Tag Archives: USA

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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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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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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“Adam Resurrected” follows the story of Adam Stein, a charismatic patient at a mental institution for Holocaust survivors in Israel, 1961. He reads minds and confounds his doctors, lead by Nathan Gross. Before the war, in Berlin, Adam was an entertainer–cabaret impresario, circus owner, magician, musician–loved by audiences and Nazis alike until he finds himself in a concentration camp, confronted by Commandant Klein. Adam survives the camp by becoming the Commandant’s “dog”, entertaining him while his wife and daughter are sent off to die. Years later we find him at the Institute. One day, Adam smells something, hears a sound. “Who brought a dog in here?” he asks Gross. Gross denies there is a dog but Adam finds him–a young boy raised in a basement on a chain. Adam and the boy see and recognize each other as dogs–and their journey begins. “Adam Resurrected” is the story of a man who once was a dog who meets a dog who once was a boy.
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In 1958, in New York City, the upper class Diane Arbus is a frustrated and lonely woman with a conventional marriage with two daughters. Her husband is a photographer sponsored by the wealthy parents of Diane, and she works as his assistant. When Lionel Sweeney, a mysterious man with hypertrichosis (a.k.a. werewolf syndrome, a disease that causes excessive body hair), comes to live in the apartment in the upper floor, Diane feels a great attraction for him and is introduced to the world of freaks and marginalized people, falling in love with Lionel.
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Little Women is a “coming of age” drama tracing the lives of four sisters: Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. During the American Civil War, the girls father is away serving as a minister to the troops. The family, headed by thier beloved Marmee, must struggle to make ends meet, with the help of their kind and wealthy neighbor, Mr. Laurence, and his high spirited grandson Laurie.
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Beautiful Gloria Wandrous, a New York fashion model engages in an illicit affair with married socialite Weston Liggett. However, Gloria’s desire for respectability causes her to reconsider her lifestyle.
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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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Recently widowed American opera diva Caterina takes her teenaged son Joe with her on a long singing tour to Italy. Absorbed in her hectic work in various Verdi operas around Rome, Caterina is soon shocked to discover that her troubled and lonely son has become a heroin addict. Her desperate attempts to wean the youth off the drug result in an incestuous relationship, but also in a possibility to reunite Joe–maybe even herself–with his real father, whose existence she has kept a secret from him.
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Lianna and her husband Dick have been married for a few years but the marriage isn’t a happy one, since Dick treats her with arrogance. One day Lianna falls in love – with Ruth, a teacher. The people who know them act different: her husband with feelings of sexual betrayal, her children with curiosity and Lianna’s friends with ambivalence.
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