title: If Beale Street Could Talk (film)

text: On October 18, 2017, it was reported that "If Beale Street Could Talk" had begun filming in New York City. That same month, Regina King, Colman Domingo, Brian Tyree Henry, Dave Franco, and Ed Skrein joined the cast of the film. Michael Beach, Finn Wittrock, Aunjanue Ellis, and Diego Luna were added in November, and in December 2017, Pedro Pascal and Emily Rios joined. In March 2018, Nicholas Britell was announced as the composer of the film's score.


title: If Beale Street Could Talk (film)

text: "If Beale Street Could Talk" began a limited release in the United States on December 14, 2018, with an expanded release on December 25. It had previously been scheduled for November 30, 2018. The film had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 9, 2018. It also screened at the New York Film Festival on October 11, 2018, the New Orleans Film Festival on October 21, 2018, and the St. Louis International Film Festival on November 10, 2018.


title: If Beale Street Could Talk (film)

text: "If Beale Street Could Talk" grossed $14.9 million in the United States and Canada, and $5.6 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $20.6 million.


title: If Beale Street Could Talk (film)

text: During its opening weekend, December 14, the film made $219,174 from four theaters, for a per-venue average of $54,794, one of the best of 2018. In its second weekend, the film earned $114,902, and in its third made $759,578 from 65 theaters. In its fourth weekend, the film expanded to 335 theaters, earning $1.9 million. The next weekend, January 11, following its Golden Globe win the film expanded to 1,018 theaters and grossed $2.3 million.


title: If Beale Street Could Talk (film)

text: On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of , based on reviews, with an average rating of . The website's critical consensus reads: ""If Beale Street Could Talk" honors its source material with a beautifully filmed adaptation that finds director Barry Jenkins further strengthening his visual and narrative craft." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 87 out of 100, based on 53 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Audiences polled by PostTrak gave the film an 82% overall positive score and a 65% "definite recommend".


title: If Beale Street Could Talk (film)

text: Eric Kohn of IndieWire gave the film an "A−", stating: "Jenkins' follow-up to "Moonlight" also maintains his own expressionistic aesthetic, with its lush colors and entrancing faces that speak volumes in few words, resulting in a fascinating hybrid experience — a seminal voice of the past merging with one of the present in a mesmerizing burst of creative passion." Siddhant Adlakha of /Film said the film felt "electric and alive" and specified, "The worlds these characters create — whether in the form of individual, soul-piercing stares, or moments of burning passion filmed in profile — carry with them the weight of the very history of which Tish constantly speaks."


title: If Beale Street Could Talk (film)

text: At the 76th Golden Globe Awards, the film was nominated for three awards: Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Supporting Actress for King, and Best Screenplay, with King winning. At the 91st Academy Awards, the film was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score, and Best Supporting Actress for Regina King, with King winning. At the 24th Critics' Choice Awards, the film received five nominations, including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress for King, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Both the National Board of Review and American Film Institute included it in their top 10 films of 2018.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Strangers on a Train is a 1951 American psychological thriller film noir produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and based on the 1950 novel "Strangers on a Train" by Patricia Highsmith. It was shot in the autumn of 1950 and released by Warner Bros. on June 30, 1951, starring Farley Granger, Ruth Roman, and Robert Walker.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: The story concerns two strangers who meet on a train, one of whom is a psychopath who suggests that they "exchange" murders so that neither will be caught. The film initially received mixed reviews but has since been regarded much more favorably.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: In 2021, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Amateur tennis star Guy Haines wants to divorce his promiscuous wife Miriam so he can marry Anne Morton, the daughter of a US Senator. On a train, wealthy smooth-talking psychopath Bruno Antony recognizes Haines and reveals his idea for a murder scheme: two strangers meet and "swap murders" — Bruno suggests he kill Miriam and Guy kill Bruno's hated father. Each will murder a stranger, with no apparent motive, so neither will be suspected. Guy humors Bruno by pretending to find his idea amusing, but is so eager to get away from Bruno that he leaves behind his engraved cigarette lighter.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Guy meets with Miriam, who is pregnant by someone else, at her workplace in Metcalf, their hometown. Miriam informs Guy that she no longer wants to end their marriage. She threatens to claim that he is the father, in order to thwart any divorce attempt. That evening, Bruno follows Miriam to an amusement park and strangles her while Guy is on the train to Washington. When Guy arrives home, Bruno informs him Miriam is dead and insists that he must now honor their deal.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Guy goes to the Mortons' home, where Anne's father informs Guy that his wife has been murdered. Anne's sister Barbara says that the police will think that Guy is the murderer since he has a motive. The police question Guy, but cannot confirm his alibi: a professor Guy met on the train was so drunk that he cannot remember their encounter. The police assign an escort to watch him.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Bruno follows Guy around Washington, introduces himself to Anne, and appears at a party at Senator Morton's house. To amuse another guest, Bruno playfully demonstrates how to strangle a woman. His gaze falls upon Barbara, whose appearance resembles Miriam's. This triggers a flashback; Bruno compulsively squeezes the woman's neck, and other guests intervene to stop him from strangling her to death. Barbara tells Anne that Bruno was looking at her while strangling the other woman, and Anne realizes Barbara's resemblance to Miriam. Her suspicions aroused, Anne confronts Guy, who tells her the truth about Bruno's scheme.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Bruno sends Guy a package containing a pistol, a house key, and a map showing the location of his father's bedroom. Guy creeps into Bruno's father's room to warn him of his son's murderous intentions, but instead finds Bruno there waiting for him. Guy tries to persuade Bruno to seek psychiatric help, but Bruno threatens to punish Guy for breaking their deal.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Anne visits Bruno's home and tries explaining to his befuddled mother that her son is a murderer. Bruno mentions Guy's missing cigarette lighter to Anne and claims that Guy asked him to search the murder site for it. Guy infers that Bruno intends to plant it at the scene of the murder and incriminate him. After winning a tennis match, Guy evades the police escort and heads for the amusement park to stop Bruno.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: When Bruno arrives at the amusement park, a carnival worker recognizes him from the night of the murder; he informs the police, who think he has recognized Guy. After Guy arrives, he and Bruno fight on the park's carousel. Believing that Guy is trying to escape, a police officer shoots at him, but instead kills the carousel operator, causing the carousel to spin out of control. A carnival worker crawls underneath it and applies the brakes too abruptly, causing the carousel to spin off its support, trapping the mortally injured Bruno underneath. The worker who called the police tells them that Bruno, not Guy, is the one he remembers seeing the night of the murder. As Bruno dies, his fingers unclench to reveal Guy's lighter in his hand. Realizing that Guy is not the murderer, the police ask him to come to the station to tie up loose ends.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Sometime later, another stranger on a train attempts to strike up conversation with Guy in the same way as had Bruno. Guy and Anne coldly walk away from him.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Alfred Hitchcock's cameo appearance occurs 11 minutes into the film. He is seen carrying a double bass as he climbs onto a train.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Hitchcock said that correct casting saved him "a reel of storytelling time", since audiences would sense qualities in the actors that did not have to be spelled out. Hitchcock said that he originally wanted William Holden for the Guy Haines role, but Holden declined. "Holden would have been all wrong—too sturdy, too put off by Bruno", writes critic Roger Ebert. "Granger is softer and more elusive, more convincing as he tries to slip out of Bruno's conversational web instead of flatly rejecting him."


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Warner Bros. wanted their own stars, already under contract, cast wherever possible. In the casting of Anne Morton, Jack L. Warner got what he wanted when he assigned Ruth Roman to the project, over Hitchcock's objections. The director found her "bristling" and "lacking in sex appeal" and said that she had been "foisted upon him." Perhaps it was the circumstances of her forced casting, but Roman became the target of Hitchcock's scorn throughout the production. Granger described Hitchcock's attitude toward Roman as "disinterest" in the actress, and said he saw Hitchcock treat Edith Evanson the same way on the set of "Rope" (1948). "He had to have one person in each film he could harass," Granger said.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Kasey Rogers (credited as Laura Elliott) noted that she had perfect vision at the time the movie was made, but Hitchcock insisted she wear the character's thick eyeglasses, even in long shots when regular glass lenses would have been undetectable. Rogers was effectively blind with the glasses on and needed to be guided by the other actors.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Hitchcock secured the rights to the Patricia Highsmith novel for just $7,500 since it was her first novel. As usual, Hitchcock kept his name out of the negotiations to keep the purchase price low. Highsmith was quite annoyed when she later discovered who bought the rights for such a small amount.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Securing the rights to the novel was the least of the hurdles Hitchcock would have to vault to get the property from printed page to screen. He got a treatment that pleased him on the second attempt, from writer Whitfield Cook, who wove a homoerotic subtext into the story. With treatment in hand, Hitchcock shopped for a screenwriter; he wanted a "name" writer to lend some prestige to the screenplay, but was turned down by eight writers, including John Steinbeck and Thornton Wilder, all of whom thought the story too tawdry and were put off by Highsmith's first-timer status. Talks with Dashiell Hammett got further, but here too communications ultimately broke down, and Hammett never took the assignment.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Hitchcock then tried Raymond Chandler, who had earned an Oscar nomination for his first screenplay, "Double Indemnity", in collaboration with Billy Wilder. Chandler took the job despite his opinion that it was "a silly little story." But Chandler was a notoriously difficult collaborator and the two men could not have had more different meeting styles: Hitchcock enjoyed long, rambling off-topic meetings where often the film would not even be mentioned for hours, while Chandler was strictly business and wanted to get out and get writing. He called the meetings "god-awful jabber sessions which seem to be an inevitable although painful part of the picture business." Chandler also felt that the original novel's plot was superior to Hitchcock's version, and argued that it should be restored. He complained privately that Hitchcock was too ready “to sacrifice dramatic logic (insofar as it exists) for the sake of a camera effect.” Interpersonal relations deteriorated rapidly until finally Chandler became openly combative; at one point, upon viewing Hitchcock struggling to exit from his limousine, Chandler remarked within earshot, "Look at the fat bastard trying to get out of his car!" This would be their last collaboration. Chandler completed a first draft, then wrote a second, without hearing a single word back from Hitchcock; when finally he did get a communication from the director in late September, it was his dismissal from the project.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Next, Hitchcock tried to hire Ben Hecht, but learned he was unavailable. Hecht suggested his assistant, Czenzi Ormonde, to write the screenplay. Although Ormonde was without a formal screen credit, she did have two things in her favor: her recently published collection of short stories, "Laughter From Downstairs", was attracting good notices from critics, and she was "a fair-haired beauty with long shimmering hair."—always a plus with Hitchcock. With his new writer, he wanted to start from square one:


