Afraid of marriage, Simone breaks off her long term engagement with her fiancé Paul de Lille. Paul heads to the top of The Eiffel Tower with thoughts of suicide. In another part of Paris and also afraid of marriage, Mignon breaks it off from her young lover. Despairing, Mignon also climbs to the top of The Eiffel Tower intending to leap to her death. There she meets Paul and the two compare stories. After discussion, Paul dissuades her from leaping and the two conspire to make their respective partners jealous by pretending to have an affair with each other.
Category: Musical
Spud Miller hopes to save his struggling radio station by winning a broadcast competition, with the help of the Radio Eye, an invention that can display live events from anywhere in the world.
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.
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.