This film turns on two basic axes: the inquiry into ways of cinematographic representation and a critical image of official Spain at the time of the Franco dictatorship. “Montage of attractions” and Brechtianism in strong doses. Umbracle is made up of fragments (some are archive footage) that resound rather than progress by unusual links, with dejá vu scenes that promise us more but remain tensely unfinished. Jonathan Rosembaun said: “few directors since Resnais have played so ruthlessly with the unconscious narrative expectations to bug us”. Learning from the feeling of strangeness caused by Rossellini as he threw well known actors into savage scenery in southern Europe. Portabella makes Christopher Lee wander around a dream-like Barcelona. Without a doubt Portabella’s most structurally complex and most profoundly political film, that is ferociously poetic.
Doc Saxon and his gang rob the Crown City bank but are double-crossed by Carrasco, a Mexican bandit, who steals the gold and leaves Doc and Donovan with nothing.
This Spanish-Italian co-production tells the story of a man who feels deep guilt for the death of his wife: he, an alcoholic, is convinced that he accidentally caused her fatal fall in their house while he was drunk.
In a French seaside town, at a boarding house for civil servants recovering from surgery and maladies, the six male residents' lives change dramatically when two women arrive: Catherine, lively, sexually liberated, willing to kiss, dance, and sleep with the men, and Leonie, reserved, formal, conservative.
After having challenged the German Ottone to single combat for the hand of Leonza, the bishop's niece, the valiant knight Anselmo da Montebello, leaves for Rome where he must deliver a precious relic to the Pope and obtain a sum of twenty-thousand crowns in order to participate in the third crusade in the Holy Land.
Intent on seeing the Cahulawassee River before it's turned into one huge lake, outdoor fanatic Lewis Medlock takes his friends on a river-rafting trip they'll never forget into the dangerous American back-country.
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Have you watched Umbracle yet? What did you think about it?
