Ivan Tchenko Movies
- 1977
Movies depicting the heroic acts of Yugoslavians involved in the anti-Nazi resistance during World War II were an important genre there for decades. This film, set in Croatia, is based on a true story. A high-school youth, who loves a Jewish girl and is a member of the communist underground, witnesses the progressive isolation of his Jewish and even his Serbian professors and the German's use of collaborating youths to enforce and add terror to their regulations. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Zvonimir Crnko, Franjo Majetic, (more)
- 1975
The son of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria, Crown Prince Rudolf, is believed to have shot his female lover and himself in a tragic suicide pact in 1882 in Mayerling. Due to Imperial cover-ups, the full story may never be known. This story has been filmed several times, in French in 1935 and in English in 1968. Hungarian director Miklos Jancso recreates those events for his own purposes, continuing his favored theme of the rejection of paternal authority. In the film, which has very little dialog, Rudolf is a good-natured pan-sexual golden boy, who cavorts on his rural estate with a host of beautiful, aristocratic lovers and friends of both sexes. He refuses to leave his country idyll even though he has been ordered to by the Emperor, his father. Despite the fact that for a large part of the film, attractive young people go about unclothed and engaging in erotic encounters, the mood is one of melancholy rather than prurience. The Prince is a political liberal who wishes to arrange things so that the Emperor will arrest him, creating a public scandal which will provide a rallying point for the opposition. Instead, when the expected troops come, Rudolf's sensuous friends loyally ward off the Imperial officers, humiliating them in the process. The result is that the guests, the Prince and a hermaphrodite friend are killed by newly arrived Imperial reinforcements, and the now-familiar official story of murder and suicide is concocted for public consumption. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Lajos Balazsovits, Pamela Villoresi, (more)
- 1969
This 90-minute TV drama was lensed on location in Paris. Charles Boyer guest stars as an old-line French Marxist who happens to be an old friend of Crime magazine publisher Dan Howard (series regular Gene Barry). Howard would like Boyer to help him pull off a delicate diplomatic mission. The Red Chinese delegation has just stormed out of an international health conference, and Howard has been assigned to woo them back. Craig Stevens also guest-stars on this October 10, 1969 episode of the popular adventure series Name of the Game. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1968
Vanessa Redgrave stars in this film biography of the free-spirited modern interpretive dancer Isadora Duncan. Trained in classical dance, Duncan shattered the traditional conformities in her art and her personal life. The film begins at the end of her life as she recalls the past while dictating her memoirs to her male secretary. Her uninhibited sexuality and insistence on personal freedom and expression shocked more conservative and narrow-minded patrons and audiences. She brought in elements of classic Greek dance during the height of the jazz age and had children in and out of wedlock. Married to sewing-machine heir Paris Singer (Jason Robards) and the Russian poet Sergei Essenin (Ivan Tchenko), her life was a rollercoaster ride of success and tragic failures. Two of her children drowned when her chauffeur left the car unattended and the vehicle plunged into a river. Duncan lived by her own rules, often shunned by the very people who had so passionately embraced her pioneering efforts in dance, women's liberation and free thinking. Redgrave was nominated for an Oscar for her performance. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Vanessa Redgrave, John Fraser, (more)
