The movie narrates the first years of the formation of the Soviet power, concentrating on the life and activities of F. Dzerzhinsky in 1918-1925.
In July 1918, as a result of a rebellion of the left SRs, the German ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach is killed. Felix Dzerzhinsky alone goes to the headquarters of the left SRs and anarchists, he manages to sway to his side the simple soldiers and sailors, participants of the mutiny, who in turn deal with their leaders.Read More »
The film reflects the period of the “cold war” of the early 1950s. In one of the countries of Eastern Europe, the construction of a new state system comes up against active resistance. An anti-democratic conspiracy is maturing: at the instigation of the ambassador, an assassination attempt against the Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic, the Communist Gannu Licht, is being organized. The Soviet Union helps the communists and detachments of armed workers arrest the conspirators.Read More »
Dick Powell plays a murdered dog reincarnated as a rumpled gumshoe–nuff said! (well, not quite, because a lead role for Peggy Dow is always worth a mention! What a shame that she retired so early–she and Powell make an excellent pair…Read More »
Plot
Ellen Beldon is due to be hanged in Texas for the murder of her husband but Jud Farrow, ranch foreman for her uncle, breaks her out of jail and escorts her to the safety of her uncle’s New Mexico ranch. Mace Beldon, her father-in-law, offers professional gunman Gil McCord five-thousand dollars to bring her back to Texas so she can be hung. He is able to get her away and, during the trip back, she tells him the story of her trial. She claims her brother-in-law, Kell Beldon, shot his step-brother (her husband)so that he would be his father’s sole heir, and that drunken fur-trapper Elby Kirby was the only witness. Gill decides to see Kirby and force a confession from him. Meanwhile, Kell gets Ellen back by chance and turns her over to the law. Gill gets an order from the district judge to stop the execution, and Kell, seeing his story falling apart tries to out-shoot Gill.Read More »
Quote:
The image of the fountain returns in Angel (1957; color; 3 min.), one of Cornell’s most poignant films. Dedicated, as Cornell said, to his friend, the painter Pavel Tchelichew, who had recently died, the film offers a rather moving meditation on mortality. Comprised of static shots of a statue of an angel and a fountain in a Flushing cemetery, the films elegant and quiet close-ups against an expanse of blue sky of the statues solid yet partly decaying marble brilliantly capture a sense both of the earthly and time-bound and the unworldly and eternal. The films stylistically innovative dissociation of moving image from moving subject (a technique Cornell also largely deploys in “Centuries of June” from the same year) anticipates by several years the daring cinematic experiments of Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1963) and Empire (1964), foregrounding duration, in contrast to movement, as cinemas true subject.Read More »
One of the last and the best of those infamous Mexican nightclub melodramas (“Películas de Cabareteras”), it features a stunning noirish cinematography, over-the-top acting by half a dozen of wonderfully weird and wicked latina beauties such as Columba Dominguez and Kitty de Hoyos (looking like a drag queen performing Marilyn Monroe!) plus great -if low budget- musical show clips performed by the mesmerizing Esquivel, the “King of Zu-Zu-Zu”! Another masterpiece from the great (beer-drinking?) director Alfonso “Corona” Blake, who began as an assistant to Luis Bunuel and Emilio “Indio” Fernandez and gave the world some of the finest campy horror- and “Il Santo”-classics. Great fun to watch – if you ever get the chance to, for it’s not available on tape or DVD.Read More »
An ex-con trying to go straight is framed for a million dollar armored car robbery and must go to Mexico in order to unmask the real culprits.
A down-on-his-luck ex-GI Joe Rolfe finds himself framed for an armored car robbery. When he’s finally released for lack of evidence–after having been beaten up and tortured by the police–he sets out to discover who set him up, and why. The trail leads him into Mexico and a web of hired killers and corrupt cop.Read More »
Plot:A variety of different people who don’t know each other get trapped in a hung elevator. When they begin to realize that their chance in being rescued is minimal, they start looking back at their lives differently. Meanwhile, a man is trying to commit suicide by jumping off the roof of the same building.Read More »
In the fall of 1939, the German heavy cruiser (referred to as a pocket battleship) Graf Spee seems to have command of the Atlantic. In the first three months of World War II, she was responsible for sinking nine ships. The British sent three cruisers commanded by Commodore Henry Harwood to confront her. The battle took place on December 13, 1939 and the British came out on top. The Graf Spee headed for the neutral harbor of Montevideo, Uruguay. They were given only a short time to effect repairs and the British did their best to make them believe a British fleet of six or eight ships awaited them. Rather than chance the loss of his men, the German Captain ordered the Graf Spee scuttled.Read More »