A chance encounter with a blonde drummer during the Holy Week in the village of Calanda leaves a deep impression on Julián (José Luis López Vázquez). When years later he reunites with his childhood friend Pablo, he finds that Pablo is married to bubbly cosmopolitan Elena (Geraldine Chaplin), the spitting image of the elusive drummer. Infatuated he tries to court her, but Elena sees nothing in the drab radiologist. Julián then turns his attention to his shy assistant Ana (also Chaplin) and grooms her into becoming the two unattainable women.

“Things last as long as they last.”

– Pablo

Saura's Peppermint Frappé takes #Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) – indeed the peppermint green of the drink is an homage – with a twist of #Buñuel and serves it over an anti-#Franco​ist tale of self-doubting machismo obsessing over The Other. Even Elena's car, American instead of a much more obvious European model, dismisses fascist Spain's perceived superiority. Indeed the Generalisimo drove a Cadillac.

Cheated out of their wages, broke Americans #Bogart and Holt are approached by a former prospector. There's #gold in the #SierraMadre mountains, he tells them.

“I know what gold does to men's souls.”

– Howard

Seemingly character driven, Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is an adventure moved by a relentless #landscape, the urge to drift, and #greed.

“Europe, a Stutz Bearcat, the best restaurants. You fellas really have a hard life, don't you?”

– Harold Horn, DA

A car crash on National Insurance Awareness Day (USA)

 

A couple rushing home at night hit a cyclist. Despite knowing that the man's still alive, they opt to leave the site of the #crash and never mention it again. News reports about the death of the cyclist cause a rupture; because of the couple's #class differences – she a wealthy socialite, he a former falange soldier turned university professor – because they're lovers, and because no one can know about their whereabouts on the night of the accident.

“He's still alive.”

Striking about Bardem's Muerte de un ciclista is its outsiderness in the Spanish film landscape. By adopting the visual language of both Italian #Neorealismo and Hollywood #melodrama, Bardem elegantly circumvents #Franco​ist censorship.

– Why so grumpy? – I'm starved! Dinner is always late!

Posted while deciding on my film dinner. Eventually I went with Tourneur's La Main du Diable (1943).

“I don't care about your barley. Or, your vines! Or, your new terra!”

– Karen

Karen – “Karin” in the opening credits – is a displaced Lithuanian woman in an Italy-based refugee camp. She meets an Italian military man bivouacking on the other side of the barbed wire and decides to say yes when he proposes. When the newly-weds leave for home, she finds to her dismay that he's a poor Sicilian fisherman from #Stromboli; a magnificent active volcanic island home to a small Catholic parish. Again displaced, Karen is confronted with herself more than with the others that share her faith.

“Here we are, poor wretches, in this hell, Condemned to tyranny.”

– Antonio

Roberto #Rossellini's Stromboli (Terra di Dio) is a peculiar melodramatic Italian/American hybrid that seems to strongly dismiss the Italian aspect. The significance of Struògnuli – the Sicilian name for the volcano – and the people's faith connected to the volatile mountain and the surrounding sea is presented as primitive superstition. That the Sicilian dialogue – song, prayer, life – remains untranslated and the locals' broken English is used as comic relief adds insult to injury.

 

Otello Martelli's photography excels when he manages to tear himself away from Bergman's face. Only when we're confronted with the magnificence of Struògnuli, the gifts from the ocean, and the greatness of nature we'll be able to understand why the island is man's home.

Commissioned for a West-German TV series called Kunstgeschichten (litt. both “art stories” and “#art histories”), filmmaker Harun Farocki visits artist Sarah Schumann in her #Berlin studio.

“An diesem Tag war das Bild, drei Monate nach Beginn und 67 Arbeitstagen fertig.”

– narrator

The resulting documentary shows the process of creating one art piece over the course of nine weeks. Schumann's work in that period consists of collage portraits of women important in her life.

A nuclear family of three goes out on a #camping-slash-fishing-trip on a remote Mexican beach. On arrival, son Bobby (Lee Aaker) causes trouble by climbing a rickety old jetty, which then collapses after dad Doug (Barry Sullivan) frees the boy's stuck foot. Now with Doug stuck and the tide rolling in, Helen (Barbara Stanwyck) is on her own and needs to find a rope. And help…

– Aw, mom. You always talk about civilization.

– Don't knock it, son.

John Sturges' Jeopardy is a thrilling reverse home invasion based on Maurice Zimm's radioplay A Question of Time. Without falling into the trap of an illustrated radio broadcast, the haunting photography by Victor Milner, small, intense cast, short runtime and claustrophobic sets make for a very modern, economic thriller.

 

And Barbara Stanwyck the type of heroine we wouldn't see much of until decades later.