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: There was not much time though — less than three weeks until location shooting was scheduled to start in the East. Ormonde hunkered down with Hitchcock's associate producer Barbara Keon—disparagingly called "Hitchcock's factotum" by Chandler—and Alma Reville, Hitchcock's wife. Together the three women, working under the boss's guidance and late into most nights, finished enough of the script in time to send the company East. The rest was complete by early November. Three notable additions the trio had made were the runaway merry-go-round, the cigarette lighter, and the thick eyeglasses.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: There was one point of agreement between Chandler and Hitchcock, although it would come only much later, near the release of the film: they both acknowledged that since virtually none of Chandler's work remained in the final script, his name should be removed from the credits. Hitchcock preferred the writing credit of Whitfield Cook and Czenzi Ormonde, but Warner Bros. wanted the cachet of the Chandler name and insisted it stay on.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Even while the torturous writing stage was plodding its course, the director's excitement about the project was boundless. "Hitchcock raced ahead of everyone: the script, the cast, the studio... pieces of the film were dancing like electrical charges in his brain." The more the film resolved in his mind's eye, the more he knew his director of photography would play a critical role in the scenes' execution. He found exactly what he needed right on the Warners lot in the person of staff cameraman Robert Burks, who would continue to work with Hitchcock, shooting every Hitchcock picture through to "Marnie" (1964), with the exception of "Psycho". "Low-keyed, mild mannered", Burks was "a versatile risk-taker with a penchant for moody atmosphere. Burks was an exceptionally apt choice for what would prove to be Hitchcock's most Germanic film in years: the compositions dense, the lighting almost surreal, the optical effects demanding." None was more demanding than Bruno's strangulation of Miriam, shown reflected in her eyeglass lens: "It was the kind of shot Hitchcock had been tinkering with for twenty years—and Robert Burks captured it magnificently."


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Burks considered his fourteen years with Hitchcock the best of his career: "You never have any trouble with him as long as you know your job and do it. Hitchcock insists on perfection. He has no patience with mediocrity on the set or at a dinner table. There can be no compromise in his work, his food or his wines." Robert Burks received the film's sole Academy Award nomination for its black and white photography.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: With cast nailed down, a script in hand, and a director of photography in tune with Hitchcock's vision on board, the company was ready to commence filming. Hitchcock had a crew shoot background footage of the 1950 Davis Cup finals held August 25–27, 1950 at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, New York. While there, the crew had done some other location scouting. Exteriors would be shot on both coasts, and interiors on Warner Brothers' soundstages.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Hitchcock and his cast and crew decamped for the East Coast on October 17, 1950. For six days, they shot at Penn Station in New York City, at the railroad station at Danbury, Connecticut—which became Guy's hometown Metcalf—and in spots around Washington, D.C.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: By month's end, they were back in California. Hitchcock had written exacting specifications for an amusement park, which was constructed on the ranch of director Rowland Lee in Chatsworth, California. The amusement park exteriors were shot there and at an actual Tunnel of Love at a fairground in Canoga Park, California. Hitchcock had already shot the long shots for the tennis match at Forest Hills and would add closer shots with Granger and Jack Cushingham, Granger's tennis coach off-screen and Guy's tennis opponent Fred Reynolds on-screen at a tennis club in South Gate, California. The rest of the shooting would take place on Warner soundstages, including many seemingly exterior and on-location shots that were actually done inside in front of rear-projection screens.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: "Strangers on a Train" marked something of a renaissance for Hitchcock, after several years of low enthusiasm for his late-1940s output, and he threw himself into the micromanagement of some of its production. Hitchcock himself designed Bruno's lobster necktie, revealed in a close-up to have strangling lobster claws, and "he personally selected an orange peel, a chewing-gum wrapper, wet leaves, and a bit of crumpled paper that were used for sewer debris" in the scene where Bruno inadvertently drops Guy's lighter down the storm drain.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: One of the most memorable single shots in the Hitchcock canon — it "is studied by film classes", says Laura Elliott, who played Miriam – is her character's strangulation by Bruno on the Magic Isle. "[I]n one of the most unexpected, most aesthetically justified moments in film," the slow, almost graceful, murder is shown as a reflection in the victim's eyeglasses, which have been jarred loose from her head and dropped to the ground. The unusual angle was a more complex proposition than it seems. First Hitchcock got the exterior shots in Canoga Park, using both actors, then later he had Elliott alone report to a soundstage where there was a large concave reflector set on the floor. The camera was on one side of the reflector, Elliott was on the other, and Hitchcock directed Elliott to turn her back to the reflector and "float backwards, all the way to the floor... like you were doing the limbo." The first six takes went badly—Elliott thudded to the floor with several feet yet to go—but on the seventh take, she floated smoothly all the way. Hitchcock's even-strained response: "Cut. Next shot." Hitchcock then had the two elements "ingenious[ly]" double printed, yielding a shot of "oddly appealing originality [with] a stark fusion of the grotesque and the beautiful... The aestheticizing of the horror somehow enables the audience to contemplate more fully its reality."


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Hitchcock was, above all, the master of great visual setpieces, and "[p]erhaps the most memorable sequence in "Strangers on a Train" is the climactic fight on a berserk carousel." While Guy and Bruno fight, the ride runs out of control until it tears itself to pieces, flinging wooden horses into the crowd of screaming mothers and squealing children. "The climactic carousel explosion was a marvel of miniatures and background projection, acting close-ups and other inserts, all of it seamlessly matched and blended under film editor William H. Ziegler's eye."


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: The explosion is triggered by the attempts of a carnival man to stop the ride after crawling under the whirling carousel deck to get to the controls in the center. Although Hitchcock admitted to undercranking the shot (artificially accelerating the action), it was not a trick shot: the man actually had to crawl under the spinning ride, just inches from possible injury. "Hitchcock told me that this scene was the most personally frightening moment for him in any of his films", writes biographer Charlotte Chandler. "The man who crawled under the out-of-control carousel was not an actor or a stuntman, but a carousel operator who volunteered for the job. 'If the man had raised his head even slightly", Hitchcock said, "it would have gone from being a suspense film into a horror film."


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: The final scene of the so-called American version of the film has Barbara and Anne Morton waiting for Guy to call on the telephone. Hitchcock wanted the phone in the foreground to dominate the shot, emphasizing the importance of the call, but the limited depth-of-field of contemporary motion picture lenses made it difficult to get both phone and women in focus. So Hitchcock had an oversized phone constructed and placed in the foreground. Anne reaches for the big phone, but actually answers a regular one: "I did that on one take", Hitchcock explained, "by moving in on Anne so that the big phone went out of the frame as she reached for it. Then a grip put a normal-sized phone on the table, where she picked it up."


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Principal photography wrapped just before Christmas, and Hitchcock and Alma left for a vacation in Santa Cruz, then in late March 1951, on to St. Moritz, for a 25th anniversary European excursion.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Composer Dimitri Tiomkin was Jack Warner's choice to score "Strangers on a Train". While he had previous Hitchcock experience on "Shadow of a Doubt" (1943), and would go on to score two more consecutive Hitchcock films, the director and composer "simply never developed much of a kinship" and "the Hitchcock films are not Tiomkin's best".


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Nevertheless, the score does pick up on the ubiquitous theme of "doubles" — often "contrasting" doubles — right from the opening title sequence: "The first shot — two sets of male shoes, loud versus conservative, moving toward a train — carries a gruff bass motif set against Gershwin-like riffs, a two-part medley called "Strangers" and "Walking" that is never heard again." The powerful music accurately underscores the visuals of that title sequence — the massive granite edifice of New York's Pennsylvania Station, standing in for Washington's Union Station—because it was scored for an unusually large orchestra, including alto, tenor and baritone saxes, three clarinets, four horns, three pianos and a novachord.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Tiomkin's contrasting musical themes continued throughout the film, delineating two characters with substantial differences: "For 'Guy's Theme', Tiomkin created a hesitant, passive idea, made-to-order music for Farley Granger's performance." Bruno, who tells Guy on the train that he admires people "who do things", gets a more vigorous musical treatment from Tiomkin: "Harmonic complexity defines the motifs associated with Bruno: rumbling bass, shocking clusters, and glassy string harmonics. These disturbing sounds, heard to superb effect in cues such as 'The Meeting,' 'Senator's Office,' and 'Jefferson Memorial,' are not just about Bruno, but about how he is perceived by those whose lives he crosses—first Guy, then everyone in Guy's entourage."


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: But perhaps the most memorable music in "Strangers" is the calliope music, heard first at the fairground and again, later, when Bruno is strangling Mrs. Cunningham at Senator Morton's soirée, and experiences his unfortunate flashback and subsequent fainting spell. It was Hitchcock, not Tiomkin, whose idea brought the four evocative numbers — "The Band Played On", "Carolina in the Morning", "Oh, You Beautiful Doll", and "Baby Face" — to the soundtrack:In one of Hitchcock's most explicit operatic gestures, the characters at the fateful carnival sing the score, giving it full dimension as part of the drama. In a conventional movie, the tune would play in the background as a clever ironic backdrop. But Hitchcock takes music to another level. Miriam and the two boyfriends in her odd ménage à trois bring "The Band Played On" to life by singing it on the merry-go-round, lustily and loudly... Grinning balefully on the horse behind them, Bruno then sings it himself, making it his motto. The band plays on through Bruno's stalking of his victim and during the murder itself, blaring from the front of the screen, then receding into the darkness as an eerie obbligato when the doomed Miriam enters the Tunnel of Love."The Band Played On" makes its final reprise during Guy's and Bruno's fight on the merry-go-round, even itself shifting to a faster tempo and higher pitch when the policeman's bullet hits the ride operator and sends the carousel into its frenzied hyper-drive.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Critic Jack Sullivan had kinder words for Tiomkin's score for "Strangers" than did biographer Spoto: "[S]o seamlessly and inevitably does it fit the picture's design that it seems like an element of Hitchcock's storyboards", he writes. It is a score that "goes largely uncelebrated."


