A jobless young couple, Yoshigi and Tsutue, wind up at the outskirts of the Suzaki red-light district in Tokyo. Tsutue talks her way into a job pouring sake for male customers at a small bar run by a sympathetic older woman, while Yoshigi is shunted off into a nearby noodle shop, where he gets a job delivering noodles. Tsutue charms and runs off with one of her clients. Yoshigi, ignoring the attentions of a sweet co-worker, pursues Tsutue.
Tag: 1950s
Fernando, the protagonist, finishes his military service in the cavalry and decides to buy the horse that has been his companion during this time. However, living with the horse becomes a grave problem, as the city that Fernando knew is not the same. He struggles to find accommodation for the animal, and he faces resistance from both his social circle as well as the new, modern world.
FBI man Stafford is extraditing convicted killer Brett Murphy from Spain to the USA. At the last minute, Murphy’s fiancée, entertainer Jean Gurney, finds he’s been taken and slips on the plane. Unknown to them, a suicidal passenger has a fire and gas bomb in his luggage. As time ticks away, minor dramas are played out on board.
Two neighbours live in the same house as the best friends until one of them buys a small harmonica and starts to play in a unbearable way. The other one takes his revenge and answers with some intolerable play on a larger accordeon. They start a competition, using bigger and bigger instruments. Other neighbours join them in a dreadful ear-splitting noise. This infernal sounds provoke some unwanted consequences, all because of a small »Piccolo« accordeon.
Filmed in Brooklyn, Image in the Snow is an early underground “trance film” in which “a young man led by despair searches a city for salvation” (director Willard Maas’ own description). He takes the Myrtle Avenue el. and finds his “ideal parents” represented as carved stone figures on a tomb in the old part of Mt. Olivet Cemetary. Although not as highly regarded as Geography of the Body or as ostentatious as Narcissus in its own time, Image in the Snow has become the most frequently revived of Willard Maas’ thematic, non-documentary films.
A surreal piece of cinema, mostly comprised of stark religious and homoerotic imagery, accompanied by increasingly dissonant music (starting with ‘The Unanswered Question’, and getting more jarring as the movie progresses.
An independent-thinking doctor in a rural community with his own ideas of how medicine should be practiced begins to find himself ostracized from the community after one of his patients commits suicide.
In this comedy, a milque-toast bank clerk is forced to deliver blackmail money to a seductive woman. Misunderstandings abound when the clerk’s brother-in-law sees him leaving the woman’s house. Soon word that the clerk has become a dashing rake is spread around the town. In the end, the owner of a sexy lingerie factory offers the clerk a partnership in his business.