The Count of Monte Cristo tells the dramatic story of Edmond Dantes, a young French sailor who is falsely denounced as a political traitor and unjustly imprisoned for eighteen years without trial. After a daring escape, Dantes flees to the island of Monte Cristo where he finds a colossal treasure of gold and jewels bequeathed to him by a dying inmate. Using these riches, he assumes a new identity and devises a plan to take vengeance on all those who betrayed him.Read More »
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A chance remark leads three French naval officers to reminisce, together and privately, about the compelling young commander Willsdorf, nicknamed The Drummer Crab, recalling his exploits from the fog-shrouded rivers of Indochina to an attempted military coup in Algeria to his lonely, anonymous vigil in the North Atlantic fishing lanes nearby. Joseph Conrad would have loved this film, arguably the finest modern seafaring adventure ever made: a thoughtful and thrilling study of man versus the elements, where the past itself becomes an elemental force even more unyielding than the vivid Winter seascapes captured by Raoul Coutard’s breathtaking cinematography. In metaphor, Willsdorf’s fate is the fate of French colonialism, and only by pursuing his memory, through crashing waves and hissing spindrift, can his three erstwhile companions (a dying captain, a middle-aged medical officer, and a robust, veteran Chief Engineer) confront and endure their collective loss. This is a spellbinding film, rich in history and detail.Read More »
To get royal backing on a needed drainage project, a poor French lord must learn to play the delicate games of wit at court at Versailles.Read More »
A man steps off a train into a French village awaiting the day when he will rob the town bank. He meets a retired poetry teacher striking up a strange friendship and explore the road not taken, each wanting to live the other’s life.Read More »
Cambrai, a modest captain in the French secret service, discovers that his superior, Colonel Toulouse, was responsible for the death of his rival Milan. To cover his tracks, Toulouse immediately sends two hit-men to Rio de Janeiro to eliminate François Perrin, the innocent “grand blond” who was instrumental in Toulouse’s scheme to remove Milan. When Perrin miraculously survives, Toulouse changes his strategy. He takes Perrin into his confidence and attempts to convert him into an ace secret agent, thereby discrediting Cambrai and proving that he is innocent of Milan’s death. When his beloved Christine is abducted by Toulouse’s agents, Perrin has no other choice. Indeed, he seems to relish the prospect of becoming a real-life James Bond…Read More »
When his father, a wealthy industrialist, is killed in aeroplane crash, Bart Cordell returns to France to take up the reins of the empire he has inherited. As a prostitute attempts to frame him for drug smuggling, Bart begins to suspect is father may have been murdered. His investigation uncovers a complex web of political intrigue, in which his own family and his stepfather are heavily implicated…Read More »
A young woman by the name of Jeanne Fortier finds herself the victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice
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The first half of the sixties saw a mini-boom of French old melodramas of the nineteenth century.The most celebrated of them “Les Mysteres de Paris” (someone’s reading that book in Cloche’s film) was filmed by André Hunebelle in 1962 with poor results;Riccardo Freda tackled D’Ennery’s “Les Deux Orphelines” (which was made by Griffith as “Orphans of the storm” in the silent era and remade by Maurice Tourneur in the thirties ) and “Roger la Honte” .
Maurice Cloche took “la Porteuse de Pain” (= bread carrier)-which he had already filmed in 1949-and succeeded measurably well;the loooong novel was simplified with good results.Read More »
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Post-’68 France as “a curious country” of befuddled fathers and obscured revolutionaries. The middle-aged Everyhomme (Philippe Noiret) is a widowed watch-tinkerer in Lyon, who gets his politics from TV news and “likes to be legal” too much to cross a red light on an empty street. The necessary shock arrives: His son (Sylvain Rougerie) is on the run, having killed a factory security guard. Gallicizing Georges Simenon’s novel, Bertrand Tavernier handles the moment with control, self-effacement, and muted compassion: Noiret’s dazed bus ride back home after being told the news, the activist paraphernalia in the boy’s room (scrawled on the wall is Céline’s dictum about pastoral battlefields) unnoticed by an imploding father fumbling for a bed.Read More »
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In the early 1950s, in a seaside town, Isabelle, a girl in her late teens,is about to spend an apparently eventless summer between her mother, her friends and a small job for a photographer whose business is lagging. But Isabelle is not the mentally balanced young lady she seems to be. In fact she is doubly traumatized, firstly by the rape she suffered eight years before from a Nazi officer and secondly by the suicide of her father shortly after. What she wants deep inside herself is to find a man, young or less young, who will bring her tenderness and happiness. Will Luc, a young German, or Monsieur Vaudois, her married boss, give her what she lacks?Read More »