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: With a release scheduled for early summer, the studio press agents swung into high gear early in 1951. Hitchcock, promotionally photographed many times over the years strangling various actresses and other women — some one-handed, others two — found himself in front of a camera with his fingers around the neck of a bust of daughter Patricia; the photo found its way into newspapers nationwide. He was also photographed adding the letter "L" to "Strangers" on the official studio poster for the film, thus changing the word to "Stranglers".


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: One studio press release gave rise to a myth that still lingers on today. Hitchcock and Patricia both were afraid of heights, and father offered daughter a hundred dollars to ride the Ferris wheel — only to order the power cut, leaving her in the dark at the very top of the ride. The press release embellished the tale, claiming he left her "dangling in total darkness for an hour," only then allowing his "trembling daughter" to be lowered and released. Although that account continues to be published in books to this day, "it just wasn't true", according to Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell. First of all, she was not up there alone: flanking her were the actors playing Miriam's two boyfriends — "and I have a picture of us waving." "This was good stuff for press agents paid to stir up thrills and it has been repeated in other books to bolster the idea of Hitchcock's sadism," but "we were [only] up there two or three minutes at the outside... My father wasn't ever sadistic. The only sadistic part was I never got the hundred dollars."


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: "Strangers on a Train" previewed on March 5, 1951 at the Huntington Park Theatre, with Alma, Jack Warner, Whitfield Cook and Barbara Keon in the Hitchcock party and it won a prize from the Screen Directors Guild. It premiered in New York on July 3, marking the reopening of the extensively remodeled Strand Theatre as the Warner Theatre, and in a dozen cities around the country. Hitchcock made personal appearances in most of them, and was often accompanied by his daughter.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Some audience feedback arriving at Jack Warner's office condemned the film for its sordid story, while just as many others were favorable. Of greater interest to Warner was the box office take, and the "receipts soon told the true story: "Strangers on a Train" was a success, and Hitchcock was pronounced at the top of his form as master of the dark, melodramatic suspense thriller."


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: The film includes a number of puns and visual metaphors that demonstrate a running motif of crisscross, double-crossing, and crossing one's double. Talking about the structure of the film, Hitchcock said to Truffaut, "Isn't it a fascinating design? One could study it forever."


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: The two characters, Guy and Bruno, can be viewed as doppelgängers. As with "Shadow of a Doubt", "Strangers on a Train" is one of many Hitchcock films to explore the doppelgänger theme. The pair has what writer Peter Dellolio refers to as a "dark symbiosis." Bruno embodies Guy's dark desire to kill Miriam, a "real-life incarnation of Guy's wish-fulfillment fantasy".


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: The theme of "doubles" is "the key element in the film's structure," and Hitchcock starts right off in his title sequence making this point: there are two taxicabs, two redcaps, two pairs of feet, two sets of train rails that cross twice. Once on the train, Bruno orders a pair of double drinks — "The only kind of doubles I play", he says charmingly. In Hitchcock's cameo he carries a double bass.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Hitchcock carries the theme into his editing, crosscutting between Guy and Bruno with words and gestures: one asks the time and the other, miles away, looks at his watch; one says in anger "I could strangle her!" and the other, far distant, makes a choking gesture.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: This doubling has some precedent in the novel; but more of it was deliberately added by Hitchcock, "dictated in rapid and inspired profusion to Czenzi Ormonde and Barbara Keon during the last days of script preparation." It undergirds the whole film because it finally serves to associate the world of light, order, and vitality with the world of darkness, chaos, lunacy and death."


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Guy and Bruno are in some ways doubles, but in many more ways, they are "opposites". The two sets of feet in the title sequence match each other in motion and in cutting, but they immediately establish the contrast between the two men: the first shoes "showy, vulgar brown-and-white brogues; [the] second, plain, unadorned walking shoes." They also demonstrate Hitchcock's gift for deft visual storytelling: For most of the film, Bruno is the actor, Guy the reactor, and Hitchcock always shows Bruno's feet first, then Guy's. And since it is Guy's foot that taps Bruno's under the table, we know Bruno has not engineered the meeting.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Roger Ebert wrote that "it is this sense of two flawed characters — one evil, one weak, with an unstated sexual tension — that makes the movie intriguing and halfway plausible, and explains how Bruno could come so close to carrying out his plan."


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: It is those flaws that set up the real themes of "Strangers." It was not enough for Hitchcock to construct merely a world of doubles — even contrasting doubles — in a strict polar-opposite structure; for Hitchcock, the good-and-evil, darkness-and-light poles "didn't have to be mutually exclusive." Blurring the lines puts both Guy and Bruno on a good-evil continuum, and the infinite shades of gray in between, became Hitchcock's canvas for telling the story and painting his characters.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: At first glance, Guy represents the ordered life where people stick to rules, while Bruno comes from the world of chaos, where they get thrown out of multiple colleges for drinking and gambling. Yet both men, like so many of Hitchcock's protagonists, are insecure and uncertain of their identity. Guy is suspended between tennis and politics, between his tramp wife and his senator's daughter, and Bruno is seeking desperately to establish an identity through violent, "outré" actions and flamboyance (shoes, lobster-patterned tie, name proclaimed to the world on his tiepin)."


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Bruno tells Guy early on that he admires him: "I certainly admire people who do things", he says. "Me, I never do anything important." Yet as Bruno describes his "theories" over lunch, "Guy responds to Bruno — we see it in his face, at once amused and tense. To the man committed to a career in politics, Bruno represents a tempting overthrow of all responsibility." And at this point the blurring of good and evil accelerates: Guy fails to repudiate Bruno's suggestive statement about murdering Miriam ("What's a life or two, Guy? Some people are better off dead.") with any force or conviction. "When Bruno openly suggests he would like to kill his wife, he merely grins and says 'That's a morbid thought,' but we sense the tension that underlies it." It ratchets up a notch when Guy leaves Bruno's compartment and "forgets" his cigarette lighter. "He is leaving in Bruno's keeping his link with Anne, his possibility of climbing into the ordered existence to which he aspires... Guy, then, in a sense connives at the murder of his wife, and the enigmatic link between him and Bruno becomes clear.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Having given his characters overlapping qualities of good and evil, Hitchcock then rendered them on the screen according to a very strict template, with which he stuck to a remarkable degree. Ebert wrote:


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Nowhere is this more evident than the scene where Guy arrives home at his D.C. apartment to find Bruno lurking across the street; Bruno killed Miriam that evening in Metcalf, and has her glasses to give to Guy almost as a "receipt" that he has executed "his" part of their "deal". "On one side of the street, [are] stately respectable houses; towering in the background, on the right of the screen, the floodlit dome of the U.S. Capitol, the life to which Guy aspires, the world of light and order." Bruno tells Guy what he has done and gives him the glasses. "You're a free man now", he says, just as a police car drives up, looking for the husband of a certain recent murder victim. Guy nervously steps into the shadows with Bruno, literally behind the bars of an iron fence; "You've got me acting like I'm a criminal", he says. "The scene gives a beautifully exact symbolic expression to Guy's relationship with Bruno and what he stands for."


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Hitchcock continues the interplay of light and dark throughout the film: Guy's bright, light tennis attire, versus "the gothic gloominess of [Bruno's] Arlington mansion"; the crosscutting between his game in the sunshine at Forest Hills while Bruno's arm stretches into the dark and debris of the storm drain trying to fish out the cigarette lighter; even a single image where "Walker is photographed in one visually stunning shot as a malignant stain on the purity of the white-marble Jefferson Memorial, as a blot on the order of things."


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Although its first rumblings came in 1947 with the trial and conviction of the "Hollywood Ten," the so-called Red Scare was gathering steam in 1950, with the espionage-related arrests of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and the trial of Alger Hiss. These events were the background to their work, while Hitchcock, Cook, Ormonde and Keon were preparing the script for "Strangers", and film scholar Robert L. Carringer has written of a political subtext to the film. Treatment writer Cook used Guy to make the film "a parable quietly defiant of the Cold War hysteria sweeping America."


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Carringer has argued that the film was crucially shaped by the Congressional inquiries, making Guy the stand-in for victims of the homophobic climate. "To all appearances Guy is the all-American stereotype, an athlete, unassuming despite his fame, conservatively dressed," wrote Carringer; he is "a man of indeterminate sexual identity found in circumstances making him vulnerable to being compromised." Hitchcock, who had drawn gay characters so sharply yet subtly in "Rope" in 1948, "drafted the left-leaning Cook... expressly because he was comfortable with sexually ambiguous characters."


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Even before sewing up the rights for the novel, Hitchcock's mind was whirling with ideas about how to adapt it for the screen. He narrowed the geographic scope to the Northeast corridor, between Washington, D.C. and New York — the novel ranged through the southwest and Florida, among other locales. The scripting team added the tennis match — and the crosscutting with Bruno's storm drain travails in Metcalf — added the cigarette lighter, the Tunnel of Love, Miriam's eyeglasses; in fact, the amusement park is only a brief setting in the novel.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: The character called Bruno Antony in the film is called Charles Anthony Bruno in the book. In the book, Bruno dies in a boating accident far removed from a merry-go-round.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: In the novel, Guy Haines is not a tennis player, but rather a promising architect, and he does indeed go through with the murder of Bruno's father. In the movie, "Guy became a decent guy who "refuses" to carry out his part of the crazed bargain..." writes Patrick McGilligan, "to head off the censors." In the novel, Guy is pursued and entrapped by a tenacious detective.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: The merry-go-round scene is not in the book, but is taken from the climax of Edmund Crispin's 1946 novel "The Moving Toyshop". All the major elements of the scene — the two men struggling, the accidentally shot attendant, the out-of-control merry-go-round, the crawling under the moving merry-go-round to disable it — are present in Crispin's account, though he received no screen credit for it.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Upon its release in 1951, "Strangers on a Train" received mixed reviews. "Variety" praised it, writing: "Performance-wise, the cast comes through strongly. Granger is excellent as the harassed young man innocently involved in murder. Roman's role as a nice, understanding girl is a switch for her, and she makes it warmly effective. Walker's role has extreme color, and he projects it deftly."


