Jean-Louis Barrault

Mr. Joly, Doctor Cordelier’s lawyer, is amazed to discover that his client and friend leaves his possessions to a stranger, Opale, a sadistic criminal. He needs this man to prove that people’s behavior can be adjusted at will…Read More »

NYT – Janet Maslin
THE great historical pageant that is Ettore Scola’s ”La Nuit de Varennes” unfolds with supreme ease. It begins with a series of casual coincidences and weaves them brilliantly into a vision of one of the most important moments in French history, a vision not the least bit limited by the specifics of its place and time.

The time is the French Revolution, and the occasion is the flight of the royal family from Paris to the small town of Varennes, where they will be captured and sent back to their deaths. But the feeling is utterly modern, or perhaps it’s timeless. The key issues of the film are the issues of any era. And the humor and generosity with which Mr. Scola presents them are correspondingly enduring.Read More »

A violinist passes on to his daughter three rings which represent three passions of his romantic past, and urges her to save each for men who truly deserve one.She squanders them all on one man who is undeserving.
On paper this looks promising; a beautiful actress, Edwige Feuilliere, an actor who’s just come off a starring role opposite Arletty in Les Enfants du paradis, a respected director, Jean Delannoy and one of THE four best scriptwriters in French cinema, Charles Spaak. Sometimes it all goes wrong but always with artists of this calibre in front of and behind the camera there are moments to savour and so it is here. Barrault doesn’t really convince as a violinist whereas Feuilliere has only to convince us she is in love. There are promising visuals and nine times out of ten Delannoy has the camera in the right place and when that is in front of Feuilliere’s face you won’t hear a peep out of me. Interesting as opposed to memorable.Read More »

Summary:
Semi-autobiographical story of Conrad Rooks, who travels to France to undergo a drug-withdrawal cure. Flashbacks to the beginings of psychedelia in San Fran.Read More »

In this experimental film, Isidore Isou, the leader of the lettrist movement, lashes out at conventional cinema and offers a revolutionary form of movie-making: through scratching and bleaching the film, through desynchronizing the soundtrack and the visual track, through deconstructing the story, he aims to renew the seventh art the same way he tried to revolutionize the literary world.Read More »

Synopsis
©Hal Erickson
Even in 1945, Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise was regarded as an old-fashioned film. Set in the Parisian theatrical world of the 1840s, Jacques Prévert’s screenplay concerns four men in love with the mysterious Garance (Arletty). Each loves Garance in his own fashion, but only the intentions of sensitive mime-actor Deburau (Jean-Louis Barrault) are entirely honorable; as a result, it is he who suffers most, hurdling one obstacle after another in pursuit of an evidently unattainable goal. In the stylized fashion of 19th-century French drama, many grand passions are spent during the film’s totally absorbing 195 minutes. Amazingly, the film was produced over a two-year period in virtual secrecy, without the knowledge of the Nazis then occupying France, who would surely have arrested several of the cast and production staff members (including Prévert) for their activities in the Resistance. Children of Paradise has gone on to become one of the great romantic classics of international cinema.Read More »