[6] Italian writer/artist/political activist Pier Paolo Pasolini (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom) paints a bleak portrait of middle-class complacency in Teorema, the story of a bourgeoise household seduced and forever changed by a mysterious stranger played by Terence Stamp (Billy Budd, The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert). The entire family — father, mother, son, daughter, and even the maid — experience …
[4] Cliff Robertson stars as Charly, a mentally disabled man who agrees to have an experimental operation that makes him more intelligent. But just as the experiment’s success is announced to the scientific world, Charly learns he will soon regress to his original state. Robertson gives an fairly effective performance here, but Charly, based on the required junior high school reading title, Flowers for Algernon, …
[7] A young man and woman living under the care of a kindly priest get wrapped up in a series of seemingly supernatural murders. It turns out a group of modern-day pirates murdered the crew of a ship three years earlier, and now the victims’ skeletons are out for vengeance. What’s great about The Living Skeleton is that the synopsis above is only the beginning. …
[8] Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda star in this fluffy, family-oriented comedy about a widower with ten children who falls in love with a widow who has eight kids of her own. But do they dare merge their families into a twenty-person household? Yours, Mine and Ours is a charming little flick that quickly won me over with Ball’s and Fonda’s performances and plenty of …
[7] Malcolm McDowell stars in Lindsay Anderson’s tale of schoolyard rebellion. If…. caught the zeitgeist when it was released in 1968 and took home the Palme d’Or at Cannes for its allegorical look at the class system and social upheaval. It also received notoriety for its nudity and bloodshed. McDowell plays one of three outcast ‘troublemakers’ in a British private school. When the self-righteous student …
[8] It may be tempting to dismiss Planet of the Apes as high camp, but there’s provocative science-fiction under those monkey masks. Charlton Heston plays an American astronaut who’s on his way back to Earth when he crashlands on a strange, desolate planet where apes rule and humans are primitive beasts of burden. Heston is captured, tortured, and humiliated by the apes. He finds sympathy …
[6] There is at least a certain amount of fun to be had in watching Clint Eastwood pump lead into Nazis. Where Eagles Dare is about a group of Allied forces trying to raid a Nazi stronghold to rescue a captured General who knows the secret plans of D-Day. The film tries very hard to be The Guns of Navarone (they’re both written by Alistair MacLean). …
[7] Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau give career-highlight performances as mismatched roommates Felix and Oscar in this comedy based on the Neil Simon play. Everyone knows the gist of the story: two men, one neat and one sloppy, are forced to share an apartment, whackiness ensues. But what you may not know is that Lemmon’s character is living with Matthau because he’s under suicide watch. …
[6] Horror master Mario Bava tackles this James Bond-like action/adventure about a stealthy thief nicknamed Diabolik (John Phillip Law) who eludes a pursuing detective through a series of elaborate heists. I didn’t find the characters terribly interesting, but the film is awash in awesome 60s production design and music. Diabolik’s expansive underground lair is every bit as magnificent as anything from a Bond film. Diabolik’s love …
[8] Steve McQueen plays a millionaire who robs a bank just for shits and giggles, and Faye Dunaway plays the insurance investigator who will either turn him in… or fall in love with him. Director Norman Jewison embraces the French New Wave to give the film a unique tone that favors style slightly higher than substance, and I’m okay with that. The result is a …
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