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| Darling, How Could You |
Yesterday Mitchell Leisen delivered the biggest surprise so far with Young Man with Ideas made at MGM in 1952. Now I discover that the year before at Paramount he made Darling, How Could You! with Joan Fontaine, John Lund and the young Mona Freeman in a comedy of domestic misunderstandings driven by daughter Freeman seeing a play about adultery and transferring all the machinations onto her own parents marriage. They have just returned from a stint running a hospital in Panama during the construction of the Panama Canal and the kids who have been under the care of a housekeeper have a lot of adjusting to do. The audience in the Jolly laughed out loud throughout and the restored digital copy on the screen was superb. More evidence, if indeed it's needed, that Leisen is perhaps the most under-discovered major Hollywood director.
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| Nagarik/The Citizen |
Ritwik Ghatak has had a strand devoted to his work and among the films screened was his very first, Nagarik/The Citizen made in 1952 but not released until 1977, after the filmmaker's death. The Indian National Film Archive has made a knockout 4K copy but the film takes a long, long time to tell the story of a young man fruitlessly searching for work and the societal barriers he encounters. In his notes on the film Shivendra Singh Dungapur calls the film "the cinematic expression of (Ghatak's) IPTA training, Marxist convictions and personal anguish over Partition." But it took a long, long time to tell it all.
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| A Man on the Beach |
Then there was the session that the cinephiles came out for in big numbers. A Man on the Beach was made in 1955. It's only 30 minutes long but it was the first film Joseph Losey made in England, after being blacklisted and going into exile, which he signed with his own name. Losey's fascination with power games is to the fore in a story about murder, changing identities and personal discovery. He pondered the themes for the rest of his career.
Film | Geoff Gardner | Spiro Economopoulos | Ross Barnard |
L’Innocente (Luchino Visconti) |
| **** |
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Kuroi Junin No Onna/Ten Black Women (Kon Ichikawa) | * | *** |
|
Ten Seconds to Hell (Robert Aldrich) |
| ***
| *** |
Osho /The Chess Master(Daisuke Ito) | * |
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Amma Ariyan (John Abraham) | * |
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Geru No Kobi/The Servant’s Neck (Daisuke Ito | *** |
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Oborokago/The Inner Palace Conspiracy (Daisuke Ito) | *** |
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Ladies of Leisure (Frank Capra) |
|
| *** |
Sunrise (F W Murnau) |
|
| **** |
Night Nurse (William A Wellman) |
|
| *** |
The Overcoat (Grigory Kozintsev & Leonid Trauberg) |
|
| * |
La Bugiarda (Luigi Comencini) |
|
| *** |
Putney Swope (Robert Downey) |
|
| *** |
Eight Girls in a Boat (Richard Wallace) | * |
| *** |
The Devils (Ken Russell) |
| *** | **** |
Mirages de Paris (Feodor Ocep) | ** |
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The Cycle (Darish Mehrjui) | **** |
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Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher) |
| *** | *** |
La Derive (Paule Delsol) | *** |
| ** |
Perfume of the Lady in Black (Francisco Barilli) |
| *** |
|
Accident (Jospeh Losey ) |
| ** | *** |
The Damned (Luchino Visconti) |
| *** |
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Die Fremde Vogel (Urban Gad) | *** |
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Senso (Luchino Visconti) |
| **** |
|
Lenny (Bob Fosse) |
| *** |
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Zouzou (Marc Allegret) | ** |
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Meren Kasvojen Edessa/By the Edge of the Sea (Teuvo Puro) |
|
| ** |
What Price Glory (Raoul Walsh) |
|
| *** |
L’Image Originelle – Wim Wenders (Pierre Henri Gibert) |
|
| ***
|
Drakula in Istanbul (Mehmet Mutar) |
|
| ** |
Sa Dam Ying/Big Boss Sis (Chung Sun) |
|
| ** |
Clash By Night (Fritz Lang) |
|
| *** |
Tales of Manhattan (Julien Duvivier) | ** |
| ** |
Young Man with Ideas (Mitchell Leisen) | *** |
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Darling, How Could You! (Mitchell Leisen) | *** |
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Nagarik (Ritwik Ghatak) | ** |
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A Man on the Beach (Joseph Losey) | *** |
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