During a #summer #vacation on #FireIsland, two young men come across Sandy, an attractive young woman with an injured #seagull. While nursing the bird back to life, the relationship between the three deepens. A second girl, the much younger Rhoda (the breathtaking Catherine Burns) is taken in by the trio.

“What are you going to do with the rest of your life? Sit on the shore and watch?”

– Sandy

Set almost entirely on a sunny #beach, Frank Perry's Last Summer may be one of the most claustrophobic films you'll ever watch.

May Lin is a real estate agent who meets up with a man in the bare, too sterile flat she brokers. Another man who took the key of the same dwellings for his own cause, decides to settle in.

 

Over time, the apartment serves not only as the space where events take place, but locks and guides the flatmates through their compulsions.

Someone breaks into song on National Sing Out Day (USA)

 

In a #plague-ridden Taiwan, it rains relentlessly. The #rain and a #virus forces people to retreat. In Hsiao Kang's crumbling building, a plumber inadvertently punches a hole from his floor to the unnamed woman's below. While she, another victim of the #disease, holes up in her apartment they struck up a strange detached relationship.

 

Between the endless downpour and frantic #food hoarding, in her heart a #musical sings.

A Walloon language professor and his French set designer fiancée are at an impasse. While his Flemish students vocally protest against more Walloon influence at their uni, the couple – who superficially speak the same #language, #French – struggles to find the right words. They meet, part ways, then find each other again on a train that at morning turns out to be standing still in the middle of nowhere. The man, now without her, disembarks and with two acquaintances who also were on that train tries to find out where he and she are.

 

André Delvaux's Un soir, un train is a masterpiece about finding the right language in a fractured world.

An American tourist visiting Dorset is tricked by a prostitute, then falls victim to a youth gang controlled by volatile con King – a still very green Oliver Reed at his meanest. The trickster is King's sister, who confides in the American hoping to escape her brother's incestuous advances.

“I'm strange, all right! I'll show you just how strange I am!”

– King

The couple elopes to a nearby island, closely followed by King and his gang, where they find a group of #children, all contently living in an underground lab, with #AutomaticDoors only they can control.

 

They are the damned.

A man and a woman meet and fall in love. The woman – Anouk Aimée – still mourns the loss of her stuntman husband, while the man – Jean-Louis Trintignant – is alone since his partner took her life, incapable of dealing with his near-fatal #crash at #LeMans.

“It's foolish to refuse happiness.”

#Trintignant came from a family obsessed with race car driving and was an avid amateur driver himself. His uncle, the #GrandPrix racer Maurice Trintignant, can be seen driving a #Maserati Tipo 151/1 during the race scene.

A deceptively simple film by Claude Lelouch, with an equally breezy soundtrack by Francis Lai.

Various characters lose their shoes in Fellini's hedonistic La dolce vita, most famously Anita Ekberg after entering a freezing Fontana di Trevi with paparazzo Marcello Mastroianni.

“I like lots of things. But there are three things I like most: love, love, and love.”

– Sylvia

A young woman jumps out of a window, leaving behind her husband, an #antiques dealer. Sitting in their bedroom with the body lying in state, the widower remembers her. In his memory, she is nameless, abstract, a state not a life..

 

Une femme douce is closely adapted from Fyodor #Dostoyevsky Кроткая [Krotkaya / A Gentle Creature] (1876).

Sunrise was bestowed the award for “Best Unique and Artistic Picture” on that first Oscar night. The first and last time that ever happened; in 1930, the price was scrapped and replaced by “Outstanding Picture” aka “Best Picture”. And that one went to the much more American-patriotic Wings (1927).

 

Also rightfully awarded in '29 were Janet Gaynor (Best Actress in a Leading Role), Charles Rosher and Karl Struss (Best #Cinematography), while Rochus Gliese was nominated for Best #ArtDirection.

“This song of the Man and his Wife is of no place and every place; you might hear it anywhere, at any time.”

– opening title card

Sunrise is a fantastic tour de force, and it winning that award should make you feel hopeful for the future of cinema. Instead, the current list of nominees and winners is, at least to me, a checklist of what to avoid for ever.

Raymond Rouleau's Les sorcières de Salem – with a screenplay by Marxist philosopher Jean-Paul #Sartre – is a very early film adaptation of Arthur Miller's 1953 #TheatrePlay The Crucible. An allegory of #McCarthyism, the play is a (partially dramatised) retelling of the #SalemWitchTrials, a dramatic episode in early US-American history. During several court and town meetings, 200 people were falsely accused of meddling with the Devil; 19 of them were eventually executed.

“If she is innocent! Why do you never wonder if Parris be innocent, or Abigail? Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God's fingers? I'll tell you what's walking Salem — vengeance is walking Salem. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!”

– Arthur Miller, The Crucible (1953)

Miller himself was accused of un-American activities in 1956 and convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to identify others present at meetings he had attended. Which doesn't mean that #WitchTrials are a thing of the past. As easily one can transplant Puritan religious mass hysteria to 1950s McCarthy anti-socialism, as easy is it applicable to the state of the world today.