Metropolitan audiences had already seen two films released after Kurosawa's Maxim Gorky adaptation: The Hidden Fortress and Yojimbo, though they wouldn't see The Bad Sleep Well, which fell between those two, for another year -- at which point I suppose that would be the "new" Kurosawa film.
If a Japanese adaptation of a Russian play is too highbrow, Americans could at least boast of their own oft-filmed playwright. Hard on the heels of The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone comes another Tennessee Williams adaptation, opening wide in Miami today.
Summer and Smoke apparently wasn't one of Williams's big hits initially but its reputation grew with his own, and in the early Sixties it seemed like his name was an exploitable commercially in Hollywood as Edgar Allan Poe's. Here's a trailer from the TCM website.
If Williams draws the highbrows (and maybe the middlebrows, too), Spartanburg, SC's idea of adult pictures is slightly more downmarket -- at least at first glance.
Il peccato di Anna would be particularly risque fare in South Carolina; Camillo Mastrocinque's 1952 Italian film uses a staging of Othello as the backdrop for an interracial romance. Mastrocinque has been noted here in the past as the director of the underrated Carmilla adaptation Crypt of the Vampire. In the second feature, Joseph Cates directs Anne Francis as a prostitute in an adaptation of a non-fiction expose. No clips online for either film.
These print ads are just beautiful. Keep them coming. In the age of fading, faceless multiplexes, these reminders of movie palaces and the riches they held inside still resonate.
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