been intended that they disembark in Cuba. Rather, they were to be set up as pariahs, to set an example before the world. As a Nazi official states in the film, when the whole world has refused to accept the Jews as refugees, no country can blame Germany for their fate.

The Cuban government refuses entry to the passengers, and the liner heads to the United States. As it waits off the Florida coast, the passengers learn that the United States also has rejected them, leaving the captain no choice but to return to Europe. The captain tells a confidante that he has received a letter signed by 200 passengers saying they will join hands and jump into the sea rather than return to Germany. He states his intention to run the liner aground on a reef off the southern coast of England, to allow the passengers to be rescued and reach safety there.

Shortly before the film’s end, it is revealed that the governments of Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have each agreed to accept a share of the passengers as refugees. As they cheer and clap at the news, footnotes disclose the fates of some of the main characters, suggesting that more than 600 of the 937 passengers, who did not resettle in Britain but in the other European nations, ultimately were deported and were murdered in Nazi concentration camps.

Voyage of the Damned.1976.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 37 min
Size: 	3.56 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x576 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	3 000 kb/s
BPP: 	0.212
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 224 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/65EDE306F3DDC0A/Voyage_of_the_Damned.1976.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Stuart Rosenberg – Voyage of the Damned (1976) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

If you agonized through “Amadeus”, cringing at the depiction of a giggling buffoon and his featherbrained Constanze, shuddering at the underlying premise that God gave the gift to the wrong man for reasons we just can’t understand, then this film may provide you with a pleasant antidote. Filmed in 1955, probably in anticipation of the bicentenary of his birth, it gives a totally different view of the composer, and recreates the last year of his life on a more intimate anti-blockbuster scale. But though it is an engaging effort with many fine points, it doesn’t succeed in redeeming Mozart from the fictions of Milos Forman’s travesty, because it is itself a fictionalization that distorts in its own way the character of the composer.

The last year of Mozart’s life was a living hell since he was physically very ill and financially in difficulty. The necessity to keep composing was all the more tortuous because of his suffering. The symptoms he had – pain, vomiting, fever, chills, swollen hands and feet, seem to point to kidney disease. He was taking large quantities of various drugs and medicines, no doubt compounding the ailment. He knew death was inevitable and his wife was terrified.

This script by Karl Hartl depicts a fun-loving girl-chaser who dashes through the fields in pursuit of his mistress, climbs trees with her, cheating on Constanze with the certainty that she will forgive him. The girl in question is Nannina (Annie) Gottlieb who created the role of Pamina. In this version it is she, not Constanze, who becomes distraught over Mozart’s illness. In the two biographies I consulted no mention is made of this exuberant love affair. It may be true, it may have happened earlier in his life or it may be Hartl’s attempt to provide Mozart with a soul-sister, since the name Gottlieb is the German equivalent of Amadeus meaning “loved by God”. The effect is to diminish the tragic end of his life and to shunt Constanze to the sidelines.

Salieri is a minor figure; there are just hints of animosity between the two men when Mozart’s face darkens at the mention of his name. No mention either of “La Clemenza di Tito” the opera that had just failed in Prague, thus placing even more pressure on Mozart to succeed the next (and last) time, with “The Magic Flute”. Freemasonry is not alluded to except through excerpts from the opera, nor is there any analysis of the symbolic shift from heresy to the deepest ritual of the Catholic Church – the Requiem Mass. But the mysterious stranger who commissions the Requiem cannot be avoided since he is the messenger of doom.

If what emerges is a buoyant, appealing tale of young man whose precociousness was rooted in a deep creative matrix, it is thanks to the radiant performance of Oskar Werner. His elegant, sensitive portrayal disarms and charms us to the point where we forget the distortions. We see in his portrayal the hunger for life, the need for love and approval, the disgust at compromise, the rebelliousness, the playfulness, the terror and acceptance of death. And all within the severe limitations of this so-called “historical” scenario.

The other players are excellent, in particular Erich Kunz as Emmanuel Shikaneder/Papageno. His clever, humorous, impatient pragmatism is a perfect complement to the unpredictable ways of creativity. The women are intelligently portrayed. The music is heavenly. (AndreaValery@imdb)

Name..........: MOZART1955.mkv
Filesize......: 1.4Gb
Runtime.......: 01:38:20
Video Codec...: x264
Bitrate....: 1700 kbps
Frame Size....: 720x544
Frame Rate....: 25fps
Audio Codec...: A_AC3
Audio Freq....: deu 48KHz
Audio Channels: Stereo
subs: eng(S_VOBSUB) + deu(S_VOBSUB) + dan(S_VOBSUB)

https://nitro.download/view/B2A9E5FCB1BFD03/MOZART1955.mkv

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English (optional)

The post Karl Hartl – Mozart AKA The Life and Loves of Mozart (1955) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
At the height of the Cold War, British spy Alec Leamas (Richard Burton) is nearly ready to retire, but first he has to take on one last dangerous assignment. Going deep undercover, he poses as a drunken, disgraced former MI5 agent in East Germany in order to gain information about colleagues who have been captured. When he himself is thrown in jail and interrogated, Leamas finds himself caught in a sinister labyrinth of plots and counter-plots unlike anything in his long career.

3.06GB | 1h 52mn | 960×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/A9A407BBC1BB61D/The.Spy.Who.Came.in.from.the.Cold.1965.576p.BDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English(Muxed)

The post Martin Ritt – The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1965) first appeared on Cinema of the World.