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Conversely, Bosley Crowther of "The New York Times" criticized the film: "Mr. Hitchcock again is tossing a crazy murder story in the air and trying to con us into thinking that it will stand up without support. ... Perhaps there will be those in the audience who will likewise be terrified by the villain's darkly menacing warnings and by Mr. Hitchcock's sleekly melodramatic tricks. ... But, for all that, his basic premise of fear fired by menace is so thin and so utterly unconvincing that the story just does not stand." Leslie Halliwell felt that Hitchcock was "at his best" and that the film "makes superior suspense entertainment," but called the story "unsatisfactory."


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: In contrast, modern reviews have been overwhelmingly positive. On Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 98% based on reviews from 52 critics, with an average rating of 8.80/10. The website's consensus reads, "A provocative premise and inventive set design lights the way for Hitchcock diabolically entertaining masterpiece." Roger Ebert has called "Strangers on a Train" a "first-rate thriller" that he considers one of Hitchcock's five best films. He added the film in his Great Movies list. In 2012, The Guardian praised the film writing "Hitchcock's study of the guilt that taints the human condition is just one cinematic masterstroke after another".


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: David Keyes, writing at "Cinemaphile" in 2002, saw the film as a seminal entry in its genre: "Aside from its very evident approach as a crowd-pleasing popcorn flick, the movie is one of the original shells for identity-inspired mystery thrillers, in which natural human behavior is the driving force behind the true macabre rather than supernatural elements. Even classic endeavors like "Fargo" and "A Simple Plan" seem directly fueled by this concept..."


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Almar Haflidason was effusive about "Strangers on a Train" in 2001 at the BBC website: "Hitchcock's favourite device of an ordinary man caught in an ever-tightening web of fear plunges Guy into one of the director's most fiendishly effective movies. Ordinary Washington locations become sinister hunting grounds that mirror perfectly the creeping terror that slowly consumes Guy, as the lethally smooth Bruno relentlessly pursues him to a frenzied climax. Fast, exciting, and woven with wicked style, this is one of Hitchcock's most efficient and ruthlessly delicious thrillers."


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: Patricia Highsmith's opinion of the film varied over time. She initially praised it, writing: "I am pleased in general. Especially with Bruno, who held the movie together as he did the book." Later in life, while still praising Robert Walker's performance as Bruno, she criticized the casting of Ruth Roman as Anne, Hitchcock's decision to turn Guy from an architect into a tennis player, and the fact that Guy does not murder Bruno's father as he does in the novel.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: According to Warner Bros' records, the film earned $1,788,000 domestically and $1,144,000 in foreign territories.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: An early preview edit of the film, sometimes labeled the "British" version although it was never released in Britain or anywhere else, includes some scenes either not in, or else different from, the film as released. According to biographer Charlotte Chandler (Lyn Erhard), Hitchcock himself did not like either the "British" "or" the "American" version:


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: In 1997, Warner released the film onto DVD as a double sided disc, with the "British" version on one side, and the "Hollywood" version on the reverse. Between the two versions of the film, the "British" version most prominently omits the final scene on the train. A two-disc DVD edition was released in 2004 containing both versions of the film, this time with the "British" version titled "Preview Version" (102:49 long) and the "Hollywood" version titled "Final Release Version" (100:40 long). The film was later made available on Blu-ray in 2012 with the same contents as the 2004 DVD edition.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: "Strangers on a Train" was adapted for the radio program "Lux Radio Theatre" on two occasions: on December 3, 1951, with Ruth Roman, Frank Lovejoy, and Ray Milland, and on April 12, 1954, with Virginia Mayo, Dana Andrews, and Robert Cummings.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: BBC Radio 4's "Afternoon Play" broadcast on 29 September 2011 was "Strangers on a Film" by Stephen Wyatt, which gives an imagined account of a series of meetings between Hitchcock (Clive Swift) and Raymond Chandler (Patrick Stewart), as they unsuccessfully attempt to create the screenplay for "Strangers on a Train".


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: The 1987 film "Throw Momma from the Train" by Danny DeVito was inspired by "Strangers on a Train", which is also watched by DeVito's character in the film.


title: Strangers on a Train (film)

text: In 2021, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".


title: Jang Na-ra

text: Jang Na-ra (; born March 18, 1981) is a South Korean singer and actress active in both the South Korean and Chinese entertainment industries since 2001. She rose to prominence with her hit studio album "Sweet Dream" in 2002, and starred in well-received television series "Successful Story of a Bright Girl" (2002), "My Love Patzzi" (2002), "Wedding" (2005), "My Bratty Princess" (2005), "You Are My Destiny" (2014), "Confession Couple" (2017), "The Last Empress" (2018–2019), and "VIP" (2019).


title: Jang Na-ra

text: Jang spent most of her childhood in her birthplace, Yeokchon-dong, Eunpyeong District in Seoul, South Korea. She appeared with her father, Ju Ho-seong who is also an actor, in the play "Les Misérables" in her primary school days, thus sparking her interest to become an actress. Jang also went on to become a model for television advertisements in her high school days before entering Chung-ang University's Department of Theater, Faculty of Fine Arts where she majored in Theater and Film in March 2000. She graduated 10 years later, on February 19, 2010. The delay was due to her continuous work since her debut after she entered the university. She also received an alumni association award for her contributions to the university during the graduation rites.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: Jang made her debut in the entertainment world as a singer in May 2001. She started her singing career by becoming a trainee and signing a contract with SM Entertainment.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: Jang released her debut album "First Story" with the title track "Burying My Face In Tears". Initially, it was not well received and only reached number 12 in Korean music charts. After starring in the popular sitcom "New Nonstop", she became more well known and released the other tracks in the album such as her pop ballad style song, "Confession" and the "April Story", ranked at the top in various music charts. The album sold 300,000 copies. Jang then became a host for MBC's music show, "Music Camp" and KBS's talk show "Love Story". By the end of 2001, she received several New Female Artist awards from year-end Music Awards ceremonies and New MC awards from Entertainment Awards ceremonies.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: In October 2002, Jang released her second album "Jjang Nara Vol.2 Sweet Dream". The song "Sweet Dream" became immensely popular and reached number 1 in Korean music charts, instantly making Jang a household name. The album also became one of the top selling albums of that year in South Korea. Due to the success of "Sweet Dream", Jang won several awards including two "Daesang" awards or the Grand Prize (equivalent to Korean Top Artist of the Year) from MBC Music Festival and KBS Music Awards. She also received the Korean Singer of the Year from China's CCTV-MTV Awards in 2003.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: In December 2003, Jang released her third album aptly titled "3rd Story" which included top tracks "I am a Woman Too" and "Is That True?".


title: Jang Na-ra

text: Jang released a Best Hits Album in 2004 consisting of songs from her 3 previous albums. She followed it up with her fourth album titled "My Story" released in December 2004, consisting of hit songs such as "I Love School" and "Winter Diary".


title: Jang Na-ra

text: With her popularity in China, she also made a career in music overseas by releasing Chinese-language albums. Her first Chinese album was a huge success, making her the first foreign artist in China with over 1 million copies sold. This was followed by the release of two more Chinese albums, "Kungfu" (2005) and "Flying High" (2006).


title: Jang Na-ra

text: She returned to the Korean music scene in 2007 with her fifth Korean album entitled "She", which consists of medium tempo "Masquerade" and the dance piece "You & I". The following year, she released a multi-lingual album titled "Dream of Asia", which includes 26 songs in 5 languages, including Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Japanese and English. Jang held a mini concert in Beijing to promote the album.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: During the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, Jang was the only singer from a non-Chinese-speaking country to appear in the 2008 Olympic song "Beijing Welcomes You".


title: Jang Na-ra

text: In 2009, she released a duet with Jimmy Lin for the soundtrack of their film "Flying with You". The track was produced by famed Singaporean musician JJ Lin.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: In 2012, four years after releasing "Dream of Asia", Jang returned to the Korean music scene with the digital single "I Only Think of You". The same year, she released her fourth Chinese album "Love Journey".


title: Jang Na-ra

text: On May 20, 2018, Jang Na-Ra performed "Sweet Dream", "I am a Woman Too", "April Story" on Sugar Man season 2, which was the highest audience rating among all terrestrial and non-terrestrial programs broadcast at the same time. "Sweet Dream" by Jang Nara became the most-viewed performing video among all Sugar Man singers.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: Jang also has a successful acting career. She first appeared in the popular MBC TV sitcom "New Nonstop", and received attention for her cute image.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: In 2002, Jang landed her first leading role in a drama in SBS's romantic comedy "Successful Story of a Bright Girl". The drama is well received and recorded high audience ratings. She won the Best New TV Actress Award at the 2003 Baeksang Arts Awards. The success of the drama and her hit song "Sweet Dream" launched her to stardom in South Korea that year. The same year, she starred in another romantic comedy series "My Love Patzzi" which also attained high ratings.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: In 2004, she came back to the small screen and starred in MBC's weekend drama "Love Is All Around", followed by KBS' romance drama "Wedding". "Wedding" established Jang as an actress, and she received viewer acclaim for her portrayal of a woman's growth and identity in marriage.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: In 2005, with her increasing popularity in China, she made a bold move by moving to China to start her singing and acting career. Her first mainstream Chinese drama is "My Bratty Princess". The success of "My Bratty Princess" catapulted her as a "hallyu" or Korean Wave star in China. She made several other drama series in China which includes "Good Morning Shanghai" in 2007, "Iron Masked Singer" in 2010, and "Unruly Qiao" in 2011.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: In 2009, she returned to the big screen with "Sky and Ocean", playing a gifted violinist with a mental age of 6 years old, diagnosed with Savant syndrome. The movie was a commercial failure, and was criticized for Jang's unfair nomination at the Grand Bell Awards even before the movie was released. However, despite the controversy, Jang won the Best Actress for a Foreign Film Award at the 19th China Golden Rooster and Hundred Flowers Awards. The film also became the first Asian film to be invited to the eighth Tirana International Film Festival in Albania, where it won the Media Award.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: In May 2011, Jang starred in KBS romantic-comedy "Baby Faced Beauty". This marks her return to Korean screens after six years. The series averaged 10% ratings throughout its run and won favorable reviews. She later won the Excellence Award for an Actress in a mini-series at the 2011 KBS Drama Awards.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: The following year, she filmed her first Chinese movie "Flying With You", starring opposite Taiwanese singer and actor Jimmy Lin. She also made a cameo appearance in another Chinese film starring Jaycee Chan titled "Whoever". The same year, she appeared together with her father in a Chinese drama entitled "Race Course".


