Claude Lelouch

A thief known as Simon the Swiss faces up and downs in his criminal profession.Read More »

Short documentary with varied footage from Iran. The Shah’s regime commissioned several soft-propaganda films of this nature from European filmmakers during the 1970s. Its existence and production is more remarkable than the film itself.Read More »

Synopsis:
Claude Lelouch’s Bandits combines a murder story with a skewered view of “family values.” Jewel thief Jean Yanne ships his daughter Marie-Sophie Lelouch off to a Swiss boarding school. His motives are not altogether paternal: Yanne intends to avenge the murder of his wife, and doesn’t want his daughter around to complicate his plans. In Switzerland, Lelouch falls in love with a young criminal, and the cycle that has entrapped her father starts all over again. Nothing is what it seems and nothing that happens is what we expect in Bandits.
~ Hal Erickson, RoviRead More »

Realising that times have changed, five unscrupulous crooks decide it is time for a reappraisal of their line of business. Prostitutes are demanding the right to strike, workers now dismiss their bosses rather than the other way round, and the world is being refashioned by political and social revolutions. For Lino, Jacques, Simon, Charlot and Aldo, the days of robbing banks are a thing of the past. Now they decide to make an active participation in this brave new world, by hijacking aeroplanes and kidnapping high-profile public figures, starting with the rock singer Johnny Halliday. It proves to be a very lucrative enterprise, until one of their victims turns the tables on them…Read More »

Quote:
Four wedding anniversaries serve to chronicle the beginning and end of a thirty-year marriage, in this tragicomic French film by director Claude Lelouche, best known to U.S. filmgoers for his Oscar-winning film A Man and A Woman. Henri (Rufus) and Janne (Bulle Ogier) are first seen on their wedding night as they hesitantly enter their new country house which faces a concrete bunker. They would really have preferred something in the city, but this is what they can afford. A resistance group overruns the house in order to take out the Germans in the bunker, and as a result of this raid Henri becomes forever associated with the resistance. Read More »

Synopsis
1935. Jacques and Simon live by their wits, from the hold-up in jewelry theft. When war broke out, the two friends and Lola, a prostitute, make the traffic with the Germans, but by discovering the methods of the Gestapo, they give up and enter the Resistance. At the end of the war, Jacques is decorated and returned to his first occupations. 1935 Flying the new model of Citroën, a man invented the gang des tractions avant. Thus begin ten years of tracking down an infernal, good between the band and the gang of bad guys. A continuous suspense on WWII base where the good are not always the nicest, and not necessarily the most wicked cruel …Read More »

Quote:
Sam Lion has led a full and successful life. As a young boy, abandoned by his mother, he was adopted by a circus family, where he developed an afinity for big cats. His career as a circus acrobat was cut short by an accident, after which he started a new life in commerce. His revolutionary cleaning products made him a wealthy man, the head of a corporate empire, but his private life was just as eventful. He marred young, had two children, his first wife died tragically, and he re-married. Now in his fifties, Sam has only one wish – to escape. Whilst crossing the ocean in a one-man dinghy, he decides to fake his own death.Read More »

A Parisian experimenter with Lumiere’s Kinematograph (Charles Denner) dies in WW1, and his son (Charles Denner) grows to be a man who barely survives WW2 in a concentration camp. He marries another refugee (Marthe Keller) who dies in childbirth, leaving him a daugher, Sarah, who at age 16 (Marthe Keller) is a spoiled debutante hopelessly in love with pop singer Gilbert Bécaud (Gilbert Bécaud) she goes through the 60s trying every fad while her father wishes she’d settle down. Meanwhile, sneak thief Simon Duroc (André Dussollier) winds up in prison, where he slowly turns his devious energies to their least-antisocial use: filmmaking.Read More »

The successful novelist Judith Ralitzer is interrogated in the police station about the disappearance of her ghost-writer. A serial-killer escapes from a prison in Paris. A missing school teacher leaves his wife and children. In the road, the annoying and stressed hairdresser Hughette is left in a gas station by her fiancé Paul while driving to the poor farm of her family in the country. A mysterious man offers a ride to her and she invites him to assume the identity of Paul during 24 hours to not disappoint her mother. Who might be the unknown man and what is real and what is fiction?Read More »