Synopsis:
Mrs. Anna Leonowens and her son Louis arrive in Bangkok, where she has been contracted to teach English to the children of the royal household. She threatens to leave when the house she had been promised is not available, but falls in love with the children. A new slave, a gift of a vassal king, translates “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” into a Siamese ballet. After expressing her unhappiness at being with the King, the slave decides to make an attempt to escape with her lover. Anna and the King start to fall in love, but her headstrong upbringing inhibits her from joining his harem. She is just about to leave Siam but something important she finds out makes her think about changing her mind.

3.32GB | 2 h 13 min | 1024×402 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/942A4AEC81D5376/The.King.and.I.1956.576p.BluRay.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

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

The post Walter Lang – The King and I (1956) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Jean-Luc Godard’s review of the film (and Artists and Models) from the August-September 1956 issue of Cahiers du Cinéma:

The grotesque is an anything but easy genre. It requires sensitivity rather than intelligence, so many of the smartest directors come to grief with it. No chance of cheating here, of escaping into the ivory tower of the misunderstood…

The Lieutenant Wore Skirts, in the style of Voltaire’s Candide or Hitchcock’s Rich and Strange, recounts the misadventures of a couple of idiots who are brought by too much love to domestic squabble and then to the point of break-up. Imagine Bécassine and the silliest boy you can think of trying to prove they love each other and only succeeding in hating each other. Happiness is not gay, says Max Ophuls; because gaiety is the opposite of happiness, caps Tashlin. Artists and Models does nothing to give him the lie. No film could be more devastating, more bitter in its humor, more brackish, with the richness of the invention constantly aggravated by the poverty of the situations, with the uneasy spectator at first forcing an unwilling laugh, then feeling ashamed, laughing again mechanically, seized in a pitiless mesh of imbecilities, and ending by roaring with laughter because it isn’t funny at all. It is, in other words, an acme of stupidity, but an acme in the same way as Bouvard et Pécuchet.

But to get back to our starting-point. With Tashlin there is no starting-point, and this is precisely his originality. Only the point of arrival matters, a scene at the very limits of absurdity in the ferociously eccentric world of the Pim, Pam, Poum of our childhood.

It is easy to see that Tashlin fondly remembers the Lubitsch of Cluny Brown and To Be or Not To Be. American comedy is dead? So be it.

Long live American comedy.

1.37GB | 1 h 38 min | 850×362 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/654E99B00580D65/The.Lieutenant.Wore.Skirts.1956.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:None

The post Frank Tashlin – The Lieutenant Wore Skirts (1956) first appeared on Cinema of the World.