title: Jang Na-ra

text: In December 2012, Jang reunited with her "Baby Faced Beauty" co-star Choi Daniel for KBS's teen drama "School 2013". She received her second consecutive Excellence Award for an Actress in a mini-series at the 2012 KBS Drama Awards.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: After filming for "School 2013" concluded, Jang immediately returned to China to film a drama titled "Red Palanquin".


title: Jang Na-ra

text: The year 2014 proved to be a busy year for Jang with three TV projects under MBC network. In July 2014, Jang played the lead role in "You Are My Destiny", the Korean adaptation of the 2008 Taiwanese hit drama Fated to Love You. This TV series reunited her with Jang Hyuk 12 years after both starred in the highly rated drama "Successful Story of a Bright Girl". You Are My Destiny was a hit in China and gained 200 million views. Shortly after, Jang starred in a one-episode drama special entitled "Old Farewell" for MBC's Drama Festival, pairing her once again with Jang Hyuk. She then took on the lead role opposite Shin Ha-kyun in the fantasy-romantic-comedy drama "Mr. Back". She later won the Top Excellence Award at the 2014 MBC Drama Awards for both television series she starred in that year.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: In 2015, Jang played a police detective in the mystery thriller "Hello Monster". In 2016, she starred in the romantic comedy "One More Happy Ending", portraying a former pop idol.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: In 2017, Jang was cast in the romantic fantasy drama "Confession Couple". The series was a success, and won acclaim from viewers. She also won the Excellence Award for an Actress in a mini-series at the 2017 KBS Drama Awards.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: In 2018, Jang was cast in the mystery thriller drama "The Last Empress", playing a musical actress who becomes the Empress of a modern-day monarch. The series received high ratings and Jang was praised for her performance with her wide range in acting.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: In 2019, Jang returned to the small screen with the office mystery drama "VIP". She won the Producer Award for her role as Na Jeong-seon at the 2019 SBS Drama Awards.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: In 2021, she appeared in occult TV series "Sell Your Haunted House" as Hong Ji-ah, an exorcist and CEO of Daebak Realty, a real estate company which only sells haunted properties.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: In 2002, Jang was named as 'CF Queen' by various news outlets. This is due to her rising number of product endorsements ranging from telecommunications (KTF), automobile (KIA Spectra), fashion (SMART uniform), fast food (Popeyes) to alcoholic beverage (잎새주)


title: Jang Na-ra

text: In March 2020, it was revealed that Jang had signed an exclusive model contract with air purifier brand 'Clair' back in December 2019. It is revealed that Jang would promote Clair's products not only in Korea but throughout Asia as well.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: Jang signed a contract with Korean cosmetic brand 'CharmZone' as an official model, as revealed in April 2020. This is to promote the company's diversification into the inner beauty market.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: 2002 was Jang's year, with best selling albums, multiple endorsements and highly rated TV shows under her belt. Her popularity throughout South Korea is massive, often dubbed as "Jang Na-ra Syndrome". And eventually, her popularity extended to China and other Asian countries. However, her workload took a toll on her health. She disclosed in an interview on Healing Camp that she suffered from gastric ulcers, irritable bowel syndrome, panic disorder, bulimia, and acrophobia due to intense stress and pressure as a celebrity. She also halted her singing activities in 2014 due to stage phobia and focused her work on acting.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: Jang belongs to a family of actors. Her father, Ju Ho-seong (real name Jang Yeon-kyo), is a theater actor, producer, and director. He also manages Jang's career since her debut. She has her own agency, Rawon Culture, which was established by her father.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: Jang is also known for her youthful appearance and has expressed her Christian faith numerous times at the SBS Drama Awards.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: On June 3, 2022, Jang announced that she will be marrying her non-celebrity boyfriend, who is six years younger than her. Their private wedding ceremony was held on June 26, 2022.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: Jang does much charity work such as sending 500 million won worth of commodities and 200 million won worth of powdered milk to the hungry North Korean children. She also established a US$10,000 Jang Na-ra scholarship foundation in the Philippines. She also works with the FHI Charity organization.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: She served as the public relations envoy for fair elections in the 2002 South Korean presidential election. She renewed this commitment as she was chosen as one of the honorary public relations ambassadors for the 2017 South Korean presidential election.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: In 2004, Jang was named public relations envoy for China by the Embassy in Korea of the People's Republic of China.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: In 2007, Jang held a fund-raising concert for child patients of leukemia in China. The Jang Foundation was established from the money raised during Jang's fan club meeting at her June 9 concert in Beijing, which was held to mark the 15th year of diplomatic relations between China and South Korea. Twelve hundred seats at the concert venue sold out early. After the concert on stage, a Chinese charity organization appointed Jang as a goodwill ambassador, making her the first foreigner to receive such an honor. The same year, she was appointed as one of the goodwill ambassadors for the China-ROK Exchange Year.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: In the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, Jang donated 150,000 dollars to a charity organization in China and 8 billion won of clothing for the victims.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: Jang is also known to contribute her talent in singing for charitable causes. In 2013, she recorded a TV campaign song named “Nanoom Song” for the Community Chest of Korea. She also performed with Jackie Chan at his charity concert "Jackie Chan and his friends" on June 24, 2006, at Nanjing, Jiangsu province of China.


title: Jang Na-ra

text: In 2017, it was revealed that Jang had secretly donated more than 13 billion won or close to 12 million US dollars since her debut in 2001 to various charities, disaster reliefs, and academic organizations. She is also known to have a big affection for animals. Aside from donating money to animal shelters, she also participates at charity events for animal care and volunteers actively for such things as cleaning sick dogs' shelters.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: The Battle of Lepanto was a naval engagement that took place on 7 October 1571 when a fleet of the Holy League, a coalition of Catholic states (comprising Spain and its Italian territories, several independent Italian states, and the Sovereign Military Order of Malta) arranged by Pope Pius V, inflicted a major defeat on the fleet of the Ottoman Empire in the Gulf of Patras. The Ottoman forces were sailing westward from their naval station in Lepanto (the Venetian name of ancient Naupactus – Greek , Ottoman ) when they met the fleet of the Holy League which was sailing east from Messina, Sicily. The Spanish Empire and the Venetian Republic were the main powers of the coalition, as the league was largely financed by Philip II of Spain, and Venice was the main contributor of ships.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: In the history of naval warfare, Lepanto marks the last major engagement in the Western world to be fought almost entirely between rowing vessels, namely the galleys and galleasses which were the direct descendants of ancient trireme warships. The battle was in essence an "infantry battle on floating platforms". It was the largest naval battle in Western history since classical antiquity, involving more than 400 warships. Over the following decades, the increasing importance of the galleon and the line of battle tactic would displace the galley as the major warship of its era, marking the beginning of the "Age of Sail".


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: The victory of the Holy League is of great importance in the history of Europe and of the Ottoman Empire, marking the turning-point of Ottoman military expansion into the Mediterranean, although the Ottoman wars in Europe would continue for another century. It has long been compared to the Battle of Salamis, both for tactical parallels and for its crucial importance in the defense of Europe against imperial expansion. It was also of great symbolic importance in a period when Europe was torn by its own wars of religion following the Protestant Reformation. Pope Pius V instituted the feast of Our Lady of Victory, and Philip II of Spain used the victory to strengthen his position as the "Most Catholic King" and defender of Christendom against Muslim incursion. Historian Paul K. Davis writes that


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: More than a military victory, Lepanto was a moral one. For decades, the Ottoman Turks had terrified Europe, and the victories of Suleiman the Magnificent caused Christian Europe serious concern. The defeat at Lepanto further exemplified the rapid deterioration of Ottoman might under Selim II, and Christians rejoiced at this setback for the Ottomans. The mystique of Ottoman power was tarnished significantly by this battle, and Christian Europe was heartened.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: The Christian coalition had been promoted by Pope Pius V to rescue the Venetian colony of Famagusta on the island of Cyprus, which was being besieged by the Turks in early 1571 subsequent to the fall of Nicosia and other Venetian possessions in Cyprus in the course of 1570. On 1 August the Venetians had surrendered after being reassured that they could leave Cyprus freely. However, the Ottoman commander, Lala Kara Mustafa Pasha, who had lost some 50,000 men in the siege, broke his word, imprisoning the Venetians. On 17 August Marco Antonio Bragadin was flayed alive and his corpse hung on Mustafa's galley together with the heads of the Venetian commanders, Astorre Baglioni, Alvise Martinengo, and Gianantonio Querini.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: The members of the Holy League were the Republic of Venice, the Spanish Empire (including the Kingdom of Naples, the Habsburg monarchy, the Kingdoms of Sicily and Sardinia as part of the Spanish possessions), the Papal States, the Republic of Genoa, the Duchies of Savoy, Urbino and Tuscany, the Knights Hospitaller, and others.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: The banner for the fleet, blessed by the Pope, reached the Kingdom of Naples (then ruled by Philip II of Spain) on 14 August 1571. There, in the Basilica of Santa Chiara, it was solemnly consigned to John of Austria, who had been named the leader of the coalition after long discussions among the allies. The fleet moved to Sicily and, leaving Messina, reached (after several stops) the port of Viscardo in Cephalonia, where news arrived of the fall of Famagusta and of the torture inflicted by the Turks on the Venetian commander of the fortress, Marco Antonio Bragadin.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: All members of the alliance viewed the Ottoman navy as a significant threat, both to the security of maritime trade in the Mediterranean Sea and to the security of continental Europe itself. Spain was the largest financial contributor, though the Spaniards preferred to preserve most of their galleys for Spain's own wars against the nearby sultanates of the Barbary Coast rather than expend its naval strength for the benefit of Venice. The combined Christian fleet was placed under the command of John of Austria (Don Juan de Austria) with Marcantonio Colonna as his principal deputy. The various Christian contingents met the main force, that of Venice (under Sebastiano Venier, later Doge of Venice), in July and August 1571 at Messina, Sicily.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: The Christian fleet consisted of 206 galleys and six galleasses (large new galleys with substantial artillery, developed by the Venetians) and was commanded by Spanish Admiral John of Austria, the illegitimate son of Emperor Charles V and half-brother of King Philip II of Spain, supported by the Spanish commanders Don Luis de Requesens y Zúñiga and Don Álvaro de Bazán, and Genoan commander Gianandrea Doria. The Republic of Venice contributed 109 galleys and six galleasses, 49 galleys came from the Spanish Empire (including 26 from the Kingdom of Naples, the Kingdom of Sicily, and other Italian territories), 27 galleys of the Genoese fleet, seven galleys from the Papal States, five galleys from the Order of Saint Stephen and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, three galleys each from the Duchy of Savoy and the Knights of Malta, and some privately owned galleys in Spanish service. This fleet of the Christian alliance was manned by 40,000 sailors and oarsmen. In addition, it carried approximately 30,000 fighting troops: 7,000 Spanish Empire regular infantry of excellent quality,


