| The Film Scripts and Treatments of Michael Black | michael@europaproductions.eu |  |
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| Redgauntlet | Pas de Deux | |||||
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Redgauntlet is a tale of royal revenge and rebellion. Edward Redgauntlet has fought in 1745 for Bonnie Prince Charlie's Scottish Stuart rebellion against the English and lost. He plans a new rebellion twenty years later. Caught up in the ramifications are his niece Greenmantle, the romantic Darcie Latimer and his best Edinburgh lawyer friend Alan Fairford. Both are kidnapped. Greenmantle is the heroine of the script, allaying the rebellion and rescuing Alan, who she marries. |
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This is the story of Nastia and Nicole. A pas de deux is a dance in ballet of two ballet dancers. Both Nastia and Nicole belong to the Ballet Russes, a Russian émigré ballet company set up in Paris after the Russian revolution during the early 1920s. Nastia is Russian, Nicole is French. They fall in love, and dance the pas de deux together. Then the Ballet Russes goes bankrupt, and the creditors argue over the name. The company splits in two, one section with Nastia going to the USA, the other with Nicole remaining and touring in Europe. WWII intervenes. Nastia becomes rich in the USA, Nicole retires from dancing and fights in the French resistance. Nastia retires also, and longs to return to Russia, but cannot do so due to the Communist regime. She remembers her youth with Nicole. She returns to France to find Nicole, now suffering from Parkinson's disease in a French hospital. As two old people, they dance the pas de deux together again, their love confirmed. | |||
| Killing Hitler | The Last Tsarina | |||||
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The true story of an attempt to assassinate Hitler
on the Russian front in 1942. Heinz Guderian is a German Wehrmacht Panzer
general who successfully mounted the German tank invasion of France in 1940.
However, Guderian advises Hitler that the war should stop there. He advises
against the planned invasion of Britain 1940. Hitler is greatly angered
and Guderian loses favour. Then Hitler orders the invasion of Russia 1941.
Again Guderian advises against it. Nevertheless the invasion proceeds. Sent
south into the Ukraine, Guderian races towards the oil fields, further convinced
by Hitler's ever changing military instructions that the Germans are simply
in a military campaign they cannot win. Mistrusting an SS general Kleist,
but needing an ally, Guderian plans an attempt to assassinate Hitler on
a Luftwaffe visit to the Russian front. Hitler is to be put on trial for
military incompetence, the trial is to be filmed for legality, and then
Hitler is to be shot. When Hitler arrives, he is surrounded by SS guards,
and the plot cannot proceed. Guderian, who faced no war crime charges at
Nuremburg, has been let down by Kleist and the SS, eager to keep Hitler
in power. The film ends with Guderian's own words from his biography. "I
will do what is right and honourable". |
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This is the story of the last Russian
Tsarina's obsession with her son Alexei's haemophilia, and her reliance
during the pre-revolutionary years on the crazed spiritual guidance of the
mad monk Rasputin. Disliking modernity and all attempts at political reform,
the Tsarina, who ran the Russian government during WWI, was more and more
obsessed by the health of her son-heir-to-the-throne, and lost all sight
of political reality whilst the on the streets situation in St. Petersburg
forever worsened. Meanwhile, whatever the Tsarina's obsessions, the young
princess Anastacia makes her own contacts with the young Russian revolutionary
Alexandra Kollontai… |
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