Tag Archives: Claire Bloom

Quote:
The Illustrated Man is classic Bradbury, a collection of eighteen startling visions of humankind’s destiny, unfolding across a canvas of decorated skin, visions as keen as the tattooist’s needle and as colorful as the inks that indelibly stain the body. The images, ideas, sounds and scents that abound in this phantasmagoric sideshow are provocative and powerful: the mournful cries of celestial travelers cast out cruelly into a vast space of stars and blackness, the sight of gray dust settling over a forgotten outpost on a road that leads nowhere, the pungent odor of Jupiter on a returning father’s clothing. Here living cities take their vengeance, technology awakens the most primal natural instincts, Martian invasions are foiled by the good life and the glad hand, and dreams are carried aloft in junkyard rockets. Read More »

Renowned author, Christian apologist, and Oxford medieval scholar C.S. Lewis agrees to marry the divorced American poet Joy Davidman Gresham, to allow her and her two sons to stay in England. But what began as an act of charity by the confirmed bachelor becomes a deep and abiding love and Read More »

Starring Dame Helen Lydia Mirren

Elijah Moshinsky directed the BBC Television Shakespeare adaptation in 1982, ignoring the ancient British period setting in favour of a more timeless and snow-laden atmosphere inspired by Rembrandt and his contemporary Dutch painters. Richard Johnson, Claire Bloom, Helen Mirren, and Robert Lindsay play Cymbeline, his Queen, Imogen, and Iachimo, respectively, with Michael Pennington as Posthumus. Read More »

Synopsis:
‘Three years after its incendiary run on the London stage, director Tony Richardson’s film version of John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger (1959) became one of the precursors to the British “kitchen sink” dramas of the 1960s. Enhancing the aim to show British life as it really was through the hopeless existence of enraged working class stiff Jimmy Porter and his put-upon, better-born wife Allison, Richardson unstintingly reveals the grunginess of their industrial city residential milieu with its drab row houses and unkempt children. Read More »

Synopsis:
British doctor Richard Johnson arrives in the city of Bath, where a smallpox epidemic has broken out. If he has any hope of stemming the disease, he must locate and isolate its source. As if he hasn’t got enough trouble on his hands, Johnson must contend with his failing marriage to Claire Bloom. Director Val Guest lifts 80,000 Suspects out of the ordinary with his inventive utilization of darkness and shadows.
— Hal Erickson. Read More »

Brooklyn Academy of Music writes:
Kurosawa’s Rashomon is transposed to the American Wild West as four participants in a rape and murder—including a Mexican bandit (Newman), the dead man (Harvey), and his wife (Bloom)—give differing accounts of what occurred. Featuring a dynamite supporting cast that includes Edward G. Robinson and William Shatner, The Outrage is lent a haunted, nightmarish atmosphere thanks to James Wong Howe’s psychologically charged camerawork. Read More »

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. Read More »