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: Free oarsmen were generally acknowledged to be superior but were gradually replaced in all galley fleets (including those of Venice from 1549) during the 16th century by cheaper slaves, convicts, and prisoners-of-war owing to rapidly rising costs.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: Ali Pasha, the Ottoman admiral ("Kapudan-i Derya"), supported by the corsairs Mehmed Sirocco (natively Mehmed Şuluk) of Alexandria and Uluç Ali, commanded an Ottoman force of 222 war galleys, 56 galliots, and some smaller vessels. The Turks had skilled and experienced crews of sailors but were significantly deficient in their elite corps of Janissaries. The number of oarsmen was about 37,000, virtually all of them slaves, many of them Christians who had been captured in previous conquests and engagements. The Ottoman galleys were manned by 13,000 experienced sailors—generally drawn from the maritime nations of the Ottoman Empire—mainly Berbers, Greeks, Syrians, and Egyptians—and 25,000 soldiers from Ottoman Empire as well as few thousands from their North African allies.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: While soldiers on board of the ships were roughly evenly matched in numbers, an advantage for the Christians was the numerical superiority in guns and cannon aboard their ships. It is estimated that the Christians had 1,815 guns, while the Turks had only 750 with insufficient ammunition. The Christians embarked with their much improved arquebusier and musketeer forces, while the Ottomans trusted in their greatly feared composite bowmen.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: The Christian fleet started from Messina on 16 September, crossing the Adriatic and creeping along the coast, arriving at the group of rocky islets lying just north of the opening of the Gulf of Corinth on 6 October. Serious conflict had broken out between Venetian and Spanish soldiers, and Venier enraged Don Juan by hanging a Spanish soldier for impudence. Despite bad weather, the Christian ships sailed south and, on 6 October, reached the port of Sami, Cephalonia (then also called Val d'Alessandria), where they remained for a while.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: Early on 7 October, they sailed toward the Gulf of Patras, where they encountered the Ottoman fleet. While neither fleet had immediate strategic resources or objectives in the gulf, both chose to engage. The Ottoman fleet had an express order from the Sultan to fight, and John of Austria found it necessary to attack in order to maintain the integrity of the expedition in the face of personal and political disagreements within the Holy League. On the morning of 7 October, after the decision to offer battle was made, the Christian fleet formed up in four divisions in a north–south line:


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: Two galleasses, which had side-mounted cannon, were positioned in front of each main division for the purpose, according to Miguel de Cervantes (who served on the galley "Marquesa" during the battle), of preventing the Turks from sneaking in small boats and sapping, sabotaging, or boarding the Christian vessels. This reserve division consisted of 38 galleys—30 behind the Centre Division and four behind each wing. A scouting group was formed, from two Right Wing and six Reserve Division galleys. As the Christian fleet was slowly turning around Point Scropha, Doria's Right Division, at the offshore side, was delayed at the start of the battle and the Right's galleasses did not get into position.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: The Ottoman fleet consisted of 57 galleys and two galliots on its right under Mehmed Siroco, 61 galleys and 32 galliots in the centre under Ali Pasha in the "Sultana", and about 63 galleys and 30 galliots in the south offshore under Uluç Ali. A small reserve consisted of eight galleys, 22 galliots, and 64 fustas, behind the centre body. Ali Pasha is supposed to have told his Christian galley slaves, "If I win the battle, I promise you your liberty. If the day is yours, then God has given it to you." John of Austria, more laconically, warned his crew, "There is no paradise for cowards."


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: The lookout on the "Real" sighted the Turkish van at dawn of 7 October. Don Juan called a council of war and decided to offer battle. He travelled through his fleet in a swift sailing vessel, exhorting his officers and men to do their utmost. The Sacrament was administered to all, the galley slaves were freed from their chains, and the standard of the Holy League was raised to the truck of the flagship.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: The wind was at first against the Christians, and it was feared that the Turks would be able to make contact before a line of battle could be formed. But around noon, shortly before contact, the wind shifted to favour the Christians, enabling most of the squadrons to reach their assigned position before contact. Four galeasses stationed in front of the Christian battle line opened fire at close quarters at the foremost Turkish galleys, confusing their battle array in the crucial moment of contact. Around noon, first contact was made between the squadrons of Barbarigo and Sirocco, close to the northern shore of the Gulf. Barbarigo had attempted to stay so close to the shore as to prevent Sirocco from surrounding him, but Sirocco, knowing the depth of the waters, managed to still insert galleys between Barbarigo's line and the coast. In the ensuing mêlée, the ships came so close to each other as to form an almost continuous platform of hand-to-hand fighting in which both leaders were killed. The Christian galley slaves freed from the Turkish ships were supplied with arms and joined in the fighting, turning the battle in favour of the Christian side.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: Meanwhile, the centres clashed with such force that Ali Pasha's galley drove into the "Real" as far as the fourth rowing bench, and hand-to-hand fighting commenced around the two flagships, between the Spanish Tercio infantry and the Turkish janissaries. When the "Real" was nearly taken, Colonna came alongside, with the bow of his galley, and mounted a counter-attack. With the help of Colonna, the Turks were pushed off the "Real" and the Turkish flagship was boarded and swept. The entire crew of Ali Pasha's flagship was killed, including Ali Pasha himself. The banner of the Holy League was hoisted on the captured ship, breaking the morale of the Turkish galleys nearby. After two hours of fighting, the Turks were beaten left and centre, although fighting continued for another two hours. A flag taken at Lepanto by the Knights of Saint Stephen, said to be the standard of the Turkish commander, is still on display, in the Church of the seat of the Order in Pisa.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: On the Christian right, the situation was different, as Doria continued sailing towards the south instead of taking his assigned position. He would explain his conduct after the battle by saying that he was trying to prevent an enveloping manoeuvre by the Turkish left. But Doria's captains were enraged, interpreting their commander's signals as a sign of treachery. When Doria had opened a wide gap with the Christian centre, Uluç Ali swung around and fell on Colonna's southern flank, with Doria too far away to interfere. Ali attacked a group of some fifteen galleys around the flagship of the Knights of Malta, threatening to break into the Christian centre and still turn the tide of the battle. This was prevented by the arrival of the reserve squadron of Santa Cruz. Uluç Ali was forced to retreat, escaping the battle with the captured flag of the Knights of Malta.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: Isolated fighting continued until the evening. Even after the battle had clearly turned against the Turks, groups of janissaries kept fighting to the last. It is said that at some point the Janissaries ran out of weapons and started throwing oranges and lemons at their Christian adversaries, leading to awkward scenes of laughter among the general misery of battle. At the end of the battle, the Christians had taken 117 galleys and 20 galliots, and sunk or destroyed some 50 other ships. Around ten thousand Turks were taken prisoner, and many thousands of Christian slaves were rescued. The Christian side suffered around 7,500 deaths, the Turkish side about 30,000.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: The engagement was a significant defeat for the Ottomans, who had not lost a major naval battle since the fifteenth century. However, the Holy League failed to capitalize on the victory, and while the Ottoman defeat has often been cited as the historical turning-point initiating the eventual stagnation of Ottoman territorial expansion, this was by no means an immediate consequence; even though the Christian victory at Lepanto confirmed the "de facto" division of the Mediterranean, with the eastern half under firm Ottoman control and the western under the Habsburgs and their Italian allies, halting the Ottoman encroachment on Italian territories, the Holy League did not regain any territories that had been lost to the Ottomans prior to Lepanto. Historian Paul K. Davis synopsizes the importance of Lepanto this way: "This Turkish defeat stopped Ottomans' expansion into the Mediterranean, thus maintaining western dominance, and confidence grew in the west that Turks, previously unstoppable, could be beaten"


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: The Ottomans were quick to rebuild their navy. By 1572, about six months after the defeat, more than 150 galleys, 8 galleasses, and in total 250 ships had been built, including eight of the largest capital ships ever seen in the Mediterranean. With this new fleet the Ottoman Empire was able to reassert its supremacy in the Eastern Mediterranean. Sultan Selim II's Chief Minister, the Grand Vizier Mehmed Sokullu, even boasted to the Venetian emissary Marcantonio Barbaro that the Christian triumph at Lepanto caused no lasting harm to the Ottoman Empire, while the capture of Cyprus by the Ottomans in the same year was a significant blow, saying that:


