Two arrested bandits are being transported by the governor’s son Chang (Wong Chung) when the bandit gang sets upon them, rescuing their members, slaying all of Chang’s men and taking him prisoner. Legendary warrior Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei-pei) is sent to rescue Chang, who is also her brother, and along the way she receives help from a kung fu master living as a drunken beggar named Drunken Cat (Yueh Hua).
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In Nazi-occupied France, Jewish theatre director Lucas Steiner (Heinz Bennent) has apparently fled the country to South America, but is in fact living in the cellar of his theatre, with only his wife Marion (Catherine Deneuve) knowing of the situation. The theatre keeps running, with Marion as the lead actress in the last play Lucas wrote before exile. Lucas listens to the play rehearsals during the day and gives Marion notes in the evening, which she passes on to the new director Jean-Loup Cottins (Jean Poiret) the next day. They have a rising star lead actor in Bernard Granger (Gerard Depardieu), who in turn has a roving eye on all the women in the company, including the costume designer (Andréa Ferréol) and a younger actress (Sabine Haudepin). The film follows the play’s production from casting through rehearsals into opening night and beyond, tracking the lives of the players and the impact of the Second World War.
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The life and career of long-serving news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) has taken a downward slide recently after his wife left him and he sank into drink, and his once high ratings have fallen to the point where his network, UBS, is forced to let him go. After being told he has just 2 weeks left on the air Howard broadcasts that in a week he will kill himself, live and during his show. Understandably he is immediately taken off the air by Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall), a rising executive surreptitiously taking over UBS from the inside, however Howard’s best friend and manager Max Schumacher (William Holden) is able to allow Howard one last show, for a chance at a dignified farewell, which Howard takes and runs with, instead offering up some frank and hard truths the general public eats up. Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), UBS’ new head of programming, sees potential in Howard’s popularity, and adapts his news show to suit, but what is more the important, the ratings or their host’s sanity?
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Clay Gregory (Bill Pullman) has successfully acquired $700,000 via a dodgy drug deal, but he wasn’t expecting his wife Bridget (Linda Fiorentino) to run off with it whilst he was in the shower. She flees New York City and lays low in the small town of Beston in Buffalo, aware that if she spends any of the money and her husband catches up with her he’ll legally own half of her belongings, and she can’t go back to New York or he’ll find her. So instead she settles down in Beston with the unassuming Mike (Peter Berg), a local man back in town after something went wrong with his recent marriage in Florida. Mike wants out of Beston, and Bridget knows just how they can help one another out.
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Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) is a poor little rich girl running away from her father (Walter Connolly) in order to be with her fiancé Westley (Jameson Thomas), whom her father disapproves of. She aims to take a bus from Florida to New York, but has never had to travel alone in the outside world before. Peter Warne (Clark Gable) has just been fired from his job as a newspaper reporter and happens to be taking the same bus as Ellie, who is trying to travel incognito, without the press getting wind of her situation. Ellie and Peter strike up an uneasy agreement wherein he’ll help get her to New York if she gives him the exclusive rights to her story once she gets there, but of course that’s not how it’s going to play out in the end.
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On Thanksgiving weekend, 1976, policeman Robert W Wood pulled over a car for driving at night with no headlights on in Dallas, Texas. The car was stolen, which Wood had no knowledge of, and sadly he was shot and killed, with the car peeling away as Wood’s partner, one of the first female officers in Dallas, fired shots after it. The police investigation led to 16-year-old David Ray Harris, who had reportedly stolen the car from his neighbour and later bragged to his friends about committing the crime, but he pointed the finger at 28-year-old Randall Adams, a man new in town planning to start a new job, whom Harris had given a ride to and spent the day with.
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This review was originally written as part of my USA Road Trip for French Toast Sunday.
Dr. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman) is a brilliant psychiatrist, but is lacking in bedside manner. She works at Green Manor amongst some quite sexist male colleagues and has never found love, until the new hospital director, Dr. Anthony Edwardes (Gregory Peck, and I’d love it if in E.R. Anthony Edwards played a Dr. Gregory Pecke, but alas life isn’t perfect) arrives to take over from long-term serving director Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carroll). Constance and Edwardes become close but his behaviour concerns her, particularly his outbursts whenever he sees dark parallel lines against a pale background and, in digging into his past, Constance discovers that Edwardes may not be quite who he seems.
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In San Francisco, profession surveillance expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is working on his latest assignment, recording a discussion between a man and a woman in a busy courtyard. Having successfully recorded their conversation, Harry begins to grow suspicious that passing on the recordings to his employer may result in some dire consequences for those involved, as happened to Harry on another job sometime ago, which directly caused the murders of three people.
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Professor Humbert Humbert (James Mason) has a job as a French Poetry teacher lined up in Ohio in autumn, but until then he plans to spend the summer in New Hampshire, staying in the spare room of the widow Mrs. Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters). It’s clear Charlotte takes an instant liking to Humbert, but he is instead infatuated with Charlotte’s 14-year-old daughter Lolita (Sue Lyon), who relishes this sudden influx of attention.
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Madame Beudet (Germaine Dermoz) lives an unhappy live being mocked and tormented by her husband (Alexandre Arquillière). He works all day as a cloth merchant and ignores his wife when he comes home. He arranges tickets for them for the theatre to a performance of Faust but, when she declines to go, he pretends he will kill himself with a gun he keeps in a top drawer. Evidently he keeps the gun unloaded and uses this trick often to mock his wife. However, when he goes to the show with his associate and his wife (Jean D’Yd & Madeleine Guitty), Mrs. Beudet loads the gun in the hope that the next time he pulls the stunt he’ll follow through and kill himself.
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Life Vs Film 