Jo Van Fleet

Trelkovsky (Roman Polanski), a quiet and unassuming Polish immigrant living in France, rents an apartment in Paris whose previous tenant, Egyptologist Simone Choule, attempted to commit suicide by throwing herself out the third-floor window and through a pane of glass below. He visits Choule in the hospital but finds her entirely in bandages and unable to talk. Whilst still at Choule's bedside, Trelkovsky meets Simone's friend, Stella (Isabelle Adjani), who has also come to visit. Stella begins talking to Simone, who becomes aware of her visitors. Initially showing some signs of agitation upon seeing them, Choule soon lets out a disturbing cry, then suddenly dies. It isn't clear which of the two has caused this reaction. Apparently unaware that Choule is now dead, Trelkovsky tries to comfort Stella but dares not say that he never knew Simone, instead pretending to be another friend. They leave together and go out for a drink and a movie (Bruce Lee's Enter The Dragon), where they fondle each other. Outside the theatre they part ways. As Trelkovsky occupies the apartment he is chastised unreasonably by his neighbors and landlord, Monsieur Zy (Melvyn Douglas), for hosting a party with his friends from the clerical office where he works, apparently having a woman over, making too much noise in general, and not joining in on a petition against another neighbor. Trelkovsky attempts to adapt to his situation, but is increasingly disturbed by the apartment and its tenants. He frequently sees his neighbors standing motionless in the toilet room (which he can see from his own window), and discovers a hole in the wall with a human tooth stashed inside. He receives a visit and a letter from one Georges Badar (Rufus), who secretly loves Simone and has believed her to be alive and well. Trelkovsky updates and comforts the man and spends the night out with him drinking at various bars around the city. Gradually he changes his breakfast habits like Simone and shifts from Gauloises to Marlboro cigarettes. One evening, Trelkovsky has a run-in with Stella who is with some friends of hers at a local bar where they talk about the late Simone. After a gathering at friend's house, Stella invites Trelkovsky back to her apartment where she tries to seduce him. Trelkovsky is quite drunk and does not respond to her advances. He tells Stella about finding the human tooth in a wall in his apartment. He then tells a story about a man who lost his arm in an accident and wanted it buried. Trelkovsky instead passes out, leaving Stella to instead sleep beside him. The next day, Trelkovsky returns to his apartment where be becomes severely agitated and enraged when he sees that his apartment has been robbed, while his neighbors and the concierge (Shelley Winters) continue to berate him for making too much noise... despite the fact that he appears to tiptoe around the apartment and watches his TV set without sound. He complains about the robbery to Zy, but the landlord is unsympathetic and refuses to allow Trelkovsky to call the police for he wants the building to remain quiet and respectable. Over the next several days, Trelkvosky becomes hostile and paranoid in his day-to-day environment (snapping at his friends, slapping a child in a park) and his mental state progressively deteriorates as he isolates himself from society. One evening, he imagines himself being attacked by a derelict in the hallway of the lobby in his apartment building while imagining it to be one of his neighbors Madame Dioz (Jo Van Fleet). He buys a wig and woman's shoes and goes on to dress up (using Simone's dress which he had found in a cupboard) and sits still in his apartment in the dead of night. He begins to suspect that Zy and neighbors had driven the previous tenant, Simone, to commit suicide by harassing her, and in his increasingly twisted state of mind, believes that they are trying to subtly change him into Simone so that he too will kill himself. He has visions of his neighbors playing football with a human head in the apartment courtyard, and begins to see himself staring out of his own window and finds the toilet covered in hieroglyphs. After a night of drinking at a local bar, Trelkovsky runs off to Stella for comfort and sleeps over at her apartment and confides in her about his fear that his neighbors are trying to kill him, but she calmly tells him that it is all in his mind. The next morning, after Stella has left for work, he concludes that she too is in on his neighbors' conspiracy when a delivery man arrives outside her apartment with a packaged delivery. In his