Depicts the quality of life in a small American town in Iowa, which is representative of thousands of such towns across the United States. Illustrates an old farm couple’s memories of play, work, family life, courtship, and marriage.
rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts
A compelling examination of the lives of three artists forced to work in secret while living in Nazi death camps during WWII: Jan Komski, Dinah Gottliebova, and Felix Nussbaum, who more than fifty years ago witnessed and painted the horrors of the Holocaust.
Sticky My Fingers, Fleet My Feet is a film about a man accepting his old age. The film is playful, as its characters have an exaggerated infatuation with their games of touch football, the main character even keeping a book of stats for himself. John D. Hancock utilizes sound in order to help with the over dramatization, as the suspense builds before kick-off, where comically a young girl picks up the ball before they can begin. The sound again emphasizes the child in these older men, when the main character returns home to a bath. He imagines now he is playing tennis with a brush, leaving the viewer, in the bit of parallelism, to see he can’t be humbled by his age for long.
The made-for-TV When She Says No takes a prismatic, Rashomon approach to its story of sexual assault. Kathleen Quinlan plays an anthropology professor who, during a roisterous campus party, has sex with three of her colleagues. She takes the matter to court, insisting that she’s been raped. The three men insist that Quinlan led them on–even when saying “no.” Both testimonies are presented in flashbacks which substantiate the words of whomever happens to be testifying. When She Says No refuses to cop out with easy answers: the “lady or the tiger” denouement allows the viewer to draw his or her own conclusion.
An American journalist travels to Istanbul with his daughter to find information about the family of his son-in-law. Something terrifying seems to have happened to them. They soon find themselves in a dangerous plot including weapons smuggling.
Volpone, an elderly Venetian, connives with his money-crazed servant to convince his greedy friends that he is dying, knowing that each will try to curry favor with him in order to be named his heir. He is inundated with valuable gifts, and soon finds himself entangled deeper and deeper in a web of lies.
In this drama, set during WWII, a teacher at a military school is derided by his students because he has not joined the military. The man is deeply disturbed by their ridicule and disrespect and so pleads with the draft-board to reconsider his “essential” status and allow him to join. He is allowed to enlist, but still, because he has a punctured ear-drum, is not allowed to join. Unable to face his students, the teacher gets a job at a shipyard, then deceives his students into believing that he is at war by having a buddy at boot camp forward their letters to him.
June Lorich works at the Mesabi Mine on Minnesota’s iron range. After an emotionally and physically abusive marriage, June is determined to make it on her own. But the worsening steel industry forces major cutbacks and June is bumped down to an all-male pit. She becomes the brunt of the other workers’ hostilities and is forced to fight against them – and the man she loves – to save her job.