Ruby Dennis is a small-time lounge singer who owns a bowling alley. The film follows his attempts to make it big while struggling against the mob and finding romance with Sharon. Dennis lives with his sister, Paula, and her son, Raymond. Paula quits her job and runs off to help the poor, leaving Dennis to keep Raymond away from a life of crime. Ruby ventures toward a spiritual crisis, something that is off-kilter to his surroundings
Tag: WEST GERMANY
Dorothea, a 16-year-old bourgeois girl from Hamburg, plays with her friends of both sexes, imitating the production of adult movies. In the end, pretending to make sex-scenes is not satisfying enough, and with a street professional, Dorothea is initiated in hard sex.
The Nazis capture an Austrian aristocrat and imprison him in solitary confinement and deprived of all intellectual stimulation. Once there, he is manipulated and interrogated in an effort to force him to reveal secret information vital to his captors. Struggling to keep his sanity, he fights back with the only means available to him–a book on chess hidden in his cell.
In this enigmatic thriller, Susannah is suddenly herded out of an apartment in the middle of the night and brought to a police station for extensive questioning about why she was in a place that belonged to a known criminal. What the police do not know is that Susannah has been somehow involved in the death of a woman and has reunited with her sister Julie in Berlin.
In 1914, with men gone to war, Marcel Proust hired Céleste Albaret as his attendant. More than eight years later, she was at his side when he died. During this entire time, she only entered his room when he rang for her, sleeping from 9 AM to 3 PM to wait during the night while he wrote. Marcel uses her as more than a servant: she is his muse, telling stories of her childhood to stir his remembrance of things past; she’s in cahoots with him as he manipulates those he wants to draw on for his writing; she listens appalled to his descriptions of the underside of Paris. Hers is a life of love and sweet devotion as he races time to finish his work before death.
In Ulrike Ottinger’s contemporary reinvention of the famous morality tale, fin de siècle dandy Dorian Gray is reimagined as a drag role, played without comment on the switch by Veruschka von Lehndorff in the male lead. Ottinger’s collision of Oscar Wilde and Fritz Lang features Delphine Seyrig as one “Dr. Mabuse,” the head of a sinister multinational newspaper agency that conspires to create, control, and destroy celebrity figure Dorian Gray. The film is an odyssey through eye-popping tableaux, including a trip to an unforgettable underworld.
In Layaly Badr’s documentary short, Road to Palestine, seven-year-old Layla – who has been badly injured in an air raid – lives in a refugee camp outside Palestine. Layla and her friends describe how they imagine Palestine, despite never having seen it.
This off-beat psychological drama by Sohrab Shahid Saless dissects German post-war society with a cutting edge. Herbert is a solid, middle-class engineer who one day quits his job and ensconces himself at home (preferably in the bathroom), refusing to say very much to anyone. His wife is all the more upset at his behavior because on Sunday mornings he goes out into the street and yells at the top of his lungs for everyone to “get up.” Eventually, the hard-working wife who is also earning their support convinces Herbert to go to a clinic for treatment, but will it change him?