Lady Chatterley 39;s Lover Ok.ru
Hilda Bagnoli
One strange feature is that whenever a photograph is seen a glamour shot of film star Carole Lombard is used rather than an accurate representation of Hazel Flagg herself. Modern woke sensibilities might be offended by the portrayal of black Americans as casually dishonest but the people of small town America are portrayed equally unflatteringly as sullen and monosyllabic. @RichardChatten
James Monaco once stated that the shock of discovering PreCode Hollywood cinema was a basic part of the education of every serious student of the film; The Mystery of the Leaping Fish preceding that fault line by a full fourteen years.
Venturing out disguised in a Kaiser Bill moustache (later revealed to be fake), walking with a Groucho Marx lope in a variety of loud checks in pursuit of a gang of criminals, he comes across a box of opium, his face lighting when he samples the contents into which he then enthusiastically tucks in, it promptly putting a spring in his step. @RichardChatten
Viewed purely as a film it succeeds extremely well with its attractive and fluid photography and, until the final couple of minutes, is remarkably faithful to the original with capitalism getting pretty short shrift in the portrayal of the hateful Mr Jones and his cronies. @RichardChatten
From a long study of the matter I have come to the conclusion that the Czech cinema possesses a singular quirkiness that is manifest in this strangely titled confection finally returning to the South Bank nearly half a century after it was included in a November 1978 season of recent Czech productions.
This heady brew is done proud by Lance Comfort enhanced some lovely use of night-for-night by Stanley Pavey, taking in along the way a conflagration in a barn and a fearsome finale in a churchyard. @RichardChatten
Once described by J G Ballard as the greatest war movie ever made, this 1943-set World War II epic, from Soviet director Elem Klimov, is certainly the most devastating serving as a metaphor for the ongoing and needless destruction wreaked by one human being on another. In this case Nazi Germany is the aggressor invading Belarus, then part of the Soviet Union.
Applying the declamatory style then fashionable in urban thrillers, a nerdy young Richard Basehart plays a killer with absolutely no redeeming features cornered in the Los Angeles storm drains as Harry Lime was the sewers of Vienna in The Third Man.
Modern viewers will be surprised to see William Shatner as the satanic snake oil salesman Adam Cramer, to which his declamatory style is well suited. Leo Gordon is cast spectacularly against type in a sympathetic role, while to further keep costs down writer Charles Beaumont (author of the original novel) makes his sole film appearance as an actor.@RichardChatten
Even at the tender age of five I was struck by the clarity with which the big screen showed up the irises of the cast. When six years later I saw it on TV it already looked like a period piece, and after nearly sixty years Lennon & Harrison are long gone, Ringo and Paul are in their eighties and Dick Lester is 91.
Having made his mark with four consecutive realist black & white dramas, Bryan Forbes made this none-too-successful attempt to lighten up and turned to Robert Louis Stevenson for his first film in colour with a cast that includes both the old and the new, ranging from John Mills, through Peter Sellers to Peter Cook & Dudley Moore (the former sporting a very dashing moustache) and Tony Hancock.
No matter how many times I see it, I always wonder if Wilfrid Lawson will make it to the end this time, Ralph Richardson is hilarious as a garrulous old bore who drives the Bournemouth Strangler to distraction with his endless talk, while Mrs Forbes demonstrates an unexpected facility with comedy in a role of wide-eyed innocence.@RichardChatten
A once in a lifetime supporting cast ranges from Lon Chaney Jr. To Thomas Mitchell; while the presence of Lee Van Cleef bridges the gap between the classic Hollywood western and Sergio Leone. @RichardChatten
In the 1880s the port city of Bristol is home Java Head a sailing ship line company. The owner has two sons . One, a handsome seaman is in love with a local girl but unable to marry her due to their feuding fathers. Eventually he returns home with an exotic and upmarket Chinese wife.
Powell was born in Canterbury himself so the choice of the locale was evidently a deeply personal one. His eye for talent is well demonstrated by his casting the hitherto unknown Denis Price and the engaging American non-professional John Sweet. @RichardChatten
The Stone Flower centres on a young stonecutter called Danilo who visits the mystical Copper Mountain to discover its infamous secret, a stone flower so mesmerising that anyone seeing it finds it impossible to leave.
Soviet colour films of the period ironically looked far better in the late forties than ten years later since the Russians still had use of captured Agfacolor stock freshly manufactured by the Germans after they constructed an Agfacolor plant in Prague.
