Jan 28th  
The Story of Mankind    

(US 1957)                       

The devil and the spirit of Man make their various cases in a celestial trial for the existence of the human race.
A curiously conceived all-star pantomime pageant of semi-comic sketches through history, with occasionally some sincere moments which clash with the comedy, enjoyable as a camp oddity although quickly becoming a bore for its many uses of stock footage from other epics in between the scenes in plastic sets.

Written by: Irwin Allen, Charles Bennett, based on the book by Hendrik van Loon.
Producer/Director: Irwin Allen.
Starring: Ronald Colman, Vincent Price, Cedric Hardwicke, John Carradine, Francis X. Bushman (Moses), Virginia Mayo (Cleopatra), Helmut Dantine (Marc Antony), Peter Lorre (Nero), Hedy Lamarr (Joan of Arc), Henry Daniell, Agnes Moorehead (Elizabeth I), Reginald Gardiner (Shakespeare), Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx (as Newton), Dennis Hopper (Napoleon), Nick Cravat, and others.
Photography: Nicholas Musuraca.
Music: Paul Sawtell.

Jan 20th   
The Men***    

(US 1950)                         

A soldier is shot and paralysed in action, but the real battle is to recover his life with his paraplegia.
Fascinating early use of Brando in films (before ego and self-indulgence took over him) in what is also a slightly sentimentalised but still vivid account of post-war survival for veterans (with real life paraplegics among the cast), although its timing nearer to the start of the Korean War rather than WWII had a bad effect commercially.

Written by: Carl Foreman.
Producer: Stanley Kramer.
Director: Fred Zinnemann.
Starring: Marlon Brando, Teresa Wright, Everett Sloane, Jack Webb, Richard Erdman, Arthur Jurado, Howard St. John, Dorothy Tree.
Photography: Robert De Grasse.
Music: Dmitri Tiomkin.

Preceded by:
How To Make Movies*
(US 1918. 15m. bw. silent; A once discarded but enjoyably revealing staged behind-the-scenes look at Chaplin's newly formed studio, with brief inclusion of The Tramp and the definite air of him enjoying his new surroundings and those he was working with.; d: Charles Chaplin; s: Charles Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Albert Austin, and others.)