In London’s Soho, Johnny Solo runs the Pink Flamingo Club. He’s tough to intimidate. So when he starts getting threats and demands for protection, he fights back. Behind the takeover plot is a competitor, Diamonds Dielli. Midnight Franklin, who’s Johnny’s girlfriend and one of the club’s headliners, wants to get Johnny out of the business. In the background are a sadistic client, an underage chorus girl, a wisecracking siren who’s not averse to rough trade, a visiting journalist, and a dancer who guards her past. Can Johnny win the struggle with Diamonds, and can Midnight get him out of harm’s way?
Tag: 1960s
Material was cut in as it came out of the camera, embarrassing moments intact. 100′ rolls timed well with music on old 78s. I was interested in immediacy, a sense of ease, and an art where suffering was acknowledged but not trivialized with dramatics. Whimsy was our achievement, as well as breaking out of step. – Ken Jacobs.
A sensitive, low-key portrait of the East Bay Activity Center, a school in Oakland, California, started in the 1950s to help emotionally disturbed children. The atmospheric documentary opens with hilly East Bay streets shrouded in fog. The mist lifts as the film moves to children at play. Often shown in unobtrusive close-up, the youngsters appear as thinking individuals, enjoying the swings, puzzling out problems, or interacting with their teacher in the classroom.
A Year in the Life of Franek W. is a 1967 Polish documentary film directed by and based on a screenplay by Kazimierz Karabasz. The film depicts a year in the life of a twenty-year-old boy from a small village, Franciszek Wróbel, who emigrates to large industrial Silesia to join the Voluntary Labor Corps. Karabasz’s method was based on careful and impartial observation of the protagonist’s fate; the only commentary was provided by letters read by Wróbel himself.
Roger Graef and The Thaldomide Society’s groundbreaking film about Brett, a boy born without arms, introduced the plight of Thalidomide children to the world. We see touching and personal scenes from his home life – rough and tumble with his brothers, meal times and other practical activities, revealing Brett’s extraordinary dexterity with his feet and his determination. Brett’s mother’s deeply personal narration describes how family life has been affected and how hurtful people’s comments can be – both to her, as a mother who took thalidomide, and in relation to Brett’s physical appearance.
The humour and irony-laden art criticism of György Kovásznai’s previous films is further developed in this short. Each of the three episodes acquired a different visual presentation. The first episode makes fun of the cinema (and its overstimulating effect), the second of the theatre (and its hypocrisy) and the third of the classical music (and its snobbism).
A leading director of the Czech film renaissance provides a philosophical meditation on life and death, set amidst complex hospital apparatus and the sadness, hope, or resignation of the patients. Existentialist rather than optimist, the approach is one of humanistic atheism, accepting death as part of life. Interviews with doctors and nurses explore their outlook; all speak of death as a fact, without either sentimentality or religiosity. The studied objectivity of the film only imperfectly hides an intense emotionality.
Scissors dance like a ballet dancer on sheets of paper. She carves the sun, the flower, the fish. The boy needs new toys. Scissors offers colored cubes and patterned balls. And then she cuts out the girl. A naughty boy wants all the toys for himself. The girl is offended and hides. The boy understands that being alone is boring. Then the scissors cut out many more boys and girls. The fun games begin.