
Josh and Dinah Barkley are a successful (though argumentative) musical-comedy team, yet Dinah chafes as Galatea to her husband’s Pygmalion. When serious playwright Jacques Barredout envisions her as a great dramatic actress, Dinah is not hard to persuade.
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Tag Archives: USA
The Tattered Dress (1957) Jack Arnold

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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The Martian Chronicles (1980) Michael Anderson

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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Sergeant York (1941) Howard Hawks

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

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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Four Friends (1981) Arthur Penn

This story of four working-class kids in a small industrial town–who go their separate ways after high school in the innocence of 1961 and come together again at the end of the turbulent Sixties–is as much about the coming of age of America as it is about the changes the characters go through. The four friends of the title are thoughtful Danilo, a Yugoslavian immigrant with dreams of being a writer and a scholar; Tom, good-looking and athletic, who is bound for the army; cautious David who has mixed feelings about staying in town and joining the family mortuary business; and lovely, ditzy, exasperating Georgia, who tries to inspire all of them with her longings for a life of Bohemian adventure. It is told through the eyes of Danilo, whose story is loosely based on the writer Tesich’s own life growing up in Bloomington, Indiana.
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Dr. Renault’s Secret (1942) Harry Lachman

A young man visits his fiancée in a remote French villa where her scientist father resides. There he meets Noel, Dr. Renault’s mysterious assistant, who has a strange attraction to Renault’s daughter. Soon he learns Noel’s true identity: he is an ape that was turned into a man by Renault’s bizarre experiments!
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Verboten! (1959) Samuel Fuller

A young American serviceman, stationed in Germany after the fall of the Third Reich, jeopardises his position with the Marshall Plan relief effort by breaking the non-fraternisatiom rule and falling in love with a young German woman. He uses his position to obtain food and luxuries for her that are in short supply, and all seems to be going well for the couple. What he doesn’t realise is that the Werewolves, the Nazi guerrilla movement, have plans in which he features heavily.
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The Great Ziegfeld (1936) Robert Z. Leonard

At the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, sideshow barker Flo Ziegfeld turns the tables on his more successful neighbor Billings, and steals his girlfriend to boot. This pattern is repeated throughout their lives, as Ziegfeld makes and loses many fortunes putting on ever bigger, more spectacular shows (sections of which appear in the film). French revue star Anna Held becomes his first wife, but it’s not easy being married to the man who “glorified the American girl.”
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The Star Witness (1931) William A. Wellman

The Leeds family is thrown right in the middle of a war between the cops and gangland when they are the only witnesses to two murders committed by gang kingpin Maxey Campos. Initially positive in their identification of the murderer, their attitudes change when young Donny Leeds is kidnapped by Campos’ boys. No amount of threatening with perjury by D.A. Whitlock can get them to tell the truth – except for cantankerous old Grandpa, civil war veteran, who berates his family for failing to do their civic duty, whatever the cost. Though having his doubts as to the credibility of his star witness, Whitlock is nevertheless taken aback when he learns Grandpa has disappeared just before he is to testify.
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