In flashback, the film traces the law-enforcement careers of African American Gregory Foster and Italian American Rocco Laurie. Friends as well as partners, Foster and Laurie endeavor to improve community relations in their crime-ridden Lower East Side precinct–which results in their being murdered by three militant extremists, who hope to intimidate the rest of the force (at the time the film was made, this motivation for the crime was still pure speculation). The killings have the opposite effect, as the rest of department rallies against its enemies, inspired by the memory of their fallen comrades. Foster and Laurie was based on the book by Al Silverman.
Month: April 2022
The main character of the film is a teenage boy, called Trta who lives with his mother, a prostitute, in a small provincial town. He roams the streets, commits small thefts and soon is sent to Belgrade to a home for juvenile delinquents. There, he is assigned to counselor Žarko who tries to win the boy’s full trust and treat him in a way that is not the practice of the Home. The Home’s authorities are against Žarko’s manner of special treatment, and the conflict is unavoidable.
The movie tells the little stories of a group of families who live in the same building in Rome as seen from the eyes of Sandrino, a little kid who is awaiting for a total solar eclipse that really happened during summer of ’61, and it was fully visible from Italy. He sees his family life, a young girl who is about to marry a man she doesn’t love, an old man who has just died and whose relatives fight for his inheritance, a blind trumpet player who hopes to recover, his little friends…
Singing on the Treadmill is a surreal operetta parody about the realities of day-to-day socialism. The film is set in a vast garbage dump where, in the depths of a quarry, next to a derelict factory building, two librettists are penning a frothy operetta about the paternalism of Kadarism, its lies, reality perceived through rose tinted glasses and squabbles over a housing allocation. However, their lacquered players are not prepared to bend to their will, they take offence and start demanding independence, rejecting ‘orders from above’ about partners and housing. Gyula Gazdag’s grotesque parody that works on several levels is amusing and dream-like, full of free-flowing associations and remarkable solutions. Citing its “disheartening existentialism”, the authorities banned the film for 10 years.
A pictorial history of Washington D.C. through old prints, daguerreotypes and photographs as well as contemporary footage to depict the turbulent history the U.S. capital and the building of the Capitol.
Before The Naked Venus, Edgar G. Ulmer shot a 30-minute pilot for a TV series based on The Swiss Family Robinson, that no networks ever picked up. The inexpressive acting of the children caused the wreckage of this short feature, despite the efforts of their coach, Adrianna Ulmer. But the director took advantage of the Mexican location to sketch the theme of Nature as a beautiful prison – an idea he would brilliantly develop in The Cavern (1965). In fact, Ulmer started working on the production of The Cavern in 1957, and this work influenced this fascinating TV oddity.
Yvonne Arthur is a mixture of charm and humour, spontaneity and spunk – but she’s an acute opportunist accustomed to living off other people’s money. What starts as an innocent reunion with a schoolmate, who is an heiress to millions, builds to the opportunity of a lifetime