A young boy and girl, dressed in costumes based on Dutch traditional clothes, find their idyllic, windmill-laden countryside is being over-run by unfeeling, unthinking mechanical men that lay waste to everything in their path. The cartoon (note the title) was a very thinly veiled propaganda film in support of the Netherlands resistance fighters during Nazi occupation in World War 2 (The film was completed when Nazi Germany had completely occupied the Netherlands).
Tag: 1940s
Tells the story of Ben Helwig and his important contribution to the American war effort. Ben’s story starts in the Great Depression when he, a young teen, is separated from his parents leaving him for a better life at an institution as they search for work. A freak baseball accident at the home leads to Benny losing sight permanently in one eye, followed by losing sight permanently in the other eye. As Ben is despondent over his new life situation, his mother realizes that she has to do something to make him feel productive again, she turning to one of his old favorite pastimes of building model planes, with his hands, sensitive to his new situation, taking over as his eyes in they being able to “see” things through touch.
Two professional people marry, but the wife insists that they be celibate for the first three months, just to see if they are truly compatible. The husband tries various tricks to lure his wife into bed, but she trumps his every serve. Finally, when she is ready for love, he isn’t, having contracted a bad case of poison oak.
Set during the Golden Age of Jazz circa 1917, Arturo De Cordova stars as Nick, the proprietor of a Bourbon Street gambling joint, an artistic haven for black musicians who gather to jam from dusk ’til dawn. When he falls in love with an opera-singing socialite, Nick realizes that only through music will he gain respectability, and launches a campaign to thrust the disreputable music known as jazz onto the highbrow American stage.
Hot Breath Harry is a hot trumpeter at a jazz club. He finds himself drafted into the Army, where he’s assigned to be the bugler of an African-American company. But everyone hates the bugler, because he blows reveille at the ungodly hour of 5 AM sharp. Sure enough, on his first day, Harry gets pelted with everything imaginable. He lands against a wall, where his trumpet falls on him. He plays a swinging wakeup that segues into the title tune, and nobody minds waking up to this. Everyone swings through the whole day, even when three soldiers march into a lake and two soldiers, followed by a grinning alligator, march out.
Unable to complete the deal by telephone, advertising executive Roberts sends his assistant Ann to Cuba to lure a Cuban band, led by Desi Arnaz, on to an American radio program. Attracted to Ann, Arnaz and his band come to New York but complications arise when the squeaky-voiced, addle-brained sponsor of the program decides she wants to be the vocalist on the program.
A professor invents a time sphere which takes a group of 1940s entertainers to Elizabethan London where they encounter Queen Elizabeth and Sir Walter Raleigh and introduce them to jazz culture – They also meet Captain John Smith and a very heavy-drinking Pocahontas. The main female character meets William Shakespeare and feeds him some of his own lines, which he eagerly writes down. A costume-production, (many of which are immaculate), which makes extensive use of the Gainsborough wardrobe.
A landmark of both experimental and queer filmmaking, Kenneth Anger’s film is a bizarre, disturbing dreamscape of violation, rape, and homoerotic sadomasochism. The film opens with Anger, who made this film when he was only 17, awaking from a troubled dream and leaving his house to go on a stroll. He is confronted by a band of buff sailors who proceed to beat, manhandled, and molest him. Recalling other surrealist masterpieces such as Un Chien andalou and Meshes in the Afternoon, this film uses elliptical narrative structure and dream-like visual metaphors and puns.