In eighteenth-century France a girl (Suzanne Simonin) is forced against her will to take vows as a nun. Three mothers superior (Madame de Moni, Sister Sainte-Christine, and Madame de Chelles) treat her in radically different ways, ranging from maternal concern, to sadistic persecution, to lesbian desire. Suzanne’s virtue brings disaster to everyone in this faithful adaptation of a bitter attack on religious abuses by the Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot.
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Tag Archives: 1960s
Francis of Assisi (1961) Michael Curtiz, Bradford Dillman, Dolores Hart, Stuart Whitman, Biography, Drama, History
Francis Bernardone (Bradford Dillman) is the son of a wealthy cloth merchant in Assisi, who gives up all his worldly goods to dedicate himself to God. Clare (Dolores Hart) is a young aristocratic woman who, according to the film, is so taken with St. Francis that she leaves her family and becomes a nun. By this time (1212 A.D.), St. Francis has a well-established reputation for his vows of poverty. The movie goes on to note miracles (such as the appearance of the stigmata on Francis’s hands and feet) and other aspects of his life, up to and including his death on October 3, 1226.
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Seven Thieves (1960) Henry Hathaway, Edward G. Robinson, Rod Steiger, Joan Collins, Crime, Drama
In Monte Carlo, Theo Wilkins recruits his young protégé Paul Mason – just released from prison – to help him rob the famous casino of $4 million. The plan is straightforward. On the night of the Governor’s Ball, Theo will create a distraction in the casino by having one of the team collapse requiring urgent medical attention. During that time Paul and another member of the crew will get the money from the vault. When the ambulance arrives, the money will leave with the sick man. The plan is a good one but not everyone will survive the robbery and no one will get rich from it.
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Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962) Albert Zugsmith, Vincent Price, Linda Ho, Richard Loo, Crime, Drama, Mystery
Gilbert de Quincey is an early 19th-century adventurer involved with helping runaway slave girls and victims of a tong war in San Francisco. Garbed in black from head to toe, de Quincey narrates his adventures. At the slave auction where beautiful Oriental girls are displayed in hanging bamboo cages, de Quincey befriends a tiny wisecracking female Oriental dwarf.
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Un film comme les autres / A Film Like Any Other (1968) Jean-Luc Godard, Documentary, Drama
Workers on a car factory argue with revolutionary students.
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The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) Robert Aldrich, James Stewart, Richard Attenborough, Peter Finch, Adventure, Drama
A cargo plane goes down in a sandstorm in the Sahara with less than a dozen men on board. One of the passengers is an airplane designer who comes up with the idea of ripping off the undamaged wing and using it as the basis for an airplane they will build to escape before their food and water run out.
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The Apartment (1960) Billy Wilder, Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Comedy, Drama, Romance
As of November 1, 1959, mild mannered C.C. Baxter has been working at Consolidated Life, an insurance company, for close to four years, and is one of close to thirty-two thousand employees located in their Manhattan head office. To distinguish himself from all the other lowly cogs in the company in the hopes of moving up the corporate ladder, he often works late, but only because he can’t get into his apartment, located off of Central Park West, since he has provided it to a handful of company executives – Mssrs. Dobisch, Kirkeby, Vanderhoff and Eichelberger – on a rotating basis for their extramarital liaisons in return for a good word to the personnel director, Jeff D. Sheldrake. When Baxter is called into Sheldrake’s office for the first time, he learns that it isn’t just to be promoted as he expects, but also to add married Sheldrake to the list to who he will lend his apartment.
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Underworld U.S.A. (1961) Samuel Fuller, Cliff Robertson, Dolores Dorn, Beatrice Kay, Crime, Drama, Thriller
Fourteen-year-old Tolly Devlin sees four hoods beat his father to death. Twenty years later, the killers have risen to the top of the crime syndicate and Tolly has a plan for revenge.
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Il grande silenzio / The Great Silence (1968) Sergio Corbucci, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Klaus Kinski, Frank Wolff, Western
Bounty killers led by Loco prey on outlaws hiding out in the snowbound Utahn mountains. After Pauline’s husband becomes Loco’s latest victim, she hires a gunman for revenge; Silence, mute since his throat was cut when he was a boy.
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Un homme qui me plaît / Love Is a Funny Thing (1969) Claude Lelouch, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Annie Girardot, Maria Pia Conte, Comedy, Drama
Filming in the USA, Henri and Françoise meet and fall in love with each other.
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Utsukushisa to kanashimi to / With Beauty And Sorrow (1965) Masahiro Shinoda, Kaoru Yachigusa, Mariko Kaga, Sô Yamamura, Drama, Romance
Long before the events of the movie Ôki, who was approaching middle age, had a relation to 16-year-old Otoko. She got pregnant, but the child was stillborn. Their relation stopped at the same time. Much later Ôki had become a famous writer, not least because of a novel about this love story. Otoko had become a famous painter. But she had never overcome the double early trauma and had become a Lesbian. Her favourite student and beloved one was the beautiful Keiko. 24 years after the early love Ôki goes from Tokyo to Kyoto to meet Otoko. The meeting is polite with secret emotional shadows. Keiko makes a plan. She intends to seduce Ôki, become pregnant, bear Ôki’s child and give it to Otoko. She hopes that Otoko may thereby get rid of her trauma. But she also wants to take her revenge on the man who had harmed her beloved. Secretly she gets acquainted with Ôki’s son, invites him to Kyoto and seduces him. Then she calls his parents and tells that he had promised to marry her.
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Isabella, duchessa dei diavoli / Isabella, Duchess of the Devils (1969) Bruno Corbucci, Brigitte Skay, Mimmo Palmara, Fred Williams, Adventure, Erotic
An Alsacian Baron massacres the family of a French Duke, and takes his lands, and his title. Isabella, the Duke’s baby child, escapes the massacre, is raised by gypsies, and comes back twenty years later to exact revenge.
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El libro de piedra / The Book of Stone (1969) Carlos Enrique Taboada, Marga López, Joaquín Cordero, Norma Lazareno, Drama, Fantasy, Horror
A governess Julia comes to work in a bourgeois family that live in an afforested property that they have recently bought. Julia was to take care about little girl named Silvia, whose unusual demeanor may find its roots in the family garden.
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Irezumi (1966) Yasuzô Masumura, Ayako Wakao, Akio Hasegawa, Gaku Yamamoto, Drama
In this elegant proto-feminist shocker from Yasuzo Masumuro, a woman forced into prostitution wreaks her spidery revenge. A mysterious tattoo artist puts his masterpiece, a human-faced spider, on a kidnapped woman’s back. She and her lover are then forced into a conspiracy-born nightmare, where they face the danger of becoming the very evil they seek to escape. With each new bloody incident, the spider’s face seems to redden with ever-growing hunger…
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Un soir, un train / One Night… a Train (1968) André Delvaux, Yves Montand, Anouk Aimée, Adriana Bogdan, Drama, Fantasy, Mystery
Mathias is a Belgian linguist, living with French theatre producer Anne. After a quarrel about moral questions, they take a train to attend a congress. While Mathias sleeps, Anne disappears. The train stops in the middle of the country and Mathias gets off the train with an older man, Hernhutter, and a young one, Val. The train moves off without them being able to catch it up. They will find a village, but cannot get any help because they do not understand a word of what the inhabitants say…
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