Monthly Archives: July 2015

Zezowate szczescie / Bad Luck (1960) Andrzej Munk, Bogumil Kobiela, Maria Ciesielska, Helena Dabrowska

Zezowate szczescie (1960)
The story is an odyssey of a little man through Poland of 1930 to 1950. It shows his attempts to cope with a changing world which seems to have no place for him. He has no consciousness of any kind but is always on the verge of turning into a more coherent human being, only to be slapped down. It begins with the hero’s childhood. Then comes the first love marred by his unwilling involvement in fascict politics, him being taken for a Jew because of his nose. Later he decides to join the army to charm the girl, but arrives too late for any fighting. He is arrested by entering German troops while he dresses in officer’s uniform and mistakenly sent to POW camp as an officer.
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Tito i ja / Tito and Me (1992) Goran Markovic, Dimitrije Vojnov, Lazar Ristovski, Predrag Manojlovic

Tito i ja (1992)
The story of a ten years old boy who, as most of the children in Yugoslavia of the fifties can hardly imagine his life without the great national leader – marshal Tito. In his school, he wins the contest for the best Tito’s composition. His reward is the participation in “Tito’s native land” march. He claims in his work that he loves Tito more than his Dad and Mom, which makes them desperate. He does not understand what is so confusing and weird in his love towards the leader. This march will be a difficult temptation for him. Unaccustomed to nature, walks and independent living, harassed by the teacher, Stalinist, he fails, gets lost in the mountain and his life changes.
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The Man with a Cloak (1951) Fletcher Markle, Joseph Cotten, Barbara Stanwyck, Louis Calhern

The Man with a Cloak (1951)
In 1848, a young Frenchwoman, Madeline Minot, goes to New York City to see Thevenet, the grandfather of her fiance. Thevenet had been with Napoleon and may be sympathetic to the political aims of his grandson. She finds the old man in very bad spirits, living in a large house with a housekeeper and a butler who are just waiting for him to die (and perhaps helping him along a bit) so they can inherit his fortune. They see Madeline as a threat to their plans. She is aided in her dealings with these strange people by a mysterious man in a cloak.
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Campane a martello (1949) Luigi Zampa, Gina Lollobrigida, Yvonne Sanson, Carlo Romano

Campane a martello (1949)
Agostina is a maid turned prostitute during World War II. She sends all the money she makes to the local priest in her home village for safekeeping. After the war is over Agostina and her friend Australia plan to open a clothing store so they return to her home island to collect the money from the priest. But after arriving there Agostina learns in shock that the priest has been dead for more than a year and that his eccentric successor mistook the received money for donations and spent all of it on building a new orphanage for war orphans. To make matters even worse, other islanders think that Agostina is now a millionaire and beg her to help them financially.
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À nous la liberté (1931) René Clair, Raymond Cordy, Henri Marchand, Rolla France

A nous la liberte (1931)
A famous left-wing satirical comedy about two ex-convicts, one of whom escaped jail and then worked his way up from salesman to factory owner, where he oversees a highly mechanized operation where the workers are reduced to mere automatons. Fearful of being exposed over his past, at first by his friend and later by another gangster, the owner chooses to give his factory to the workers, then escapes with his friend to the freedom of the open road. The production company for “A Nous la Liberte” was for more than a decade embroiled in a lawsuit claiming that Charles Chaplin had seen their film and plagiarized many ideas from it as he developed “Modern Times.”
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Sons and Lovers (1960) Jack Cardiff, Trevor Howard, Dean Stockwell, Wendy Hiller

Sons and Lovers (1960)
Jack Cardiff received a 1960 Oscar Nomination as Best Director for this lush, engaging film starring Trevor Howard, Dean Stockwell and Donald Pleasence, which was adapted from D.H. Lawrence’s classic novel. A young man with artistic talent who lives in a close-knit, English coal-mining town during the early 20th Century finds himself inhibited by his emotionally manipulative, domineering mother.
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