Carla de Hulvea is a rumba dancer who makes news by posing as a South-American heiress. She is doing fine with her hoax until she meets American Peter Jackson, a high-pressure promoter who is looking for movie-producing money. He does some big-time bluffing on his own in order to get Carla to invest in a film he is making with his partner, Roy Harley. Through Carla, Roy meets actress Diana West, who is given a role in the movie, and Roy falls in love with her.
Category: Musical
Vesta Tilley is the daughter of a music-hall chairman who watches shows from the wings with great enthusiasm. One day, her father finds her dressed as a boy, singing to an audience of dolls. Her act, he believes, is good enough to be performed in front of a live audience. As time goes on, word of her spreads. Viewed as the first male impersonator, her fame leads her into marriage to a nobleman.
Popular jazz drummer and actor Frankie Sakai stars in this comic version of the “industrial competition” genre: two tourism companies compete for foreign clients in the run up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Highlighting the coming internationalization of Japan, the film dramatizes the felt tensions between tradition and modernity, the pressures of the “economic animal” lifestyle, and the energy of high economic growth. The closest Japanese cinema ever came to the full-blown Broadway style musical, with singing and dancing on the streets of Tokyo, music by avant-garde composer and jazzman Toshiro Mayuzumi, lyrics by renowned poet Shuntaro Tanikawa.
In this musical, a popular singer runs away from stardom to find some much needed R&R on a Mexican ranch. His manager is terribly upset and sends a pretty young woman to lure him back. However, the gal constantly natters away at the exhausted entertainer.
World War II is over but Captain Willoby and his men must “occupy” remote Midi Island. The men are disgusted at not going home…until they meet the friendly island women. Unfortunately, Willoby has been ordered to prohibit his men from “fraternizing.” This task, already frustrating, is made worse by the presence of missionary’s niece Diana and the arrival of gorgeous journalist Angela. Meanwhile, the island king has presented Willoby with equally gorgeous Rozouila as “wife”…
Parking is director Jacques Demy’s homage to Jean Cocteau’s 1948 masterwork Orpheus. As in the Cocteau film, Demy relates the Orpheus and Euridyce legend in a contemporary setting. Now a rock ‘n’ roll sensation (instead of the poet of the Cocteau film) Orpheus falls in love with Eurydice, who in this version is a sculptress rather than a princess. The rest of the film adheres to the familiar story. Euridyce, who is death personified, beckons Orpheus into Hell, ostensibly to revive his dead lover. A shade brighter and more buoyant than its source material, Parking is the usual Jacques Demy brew of beautiful imagery and hokey dialogue.
A musical adaptation of Charles Dickens’ “The Old Curiosity Shop,” the film tells the story of Little Nell and her feckless grandfather who, in hopes of leaving Nell a sizable inheritance, has run up huge gambling debts to a heartless moneylender named Daniel Quilp. Quilp eventually seizes the old man’s junk shop, forcing Nell and her grandfather to eke out a miserable existence as paupers in the Midlands.
A young songwriter leaves his Kentucky home to try to make it in New Orleans. Eventually he winds up in New York, where he sells his songs to a music publisher, but refuses to sell his most treasured composition: “Dixie.” The film is based on the life of Daniel Decatur Emmett, who wrote the classic song “Dixie.”