In 1461, French nobles fearing King Louis XI may seize their lands, join forces with the rebellious Duke of Burgundy to overthrow the king. One of the Duke’s captains suggests enlisting the aid of Francois Villon who is known to oppose the king and is leader of the Vagabonds, a group that robs the rich to aid the poor. In league with Burgundy, Villon and two of his cohorts enter Paris, but are captured by the king’s men. The king, recognizing Villon’s power over the people, proposes that Villon defend Paris against Burgundy and help uncover traitors in the court.
Tag: 1950s
Britain’s first musical shot in colour and widescreen (a process called Cosmoscope) is a cabaret-style featurette centred on a group of young people in Chelsea lodgings, watched over by a fatherly caretaker. Eight specially written songs are performed by stage stars of the day – most notably Georgia Brown, who later created the role of Nancy in Oliver!
Renowned Egyptian director Youssef Chahine established his international reputation with Cairo Station after it screened at the Berlin Film Festival. Focusing on a group of marginalised luggage carriers and soft-drink sellers who live in abandoned traincars, Chahine posits Cairo’s main railroad station as a microcosm of Egyptian society. A crippled newspaper dealer (played powerfully by Chahine himself), falls in love with a beautiful but indifferent lemonade seller who is engaged to the muscular and virile leader of the luggage-carriers. Swept away by his obsessive desire, the crippled man kidnaps the object of his passion, with terrible consequences.
Dramatisation of the Bakiga people’s attempt to cultivate the Kigezi district of Uganda, region inhabited by Pygmies. Jonathan, educated clerk, son of the village’s chief, goes along with other men’s of the village to build the new farms. Injured in a movement of buffaloes, he is helped by some Pygmies villagers with who he becomes friends. When returning to his people’s settlement, his peers don’t see these new acquaintances in a favorable light.
Daniel Thatcher is an American sergeant serving with a British tank corps in North Africa. He and most of his unit are captured by the Germans, who learn his identity as a man who once tried to assassinate Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s right-hand man. Thatcher’s wife was killed in the concentration camps, and now, after his failed attempt to kill the Nazi leader, Thatcher is a real prize for his captors. But Thatcher prefers not to go back to Germany as a prize, so he leads his fellow tankers in an escape attempt.
Rancher Rex Allen receives a summons from his uncle, an old time frontiersman, that he is in trouble. The uncle has been hired to lead a modern-day band of adventurers on a wagon train retracing the route taken by their ancestors 100 years ago. Before Rex can talk to his uncle, the uncle is murdered, and Rex sets out to find the killer and the motive by taking his uncle’s place as the leader of the wagon train. He discovers that the motive was the gold that the original pioneers had cached in a cave on the trail to California, and now has to find the culprit that is after it.
A white red-haired girl has been raised by the Cherokee Indians after her family was massacred. She considers herself a Native American and she regards all whites as her enemies. Her feelings are justified when outlaws kill her Indian parents. Realizing she can’t seek vengeance alone; she grudgingly accepts the help of white marshal Hollister and is now called the ‘Rose of Cimmarron’.
Charlie becomes a paratrooper, but, while serving in North Africa, he mistakenly kills one of his fellow U.S. soldiers, who is masquerading as a Nazi in order to wipe out a nest of the enemy. The action moves to Sicily and then to Salerno. Shunned by his fellow soldiers, including his childhood friend Ace, Charlie is forced to prove himself when it is left up to him to transport a generator across an open road in full view of Nazi attackers.