Michelangelo Antonioni's first narrative feature is a stark, minimal interpersonal drama that would establish many of the themes and techniques that would recur in his work for the rest of his career. Story of a Love Affair centers on the dynamic between Guido and Paola, two old flames re-igniting their passions for one another.
Fidelio (Op. 72) is a German opera in two acts by Ludwig van Beethoven. It is Beethoven's only opera. The German libretto is by Joseph Sonnleithner from the French of Jean-Nicolas Bouilly which had been used for the 1798 opera Léonore, ou L’amour conjugal by Pierre Gaveaux, and for the 1804 opera Leonora by Ferdinando Paer (a score of which was owned by Beethoven). The opera tells how Leonore, disguised as a prison guard named "Fidelio", rescues her husband Florestan from death in a political prison.
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An agonizing portrait of desperate Japanese soldiers stranded in a strange land during World War II, Kon Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain (Nobi) is a compelling descent into psychological and physical oblivion. Denied hospital treatment for tuberculosis and cast off into the unknown, Private Tamura treks across an unfamiliar Philippine landscape, encountering an increasingly debased cross section of Imperial Army soldiers, who eventually give in to the most terrifying craving of all. Grisly yet poetic, Fires on the Plain is one of the most powerful works from one of Japanese cinema’s most versatile filmmakers.
Forbidden Planet is a combination of science, romance, comedy, and horror. The basic story involves a space rescue to a distant alien world, in search of a long-missing, previous expedition. They discover an eccentric scientist, his beautiful daughter, a powerful robot, and a horrible secret.
This suspenseful screenplay, that is way ahead of its time, by Cyril Hume, (story by Irving Black and Allen Adler), was a VERY LOOSE adaptation of Shakespeare's "The Tempest," mixed with elements from Freudian psychology.
In Korea, on 6 September 1950, Lieutenant Benson's platoon finds itself isolated in enemy-held territory after a retreat. Soon they are joined by Sergeant Montana, whose overriding concern is caring for his catatonic colonel. Benson and Montana can't stand each other, but together they must get the survivors to Hill 465, where they hope the division is waiting. It's a long, harrowing march, fraught with all the dangers the elusive enemy can summon. Who will survive?
ALL tangled up in the madness of a Rio de Janeiro carnival, full of intoxicating samba music, frenzied dancing and violent costumes, the Frenchman Marcel Camus presents us a melancholy tale in his color film, "Black Orpheus" ("Orfeu Negro"), which came to the Plaza yesterday.
It is a tragic story of a Negro chap and a Negro girl who meet at the time of the annual blowout, fall suddenly and rapturously in love, whirl through the night in a furious revel and fall off a cliff in the dawn. At least, the fellow falls off the cliff, holding the dead body of the girl in his arms. She has been killed the previous evening while trying to escape a scoundrel in a skeleton costume.
One of the master pieces of the Egyptian Cinema in the 20th century based on the novel by the great Egyptian writer Taha Hussein (1889-1973). The novel itself is regarded as a masterpiece of the Arab literature.
The classic conflict between desire and obligation set deep in the countryside and manifests itself through a love story between Amna the maid and the engineer she works for, and who she plans to take revenge on for seducing her late sister and destroying the honor of her whole family.
99 River Street is one of director Phil Karlson's brutal, sweaty excursions into film noir, and it has as many detractors as it has admirers. Certainly, there's a lot to applaud in River, starting with the economical way in which Karlson tells this complicated story. Karlson, as usual, is in love with close-ups, and there's a reason for it: they force the audience to concentrate on the character at hand, to experience his experience in a direct and no-nonsense manner.
This is the notorious Mars and Beyond episode of the Disneyland TV show. A masterpiece of animation and sci-fi that was way ahead of it's time. Directed by Ward Kimball, perhaps the most inventive of all Disney animators and probably the only one who admitted to experimenting with psychedelic drugs in the 60's, also the only animator who Walt Disney ever called a "genius." An excerpt from this program was included in Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt's The Animation Show a couple years ago, where it made all the other shorts look boring in comparison.
