Helen Roberts, who’s on probation, goes back to work as a waitress at Torre’s Fish Palace, a San Francisco waterfront dive. The customers are low characters trying to make time with Helen and ex-rum runners trying to make a dishonest dollar. Some of the latter, including Helen’s unwelcome suitor Martin Rhodes, are after a mysterious, valuable hidden “cargo”; when violence erupts, Helen finds herself innocently involved, and is soon on the run from both cops and crooks.
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Crime
Elles étaient cinq / The Five of Us (2004) Ghyslaine Côté, Jacinthe Laguë, Julie Deslauriers, Ingrid Falaise, Crime, Drama
In Montreal, the teenagers Manon, Anne, Isa, Claudie and Sophie are friends since their childhood. While spending a couple of days in the cottage of Sophie’s parents nearby a lake, the girls decide to give a party, and Manon and Sophie hitch for a ride to the town in a jeep to buy some beers and supplies and they invite the driver to the party. On the return, the same driver stops the car and later Sophie is found stabbed, raped and covered of blood. Fifteen years later, Manon sees the guy in a car-wash and she invites her former friends to return to the house nearby the lake, where wounds of their traumatic loss are disclosed.
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Nihon kuroshakai / Ley Lines (1999) Takashi Miike, Shô Aikawa, Samuel Pop Aning, Takeshi Caesar
A group of Chinese youths living in Japan struggle to make their way in life and eventually find trouble with the local crime syndicate.
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Les tontons flingueurs / Monsieur Gangster (1963) Georges Lautner, Lino Ventura, Bernard Blier, Francis Blanche
Ex-gangster Fernand (Lino Ventura) receives a call from a dying friend, a mob boss nicknamed “The Mexican”. The doomed mobster talks Fernand into taking care of some criminal business and looking after his soon-to-be-married daughter. When a longtime mobster heavy, Volfoni takes exception to Fernand for being an outsider, they come after Fernand who is equal to the task. He defends himself in a series of comical killings from the onslaught of the mob.
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Le pacha / Pasha (1968) Georges Lautner, Jean Gabin, Dany Carrel, Jean Gaven
Six months before his retirement from the criminal police, inspector Joss finds his colleague Gouvion dead, in a poorly faked suicide attempt. Joss loses his temper, and investigates on his own, which leads him through the bas-fond of Paris…
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The Cry Baby Killer (1958) Jus Addiss, Carolyn Mitchell, Harry Lauter, Jack Nicholson
17-year-old Jimmy Walker is brutally beaten by Manny Cole and two of his teen-age punk friends, Joey and Al, because Manny wants to move in on Jimmy’s girl, Carole Fields. Later, Jimmy shows up at the hangout of the teenage crowd to take Carole away, and challenges Manny to a fight. Manny’s two buddies move in with brass knuckles, and one of them pulls a pistol, which falls to the ground in the scuffle. Jimmy picks it up and shoots Manny and Al. A police officer orders Jimmy to surrender, but he panics, thinking he killed the pair, and dives into a small storeroom, and holds Sam and Mrs. Maxton and her small infant baby hostages. Police Lieutenant Porter and others plead with Jimmy to surrender and release the hostages, but the terrified Jimmy threatens Sam and Mrs. Maxton with death if they break out. A large crowd gathers and almost breaks through the police lines to storm the storeroom. Porter decides to use tear gas, with a rescue unit standing by to help Mrs. Maxton and her baby….
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The Brides of Fu Manchu (1966) Don Sharp, Christopher Lee, Douglas Wilmer, Heinz Drache
Christopher Lee returns as Sax Rohmer’s insidious Asian villain Fu Manchu for the second of his five vehicles. This time Fu Manchu and his army of henchmen are kidnaping the daughters of prominent scientists and taking them to his remote island headquarters. Instead of asking for ransom, Fu demands that the fathers help him to build a death ray, which he intends to use to take over the world. But Fu’s archenemy, Nayland Smith of Scotland Yard, is determined not to let that happen…
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Coup de torchon (1981) Bertrand Tavernier, Philippe Noiret, Isabelle Huppert, Stéphane Audran
1938, in a French african colony. Lucien Cordier is the cop of this village, populated with blacks and a few whites (usually racialist and lustful). He is a washout, everyone (including his wife Huguette) humiliates him. He never arrests anyone and looks at elsewhere when a dirty trick occurs. But one day, he turns into a machiavellian exterminating angel.
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Death of a President (2006) Gabriel Range, Hend Ayoub, Becky Ann Baker, George W. Bush
Years after the assassination of President George W. Bush in Chicago, an investigative documentary examines that as-yet-unsolved crime.
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Le trio infernal / The Infernal Trio (1974) Francis Girod, Michel Piccoli, Romy Schneider, Mascha Gonska
Marseilles, 1919. Georges Sarret is a distinguished and respected lawyer, recently honoured for his services in the First World War. He takes as his lover Philomène Schmidt, a young German woman, who has just lost her job and home. To enable Philomène to remain in France, Georges finds her a husband – who dies conveniently of natural causes a month after the wedding. Georges repeats the trick with Philomène’s sister, Catherine – marrying her off to an old man who dies suddenly so that the scheming trio can profit from his life insurance. When an accomplice in the scheme, Marcel Chambon, threatens to blackmail them, Georges and his two lovers have no option but to kill him and his mistress. Having dissolved the bodies in sulphuric acid, Georges hires another man to pose as Chambon so that he can secure his assets. Flush with the success of this venture, Georges proposes his most ambitious scam: he will insure Catherine’s life with five separate insurance companies; a young orphan woman who is dying from tuberculosis will provide Catherine’s death certificate when the moment comes. Unfortunately, the scheme does not go quite as planned…
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