Michèle Morgan

  • Giuseppe Tornatore – Stanno tutti bene AKA Everybody’s fine (1990)

    1981-1990CultDramaGiuseppe TornatoreItaly
    Stanno tutti bene (1990)
    Stanno tutti bene (1990)

    Matteo Scuro is a retired Sicilian bureaucrat (responsible mainly for the writing of birth certificates), a widower with five children, all of whom live on the mainland and hold responsible jobs. He decides to surprise each with a visit and finds none as he imagined. The film is a veritable travelogue across contemporary Italy, as Matteo journeys to Napoli, Roma, Firenze, Milano, and Turino to search for each of his children; he even spends one night on the streets among the homeless. Scuro returns to Sicily, visits his wife’s grave, and reports with irony that “stanno tutti bene.”Read More »

  • Jean Delannoy – La symphonie pastorale AKA The Pastoral Symphony (1946)

    Jean Delannoy1941-1950DramaFrance
    La symphonie pastorale (1946)
    La symphonie pastorale (1946)

    The pastor of a mountain village adopts a small blind girl, Gertrude. As Gertrude grows up into an attractive young woman the pastor, now middle-aged, realises that he is in love with her. To his chagrin, his adopted son, Jean, is also in love with Gertrude, even though he is shortly to be married to another woman. Jean’s fiancée is jealous of Gertrude and arranges for her to see a doctor in the hope that she might be cured and to enable Jean to choose equally between the two women. Miraculously, Gertrude’s sight is restored and she returns to the village a changed woman. Unable to accept Jean’s love and disappointed by the pastor’s affections for her, she realises that her former happiness has been lost forever. (Films de France)Read More »

  • Jean Grémillon – L’Étrange Madame X AKA Strange Madame X (1951)

    Jean Grémillon1951-1960DramaFranceRomance

    Synopsis:
    Étienne, a modest carpenter, believes he has found the perfect partner in Irène, a beautiful young woman who appears to be devoted to him. But Irène is not the simple housemaid she pretends to be. In truth, she is the wife of a wealthy man, living in a grand house where she plays hostess at her frequent soirées to the cream of Parisian society. Irène is content with her double life until the day she discovers she is pregnant with Étienne’s child. After the baby is born, Irène promises to marry Étienne, without telling him that she must first persuade her present husband to agree to a divorce. Étienne’s hopes for future happiness are dashed when the business he attempts to set up fails and his child falls dangerously ill. The final blow comes when he visits Irène at the house where she claims to work and discovers the truth that she has long concealed from him…
    — James Travers .Read More »

  • Jean Grémillon – Remorques aka Stormy Waters (1941)

    1941-1950DramaFranceJean Grémillon

    Summary
    This tender, muscular, fatalistic film rematches Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan (after Le quai des brumes) in an anguished love triangle with Madeleine Renaud, Grémillon’s favorite actress. Love, obligation and desire play out against the backdrop of the merciless ocean and the seductive escape of sea-going.

    Laurent (Gabin) is a tugboat owner who rescues a merchant vessel from a violent sea. Besides its unscrupulous captain, the rescued ship’s most dangerous cargo is his restless and seductive wife (Morgan). Meanwhile, Gabin’s devoted but ailing wife (Renaud) waits impatiently for him at home…

    As dbdumonteil notes, the plot is banal… but Gabin, Prévert and Armand Thirard’s luminous lighting paint it in forty shades of grey.
    (filmnutz)Read More »

  • René Clair – Les grandes manoeuvres AKA The Grand Maneuver (1955) (HD)

    1951-1960DramaFranceRené ClairRomance

    A French lieutenant makes a bet that he can seduce any woman in town in the two weeks before his regiment leaves for maneuvers, but his chosen target (a Parisian divorcée) isn’t like other girls he’s known.Read More »

  • Albert Valentin – L’entraîneuse (1939)

    Albert Valentin1931-1940DramaFrance

    Synopsis:
    The young Suzy is a nightclub hostess in a cabaret in which Frehel is the star. Because one night she gets propositions from a rich widower who would like to have her as his girlfriend, Suzy wishes to leave this place, where she has no future, for a better one. Abandoned by her protector, a young hoodlum named Robert, she gets the occasion to get away from it. She decides to go on vacation on the Riviera and stay at the Chateau des Cedres, the former residence of a noble family that has been transformed into a bourgeois guest house by the baroness Saint-Leu. Shy and elegant, in her modest suit, Suzy stays there under the name of Suzanne Michelet and soon makes new friends among the young people of very wealthy families.Read More »

  • Claude Autant-Lara – Marguerite de la nuit AKA Marguerite of the Night (1955)

    1951-1960Claude Autant-LaraDramaFantasyFrance

    Quote:
    Truffaut and Godard gave a bad name to the “quality” French cinema that preceded them. This film was one of their pet examples of what they saw as staid, boring, unadventurous cinéma de papa. Without an axe to grind, it is actually a breathtakingly bold modernization of the Faust legend, ravishing to look at with its highly stylized sets (Trauner on LSD) and containing multi-layered undercurrents, including a message on the unthinking destructiveness of youth which seems almost like a prescient reply to its New Wave critics.Read More »

  • Maurice Gleize – Le récif de corail AKA Coral Reefs (1938)

    1931-1940AdventureDramaFranceMaurice Gleize

    Brisbane, Australia, late 1910s. A man on the run from a murder charge buys a place as a stowaway on a smuggler ship bound for Mexico, by way of a tiny coral reef atoll.

    Quote:
    Between 1923 and 1952 Maurice Gleize managed to direct twenty two films in France without distinguishing himself. This one, with a screenplay by top French scriptwriter Charles Spaak, had arguably the best cast he ever got to work with (on other occasions he directed Fenandel, Charles Vanel and Marie Bell) from co-stars Jean Gabin and Michele Morgan – hot on the heels of Quai des brumes that same year – to Saturnin Fabre, Gaston Modot and Julien Carrette but for all Gleize extracted from them it might as well have been John Lund and Maria Montez supported by Leo Gorcey and the Bowery Boys.Read More »

  • François Villiers – Le puits aux trois vérités AKA Three Faces of Sin (1961)

    1961-1970DramaFranceFrançois Villiers

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    Synopsis
    Midnight in Paris, Faubourg St Honoré. In one house, a woman suddenly screams and the sound of a gunshot is heard. A short time later, Laurent Lénaud, a young painter, is running away with a suitcase. Arriving at a hotel, he enters a room where a young woman named Rossana is crying. The room is strewn with broken furniture and clothes lie on the floor. Laurent is almost certain that his wife Danielle is to blame for this. Meanwhile, in an expensive apartment a woman is responding to the questions put to her by police officer Bertrand. She is Renée Plèges, the owner of an antiques shop. That evening, she found her daughter Danielle shot dead. Renée explains that Laurent, her son-in-law, wanted to leave Danielle. When she refused to divorce him, he killed her. While Bertrand asks Renée to tell him everything she remembers since the first day she met Laurent, the latter recounts to his mistress Rossana the events that took place before Danielle’s death. Two completely different stories emerge. Then Danielle’s personal diary is found, bringing a third explanation of what took place that evening…Read More »

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