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by Nathaniel R

While we're sad about the current state of Oscar we still have 93 other years of Oscar history to obsess over. So I'm happy to share that I was invited back for a final appearance on "The One-Inch Barrier". Juan Carlos Ojano's podcast has looked at every Oscar race for Best International Feature Film while moving backward in time. Well almost every. There's still a few episodes to go. For this episode Juan Carlos and I talked about the nominated films of 1957 including The Gates of Paris (France), the noir The Devil Strikes at Night (Germany), the musical melodrama Mother India (India), the WW II survival drama Nine Lives (Norway), and the winning film Federico Fellini's enchanting Nights of Cabiria (Italy).

Ingmar Bergman's influential early classic The Seventh Seal was also submitted for the Oscars that year but the Academy unwisely passed. I have words about that.

Olaf Möller in front of Katharine Hepburn posters for Christopher Strong and Spitfire: "Das Spukschloss im Spessart [The Haunted Castle]! Which is fantastic. Great musical! It's a horror musical." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

On the opening night of The Lost Years of German Cinema: 1949–1963 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, film historian Olaf Möller, following his introduction of Gottfried Kolditz's White Blood (Weißes Blut), joined me for a conversation on the program he curated that includes sensational work of filmmakers Helmut Käutner, Hans Heinz König, Fritz Lang, Peter Lorre, Kurt Hoffmann, Harald Braun, Wolfgang Staudte, Aleksander Ford, Konrad Petzold, and Robert Siodmak.

Earlier in the day at the Walter Reade Theater I watched Robert Siodmak's The Devil Strikes At Night (Nachts, Wenn Der Teufel Kam) and Hans Heinz König's Roses Bloom In The Moorland (Rosen Blühen Auf Dem Heidegrab). I started out with a couple of childhood television memories.

Fritz Lang's The Tiger Of Eschnapur...

‘The Salesman’ (Courtesy: Amazon Studios and Cohen Media Group)

By: Carson Blackwelder

Managing Editor

The one chance for the entire world to get involved with the Academy Awards has always been the best foreign language film category. Since any country can submit a film each year, though, that means the competition is intense. Let’s take a look at the countries that have snagged nominations this year and see how they’ve performed in the past in the hopes of shedding some light on what might happen come February 26.

This year the five nominees for best foreign language film are Land of Mine from Denmark, A Man Called Ove from Sweden, The Salesman from Iran, Tanna from Australia, and Toni Erdmann from Germany. The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg lists The Salesman as the frontrunner in this category — obviously due to the film’s merits and also potentially due to its director,...

Best Foreign Language Film Oscar 2016: 'Viva' with Héctor Medina. Multicultural Best Foreign Language Film Oscar 2016 submissions Nearly ten years ago, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences changed a key rule regarding entries for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar;* since then, things have gotten quite colorful. Just yesterday, Sept. 16, '15, Ireland submitted Paddy Breathnach's Viva – a Cuban-set drama spoken in Spanish. And why not? To name a couple more “multicultural and multinational” entries this year alone: China's submission, with dialogue in Mandarin and Mongolian, is Wolf Totem, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud – a Frenchman. And Germany's entry, Labyrinth of Lies, was directed by Giulio Ricciarelli, who happens to be a German-based, Italian-born stage and TV actor. 'Viva': Sexual identity in 21st-century Cuba Executive produced by Best Supporting Actor Academy Award winner Benicio Del Toro (Traffic), Viva tells the story of an 18-year-old Havana drag-club worker,...

Virginia Bruce: MGM actress ca. 1935. Virginia Bruce movies on TCM: Actress was the cherry on 'The Great Ziegfeld' wedding cake Unfortunately, Turner Classic Movies has chosen not to feature any non-Hollywood stars – or any out-and-out silent film stars – in its 2015 “Summer Under the Stars” series.* On the other hand, TCM has come up with several unusual inclusions, e.g., Lee J. Cobb, Warren Oates, Mae Clarke, and today, Aug. 25, Virginia Bruce. A second-rank MGM leading lady in the 1930s, the Minneapolis-born Virginia Bruce is little remembered today despite her more than 70 feature films in a career that spanned two decades, from the dawn of the talkie era to the dawn of the TV era, in addition to a handful of comebacks going all the way to 1981 – the dawn of the personal computer era. Career highlights were few and not all that bright. Examples range from playing the...

'The Devil Strikes at Night,' with Mario Adorf as World War II era serial killer Bruno Lüdke 'The Devil Strikes at Night' movie review: Serial killing vs. mass murder in unsubtle but intriguing World War II political drama After more than a decade in Hollywood, German director Robert Siodmak (Academy Award nominated for the 1946 film noir The Killers) resumed his European career in the mid-1950s. In 1957, he directed The Devil Strikes at Night / Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam, an intriguing, well-crafted crime drama about the pursuit of a serial killer – and its political consequences – during the last months of the mass-murderous Nazi regime. Inspired by real events, The Devil Strikes at Night begins as war-scarred Hamburg is deeply shaken by the horrific murder of a waitress. Through the Homicide Bureau, inspector Axel Kersten (Claus Holm) begins an investigation that leads him to a mentally disabled laborer,...

Denzel Washington, Dionne Warwick, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Dietmar Bär: Golden Camera Awards Initially a television award, the German weekly Hörzu's Golden Camera Award now covers a variety of categories, including movies, music, sports, pop culture, and even activism. Unlike the German Film Academy's prestigious Lola Awards — Germany's equivalent of the Oscars — the Golden Camera is basically a pop award. At a ceremony held Saturday, Feb. 4, at the Berlin headquarters of Hörzu's publishing house Axel Springer, this year's winners in the international movie categories were Scarlett Johansson and Denzel Washington, while Morgan Freeman received a Lifetime Achievement trophy. A couple of weeks ago, Freeman received a similar honor — the Cecil B. DeMille Award — from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Additionally, Dionne Warwick received her own Lifetime Achievement Golden Camera in the music category. Now, not that the U.S. media would know or care about this little detail,...

Nachts, WENN Der Teufel Kam / The Devil Strikes At Night (1957) Direction: Robert Siodmak Cast: Claus Holm, Annemarie Düringer, Mario Adorf, Hannes Messemer, Carl Lange, Werner Peters Screenplay: Werner Jörg Lüddecke; from an article by Will Berthold Oscar Movies Recommended with Reservations Mario Adorf in The Devil Strikes at Night After more than a decade in Hollywood, German-born director Robert Siodmak (nominated for an Academy Award for The Killers in 1946) resumed his European career in the mid-1950s. In 1957, he directed Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam / The Devil Strikes at Night, an intriguing, well-crafted crime drama about the pursuit of a serial killer — and its political consequences — during the last months of the mass-murderous Nazi regime. Inspired by real events, The Devil Strikes at Night begins as war-scarred Hamburg is deeply shaken by the horrific murder of a waitress. Through the Homicide Bureau, inspector Axel Kersten (Claus [...]...