Epics-HD: 55 Days at Peking *** (1963, Drama)
Summary: In 1900 Peking, Boxer fanatics are encouraged by the Empress to take over the city and besiege the international diplomatic quarter.
Divine-HD: Butterfield 8 **+ (1960, Drama)
Summary: "I was the slut of all time!" declares Elizabeth Taylor in the role for which she won her first Academy Award®. Taylor plays Gloria, a model of loose morals who discovers a last chance at love and redemption when she spends a week with Weston Ligget (Laurence Harvey), a man who married into money and hates himself for it. They fall in love, but before they can find happiness they have to overcome their own worst natures. BUtterfield 8 (named after Gloria's answering service) is a big boozy melodrama, full of gorgeous clothes, catty comments, and emotional showdowns--but along the way it plumbs some genuine sadness. No one can be simultaneously overblown and utterly sincere like Elizabeth Taylor; the movie is mired in the morality of the time, but her performance makes Gloria's mixture of grief and anger seem immediate and genuine. --Bret Fetzer
World Cinema-HD: Montenegro *** (1981, Comedy)
Summary: From eccentric Yugoslavian director Dusan Makavejev (SWEET MOVIE) comes this edgy comedy about a bored woman's liberation through sex. Unhappy American spouse Marilyn Jordan (Susan Anspach) is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She lives with her remote husband, Martin -- the erotic equivalent of a two-minute yawn. One day at the airport, she is separated from him, misses her plane, and joins up with some jovial Yugoslavian immigrants. She begins an affair with one of them, Montenegro, and must then decide whether her new life of unremitting passion can substitute for the stability she abandoned.
Divine-HD: The Producers ***+ (1968, Comedy)
Summary: Mel Brooks's directorial debut remains both a career high point and a classic show business farce. Hinging on a crafty plot premise, which in turn unleashes a joyously insane onstage spoof, The Producers is powered by a clutch of over-the-top performances, capped by the odd couple pairing of the late Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, making his screen debut.
Mostel is Max Bialystock, a gone-to-seed Broadway producer who spends his days wheedling checks from his "investors," elderly women for whom Bialystock is only too willing to provide company. When wide-eyed auditor Leo Bloom (Wilder) comes to check the books, he unwittingly inspires the wild-eyed Max to hatch a sure-fire plan: sell 25,000 percent of his next show, produce a deliberate flop, then abscond with the proceeds. Unfortunately for the producers (but fortunately for us), their candidate for failure is Springtime for Hitler, a Brooksian conceit that envisions what Goebbels might have accomplished with a little help from Busby Berkeley.
Truly startling during its original 1968 release, The Producers does show signs of age in some peripheral scenes that make merry at the expense of gays and women. But the show's nifty cast (notably including the late Dick Shawn as LSD, the space cadet that snags the musical's title role, and Kenneth Mars as the helmeted playwright) clicks throughout, and the sight of Mostel fleecing his marks is irresistibly funny. Add Wilder's literally hysterical Bloom, and it's easy to understand the film's exalted status among late-'60s comedies. --Sam Sutherland