twisted mind, Trelkovsky looks through the peakhole of the front door and sees Zy there. After the delivery man leaves, Trelkvosky proceeds to wreak havoc in her apartment before departing, and steals her hidden supply of money. That evening, Trelkvosky is drinking at a local bar again when he makes the mistake of asking the barman where he can buy a gun. The barman and the manager throw him out of the bar from where the drunk Trelkvosky wanders into the street where he gets hit by a passing car driven by an elderly couple. The old man and woman stop and exit the car to check on him, and he is not wounded too seriously. An doctor appears and gives him a sedative injection due to his odd behavior. As a result, Trelkvosky perceives the elderly couple as landlord Zy and wife after which the couple return him to his apartment. By this point, a deranged Trelkovsky dresses up again as a woman and throws himself out the apartment window in the exact same manner of Simone Choule, before what he believes to be a clapping, cheering audience composed of his neighbors in the courtyard. The suicide attempt, in fact, wakes up his neighbors (whom Trelkovsky sees as humanoid monsters decending upon him). The neighbors arrive at the scene together with the police just in time for the wounded Trelkovsky to crawl up to his apartment and jump one more time. The end of the movie is enigmatic. Trelkovsky is bandaged up at the local hospital in the same fashion as Simone Choule in the very same hospital bed. When Trelkovsky looks up, two visitors come to visit him the next day. It happens to be Stella... and his own self standing before him in the exact same manner when Trelkvosky and Stella visited Simone in the hospital earlier. Trelkovsky then lets out the same disturbing scream that Simone had screamed. There is the possibility that this scene is not a flashback but that Trelkovsky is really Simone Choule and the whole supernatural cycle is about to start all over again.

This is the funny story about two warring Mafia gangs in New York City. The weaker gang uses a lion to blackmail the opposite gang's "clients." The police succeed in stopping one of the gangs, while the other remains without the boss.

It is about May of 1948 in a small northern Florida town. As the film opens, Lucas Jackson (Paul Newman) is using a pipe cutter to cut the tops off of parking meters. He is drinking, possibly drunk, but not violent. When the police arrive, he is peacefully arrested. Luke and three other men arrive at a rural Florida prison where they serve on a road gang performing hard labor. When he arrives at the prison, the warden reads his record. He remarks that Luke had been in the Army, attained the rank of Sargeant, was awarded several medals, but was discharged as a private. Something he did got him busted back down to the same rank at which he entered the Army. Luke is sentenced to two years. Dragline (George Kennedy) is clearly the leader of the prisoners. He is uneducated and illiterate, but smarter, stronger, bigger, and does not hesitate to exercise his power over them. Most of the prisoners willingly submit to Dragline, but Luke does not. There is no open opposition to Dragline, just a casual refusal to change his behavior in order to please others. Nevertheless, Dragline sees this as a threat to his power and dominance. The men leave at sunset and perform over 12 hours daily of grueling hard labor under intense heat and humidity on the side of the road cutting grass with a sickle or shoveling dirt. One of the new prisoners passes out the first day and another one tries to get out of the detail by sweeping, which was a trick played on him. Luke makes it the first day, but exhausted and barely able to get back into the truck. At the end of the first day for the new men, Alibi, the one who tried to get out of the hard labor by sweeping, is made to sleep in the box the first night, a cramped isolation unit outside to learn a lesson to not challenge the guards. After Luke says something that Dragline takes as a challenge to his authority, Dragline arranges for he and Luke to have a boxing match. Being much larger, Dragline simply pounds Luke into a pulp, but Luke will not give up, or stay down on the ground. What begins as a boxing match with enthusiastic prisoners and guards watching slowly turns into a sad spectacle. Prisoners begin to plead with Luke to lay down and refuse to get back up, and eventually Dragline himself pleads with Luke to simply stop fighting back, but Luke will not stop. The prisoners begin to walk away, unable to watch the sad scene any