Monthly Archives: September 2015

Oorlogswinter / Winter in Wartime (2008) Martin Koolhoven

Oorlogswinter (2008)
Near the end of World War II, 14-year-old Michiel becomes involved with the Resistance after coming to the aid of a wounded British soldier. With the conflict coming to an end, Michiel comes of age and learns of the stark difference between adventure fantasy and the ugly realities of war.
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Les dimanches de Ville d’Avray / Sundays and Cybele (1962) Serge Bourguignon

Les dimanches de Ville d'Avray (1962)
After killing a child on a routine bombing mission in Vietnam, Pierre suffers from delayed stress and partial amnesia. Returning to France, he lives like a vegetable until he meets a young girl who has been dumped by her father at a boarding school. Posing as her father, Pierre contrives to meet the girl every Sunday, to play with her and perhaps recover his memory. The innocent friendship is misread by nearly everyone, even people who know Pierre well.
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Sterne / Stars (1959) Konrad Wolf

Sterne (1959)
Bulgaria, 1943. A train carrying Greek Jews is bound for the Auschwitz extermination camp and stops over in a small town in southwest Bulgaria. The school is converted into camp. Passing by the barbed-wire fence, the the Nazi army sergeant Walter meets a young Jewess called Ruth and falls in love with her. His buddy, Lieutenant Kurt, who is in charge of the camp, has her brought to a party in the pub. There Walter has a chance to talk with her. Having grown indifferent to people suffering, he is now awakened to unsuspected emotions and experiences a change of heart. When he next meets the girl, Walter convinces her that Nazism and war. Her fate and love make anew man of him. He gives a package of medicine for the inmates of the camp to Petk, a Bulgarian antifascist worker, but the German find them and destroy them. Walter is making arrangements for Ruth’s escape. He asks Petko to hide her but it is too late. The train has left.
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The Tattered Dress (1957) Jack Arnold

The Tattered Dress (1957)
After a wild night, wealthy Michael Reston’s adulterous wife Charleen comes home with her ripe young body barely concealed by a dress in rags; murder results. Top defense lawyer J.G. Blane, whose own marriage exists in name only, arrives in Desert View, Nevada to find the townsfolk and politically powerful Sheriff Hoak distinctly hostile to the Restons. In due course, Blane discovers he’s been “taken for a ride,” and that quiet desert communities can be deadly…
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Die Screaming, Marianne (1971) Pete Walker

Die Screaming, Marianne (1971)
After their parents divorce, one daughter lives with her mother in England while the other lives with her father in Portugal. After the untimely death of her mother, the one daughter stands to inherit a large sum of money and also a number of documents containing information that will incriminate her father, who was a crooked judge. While her father wants the documents, her sister wants the money and they will each stop at nothing, even murder, to get what they want.
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The Martian Chronicles (1980) Michael Anderson

The Martian Chronicles
Earth sends its first manned probe to Mars in 1999, and a jealous Martian murders the two astronauts when his wife has erotic dreams of meeting them. Members of a subsequent expedition are hypnotized into believing that they have landed in the childhood community of their leader and have been reunited with deceased family and friends, and they are poisoned by the Martians. Col. John Wilder leads a third expedition and learns that a chicken pox virus brought to Mars by the first two expeditions has almost eradicated the Martian population. A member of Wilder’s team becomes obsessed with protecting Mars from Earthman and murders some of the others in Wilder’s party, before Wilder kills him. Colonists arrive on Mars to settle, among them priests seeking God, and a lone Martian masquerades as the most desired persons of various settlers. Global war on Earth reduces man’s natal planet to radioactive waste, and most of the settlers returned there prior to the holocaust.
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Paloma de papel / Paper Dove (2003) Fabrizio Aguilar

Paloma de papel (2003)
Juan, a young man convicted of terrorism, is given amnesty from a Lima prison; he boards a bus to return home and, in his mind’s eye, recalls events in his village near Huaraz when he was 10 or 12. His father is long dead, his mother lives with Fermin, secretly a sympathizer with the Communist guerrillas in the hills. Town leaders are assassinated at night. When Juan discovers Fermin’s secret, Juan is spirited away to the guerrillas to learn Marxist slogans and how to fight. When the band decides to attack the town to avenge the death of a comrade, Juan must choose. There are no white hats on any side: critical thought without love of life bears no fruit, writes Erich Fromm.
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Sergeant York (1941) Howard Hawks

Sergeant York (1941)
A hillbilly sharpshooter becomes one of the most celebrated American heroes of WWI when he single-handedly attacks and captures a German position using the same strategy as in turkey shoot.
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Sylvia Scarlett (1935) George Cukor

Sylvia Scarlett (1935)
Escaping to England from a French embezzlement charge, widower Henry Scarlett is accompanied by daughter Sylvia who, to avoid detection, “disguises” herself as a boy, “Sylvester.” They are joined by amiable con man Jimmy Monkley, then, after a brief career in crime, meet Maudie Tilt, a giddy, sexy Cockney housemaid who joins them in the new venture of entertaining at resort towns from a caravan. Through all this, amazingly no one recognizes that Sylvia is not a boy…until she meets handsome artist Michael Fane, and drama intrudes on the comedy.
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L’espion / The Defector (1966) Raoul Lévy

L'espion (1966)
Montgomery Cliff (in his last role) plays James Bower, an American physicist visiting West Germany who’s recruited by a shady CIA agent, named Adam, to help them with the defection of a Russian scientist. But an East German secret agent, named Peter Heinzeman, learns of Bower’s meeting with Adam and threatens Bower to mind his own business, while Bower learns of a back story to all this involving stolen microfilm that each side wants.
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