mcg's - Rented List
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The Battle of Algiers (1966)La Battaglia di Algeri
Gillo Pontecorvo's multi-award winning picture 'The Battle of Algiers' has perhaps never been as pertinent as it is now. Set from 1954 to 1962, the movie uses documentary-style black and white photography to recreate real events. Algerian liberation fighters use terrorist techniques against the French colonial occupiers; the French retaliate with brutal military force. Brilliantly directed set-pieces and remarkable crowd scenes make the film a masterpiece; the ominous familiarity of its subject makes it a must-see" - The Times How to win battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in Cafes. Sounds familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.'' - Pentagon tlyer for their in-house screening of Battle Of Algiers All the armies of the world - including the Pentagon - will never, but never, be able to conquer a country which wants to control its own destiny" - Saadi Yacef - Director:
- Gillo Pontecorvo
- Cast:
- Brahim Hadjadj, Jean Martin, Yacef Saadi
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Ruthless criminals, a dedicated honest cop, sultry women and a gripping plot - all the elements of a classic police action-drama are here in force. Police Sergeant Bannion (Glenn Ford) is investigating the apparent suicide of a corrupt cop, then is suddenly ordered to stop - and The Big Heat is on. Driven to unravel the mystery, Bannion continues probing until an explosion meant for him, kills his wife. He resigns from he force and soon learns that behind it all is the powerful underworld led by Mike Lagana (Alexander Scourby) and his cold-blooded henchman, Vince Stone (Lee Marvin). When Stone's girl Debby (Gloria Grahame) makes a play for Bannion, Stone disfigures her face and in revenge, she tells all she knows. A life-or-death confrontation between Bannion and Stone brings this classic film noir thriller to a climatic unmissable finale! - Director:
- Fritz Lang
- Cast:
- Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Jocelyn Brando
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What is The Trouble With Harry? Well, it's the fact that he's dead, and while no-one really minds, everybody thinks they are responsible. After several unearthings of the corpse, plenty of humour a la Hitchcock, and love affairs between the major characters, the real cause of death is revealed, and Harry troubles no one again. It's a delightful romp and a decidedly different movie from the Master of Suspense. - Director:
- Alfred Hitchcock
- Cast:
- John Forsythe, Shirley MacLaine, Edmund Gwenn
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Classe Tous Risques (1960)The Big Risk
French gangland boss Abel Davos (Lino Ventura) has been on the run in Italy for a decade in order to escape a death sentence. But when police finally close in, he turns to his old criminal friends to help him and his young family return to Paris. With loyalty in short supply, it takes an insouciant stranger (Jean-Paul Belmondo) to come to the rescue. - Director:
- Claude Sautet
- Cast:
- Lino Ventura, Sandra Milo, Jean-Paul Belmondo
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Freud (1962)Freud: The Secret Passion
He dared to search beyond the flesh...This pseudo-biographical movie depicts 5 years from 1885 in the life of the Viennese psychologist Freud (Montgomery Clift). Disillusioned with the way his colleagues refuse to treat patients in a mental asylum, following a trip to Paris to visit Dr. Charcot he sees how hysterical patients are treated by means of hypnosis. Experimenting with these new techniques, Freud concentrates on Cecily Koertner (Susannah York), a young woman suffering a nervous and physical breakdown upon the death of her father. - Director:
- John Huston
- Cast:
- Montgomery Clift, John Huston, Susannah York
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Set in the early 1930's and filmed on location in the Tennessee Valley, Wild River features Montgomery Clift as an idealistic Tennessee Valley Authority agent who is assigned the task of convincing the locals to move from their property so that a beneficial dam can be built. One major barrier stands in his way, a feisty old woman (the estimable Jo Van Fleet) who simply refuses to budge from her land. Elia Kazan's masterful recreation of a troubled and complex period in American history is marked not only by its astounding locations, its first rate performances (alongside Van Fleet, Lee Remick excels as the holdout's granddaughter and look out also for an uncredited Bruce Dern in his first screen role) but by its forward thinking and undeniably powerful social liberalism. - Director:
- Elia Kazan
- Cast:
- Montgomery Clift, Lee Remick, Jo Van Fleet
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Clift stars as George Eastman, a poor young man determined to win a place in respectable society and the heart of a beautiful socialite (Elizabeth Taylor). Shelley Winters plays the factory girl whose dark secret threatens Eastman's professional and romantic prospects; consumed with fear and desire, Eastman is ultimately driven to a desperate act of passion that unravels his world forever... - Director:
- George Stevens
- Cast:
- Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters
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Léon Morin, Priest (1961)Leon Morin, Pretre