longer. Dragline himself wants the fight to end, and at one point has to catch the beaten and exhausted Luke from falling down, carrying him across his shoulder and gently setting him on the ground, only to have Luke use what little strength he has left to tap Dragline with one last punch. Finally, even Dragline cannot continue. The only men who are still watching are the guards and the warden, but the warden seems concerned about Luke's stubbornness and the guards remain indifferent. Luke becomes the prisoners' hero, and even Dragline is now respectful of Luke during a card game that night of having tricked a fellow opponent on betting with a bad hand dealt, giving him the name "Cool Hand Luke." On the chain gang, Luke encourages the other prisoners, by his own attitude and energy, to excel at their menial tasks. This not only encourages camaraderie among the prisoners, it deprives the guards of a stick to hold over the prisoners' heads. The prisoners are forced to shovel sand over a freshly tarred road, and they perform the job so quickly and with such a sense of competition that they complete the job early, and thus by default earn a few hours of relaxation, because there is no more road on which to work. On a Sunday, Luke's mother comes to visit him, visibly ill and dying of cancer or emphysema and still chain-smoking, and it is clear that Luke gets his independent streak from her. He admired her ability to live life on her own terms, and has tried to emulate that, but with much different results. During one very hot and rainy night, Luke decides out of the blue that he can eat 50 eggs. Most of the other prisoners oppose and that it's impossible or will kill him, but Dragline begins to take bets. Luke barely succeeds at it and collects all the money from bets. Soon after, Luke receives a telegram that his mother has died. The warden uses the death of Luke's mother as an excuse to lock him in "the box," solitary confinement in a hot wooden shed. The warden claims that men will often run away when their relatives die, so he locks Luke up until after Luke's mother is buried. This has the opposite effect, and Luke promptly escapes after being released from solitary. Luke is later caught, after mailing a picture and magazine back to his former fellow prisoners. He is double-chained, but escapes a second time. Again, he is recaptured. While Luke is becoming the "hero" of his fellow prisoners, it is a role he does not want. He admonishes them to "stop feeding off me," to stop living life vicariously through his acts. The guards and warden determine to break Luke's will. They force him to dig and bury, then re-dig and re-bury, a ditch. He is beaten and tormented, until he finally begs God to spare him from the warden and guards. They take this as a sign that he is finally a broken man, and Luke himself later admits that it did break him. A few days later, the guards have now made Luke a trustee. Nonetheless, when he is later given an opportunity, he seizes it and escapes again, stealing one of the prison trucks to make his get-away. This time, Dragline decides to go with Luke. Only later, after their escape, does Dragline weigh out the consequences. He had only two years left on his sentence, but now - if caught - will probably have many more years in prison. Dragline wants to team up with Luke, but Luke tells him that he wants to go alone. Luke has always been an individual, not a conventional leader, and does not want to take on that role now. Luke goes into a church, after being completely irreverent to God through the entire film, and asks God to help him escape. But the warden and guards arrive, and when Luke mocks them from the church window, he is shot. The local police want to take Luke to the hospital, but the warden insists that they take him back to prison instead. It is clear that Luke will not make it that far, but the warden heads off with Luke in his car. The one guard who always wears sunglasses is attacked by Dragline, and though Dragline is subdued, he managed to take off the guard's mirror-like sunglasses (and the warden runs over them with his car). In the final scene, Dragline is regaling the prisoners with stories of Luke's final moments, and it is clear that Luke is dead. He is the true anti-hero, never wanting to be anybody's role model, just wanting to live life on his own terms. But like the guard's sunglasses, Luke managed to unmask the injustice and hypocrisy of the system in which he was confined. Basically, he gave up his life over a parking meter, but in the final analysis he could not be broken by the system.

