tegeus-Cromis
a better poet than swordsman
- Joined
- May 17, 2019
- Messages
- 1,343
A thread to recommend films that you love and that others here may not be aware of. My recommendations:
High Barbaree, dir. Jack Conway, 1947, with Van Johnson and June Allyson. Growing up, Van Johnson's character has an eccentric uncle who claims to have once found an unknown island in the Pacific. When his bomber is downed during WWII, he stumbles across the same island... Beautiful, strangely magic-realist fantasy.
Hold Back the Dawn, dir. Mitchell Leisen, 1941, with Charles Boyer, Olivia de Havilland, and Paulette Goddard. European con-man in Mexico during WWII tries to seduce American schoolmarm as his ticket into the US. Gorgeous melodrama, much of it shot on location, prefiguring, to my mind, some of the look of Rossellini and the ItalIan Neo-realists.
Interlude, dir. Douglas Sirk, 1957, with June Allyson (her again!) and Rossano Brazzi. Many of you may know Sirk's great melodramas of the 1950s, such as All that Heaven Allows, Imitation of Life, and Written on the Wind. Made during the same period, this one is for some reason much less known than the others. Intense innocent-American/worldy European romance in post-war Munich, shot on location, with a strong theme deriving from "Jane Eyre." Since the male protagonist is a music conductor, this is also Sirk's film that is most steeped in music (Brahms, Schumann, and Mozart, especially), and also perhaps his most musical in construction.
Three Crowns of the Sailor, dir. Raul Ruiz, 1982, starring probably no one you've heard of. Peruvian director working in France (and in French) to adapt what is basically a magic-realist retelling of Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." The cover of the DVD I own also says "Orson Welles meets Hans Christian Andersen and Edgar Allen Poe," which is a pretty fair description too. One of my favorite movies ever.of
EDIT: edited for typos.
High Barbaree, dir. Jack Conway, 1947, with Van Johnson and June Allyson. Growing up, Van Johnson's character has an eccentric uncle who claims to have once found an unknown island in the Pacific. When his bomber is downed during WWII, he stumbles across the same island... Beautiful, strangely magic-realist fantasy.
Hold Back the Dawn, dir. Mitchell Leisen, 1941, with Charles Boyer, Olivia de Havilland, and Paulette Goddard. European con-man in Mexico during WWII tries to seduce American schoolmarm as his ticket into the US. Gorgeous melodrama, much of it shot on location, prefiguring, to my mind, some of the look of Rossellini and the ItalIan Neo-realists.
Interlude, dir. Douglas Sirk, 1957, with June Allyson (her again!) and Rossano Brazzi. Many of you may know Sirk's great melodramas of the 1950s, such as All that Heaven Allows, Imitation of Life, and Written on the Wind. Made during the same period, this one is for some reason much less known than the others. Intense innocent-American/worldy European romance in post-war Munich, shot on location, with a strong theme deriving from "Jane Eyre." Since the male protagonist is a music conductor, this is also Sirk's film that is most steeped in music (Brahms, Schumann, and Mozart, especially), and also perhaps his most musical in construction.
Three Crowns of the Sailor, dir. Raul Ruiz, 1982, starring probably no one you've heard of. Peruvian director working in France (and in French) to adapt what is basically a magic-realist retelling of Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." The cover of the DVD I own also says "Orson Welles meets Hans Christian Andersen and Edgar Allen Poe," which is a pretty fair description too. One of my favorite movies ever.of
EDIT: edited for typos.
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