There are a zillion great, old films for free on youtube. I wanted to bring them together on one blog for lovers of older films or people who want to learn about film history and see some of the best films ever. When I was younger there was a theater called the Parkway (in Chicago) that showed such films. It was torn down (so it goes). So this blog is kind of my own personal Parkway. djg51qu@gmail.com I will post new films each Saturday.
I think this Japanese mystery owes a lot to American film noir - especially in regard to its reliance on bizarre coincidences to drive the story-line.
I'm posting this film because I really loved the performance of Yoko Minimida, who was also in the film The Crucified Lovers. She is great as the compassionate and trusting wife who helps a journalist determine who the real murderer of a low-life criminal is, thus freeing her husband.
Basically, as a telephone receptionist, the heroine of this film hears, by accident, the voice of a person who has committed murder while she is on the phone at her job, and recognizes the voice three years later as the voice of the new 'business' associate of her husband. Stuff starts rolling from there.
It looks as if there are some North Korean films on youtube.
This war movie was the first North Korean film I had ever seen - essentially a group of North Korean commandos has to infiltrate South Korea during the war, posing as injured soldiers traveling to a South Korean hospital. One of the soldiers has to break his cover, however, when he sees a South Korean guy physically abusing a child on the train. This is despite his awareness that "...the mission is everything." Breaking his cover thus means that the mission has to be attempted in a much more difficult fashion since the enemy is now aware that a group of commandos is on some type of mission in their territory.
So this is not an unsophisticated plot twist. After the soldier breaks his cover, he is told that he is too emotional, yet, one has to question whether or not saving the mission was worth allowing an innocent child to be abused. Probably the higher or better response was to potentially abandon the mission in order to protect the child, or was it? So the film has its thought-provoking element.
Also, this type of moral conflict is relevant to a story which was in the news last year in NY City. A police officer was working undercover within a motorcycle gang that was suspected of drug dealing and various other crimes. He felt that he had been told not to break his cover - his mission was to determine where this gang was getting its drugs. So when the motorcycle gang began beating an innocent man on a street in Manhattan, he did not attempt to stop this nor did he call the police to stop the beating. He was then arrested and recently sentenced to prison for not breaking his cover. So in our society it would seem that breaking one's cover is mandatory if one might become involved in some type of crime.
There's a lot of patriotism and martial arts and North Korean comradery in this film.
Groucho Marx once quipped, "Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you've got it made."
Van Heflin's two most memorable roles were as uber-sincere men in: The Strange Love of Martha Ivers and Shane.
In The Prowler, on the other hand, Heflin plays a guy who is great at playing the role of or effectively mimicking a sincere man - maybe a self-referential gibe initiated by director Joseph Losey at Van Heflin's screen reputation.
Like most film noir classics, there are flaws. There are bizarre coincidences which would never have happened in real life, for example. But that's film noir - bizarre coincidence is part of the genre.
