Anthony Quinn: a 1969 double-bill
Anthony Quinn stars in two flawed but worthy films from 1969: Daniel Mann’s A Dream of Kings (on DVD from Warner Archive) and Stanley Kramer’s The Secret of Santa Vittoria (on Blu from Twilight Time).
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Burt Lancaster Goes to War!
Burt Lancaster stars in Stanley Kramer and Abby Mann’s classic postwar drama Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) + John Frankenheimer’s WII art heist thriller The Train (1964), both on Blu via Twilight Time.
BR: Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
Abby Mann’s original 1959 Playhouse 90 teleplay was a risky venture in spite of being broadcast 15 years after the end of WWII, tackling the subject of Nazi atrocities when the general public (specifically American and European audiences) had little interest in hearing more tales about murdered Jews and details of something called concentration camps…
BR: Train, The (1964)
One of the greatest WWII and caper films most may never have heard of, The Train was based on the autobiographical book Le front de l’art by Rose Valland, a woman charged with cataloguing France’s Parisian art treasures for the Nazis, and whose meticulous record keeping enabled the French to keep a tally of stolen art during the war’s final period as the Nazis attempted to smuggle as much cultural loot to Berlin…
DVD: Dream of Kings, A (1969)
What begins as a small drama about a liar, gambler, womanizer, father, and proud Greek turns into a much different film when lead character Matsoukas (Anthony Quinn) makes decision and pushes the story in a direction that may have worked in Harry Mark Petrakis’ novel, but in Daniel Mann’s film it causes Matsoukas to lose some tenuous audience sympathy…
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