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: In 1572, the allied Christian fleet resumed operations and faced a renewed Ottoman navy of 200 vessels under Kılıç Ali Pasha, but the Ottoman commander actively avoided engaging the allied fleet and headed for the safety of the fortress of Modon. The arrival of the Spanish squadron of 55 ships evened the numbers on both sides and opened the opportunity for a decisive blow, but friction among the Christian leaders and the reluctance of Don Juan squandered the opportunity.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: Pius V died on 1 May 1572. The diverging interests of the League members began to show, and the alliance began to unravel. In 1573, the Holy League fleet failed to sail altogether; instead, Don Juan attacked and took Tunis, only for it to be retaken by the Ottomans in 1574. Venice, fearing the loss of its Dalmatian possessions and a possible invasion of Friuli, and eager to cut its losses and resume the trade with the Ottoman Empire, initiated unilateral negotiations with the Porte.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: The Holy League was disbanded with the peace treaty of 7 March 1573, which concluded the War of Cyprus. Venice was forced to accept loser's terms in spite of the victory at Lepanto. Cyprus was formally ceded to the Ottoman Empire, and Venice agreed to pay an indemnity of 300,000 ducats. In addition, the border between the two powers in Dalmatia was modified by the Turkish occupation of small but important parts of the hinterland that included the most fertile agricultural areas near the cities, with adverse effects on the economy of the Venetian cities in Dalmatia. Peace would hold between the two states until the Cretan War of 1645.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: In 1574, the Ottomans retook the strategic city of Tunis from the Spanish-supported Hafsid dynasty, which had been re-installed after John of Austria's forces reconquered the city from the Ottomans the year before. Thanks to the long-standing Franco-Ottoman alliance, the Ottomans were able to resume naval activity in the western Mediterranean. In 1576, the Ottomans assisted in Abdul Malik's capture of Fez – this reinforced the Ottoman indirect conquests in Morocco that had begun under Suleiman the Magnificent. The establishment of Ottoman suzerainty over the area placed the entire southern coast of the Mediterranean from the Straits of Gibraltar to Greece under Ottoman authority, with the exceptions of the Spanish-controlled trading city of Oran and strategic settlements such as Melilla and Ceuta. But after 1580, the Ottoman Empire could no longer compete with the advances in European naval technology, especially the development of the galleon and line of battle tactics used in the Spanish Navy. Spanish success in the Mediterranean continued into the first half of the 17th century. Spanish ships attacked the Anatolian coast, defeating larger Ottoman fleets at the Battle of Cape Celidonia and the Battle of Cape Corvo. Larache and La Mamora, in the Moroccan Atlantic coast, and the island of Alhucemas, in the Mediterranean, were taken (although Larache and La Mamora were lost again later in the 17th century). Ottoman expansion in the 17th century shifted to land war with Austria on one hand, culminating in the Great Turkish War of 1683–1699, and to the war with Safavid Persia on the other.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: Giovanni Pietro Contarini's "History of the Events, which occurred from the Beginning of the War Brought against the Venetians by Selim the Ottoman, to the Day of the Great and Victorious Battle against the Turks" was published in 1572, a few months after Lepanto. It was the first comprehensive account of the war, and the only one to attempt a concise but complete overview of its course and the Holy League's triumph. Contarini's account went beyond effusive praise and mere factual reporting to examine the meaning and importance of these events. It is also the only full historical account by an immediate commentator, blending his straightforward narrative with keen and consistent reflections on the political philosophy of conflict in the context of the Ottoman-Catholic confrontation in the early modern Mediterranean.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: The Holy League credited the victory to the Virgin Mary, whose intercession with God they had implored for victory through the use of the Rosary. Andrea Doria had kept a copy of the miraculous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe given to him by King Philip II of Spain in his ship's state room. Pope Pius V instituted a new Catholic feast day of Our Lady of Victory to commemorate the battle, which is now celebrated by the Catholic Church as the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. Dominican friar Juan Lopez in his 1584 book on the rosary states that the feast of the rosary was offered "in memory and in perpetual gratitude of the miraculous victory that the Lord gave to his Christian people that day against the Turkish armada".A piece of commemorative music composed after the victory is the motet "Canticum Moysis" (Song of Moses Exodus 15) "Pro victoria navali contra Turcas" by the Spanish composer based in Rome Fernando de las Infantas. The other piece of music is Jacobus de Kerle's "Cantio octo vocum de sacro foedere contra Turcas" 1572 (Song in Eight Voices on the Holy League Against the Turks), in the opinion of Pettitt (2006) an "exuberantly militaristic" piece celebrating the victory. There were celebrations and festivities with "triumphs" and pageants at Rome and Venice with Turkish slaves in chains.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: The fortress of Palmanova in Italy originally called "Palma" was built by the Republic of Venice on 7 October 1593 to commemorate the victory.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: There are many pictorial representations of the battle. Prints of the order of battle appeared in Venice and Rome in 1571, and numerous paintings were commissioned, including one in the Doge's Palace, Venice, by Andrea Vicentino on the walls of the "Sala dello Scrutinio", which replaced Tintoretto's "Victory of Lepanto", destroyed by fire in 1577. Titian painted the battle in the background of an allegorical work showing Philip II of Spain holding his infant son, Don Fernando, his male heir born shortly after the victory, on 4 December 1571. An angel descends from heaven bearing a palm branch with a motto for Fernando, who is held up by Philip: "Majora tibi" (may you achieve greater deeds; Fernando died as a child, in 1578).


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: "The Allegory of the Battle of Lepanto" (c. 1572, oil on canvas, 169 x 137 cm, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice) is a painting by Paolo Veronese. The lower half of the painting shows the events of the battle, whilst at the top a female personification of Venice is presented to the Virgin Mary, with Saint Roch, Saint Peter, Saint Justina, Saint Mark and a group of angels in attendance.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: A painting by Wenceslas Cobergher, dated to the end of the 16th century, now in San Domenico Maggiore, shows what is interpreted as a victory procession in Rome on the return of admiral Colonna. On the stairs of Saint Peter's Basilica, Pius V is visible in front of a kneeling figure, identified as Marcantonio Colonna returning the standard of the Holy League to the pope. On high is the Madonna and child with victory palms.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: Tommaso Dolabella painted his "The Battle of Lepanto" in c. 1625–1630 on the commission of Stanisław Lubomirski, commander of the Polish left wing in the Battle of Khotyn (1621). The monumental painting (3.05 m × 6.35 m) combines the Polish victory procession following this battle with the backdrop of the Battle of Lepanto. It was later owned by the Dominicans of Poznań and since 1927 has been on display in Wawel Castle, Cracow.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: The statue of John of Austria in Messina was erected by decision of the city's Senate in 1571, as John had returned to Messina after the battle. It was sculpted by Andrea Calamech and dedicated in 1572.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: There was an immediate poetical response to the victory at Lepanto. In Italy alone 233 titles of sonnets, madrigals and poems were printed between 1571 and 1573, some of these including writing in dialect or Latin. This was replicated by the Spanish response, with poems in Catalan and the Mallorcan dialect and full scale epics by Juan Latino ("Austriados libri duo" 1573), Jerónimo Corte-Real ( "Austriada ou Felicissima Victoria", 1578) and ("La Austriada", 1586). Though these longer works have, in the words of a later critic, "not unjustly been consigned to that oblivion which few epics have escaped", there was also a Spanish ballad which retained its popularity and was translated into English by Thomas Rodd in 1818.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: The most popular British poem on the subject was "The Lepanto" by King James VI of Scotland. Written in fourteeners about 1585, its thousand lines were ultimately collected in "His Maiesties Poeticall Exercises at Vacant Houres" (1591), then published separately in 1603 after James had become king of England too. There were also translations in other languages, including into Dutch as "Den Slach van Lepanten" (1593) by Abraham van der Myl. "La Lepanthe", the French version by Du Bartas, accompanied James' 1591 edition; a Latin version, the "Naupactiados Metaphrasis" by Thomas Murray (1564–1623), followed a year after James' 1603 publication.


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: The royal connection ensured that the battle was featured in Stuart aquatic pageants representing sea battles between Christians and Turks well into the reign. And in 1632 the story of the battle was retold in couplets in Abraham Holland's "Naumachia". Centuries later G. K. Chesterton revisited the conflict in his lively narrative poem "Lepanto", first published in 1911 and republished many times since. It provided a series of poetic visions of the major characters in the battle, particularly the leader of the Christian forces, Don Juan of Austria, then closed with verses linking Miguel de Cervantes, who also fought in the battle, with the "lean and foolish knight" he would later immortalise in "Don Quixote".


title: Battle of Lepanto

text: At the start of the 20th century too, Emilio Salgari devoted his historical novel, "Il Leone di Damasco" ("The Lion of Damascus", 1910), to the Battle of Lepanto, which was eventually to be adapted to film by Corrado D'Errico in 1942. In 1942 as well, English author Elizabeth Goudge has a character in her war-time novel, "The Castle on the Hill" (1942), recall the leading role of John of Austria in the battle and the presence of Cervantes there. Much as combatants had appropriated Chesterton's poem to the circumstances of World War I, Goudge harnessed that ancient incident to British resistance to Nazi Germany during World War II.


title: Shattered (2022 film)

text: Shattered is a 2022 American thriller film directed by Luis Prieto, written by David Loughery, and starring Cameron Monaghan, Frank Grillo, Lilly Krug, and John Malkovich.


title: Shattered (2022 film)

text: Chris, a rich divorcee, falls in love with a mysterious woman Sky, only to find himself, his ex-wife and their child trapped. A desperate fight for survival ensues.


title: Shattered (2022 film)

text: The film was released in select theaters and On Demand on January 14, 2022, and released on DVD and Blu-ray on February 22, 2022.


title: Shattered (2022 film)

text: Angela Dawson of "Forbes" gave the film a positive review and wrote, "Spanish Filmmaker Luis Prieto Balances Income Inequality And Chills In ‘Shattered’ Thriller." Michael Nordine of "Variety" gave the film a negative review and wrote, "What follows has shades of everything from "Misery" to "Audition", albeit with little of either film’s bawdy bravura." Matt Zoller Seitz of "RogerEbert.com" awarded the film one and a half stars, calling it "a machine that promises to fulfill certain functions. Unfortunately, the craftsmanship is lacking."


