Filmed in quasi-documentary fashion, the made-for-TV The Face of Rage is set in a rehabilitation facility. Here a group of rapists are required to confront their victims face-to-face. The film concentrates on the bitter verbal sparring session between assaulter Richard and assaultee Rebecca. Director Donald Wrye co-wrote the screenplay for Face of Rage with Hal Sitowicz, drawing much of the dialogue from real-life transcripts.
Tag: USA
Documenting and contrasting children’s youthful beauty with the squalor, hardship and wasted potential of their daily lives; students learning how their counterparts really live and are encouraged to think about what these children need to thrive.
Ski instructor Johnny is carrying on a romance with Samantha, a married woman who also serves as the hostess at a ski lodge. Samantha coaxes Jack into giving skiing lessons to the Stones, a rich family whose patriarch is the head of a mysterious company planning to take over the resort.
An insightful illumination of author Paul Bowles’ original and lesser-known career as an avant-garde composer, Owsley Brown’s Night Waltz is an elegant and soulful document of discovery. Interviewed in Morocco during the last months of his life, Bowles journeys back to his early years as a contemporary and occasional collaborator of other such iconic figures as Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and Orson Welles. Bowles’ uncut compositions–performed by the Eos Orchestra–are punctuated with stunning visual essays by filmmakers Nathaniel Dorsky and Rudy Burckhardt. Long after retiring from his more well-known profession, Bowles kept music as a vital part of his life, tapping out fresh rhythms on his Tangier table tops until the end of his days.
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.
Pier 13 is a remake of the delightful Spencer Tracy-Joan Bennett vehicle Me and My Gal, which itself was a reworking of a 1922 silent picture. Wisecracking cop Danny Dolan (Lloyd Nolan) takes a liking to self-reliant waterfront waitress Sally Kelly (Lynn Bari), and the feeling is definitely mutual. But when Sally begins behaving strangely, Dolan suspects that she’s mixed up with notorious criminal Johnnie Hale.
A man who has worked his whole life to become wealthy is determined to bring his son up with everything he has never had as a youngster. Needless to say the young lad grows up to be a spoiled brat by the time he reaches college age and wreaks havoc on anyone who stands in his way. In the meantime, his father has fallen in love with a beautiful artist who has his best interest at heart. The problem is that the son also develops feelings for her. This film was adapted form the popular Howard Spring novel.
