A taut crime thriller about the hunt for a mysterious stranger who is poisoning small children with barbiturates. A tough and compelling film, which offers a gritty reflection of life in 1960s South East London behind the initial whodunnit. Ellen McIntosh gives a bravura performance as a single mother juggling work with raising a family, and Jean Anderson paints a sympathetic portrait of an older mother coming to terms with the extent of her son’s mental health issues. Striking and bold, The Silent Playground explores the fine line between innocence and criminality.
Tag: 1960s
This drama about the Carmelite order of nuns is set during the French Revolution. A young woman seeks refuge with the Carmelites because she is terrified of dying during the upheaval. The longer she associates with the nuns the more she is transformed by their faith and devotion.
A group of children use a cabin as the meeting place where they gather to sing. When the owner of the place has financial difficulties and thinks of selling it, the friends will devise a way to earn money: they will dye the surrounding sheep in different colors and try to sell the wool as if it were a natural product.
Yoshishige Yoshida’s first feature follows the lives of young students against a background of jazz, emptiness and boredom. The plot is fairly simple: a “good-for-nothing” from a poor background falls in love with the young secretary of his rich friend’s father. The woman senses good in him and tries to lead him on the right path.
Tab Hunter plays a mentally unbalanced ex-con living in London, who is seen emerging from prison during the opening credits. His wife seems to have struck up a platonic friendship with Hunter’s employer during his incarceration and their son (whom it appears Tab has never met) clearly looks at this “uncle” as a surrogate father. It emerges that Tab’s character murdered someone in a brawl so his mental state has always been questionable, but the combination of dealing with the sudden onset of paternal resposibility, a love rival and the alienation he feels upon release lead to a tragic climax!
Two women on vacation decide to see who the better seductress is. When an accident causes tragedy, their husbands do what they can to cover all traces of a scandal.
The theme of Fredi M. Murer’s contribution to the episode film Swissmade is “Switzerland after us”. Murer’s episode takes place in the year 2069. An “integrated citizen with a latent tendency to become an unintegrated citizen” is commissioned by the “Brain Center” to produce a film report about the unknown mission of a foreign being. The alien being is an extraterrestrial designed by H. R. Giger long before ALIEN with a built-in camera and tape, which travels across the earth in the year 2069 to explore current conditions.
Sial IV is a French TV miniseries by Greek filmmaker and writer Adonis Kyrou, adapted from the speculative fiction novel Deadly Image (AKA The Uncertain Midnight) by British author Edmund Cooper. It tells the story of Denis Lange, a fallout shelter engineer who is accidentally trapped in suspended animation as war breaks out in 1970, only to awaken in the early 2100s in Sial IV, an underground city in which humankind lives a life of leisure, having discharged all responsibility to androids. Assigned the android Diana as his personal assistant, Denis ventures through this unsettling idyll, eventually finding a small but tenacious group of resistors who seek to uncover the truth about the compound and its ruler, the mysterious Machiavelli.