title: The Informer (2019 film)

text: The Informer is a 2019 British crime thriller film directed by Andrea Di Stefano and written by Matt Cook, based on the novel "Three Seconds" by Roslund & Hellström. The film stars Joel Kinnaman, Rosamund Pike, Common, Ana de Armas, and Clive Owen.


title: The Informer (2019 film)

text: Several years ago, Peter Koslow was released early from prison on condition that he work as an undercover informant for the FBI's New York City field office. Having worked his way into a Polish crime organization, he is about to provide his handler, Special Agent Wilcox, with substantial evidence to indict crime boss Ryszard "The General" Klimek. Koslow is outfitted with a wire as he smuggles a large amount of fentanyl through the Polish consulate's office with the intention of it being delivered to the General. However, Koslow's cohort Staszek learns of a potential buyer and instead veers off-plan. Meeting with the buyer, Koslow quickly deduces that he is an undercover police officer. When tensions arise, the officer attempts to apprehend Koslow, but Staszek kills him. Listening to this over the wire, Koslow's handlers abandon him. Koslow and Staszek are brought before the General, and Koslow is told he will be required to return to prison in order to run the drug trade on the General's behalf. Initially reluctant, Koslow agrees after the lives of his wife and daughter are threatened.


title: The Informer (2019 film)

text: Wilcox informs Koslow that he will continue to act as an informant while imprisoned, and in return he will be freed upon completion. Meanwhile, NYPD Detective Grens begins to investigate the murder of the undercover officer and suspects the Polish Mafia. He obtains security camera recordings of Koslow leaving the scene and the FBI vehicle driving by. The General and his wife visit with Koslow and his wife, Sofia, in preparation for Koslow's return to prison. The following day, Koslow breaks his parole. Grens meets with Wilcox and Montgomery, who deny knowledge of the murder. He also speaks with Sofia, who refuses to divulge information about her husband. Meanwhile, Koslow begins his drug distribution but is thwarted by corrupt prison officer Slewitt who works for Smiley Phelps, the boss of the prison gang who holds sway over the drug trade. Koslow is nearly killed until he reveals to Smiley that he is an informant working to take down the General, Smiley's competition. Koslow calls Wilcox for help, but she is unable to help after being ordered by Montgomery to "burn" Koslow to cover up the FBI's involvement in the operation that led to the murder of the undercover police officer. Koslow then calls Sofia, asking her to give Grens the secret audio recordings he taped while speaking with Wilcox.


title: The Informer (2019 film)

text: Wilcox reluctantly leaks to the General's attorney that Koslow is an FBI informant, and the General orders him and his family to be killed. Koslow is attacked and nearly killed by a Polish gangster but manages to subdue his assailant. In an act of desperation, he takes Slewitt hostage and renders him unconscious. Meanwhile, Wilcox confronts Sofia and takes possession of the tapes. At the prison, Montgomery has taken command of the hostage situation and Koslow, using his past experience as a U.S. Special Forces sniper, enacts a means of escape when he switches outfits with Slewitt and strategically places a propane tank behind them, causing a sniper to mistakenly kill Slewitt and hit the tank, triggering a massive explosion. Staszek and another Polish gangster attempt to kill Koslow's family, but Grens arrives and thwarts them. Grens is shot but Sofia saves him and both gangsters are ultimately killed.


title: The Informer (2019 film)

text: Koslow is transferred via ambulance and awakens to find that Wilcox is his escort. She allows Koslow to escape as retribution for her actions. In NYC, Wilcox confronts Montgomery and has him arrested after she wears a wire to record him threatening to kill Koslow to cover up his actions. Grens and Wilcox partner to help Koslow and protect his family, sending Koslow into hiding until the FBI investigation into the corruption is concluded and he can be a free man.


title: The Informer (2019 film)

text: Filming took place in Pinewood Studios (UK), Iver Heath (UK), Gloucester Prison (UK) and Brooklyn, New York (US) in 2017.


title: The Informer (2019 film)

text: In September 2017, Aviron Pictures acquired U.S. distribution rights to the film, while Warner Bros. handled British distribution rights to the film. It was released on 6 November 2020, in the United States. It was originally scheduled to be released on 17 August 2018, which was delayed until 1 February 2019, and then to 22 March 2019. It was then further delayed multiple times due to financial problems involving Aviron. The film's first delay due to financial issues was until 16 August 2019, before being delayed again, to 10 January 2020, and then to 13 March 2020, and then to 31 July 2020, and then to 6 November 2020.


title: The Informer (2019 film)

text: Redbox Entertainment and Vertical Entertainment distributed the DVD and Blu-Ray in the United States on its Redbox kiosks on 18 December 2020.


title: The Informer (2019 film)

text: On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of based on reviews, with an average rating of . The site's critics consensus reads: ""The Informer" may prove a passable diversion for less demanding thriller fans, but most of its ingredients have been recycled from superior entries in the genre." On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 61 out of 100, based on 12 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".


title: The Informer (2019 film)

text: Peter Bradshaw of "The Guardian" gives the film 3 out of 5 stars, and wrote: "It might have made better sense as an episodic drama on television but it is brash and watchable, its world reeking with cynicism and fear."


title: The Informer (2019 film)

text: Tim Robey of "The Telegraph" gave the film 4 out of 5 stars, and wrote: ""The Informer" is one of the year's more pleasant genre surprises: a clenched fist of a crime thriller in the mode of "The Departed" or "The Town", in which every element is just a notch smarter than you'd expect." Guy Lodge of "Variety" called it "a surprisingly well-oiled genre machine" and says it is a film "that knows its limits, and works tidily within them".


title: No One Gets Out Alive (film)

text: No One Gets Out Alive is a 2021 British horror film directed by Santiago Menghini from a screenplay by Jon Croker and Fernanda Coppel, based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Adam Nevill. It stars Cristina Rodlo and Marc Menchaca and was released on 29 September 2021 by Netflix.


title: No One Gets Out Alive (film)

text: Ambar, an undocumented immigrant, moves from Mexico to Cleveland after her mother passes away. She supports herself with an under the table job and her savings. In search of a place to stay, she finds a dilapidated boarding house run by Red, who requires the first month's rent up front. After she moves in, strange things start happening to her there and elsewhere. One night she sees a man banging his head against the door, whom she later learns is Red's mentally disturbed brother, Becker. Some rooms in the house are filled with strange artifacts, including depictions of ritual sacrifice. Ambar begins to see ghostly figures around the house.


title: No One Gets Out Alive (film)

text: In search of a better job, she gives a co-worker the remainder of her savings to obtain a fake ID that proclaims her a U.S. citizen, but the co-worker steals the money and disappears. When Ambar insists her boss give her the co-worker's address, he fires her.


title: No One Gets Out Alive (film)

text: Frightened by supernatural visions, Ambar flees the boarding house. Desperate for money and unable to receive help from her distant cousin, Beto, Ambar is forced to call Red. They meet at a nearby diner and Red promises to refund her deposit, but only if she returns to the house as he claims to not have the cash on him. When they arrive at the boarding house, the cash is not in her room as promised. Instead, Becker shows up and forces Ambar to drink some wine. As soon as he leaves, she locks her door. A while later, the two Romanian women who have also moved into the boarding house, knock on her door. They discuss their dreams about a stone box. Petra starts singing which puts Ambar to sleep.


title: No One Gets Out Alive (film)

text: Ambar wakes up to Red and Becker restraining the women and preparing them to be taken down to the basement. She attacks Red to try to stop him, but Becker throws her against the wall. Beto comes looking for Ambar but is assaulted by Becker. After Becker takes one of the women downstairs; Red tells Ambar that his dad was an archeologist (as seen in the home movies at the start of the film) who brought back a stone box from his trip to Mexico in 1963. Red's father, along with his mother, Mary, trapped and murdered women (the ghosts that Ambar has seen and heard throughout the house). After they killed their father for sacrificing their mother, Red wanted to leave but Becker insisted on staying, as each woman sacrificed to the stone box improved Becker's health.


title: No One Gets Out Alive (film)

text: Becker returns and carries the screaming Ambar to the basement, where she sees the other woman has been decapitated. He ties Ambar to a stone slab in front of an altar where the box sits, opens the box and leaves the room, shutting the door behind him. Ambar continues screaming and Beto bursts into the room and unties her.


title: No One Gets Out Alive (film)

text: As they attempt to escape the basement, Ambar is caught up in a dream of her mother on her deathbed. At the same time, a large moth-like creature slowly emerges from the box and takes Ambar's head between its hands. In the dream, Ambar's mother is begging her to stay, and she begins to strangle Ambar. However, Ambar fights back and suffocates her mother instead. This causes the monster, the Aztec goddess Ītzpāpālōtl (God of Paradise made possible through sacrifice), associated with the moth seen throughout the film ("Rothschildia erycina"), to retreat back into the box. Ambar comes out of the dream state to find herself standing by the alter alone.


title: No One Gets Out Alive (film)

text: Ambar hears Becker and Red preparing Petra for sacrifice. Becker notices his wounds are not healing and says somethings wrong. Ambar grabs a macuahuitl from the study and goes upstairs, where she injures Red and is then attacked by Becker. Petra tries to help but is thrown over the balcony and killed. Becker chokes Ambar, but she slices his carotid artery with an obsidian blade from the macuahuitl, then smashes his head with it. She hears Red, wounded but alive, shuffling around in the next room. She brings him downstairs, ties him onto the stone table, and watches the monster bite off his head. Walking through the house, she passes Red, who has become a ghost like the other sacrificed women. As she starts to leave the house, her ankle, broken by Becker earlier, suddenly heals as a result of sacrificing Red to the monster. She stops and puts out her hand to let a moth land on it then turns back towards the basement door, showing the same physical effects that Becker had.


title: No One Gets Out Alive (film)

text: On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 67% based on 18 reviews, with an average rating of 6/10. Metacritic gave the film a weighted average score of 43 out of 100 based on 5 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".