This Merton Park espionage drama came as an early indication that Ken Hughes was a director to look out for. The subject belongs to a conventional thriller but a vein of eccentric humour runs throughout and the jaunty little hammond organ score which gives the film its unusual title adds a tone of whimsy and evokes a silent film.
In his first film after exploring the dark side of America in Gun Crazy, Joseph H. Lewis turned his talents to this ultra-patriotic movie beginning and ending with To the Shores of Tripoli over the credits culminating with a finale set in the snowy wastes of Inchon which was one of the very few Korean War films actually made during the war.
The cinematic legacy of the Beat Generation has always been far more interesting than that of the hippies. Graced by the black & photography of Christian Matras this film creates a Paris far removed from the early work of Godard then being made.
As usual with Hitchcock obvious models compete with actual locations. His anarchist cell sure are a sinister looking lot, particularly William Dewhurst as their unctuous little quartermaster. @RicharChatten
The Home entertainment release comes complete with bonus features including an Introduction by Martin Scorsese, a new interview with film critic Anna Bogutskaya as well as a rare filmed interview with Thorold Dickinson discussing the film in detail. THE QUEEN OF SPADES is the newest addition to the ever-expanding Vintage Classics collection.
Composition, lighting and costumes are always the most significant elements in a Greenaway film. And yes, the aesthetics are wonderful to look at, but they are only as alive as Greenaway allows them to be. The artist/painter Greenaway is always in control of the filmmaking process: and rather like Robert Bresson before him, the actors are merely pawns in the process, with the camera as a paintbrush. The rest is amateur philosophy and a total reliance on art history, Renaissance, Baroque and Flemish predominating. On his way to visual perfection, second-hand or otherwise, Greenaway chanced upon film as his medium, and has used it as an intermediate step.
Atmospherically filmed on location in County Durham, it would have been interesting to have seen it in an alternative version in which Michael Craig & Patrick McGoohan switched roles, since the latter was quite a calvinist himself in real life. @RichardChatten
At the end the possibility lingers that the whole thing was a hallucination and the marked disparity in style between individual scenes was swiftly confirmed by a quick search of Wikipedia which reveals that the scenes of heaven were actually lifted from an Italian film made twenty years earlier.
The silent influence can also be discerned by imagery like the angel wearing a huge pair of wings which suddenly appears in a fashion reminiscent of Melies; which also has the advantage of making the contrast with the documentary-style footage of urban black nightlife over eighty years ago doubly striking. @RichardChatten
At a superficial glance this appears just another yarn about the foreign legion, based on a 1927 novel by Georges Arthur Surdez and adapted for the screen by Irving Wallace and Lewis Meltzer; but on closer inspection it turns out to have elements of Lost Horizon thrown into the mix, with ravishing redhead Arlene Dahl photographed in Technicolor in a succession of glitzy, diaphanous outfits by Bill Thomas by veteran cameraman John Seitz (whose CV included The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Sunset Boulevard).
After returning to Europe Sirk settled in Switzerland, working again for the theatre in Germany and teaching at the Munich-based Hochschule fr Film und Fernsehen (HFFM), where he supervised the completion of three short films.
Scandal is based on the autobiography of Francois Eugene Vidocq, erstwhile criminal who became the Police Chief of Paris. Adapted by Ellis St. Joseph, Vidocq tries his best to camouflage his real past: His father was a wealthy man, and probably the first victim of his criminal son.
To be commended for acknowledging that middle-aged women still harboured passions, Miss Wyman plays a widow who shocks friends and family by announcing her intention to marry a young hunk in a lumberjack shirt.
As Britain continued to suffer rationing and austerity, smuggling rapidly came to seem rather romantic and featured in quite a few films at that time; now so long ago that Derek Bond, John Horsely, Harry Towb and even Michael Balfour all then looked relatively young and dashing. @RichardChatten
Only in the movies could a man find himself being interrogated in court by a district attorney who had previously been the discarded suitor of the woman he married; played, moreover, by Vincent Price with all the vengeful malice he could muster.
A tour-de-force of misogyny and profanities Doberman champions its anti-intellectual stance with an unrelenting orgy of violence that would make the first time director later fare look comparatively sane and docile. After cutting his teeth with a strong cast of Vincent Cassel, Monica Bellucci and Romain Duris, the Dutch director would graduate to more sober features in the shape of quasi western Renegade and stylish biopic Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky.
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