Lawman Wyatt Earp and outlaw Doc Holliday form an unlikely alliance which culminates in their participation in the legendary Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. After a long career as a lawman that made him a legend, Wyatt Earp (Burt Lancaster) decides to quit and join his brothers in Tombstone, Arizona. There, he would see them in a feud with the Clantons, a local clan of thugs and cattle thieves. When the showdown becomes inevitable, the help will come from Doc Holliday (Kirk Douglas), a terminally-ill gambler who happens to be another Wild West legend. —Dragan Antulov <dragan.antulov@altbbs.fido.hr>

Set in 1917, during World War I, in the central California coastal town of Salinas. Cal "Cain" Trask (James Dean) and Aron "Abel" Trask (Richard Davalos) are the young adult sons of a modestly successful farmer and wartime draft board chairman named Adam Trask (Raymond Massey). The loner Cal is moody and embittered by his belief that his father favors Aron. The Trask family has a farm in the fertile Salinas valley. Although both Cal and Aron had long been led to believe that their mother had died "and gone to heaven," the opening scene reveals that Cal has apparently come to realize that his mother is still alive, owning and running a successful brothel in nearby town of Monterey. After the father's idealistic plans for a long-haul vegetable shipping business venture end in a loss of thousands of dollars, Cal decides to enter the bean-growing business, as a way of recouping the money his father lost in the vegetable shipping venture. He knows that if the United States enters the war, the price of beans will skyrocket. Cal hopes this will finally earn him the love and respect of his father. He goes to his mother Kate (aka: Eve) (Jo Van Fleet) to ask to borrow the capital he needs. She reluctantly lends him $5,000. Meanwhile, Aron's girlfriend Abra (Julie Harris) gradually finds herself attracted to Cal, who seems to reciprocate her feelings despite her being involved with his younger brother. Cal's business goes quite well, and he decides to give the money to Adam at a surprise birthday party for his father, which he and Abra plan together. As the party gets underway, Aron suddenly announces that he and Abra are engaged. While Adam is openly pleased with the news, both Abra and Cal are uneasy, having recently discovered a mutual attraction for one another is emerging, despite their suppressed feelings. Cal makes a surprise birthday present of the money to his father; however, Adam refuses to accept any money earned by what he regards as war profiteering. Cal does not understand, and sees his father's refusal to accept the gift as just another emotional rejection. When the distraught Cal leaves the room, Abra goes after him, to console him as best she can. Aron follows and orders Cal to stay away from her. In anger, Cal takes his brother to see their mother, then returns home alone. When his father demands to know where his brother is, Cal tells him. The shock drives Aron to get drunk and board a troop train to enlist in the army. When Sam "Seth" Barrows (Burl Ives), the local sheriff, brings the news, Adam rushes to the train station in a futile attempt to dissuade him, he fails and can only watch helplessly as his son steams away from him with his head out the rail car window, maniacally laughing at him to take him to a miliary base. Adam suffers a stroke because of the incredible strain, leaving him paralyzed and unable to communicate. Most of the townspeople, including Sam, blame Cal for what has happened. Sheriff Sam persuades Cal to leave town and quotes a Bible verse relating the event to the conflict of Cain and Abel in the land east of Eden. After everyone leaves, Cal tries to talk to Adam, but gets no response and leaves the bedroom. Abra enters the room alone and pleads with Adam to show Cal some affection before it is too late. She persuades Cal to go back into the room. When Cal makes his last bid for acceptance before leaving town, his father manages to speak. He tells his son to get rid of the annoying nurse and not to get anyone else, but to stay and take care of him himself. The film ends with Cal and Abra sitting by Adam's bedside, the emotional chasm between the father and son apparently closed.

A Sicilian seamstress who idolizes her husband must deal with several family crises upon his sudden death. An Italian-American neighborhood in Louisiana is disturbed when truck driver Rosario Delle Rose is killed by police while smuggling. His buxom widow Serafina miscarries, then over a period of years draws more and more into herself, trying to force her lovely teenaged daughter Rosa to do likewise. On one eventful day, Rose finally breaks away; Serafina learns of Rosario's affair with another woman; and a new carefree, handsome Italian truck driver enters her life... —Rod Crawford <puffinus@u.washington.edu>