Author Archive: Retro

A feud between families leads to bloodshed.

Extremely reclusive artist takes the place of his late valet and enjoys the world more as a “servant”. Produced by Arthur Hopkins. Dir. Sam Newfield.

Federal agent Alan Fields, undercover as Jonathan Pinkerton, an employee of Lloyds of London, is investigating a bank robbery where one of the three thieves has killed the other two to take possession of all the money.

An attractive young French girl instigates rivalry between two brothers when she becomes the bride of the younger one

A hunt for a spy, in an hotel in the South of France just before World War Two.

A Los Angeles psychiatrist testifies for the prosecution in the trial of an accused child molester. Later the defendant, who is out on bail, is found dead in the psychiatrist’s office, in what appears to be a suicide. Shaken, the psychiatrist moves to the mountains outside of L.A. Not long afterwards a detective he knows comes to him for help. A seven-year-old girl saw someone kill both of her parents, but is so traumatized by the event that she can’t remember anything, and the detective wants the doctor to help jar her memory. Soon, however, the doctor and the detective discover that the parents’ murder and the pedophiles “suicide” may be linked to a shadowy group of wealthy and influential pedophiles, and that the child isn’t the only one whose life is in danger.

A man claims innocence after being accused of murdering a bookie. His wife and brother-in-law investigate, uncovering inconsistencies as they search for the real culprit.

An expedition exploring the Amazon jungle comes across a jungle goddess who lives among the animals and fears none of them–and apparently has found the secret of eternal youth.

Normally, an actor or actress in a foreign-language film was not the ideal candidate for an Academy Award, inasmuch as his or her English-language “performance” was often dubbed in by an anonymous third party. Such was not the case of Sophia Loren in Two Women (La Ciociara), who did her own English dubbing. Adapted by director Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini from the novel by Alberto Moravia, Two Women is the semi-neorealist account of widow Cesira (Loren) and her teenaged daughter, Rosetta (Eleanora Brown), as they struggle to survive in war-ravaged Italy. A conventional romantic triangle between mother, daughter, and Michele (Jean-Paul Belmondo), is barely under way when the war rears its ugly head once more. Seeking shelter in a bombed-out church, Cesira and Rosetta are attacked and raped — a horrifying sequence, capped by a freeze-frame close-up of Rosetta, her face a taut mask of terror (this image was enough to prompt a [...]