Audley, Maxine

The Agony and the Ecstasy

Carol Reed (The Third Man) directed this 1965 portrait of the relationship between Michelangelo (Charlton Heston) and Pope Julius II (Rex Harrison), who commissioned the artist to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Based on a novel by Irving Stone, the script plods along, juggling the dynamics between the two men along with a somewhat perfunctory love story and distracting battle sequences. Reed seems more attuned to the nuances and great pains of the artistic process, as seen in sequences of Michelangelo working. But the overall focus of the film is unfortunately fuzzy. --Tom Keogh

Charlton Heston and Rex Harrison portray two of the Renaissance's most colorful figures in this historical drama based on Irving Stone's best-seller set in the early 16th century. When Pope Julius ll (Harrison) commissions Michelangelo (Heston) to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the artist initially refuses. Virtually forced to do the job by Julius, he later destroys his own work and flees to Rome. Eventually resumed, the project becomes a battle of wills fueled by artistic and temperamental differences that form the core of this movie. Nominated for an Oscar® Cinematography and named one of the year's best films by the National Board of Review.

The Vikings

Kirk Douglas produced the trendsetting barbarian epic The Vikings and took the showiest, most aggressive role: lusty Viking prince Einar, the "only son in wedlock" of King Ragnar (a cackling, wild-eyed Ernest Borgnine). With jagged scars down his face and a milky-white blind eye that almost glows in his skull, Douglas has a rowdy time battling defiant slave Tony Curtis (the long-lost heir to the British throne) for the hand of the beautiful princess Janet Leigh. It's pure Hollywood hokum, sure, but spectacular hokum: the great cinematographer Jack Cardiff turns his Norway locations into a lush Valhalla on earth. Faced with an absurd story, journeyman director Richard Fleischer goes for the gusto in brawling Viking parties, furious sieges, and clanging broadsword battles. An enormous hit, the film spawned a huge wave of Viking movies, some perhaps smarter but none as much fun. --Sean Axmaker

Hollywood legends Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, Ernest Borgnine and Janet Leigh dazzle in this epic chronicle of brutal rivalry and bloodthirsty ambition. Roaring through the 9th century with powerful performances and "brilliant visual drama" (Cue), The Vikings is a riveting "spectacle of have-at-'em action" (Los Angeles Examiner)! Bitter hatred divides two brothers. Prince Einar (Douglas) is the son and heir of a savage Viking chieftain. Prince Eric (Curtis) is his unknowing half-brother, the bastard offspring of Einar's father and an English queen. When the Vikings kidnap a princess (Leigh), her beauty inflames the desires of both men, forcing a bloody duel thatdecides their fate and the future of the English throne.

The Prince and the Showgirl

Destined to remain a curio in the careers of Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier, The Prince and the Showgirl is a good movie that might have been great. While's she's wonderful as a saucy showgirl with a knack for foreign relations, Monroe's off-screen notoriety in 1957 made this a directorial nightmare for Olivier, who never bursts out of his stiff-collared finery as the Carpathian Prince Regent, who's smitten by Marilyn's innocent, unpolished candor. Of course, she's actually smarter than the monocled monarch, at least in her sensible handling of his stuffed-shirt diplomacy, so it's easy to forgive Terence Rattigan's script (from his play The Sleeping Prince) for favoring pomp over circumstance. The comedy percolates without bubbling over in this tale of opposites attracting, but it's a top-drawer production anyway, blessed by Jack Cardiff's gorgeous Technicolor cinematography and by the charm of costars who successfully concealed their off-screen anxieties. --Jeff Shannon

Peeping Tom - Criterion Collection

Michael Powell lays bare the cinema's dark voyeuristic underside in this disturbing 1960 psychodrama thriller. Handsome young Carl Boehm is Mark Lewis, a shy, socially clumsy young man shaped by the psychic scars of an emotionally abusive parent, in this case a psychologist father (Michael Powell in a perverse cameo) who subjected his son to nightmarish experiments in fear and recorded every interaction with a movie camera. Now Mark continues his father's work, sadistically killing young women with a phallic-like blade attached to his movie camera and filming their final, terrified moments for his definitive documentary on fear. Set in contemporary London, which Powell evokes in a lush, colorful seediness, this film presents Mark as much victim as villain and implicates the audience in his scopophilic activities as we become the spectators to his snuff film screenings. Comparisons to Hitchcock's Psycho, released the same year, are inevitable. Powell's film was reviled upon release, and it practically destroyed his career, ironic in light of the acclaim and success that greeted Psycho, but Powell's picture hit a little too close to home with its urban setting, full color photography, documentary techniques, and especially its uneasy connections between sex, violence, and the cinema. We can thank Martin Scorsese for sponsoring its 1979 rerelease, which presented the complete, uncut version to appreciative American audiences for the first time. This powerfully perverse film was years ahead of its time and remains one of the most disturbing and psychologically complex horror films ever made. --Sean Axmaker

A frank exploration of voyeurism and violence, Michael Powell's extraordinary film is the story of a psychopathic cameraman-his childhood traumas, sexual crises, and murderous revenge as an adult. Reviled by critics upon its initial release for its deeply unsettling subject matter, the film has since been hailed as a masterpiece.

