Ladies Courageous – 1944
All but forgotten today, Ladies Courageous was one of the more successful wartime morale-boosters. Loretta Young heads the virtually all-female cast as Robert Harper, no-nonsense executive officer of the original 24 members of the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron. Each of the women under her command has a story to tell, and tell it they do in long, verbose flashbacks. Standing out in the supporting cast is Geraldine Fitzgerald as Vinnie Alford, who joins the WAFs for publicity purposes and nearly scuttles the program in the process. Also appearing is the tragic Diana Barrymore, whose leading role was considerably trimmed before the film was released to the public.
$
8.00
Five Gates To Hell - 1959
The celebrated author of 1975's Shogun, James Clavell, directs (and produced and
wrote) this effective, if low-budget World War II drama. The story takes place
in French Indochina (later Vietnam) where a group of two Red Cross doctors and
seven nurses are captured by a guerrilla band and taken to the side of a
grievously ill warlord. The realities of war and its effects on everyone are
brought forward as the doctors are eventually killed, and the nurses use sex as
a means of escaping their captors. Brutal scenes of the stabbing of a patient
under surgery and the symbolic murder of a nun are qualified by the even-handed
portrayal of the damage war does to the human side of human nature.
$
8.00
Bitter
Victory – 1958
In Nicholas
Ray's WWII drama, two British officers, Captain Leith (Richard Burton) and
Major Brand (German character actor Curd Jürgens, who would later play Bond foe
Karl Stromberg in The Spy Who Loved Me), a South African, are being considered
to lead a daring raid to steal crucial documents from a Nazi stronghold in
Libya. The two don't seem particularly fond of each other. Brand's wife, Jane
(Ruth Roman of Strangers on a Train), arrives on the base. There's an odd
awkwardness when Brand introduces her to Leith at the officers' club. It turns
out the two already know each other, intimately. They were romantically
involved long ago, until Leith broke it off without warning. Jane later met
Brand. Leith and Jane keep their relationship a secret from Brand, but he
realizes something's up when he goes out for a bit and comes back to find them
dancing together. He later gets angry when his wife slips up and refers to
Leith as "Jimmy." Brand and Leith are chosen to lead the mission
together. Jane says goodbye to Leith, and Wilkins (Nigel Green of The Ipcress
File) and some other soldiers see them together. The raid goes fairly smoothly,
until Brand can't bring himself to kill a German sentry, and Leith feels
compelled to step in and do it for him. Brand's resentment of Leith grows. The
team steals the documents and heads out across the desert to make their escape.
They're attacked by a German patrol, and after the melee, Brand arouses
suspicious when he orders Leith to stay with three badly wounded soldiers while
the rest of the group leaves for the rendezvous point. Bitter Victory is based
on the novel by René Hardy. Jean-Luc Godard famously said of the film in his
review, "Nicholas Ray is cinema."
$
8.00
Unpublished
Story - 1942
Bob Randall
(Richard Greene) is a reporter who gets to witness first-hand the British
retreat from Dunkirk in May of 1940. He returns to his job in a London now
facing nightly German bombing raids, and finds himself saddled with Carol
Bennett (Valerie Hobson), a neophyte reporter. Bob is eager to take on the
Nazis and, in the absence of any on the ground that he can fight, he turns to
the leaders of a pacifist movement, The People for Peace. But no sooner does he
start to look into who they are than he finds himself being shadowed by
mysterious men and stirring up a hornet's nest of activity in his wake. While
Carol tries to keep up and do her bit, and Bob tries to look out for her and
find out just what he's stepped into -- which soon involves kidnappings and
murder -- the German bombers keep coming and the newspaper's survival is
threatened. Bob and Carol are drawn together romantically in the midst of these
overlapping crises, and manage to find some time for each other while helping
their long-suffering editor (Brefni O'Rourke) save the newspaper and the
British secret service save the country.
$
8.00
Night Train
To Munich – 1940
Rex Harrison
astonished his fans by donning a Nazi uniform in the British suspenser Night
Train (originally titled Night Train to Munich). Actually he's a British agent,
working undercover to rescue a Czech inventor from the Gestapo. The inventor's
daughter (Margaret Lockwood) becomes the unwitting pawn of a genuine Nazi (Paul
von Hernreid, just before he became Paul Henreid) during a long train ride from
Germany to France and back again. Director Carol Reed never denied that his
inspiration for Night Train was Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (both films were
written by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat). The homage was solidified by the
presence in Night Train of two carryovers from the Hitchcock film: those ardent
British cricket fans Charters and Caldicott (Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne).
Night Train was liberally adapted from the Gordon Wellesley novel Report on a Fugitive
$
8.00