Smooth but drowsy mystery/thriller made worthwhile by the great Jack Hawkins. Gilliat has sound instincts and brings a certain amount of style to the noir elements (and the opening titles), but the basic material is not especially distinguished. Greta Gynt has a lively turn as a woman-about-town. Also of note is a brief appearance by Christopher Lee shortly before he put on the fangs.
Jean Gabin is at his most wearily romantic as aging gangster Max le Menteur in the Jacques Becker gem Touchez pas au grisbi (Hands Off the Loot!). Having pulled off the heist of a lifetime, Max looks forward to spending his remaining days relaxing with his beautiful young girlfriend. But when Riton (René Dary), Max’s hapless partner and best friend, lets word of the loot slip to loose-lipped, two-timing Josy (Jeanne Moreau), Max is reluctantly drawn back into the underworld. A touchstone of the gangster-film genre, Touchez pas au grisbi is also pure Becker—understated, elegant, evocative.
Shot in magnificent Technicolor Cinemascope, Sea Wife is one of those turgid and morose melodramas that were inexplicably popular in the post-Second World War period. Set in the south Pacific during the height of the war’s hostilities, the film looks at the tortuous relationships among an implausible cross-section of race, class and gender as four characters are set adrift in a lifeboat after their ship is sunk by the Japanese off the coast of Singapore in 1942.
When a nuclear-powered submarine, the Tiger Shark, sets out to investigate a series of mysterious disappearances near the Arctic Circle, its fearless crew finds itself besieged by electrical storms, an Unidentified Floating Saucer, and lots of hairy tentacles.
Seasoned serial director Spencer Gordon Bennett helmed this story of a one-eyed, octopoidal space alien, wreaking havoc upon atomic subs at the North Pole.
On the last day of World War Two in a small town somewhere in Poland, Polish exiles of war and the occupying Soviet forces confront the beginning of a new day and a new Poland. In this incendiary environment we find Home Army soldier Maciek Chelmicki, who has been ordered to assassinate an incoming commissar. But a mistake stalls his progress and leads him to Krystyna, a beautiful barmaid who gives him a glimpse of what his life could be. Gorgeously photographed and brilliantly performed, Ashes and Diamonds masterfully interweaves the fate of a nation with that of one man, resulting in one of the most important Polish films of all time.
Two brothers compete for the amorous favors of a young woman during a seaside summer of gambling, boating, and drinking, in this seminal Sun Tribe (taiyozoku) film from director Kô Nakahira. Adapted from the controversial novel by Shintarô Ishihara, and critically savaged for its lurid portrayal of the postwar sexual revolution among Japan’s young and privileged, Crazed Fruit is an anarchic outcry against tradition and the older generation.
Questioned as a murder suspect, solid (but drunk) citizen Al Willis attacks his police questioners, is beaten, and swears vengeance against them. Next night, Lieut. Parks is murdered; Willis is the only suspect in the eyes of tough Chief Conroy, who pursues him doggedly despite lack of evidence. The obsessed Conroy is dismissed from the force, but continues to harass Willis, who flees to a sleazy town on the Mexican border. Of course, Conroy follows. But which is crazy, Conroy or Willis?
Red River is the most legendary of Howard Hawks' western epics. Less well known is The Big Sky, a Kirk Douglas vehicle which evokes the Western frontier of the 1830s.
In Red River, John Wayne leads the first big cattle drive, thousands of miles north to the railroad. In The Big Sky, French merchant Jourdonnais (Steven Geray) becomes the first keelboat captain to journey up the wild, unexplored Missouri river, to trade for furs with the Blackfeet Indians.
Hawks takes his time, with even a musical number or two helping to develop his characters. There are stirring action scenes, which show with convincing realism the difficulties of navigating a big keelboat upriver. Especially while being attacked by Crows on the warpath! But Hawks is equally adept at comic scenes, the most memorable of which is the drunken amputation of Deakins' crushed finger.
A Sicilian nobleman is very jealous of his mistress and when she gets married flies off his handle and commits a murder of which an innocent man is accused. He is however tormented by his conscience. (IMDb)
