Tag Archives: 1970s

Madhouse (1974) Jim Clark, Vincent Price, Peter Cushing, Robert Quarry, Crime, Horror, Mystery

Madhouse (1974)
The career of horror icon Paul Toombes (Vincent Price) ends in scandal when his fiancée dies under mysterious circumstances. Freed from the mental hospital where he had been committed, the recovered Toombes and screenwriter Herbert Flay (Peter Cushing) intend to revive his most popular character, Dr. Death, for a television series. But the dead bodies start piling up – all of them killed in ways that mimic the victims in Toombes’ films – and to clear his name he must find the real killer.
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The WIZ / Le Magicien d’Oz (1978) Sidney Lumet, Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Nipsey Russell, Adventure, Family, Fantasy

Le Magicien d’Oz (1978)
A Thanksgiving dinner brings a host of family together in a Harlem apartment, where a 24-year-old schoolteacher named Dorothy Gale lives with her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry . Extremely introverted, she has, as Aunt Em teases her, “never been south of 125th Street”, and refuses to move out and on with her life. While Dorothy cleans up after the meal, her dog Toto runs out the open kitchen door into a violent snowstorm. She succeeds in retrieving him, but finds herself trapped in the storm…
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The Tenant / Le locataire (1976) Roman Polanski, Isabelle Adjani, Melvyn Douglas, Thriller, Drama

The Tenant (1976)
In Paris, the shy bureaucrat Trelkovsky rents an old apartment without bathroom where the previous tenant, the Egyptologist Simone Choule, committed suicide. The unfriendly concierge (Shelley Winters) and the tough landlord Mr. Zy establish stringent rules of behavior and Trelkovsky feels ridden by his neighbors. Meanwhile he visits Simone in the hospital and befriends her girlfriend Stella. After the death of Simone, Trelkovsky feels obsessed for her and believes his landlord and neighbors are plotting a scheme to force him to also commit suicide.
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Landscape after Battle / Krajobraz po bitwie (1970) Andrzej Wajda, Daniel Olbrychski, Stanislawa Celinska, Aleksander Bardini, Drama, Romance

Landscape after Battle (1970)
Film opens with the mad rush of haphazard freedom as the concentration camps are liberated. Men are trying to grab food, change clothes, bury their tormentors they find alive. Then they are herded into other camps as the Allies try to devise policy to control the situation. A young poet who cannot quite find himself in this new situation, meets a headstrong Jewish young girl who wants him to run off with her, to the West. He cannot cope with her growing demands for affection, while still harboring the hatred for the Germans and disdain for his fellow men who quickly revert to petty enmities.
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La rupture / The Breach (1970) Claude Chabrol, Stéphane Audran, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Michel Bouquet, Thriller, Drama

La Rupture
Hélène Régnier walks out on her drug-addicted husband Charles after he brutally attacks their infant son. She stays in a run-down hotel whilst her son convalesces in hospital and she files for divorce. Charles’s wealthy bourgeois father is adamant that Hélène will lose custody of her child and, to that end, he engages a former business associate of Charles, Paul Thomas, to discredit her. When Paul fails to uncover any incriminating evidence against Hélène he concocts a scheme that will destroy her reputation. Things do not go quite as planned…
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MADO (1976) Claude Sautet, Michel Piccoli, Ottavia Piccolo, Jacques Dutronc, Drama

MADO (1976)
Middle-aged businessman Simon Léotard finds his future in jeopardy when his partner Julien commits suicide after having accumulated a mass of debts. Simon’s unscrupulous business rival Lépidon offers to save him from bankruptcy by buying his company, at a discount rate. Reluctant to fall into Lépidon’s trap, Simon decides to resolve the crisis himself. A prostitute, Mado, provides him with the solution to his problems…
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Docteur Popaul / Scoundrel in White (1972) Claude Chabrol, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Mia Farrow, Laura Antonelli, Comedy

Scoundrel in White (1972)
Dr Paul Simay is a lady’s man who claims to prefer ugly women. He makes his point by winning a bet that he can sleep with the most ugly women in a year. He therefore has no qualms about marrying Christine, a paraplegic with buck-teeth, especially when her father is a wealthy doctor who can advance his career. His views change when he meets Christine’s beautiful sister, Martine. When she realises that Paul has been cheating on her and has given her sister a child, Christine decides to extract a cruel revenge…
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High Plains Drifter (1973) Clint Eastwood, Verna Bloom, Marianna Hill, Western

High Plains Drifter (1973)
“Who are you?” the dwarf Mordecai (Billy Curtis) asks Clint Eastwood’s Stranger at the end of Eastwood’s 1973 western High Plains Drifter. “You know,” he replies, before vanishing into the desert heat waves near California’s Mono Lake. Adapting the amorally enigmatic and violent Man With No Name persona from his films with Sergio Leone, Eastwood’s second film as director begins as his drifter emerges from that heat haze and rides into the odd lakefront settlement of Lago. Lago’s residents are not particularly friendly, but once the Stranger shows his skills as a gunfighter, they beg him to defend them against a group of outlaws (led by Eastwood regular Geoffrey Lewis) who have a score to settle with the town. He agrees to train them in self-defense, but Mordecai and innkeeper’s wife Sarah Belding (Verna Bloom) soon suspect that the Stranger has another, more personal agenda. By the time the Stranger makes the corrupt community paint their town red and re-name it “Hell,” it is clear that he is not just another gunslinger. With its fragmented flashbacks and bizarre, austere locations, High Plains Drifter’s stylistic eccentricity lends an air of unsettling eeriness to its revenge story, adding an uncanny slant to Eastwood’s antiheroic westerner. Seminal western hero John Wayne was so offended by Eastwood’s harshly revisionist view of a frontier town that he wrote to Eastwood, objecting that this was not what the spirit of the West was all about. Eastwood’s audience, however, was not so put off, and an exhibitors’ poll named Eastwood a top box-office draw for 1973.
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Jaws 2 (1978) Jeannot Szwarc, Roy Scheider, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton, Adventure, Horror, Thriller

Jaws 2 (1978)
The small island resort town of Amity is trying to bounce back from the financial troubles that suffered after becoming known as the site of shark attacks four years earlier. Mayor Larry Vaughn is welcoming developer Len Peterson and his new resort to Amity. Two scuba divers are exploring the area where the Orca sank after police chief Martin Brody killed a huge shark four years ago. A shark shows up and devoured the two divers, but not before one of the divers takes a close-up picture of the shark’s eye, and sometime later, while a mother is driving a boat that’s pulling her water-skiing teenage daughter, the shark devours the daughter and causes the mother to accidentally blow up the boat, then a killer whale is found on the shore with a huge bites on it. After Brody sees this, he knows there’s another huge great white shark in Amity’s waters, but Vaughn and Peterson explain these attacks away as non-shark accidents, because the thought of another shark in Amity’s waters would drive…
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