Shaun Lawton Movies
- 1995
This Scandinavian tragedy is based on a novel by Knut Hamsun and centers on the reminiscences of Lt. Thomas Glahn, a big-game hunter, as he reflects upon the woman who continues to haunt him even though he has "quite forgotten" her. The story jumps back four years. It is summer in an isolated Norwegian fishing village. There the hunter lives in a leased hut in the middle of a forest. His only companion is Aesop, his beloved hunting dog. While there, he encounters Edvarda, a merchant's daughter; for both it is love at first sight. They begin innocently trysting at night in the forest, but their physical expressions of love are limited to the occasional kiss. At the beginning of their relationship, Glahn gives Edvarda two green feathers. Glahn reveres this young woman, and though she would like him to make love to her, he cannot. The woman gets frustrated and the relationship begins to sour. Glahn then begins a sexual relationship with a married woman and Edvarda marries another. Later a tragedy occurs and Glahn does something terribly cruel to Edvarda before he leaves. She returns the feathers. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- 1989
- R
Noted French director Claude Chabrol helmed this oddity, a remake of German director Fritz Lang's 1922 classic Dr. Mabuse. The film features an all-star international cast as it tells the futuristic horror story of a bizarre epidemic which has swept West Berlin leaving a grim trail of grisly suicides. Meanwhile, the media broadcasts weird, highly suggestive propaganda. The authorities are appalled by all the bloodshed, but only one lone cop suspects that the "suicides" are really the work of a demented criminal mastermind. The film is also known as Dr. M. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Alan Bates, Jennifer Beals, (more)
- 1987
Alex (Kari Vaananen) is a Finnish cabbie working in Berlin with plenty of problems in this comedy with film noir touches. With two dead men and a suitcase filled with hundred dollar bills, he has difficulty disposing of the bodies. He is chased by the top crime boss (Samuel Fuller) and his crony (Eddie Constantine). Alex's wife is allergic to the money, so the cabbie endures more than he can handle trying to rid himself of the cash and the corpses. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Kari Väänänen, Roberta Manfredi, (more)
- 1986
This somber drama finds Norbert (Zacharias Preen) as a bank trainee who takes little pleasure in life except movies from the 1950s. He lives with his mother (Karin Baal) and resents her for ending the relationship with the father he has never met. Depressed and alienated, he wanders the streets of Berlin and imagines that strange men in their late 30s may in fact be his father. Norbert engages in a brief love affair with Gabriele (Barbara Rudnik), a woman on the run who is somewhat older than him. He continues to descend into a tragic morass of mental illness, his life paralleling the bleak themes of the films he loves. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Barbara Rudnik, Karin Baal, (more)
- 1985
- R
Laurence Olivier trots out his late-career German accent once again, playing Rudolf Hess in this sequel to Wild Geese. Richard Burton was set to star in the film, but when he died, Edward Fox was brought in as a replacement, playing Burton's younger brother. (the film is dedicated to Burton). The story concerns John Haddad (Scott Glenn), who is hired by a television company to engineer the kidnapping of Rudolf Hess from Spandau prison. Helping him with his assignment are the brother and sister team of Kathy (Barbara Carrera) and Michael Lukas (John Terry). The mercenaries hopes to force Hess to divulge hidden Nazis secrets left unrevealed since World War II. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Scott Glenn, Barbara Carrera, (more)
- 1982
Gudrun Landgrebe plays a housewife who abruptly leaves her husband for a life of prostitution. At first, she retains her staid, middle-class values, but before long she is one of the most sexually adventurous women walking the streets. Soon she has more business than she can manage, forcing her to learn highly advanced bookkeeping skills to keep her business in order. While Gundrun indulges customers with fetishist inclinations, her AC-DC business partner Mathieu Carriere services both male and female clients. Becoming romantically involved themselves, Gundrun and Mathieu find that they can't manage a private and professional life at the same time. As the title suggests, one of the partners takes very drastic measures to express her discomfort with the conditions that prevail. Woman in Flames was an enormous moneymaker in Germany, where it was released as Die Flambierte Frau (which translates to the curiously gastronomic title A Woman Flambee). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Gudrun Landgrebe, Mathieu Carrière, (more)
Usually misattributed to the horror genre, this challenging and highly unusual drama stars Isabelle Adjani as a young woman who forsakes her husband (Sam Neill) and her lover (Heinz Bennent) for a bizarre, tentacled creature that she keeps in a run-down Berlin apartment. In the beginning, her husband knows nothing about the monster and sincerely believes that his wife is insane. He has her tailed by private detectives, whom she kills and feeds to the creature. Still unaware of what has happened, the husband contends with the reserved and inadvertently seductive presence of his wife's look-alike (also played by Adjani), a schoolteacher who frequently comes to tutor his son while his wife is away. Though tempted by her quiet goodness and beauty, he is still passionately in love with his wife and even after he finds out about the murders, he stays by her side and helps her conceal her crimes. Filmed amidst the oppressive backdrop of the Berlin Wall by the expatriate Polish director Andrzej Zulawski (who was unable to work in his homeland after too many clashes with the authorities), the picture is so relentlessly intense and so deliberately esoteric, that most viewers would find it too hard to connect with. Still its symbolism, its unbridled and flashy directorial style, and the tour de force performance by Isabelle Adjani earned this unique tale a cult following in Europe. The version originally released in the U.S. had 45 minutes chopped out; in this form, it is barely comprehensible and looks like a cheap, gory feast. ~ Yuri German, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill, (more)
- 1979
Why is it that some of the most outlandish movie plotlines are grounded in reality? The Great Riviera Bank Robbery is based on an actual occurrence in 1976. A fascist terrorist group, known as "The Chain", joins forces with a gang of professional criminals to pull off a heist. The target: a bank vault in a French resort town, bulging with tourist money. The booty: fifteen million dollars. In the tradition of Rififi, we follow the thieves' progress step by step, inch by inch, from conception to execution to aftermath. Throughout The Great Riviera Bank Robbery, you'll be declaring in dropped-jaw amazement that "this can't be true!"....but true it is. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
