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Squadron Leader Gerry Burton is sent to a tranquil country village to recover from the effects of a plane crash and be nursed back to health by his beautiful sister Joanna. As they are new to the community, they are shocked to receive an anonymous, sexually explicit poison pen letter. They later find that other village gentry have been victimized by the same crank writer, and the vicar's wife sends for her friend Miss Marple in hopes of exposing the perpetrator. When a solicitor's wife apparently takes poison after receiving a particularly vicious message, Miss Marple suspects that the letters are a smokescreen for something more ominous. When a house maid is found bludgeoned to death, she knows she is right. Written by Gabe Taverney (duke1029@aol.com0
A rare beatnik artifact of the early 1960s, one of only a few such films made before the hippies took over Hollywood. Low budget and in b&w, it's set in Greenwich Village, with what seems like a mostly improvised script. Directed by Larry Moyer, it begin as a late film noir crime tale involving a bank robbery where only one of a group of thieves escapes with his life, as well as $90,000 in loot. Injured and on the run, he hides in a local tour bus and is soon taken in by a group of bohemians who shoot him full of morphine to ease his pain and let him sleep it off on a mattress. 60's cult hero and "Vanishing Point" star, Barry Newman plays Mason, head beatnik. Multi-generational star Lionel Stander is the owner of both an upstairs coffeehouse and garret, where these beatniks hang out. They, in turn, bring the tourist trade in. Although the robbery is supposed to be the main focus of the plot, it quickly turns into more of a character study featuring these rebellious bon vivants and their odd lifestyle, which includes smoking and selling dope, mooching at art galleries, long conversations about all sorts of things and a beat shindig, shot Cinema Verite style in the director's actual apartment. Along the way, they do things like shower together at the home of an heiress and mostly plot ways to get the bank heist money away from Barry Newman, who's too clean-cut to be one of them, but wins us over with his naturally arrogant charisma. The whole thing climaxes at the Feast of San Gennaro, in a typically documentary style conclusion. Written by Richard Santoro
