Wendell Lawson has only 6 months to live. Not wanting to live his last few months of life waiting for the end, he decides to take his own life. He enlists the help of a humorously delusional mental patient, and the movie chronicles his many unsuccessful attempts to kill himself. Will he ever succeed…?
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Tag Archives: 1970s
Uma Abelha na Chuva / A Bee in the Rain (1972) Fernando Lopes, Laura Soveral, João Guedes, Zita Duarte, Drama
This Portuguese drama examines the daily life minutiae and intrigues of two scions of society in the rural village where they live. One is a wealthy landowner, the other a widowed aristocrat who lives in a world of her own. “Starting off from a fine novel by Carlos de Oliveira, Fernando Lopes doesn’t so mush reconstitute a story, but rather defines an atmosphere parallel to that which exists in the literary work. The erosion of time, the crumbling of an epoch, the decline of a stately home, the disintegration of emotions: the film version of A Bee in the Rain talks about all these things, using a language that is sparse and unpolished, fascinating and at the same time repulsive in its disturbing silence” (Lauro Antonio).
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Kage no kuruma / The Shadow Within (1970) Yoshitarô Nomura, Shima Iwashita, Gô Katô, Mayumi Ogawa, Drama
When a married man begins an affair with a woman from his past, he comes to suspect her young son intends to murder him.
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Midare karakuri / Murder in the Doll House (1979) Susumu Kodama, Shin Kishida, Koichi Kitami, Yûsaku Matsuda, Drama, Sci-Fi, Horror
In the best traditions of Japanese mystery stories which place fiendishly elaborate plots at their centre, Murder at the Doll House more than succeeds as a classic detective story. We’re presented with a set of strange occurrences which our master sleuth will explain to us in a long lecture at the end and even if one or two twists are a little obvious, the satisfaction involved in having figured them out ahead of time outweighs any kind of disappointment. Toshio may say he wants to be like Philip Marlowe but in actuality his detective is a little more in the European mould – almost like a more active Poirot or a slightly less obtuse Sherlock Holmes. Still, donning a trench coat with a turned up collar yet eschewing the classic hat which would have obscured his giant ‘70s perm, Matsuda once again turns in a very “cool” performance as super smart private eye.
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Akenfield (1974) Peter Hall, Stanley Baxter, Ronald Blythe, Ethel Branton, Drama
As the young man, Tom, prepares to leave the Suffolk village of his birth, voices and experiences from his family’s past crowd in on his mind, weaving a poetic tapestry of the love of home and the longing to get away from it.
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The Killing Kind (1973) Curtis Harrington, Ann Sothern, John Savage, Ruth Roman, Crime, Drama, Horror
Young Terry Lambert returns home from serving a prison term for a gang-rape he was forced to participate in. He seeks revenge on his lawyer and the girl who framed him. But his real problem is his overbearing mother, whose boarding house he resides in and who keeps bringing him glasses of chocolate milk. One of her boarders, Lori, becomes attracted to him. However, while he was serving his prison sentence, Terry developed an interest in rough, violent sex, and gory death. Now, one by one, some of the town’s women pop up dead.
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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1973) David Winters, Kirk Douglas, Susan George, Susan Hampshire, Horror, Musical, Sci-Fi
Musical version of the story in which Dr. Henry Jekyll experiments with scientific means of revealing the hidden, dark side of man and releases a murderer from within himself.
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Noroît / Northwest Wind (1976) Jacques Rivette, Bernadette Lafont, Geraldine Chaplin, Kika Markham, Adventure, Drama, Fantasy
After her brother was killed by a notorious all-female pirate gang, Morag dedicates her life to bringing the murderers to justice. Soon, she has become an important member of the pirate gang and has begun acquiring the loyalty of key members. Eventually, she makes her move and challenges the leader, a demi-god, known as “The Daughter of the Sun.”
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Yatsuhaka-mura / Village of Eight Gravestones (1977) Yoshitarô Nomura, Ken’ichi Hagiwara, Mayumi Ogawa, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Horror, Mystery, Thriller
A Tokyo man witnesses the death by poisoning of his grandfather, and travels to his hometown of Yattsu Mura to find the killer. Centuries ago, the town was the site of a massacre, and is now the stalking ground of a mysterious serial killer…
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Scipione detto anche l’africano / Scipio the African (1971) Luigi Magni, Marcello Mastroianni, Silvana Mangano, Vittorio Gassman, Comedy, History
During the Second Punic War, the commander Scipio Africanus (Marcello Mastroianni) is in a crisis because the Roman army can not defeat the many Carthaginian legions of Hannibal Barca. Teaming with his brother Scipio Asiaticus (Ruggero Mastroianni), Africanus manages to destroy the troops of Hannibal at Zama and to win the war. When he returns triumphant to Rome, he realizes that he has been manipulated like a puppet by the consul Marcus Porcius Cato, called “the Censor” (Vittorio Gassman). Scipio, disgusted by the poor Roman politics, withdraws from his rank of general, while Cato plans to destroy with a third war the cursed city of Carthage.
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