The Looking Glass War

A King in New York / A Woman of Paris (2 Disc Special Edition)

Chaplin working as usual on both sides of the camera was in self-imposed exile from the United States when he launched this pie in the face at targets that include overhyped movies overamped music celebrity facelifts ad pitchmen and political witchhunts. Chaplin plays a deposed European monarch who comes to Manhattan and is soon made a media sensation by advertisers eager to cash in on his name. Charlie's son Michael Chaplin plays the firebrand youth who helps the king rediscover his ideals. The comedy sequences are imaginative and many. The satire is topical yet timeless. Today as yesterday Chaplin rules.Running Time: 362 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA UPC: 085393765323

A King in New York
A King in New York, Charlie Chaplin's penultimate film--featuring his final starring performance--was made in 1957 but wasn't officially released in America until the '70s, when it, surprisingly enough, won an Oscar for Chaplin's score. What took so long? Thanks to his politics and unorthodox personal life, Chaplin was pretty roundly hated by the late '50s, but had the movie been better, someone might've brought it stateside sooner. Chaplin plays King Shahdov of Estrovia, on the lam when revolution grips his homeland. In New York, despite the occasional indignity, he's treated as royalty until he takes a stand against the commie-hunters, a plotline that hit way too close to home at the time (Chaplin, remember, was ahead of everyone in attacking Hitler when he made The Great Dictator). There's one inspired bit, as Shahdov orders dinner over the din of a supper club, but overall, the satire is strident, and Chaplin's takes on such things as technology and pop music make him look decidedly like an old fogey. --David Kronke

A Woman of Paris
At the height of his popularity, Charlie Chaplin chose to make a straight dramatic feature--without himself in a starring role. The plot of A Woman of Paris is perhaps not new: after a tragic misunderstanding, a small-town girl (former Chaplin paramour and longtime co-star Edna Purviance) goes to Paris and becomes the mistress of a rich playboy (Adolphe Menjou). But if the outline is familiar melodrama, the film still looks remarkable for its measured, adult attitude toward its characters; they are not black or white, but complicated, sophisticated shades of gray. Menjou, in particular, is a charming and thoroughly delightful cad. The film's matter-of-fact spirit on the subject of how adults conduct their sexual lives is also impressive. Critics loved the picture, but audiences did not, and Chaplin soon returned to comedy. He can be glimpsed, disguised, in a one-scene walk-through as a clumsy train porter. --Robert Horton

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed

Peter Cushing delivers his most cold-blooded portrayal of the mad Baron in his fifth turn as Dr. Frankenstein. Abandoning his latest experiment after a drunk stumbles into his secret lab (upsetting a severed head) he hurriedly finds new lodgings with a sweet young thing (Hammer glamour babe Veronica Carlson) whose boyfriend (Simon Ward, in his film debut) works in the local sanitarium. Frankenstein blackmails the lovers into complicity with his latest experiment, resorts to kidnapping and murder for his subjects, turns accomplice Ward into a killer, and even rapes Carlson in a coldly brutal scene. The goriest film of the series kicks off with a flamboyant beheading with a scythe (seen only as a spray of blood across a window) and is full of bloody brain surgery, conveniently offscreen but vividly suggested in the slurping sound effects of surgical saws and drills and the gallons of blood left in their wake. Freddie Jones is heartbreaking as Frankenstein's latest creature, a once-insane scientist who awakens to find himself cured but trapped in a grotesque, alien body. When he attempts to communicate with his wife, half hiding in a dark corner while she peers around and sees only a monster, director Terence Fisher offers the most affecting moment of pathos in the entire series. Cushing and Fisher reunited for one more film together, the seventh and final film in the series, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell. --Sean Axmaker

Another take on the classic tale. This one's a British version from 1969 with a more heartless version of the mad scientist. Instead of having a lab assistant to do his dirty work, this Dr. Frankenstien pushes a young doctor and his betrothed to kidnap the next victim. They must capture the mentally ill Dr. Brandt so that hi sbrain may be used in Dr. Frankenstein's experiments.

Hell is a City

Sleeping Tiger, The

In an effort to apply his theories of criminal reformation, a psychiatrist gives refuge to a handsome crook. The thief and the doctor's wife fall in love and make plans of their own.

The Prince & The Showgirl (Deluxe Series Box Set)