In a town in the French Alps during the Occupation, Barny (Emmanuelle Riva) is a young, wayward, sexually frustrated widow, living with her little girl. She is also a communist militant who long ago decided that the easiest way was the best. One day she enters a church, randomly chooses a priest (Jean-Paul Belmondo) to confess to and, while in confessional, attempts to provoke him by criticizing Catholicism. Instead of being affronted, the priest engages her in an intellectual discussion regarding religion. The priest is Leon Morin, young, handsome, smart and altruistic. He invites Barny to continue the conversation outside of confessional. She begins regularly seeing him and is impressed by his moral strength, while he makes it his mission to steer her onto the right path. - Director:
- Jean-Pierre Melville
- Cast:
- Jean-Paul Belmondo, Emmanuelle Riva, Irène Tunc
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When shy, emotionally fragile Catherine Sloper (Olivia de Havilland), the daughter of a wealthy New York doctor, begins to receive calls from the handsome spendthrift Morris Townsend (Montgomery Clift), she becomes possessed by the promise of romance. Are his smoldering professions of love sincere, as she believes they are? Or is Catherines calculating father (Ralph Richardson) correct in judging Morris a venal fortune seeker? - Director:
- William Wyler
- Cast:
- Olivia De Havilland, Montgomery Clift, Ralph Richardson
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An Autumn Afternoon / A Hen in the Wind (1962)Sanma no aji / Kaze no naka no mendori
Yasujiro Ozu's elegiac final film, 'An Autumn Afternoon', charts the inevitable eclipse of older generations by irreverent youth. Revisiting the story of his earlier masterpiece Late Spring (1949), Ozu once again casts Chishu Ryu in the role of Hirayama, the concerned father to unmarried Michiko. Harangued on all sides to marry off Michiko, Hirayama reluctantly prepares to bid his old life farewell. A cast of tragi-comic characters weaves seamlessly through this gently satirical portrayal of life's inevitable, endless cycle. - Director:
- Yasujirô Ozu
- Cast:
- Chishû Ryû, Shima Iwashita, Keiji Sada
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Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)Battle of City Hall
Off-screen pals James Cagney and Pat O'Brien teamed for the sixth time in this enduring gangster classic. Cagney's Rocky Sullivan is a charismatic ghetto tough whose underworld rise makes him a hero to a gang of slum punks. O'Brien is Father Connolly, the boyhood chum-turned-priest who vows to end Rocky's influence. Other ace talents join them: Humphrey Bogart as a scheming lawyer, Ann Sheridan as Rocky's hard-edged girlfriend and the Dead End Kids as worshipful street urchins, all ably directed by Michael Curtiz. - Director:
- Michael Curtiz
- Cast:
- James Cagney, Pat O'Brien, Humphrey Bogart
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The Camp (2015)Naked Among Wolves / Nackt unter Wölfen
Buchenwald Concentration Camp, March 1945. The prisoners' struggle for survival and plans of an underground resistance movement are made all the more perilous by the arrival of a young Jewish boy, smuggled in by a new arrival in the hope of hiding him. With the guards tipped off, the courage and humanity of the inmates is tested to the limit as the SS resort to their most inhumane methods to find the boy and the resistance leaders. With the US Army just weeks away the prisoners must remain defiant and pray for liberation in the face of unspeakable brutality. - Director:
- Philipp Kadelbach
- Cast:
- Florian Stetter, Peter Schneider, Sylvester Groth
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Whilst holidaying in Marrakech, ordinary English couple, Perry (Ewan McGregor) and Gail (Naomie Harris), befriend a flamboyant and charismatic Russian, Dima (Steilan Skarsgard), who unbeknownst to them is a kingpin money launderer for the Russian Mafia. Lured into a Russian mobsters plans to defect, the couple soon find themselves thrust between the Russian Mafia and British Secret Service agent Hector (Damian Lewis), neither of whom they can trust. - Director:
- Susanna White
- Cast:
- Carlos Acosta, Radivoje Bukvic, Stellan Skarsgård
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I Vitelloni (1953)I vitelloni
The film is essentially a rites of passage story involving a group of friends growing up together in a small provincial town. This seemingly aimless fraternity is led by Fausto in their daily routine of hanging around in bars and wasting their days whilst dreaming of breaking free of their parochial chains to taste the adventure the world has to offer. Events force the womanising Fausto to choose between responsibility and freedom which in turn prompts the other members of the group to look at their own futures in a new light. - Director:
- Federico Fellini
- Cast:
- Alberto Sordi, Franco Fabrizi, Franco Interlenghi
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Ashes and Diamonds (1958)Popiól i Diament
On the last day of World War Two in a small town somewhere in Poland, Polish exiles of war and the occupying Soviet forces confront the beginning of a new day and a new Poland. In this incendiary environment we find Home Army soldier Maciek Chelmicki, who has been ordered to assassinate an incoming commissar. But a mistake stalls his progress and leads him to Krystyna, a beautiful barmaid who gives him a glimpse of what his life could be. Gorgeously photographed and brilliantly performed, Ashes and Diamonds masterfully interweaves the fate of a nation with that of one man, resulting in one of the most important Polish films of all time. - Director:
- Andrzej Wajda
- Cast:
- Zbigniew Cybulski, Waclaw Zastrzezynski, Adam Pawlikowski
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