S2.E8 ∙ The Sisters

Film version of the TV series You Can't See Round Corners (1967). Small time bookie, Frankie McCoy is conscripted into the army during the Vietnam War, and is frustrated because his girlfriend will not have sex with him.

A young man befriends the last surviving Civil War veteran, intending to rob him of $50,000.

A respected war correspondent is found murdered, with three bullets--from three different guns--in him. Three different men are arrested, convicted and sentenced to death for the murder, but only one can be the actual killer. A criminologist sets out to find who is really guilty.

With This Breath I Fly presents an intimate portrait of two courageous Afghan women fighting for their freedom after being imprisoned for moral crimes, while exposing the complicity of the European Union in censoring their voices.

Republic, never a company to not try getting ahead of the curve and with writers who could remember the 1930's social conscience WW I vets-returning-home films, made this in mid-1944 (a full year before the end of WW II) as a don't-let-it-happen-again sermon. The semi-prologue opening finds Father Jim Donnelly before a post-war planning board in Washington and, as Priests quite often did in 1930 and 1940's films, tells his point-making story in flashback of how WW I vet Eddie Ballinger, shaken by battle experiences anyway, returns home to a job that is no longer there for him and finds "No Help Wanted" signs standing in his way of making an honest living. Despite the pleas from his mother and his sweetheart Lucy Manners, Eddie starts hauling booze for bootlegger Tim Oberta and takes up with entertainer Lola, who eventually betrays him, mainly because she is a one-name character and that's what one-name characters are there for... especially in a movie with the lead playing his 1944 version of Jimmy Cagney in a 1933 Warner's film. Father Jim makes his don't-repeat-the-past point in less than an hour as the hearing committee had also seen and heard the story before.

"Menagerie" is a drama which takes place in the early 1990s, in one Serbian village near the coast of river Drina. It is a story about moral and historical breakdown of one country, located at a milieu separated from urban life, in an area that lives on specific rules and relationships between people. Srna, daughter of Strain, the most powerful man in the village, is promised for a wife to Jovan. Jovan is the son of a local forester Tadija, who, in return, allows Strain poaching and illegal cutting of village wood. Although there is attraction between Srna and Jovan, they still don't want to be married by the wish of their fathers. Suddenly Petar, the ex-forester who was seven years in jail for killing Strain's older son, returns to the village. His return changes lives of all characters in this story indicating the uncertain end of it.