Pierre Chenal

  • Pierre Chenal – L’alibi (1937)

    1931-1940FranceMysteryPierre ChenalThriller

    Paris, 1937. Winckler kills his enemy Gordon, a Chicago mobster, from the stage of a Parisian music hall, where he performs telepathy. He pays another artist, Helene, so that she tells the police they’ve spent the night together, which doesn’t fool Callas, the police officer who investigates the murder. He hires one of his fellow officers in order to seduce Helene.Read More »

  • Pierre Chenal – La bête à l’affût AKA Beast at Bay (1959)

    1951-1960Film NoirFrancePierre ChenalThriller

    User Review by dbdumonteil
    Pierre Chenal’s last hurrah-although not his last movie, it’s easily the best of the four thrillers he made when he was back from Argentina. “Jeux Dangereux” the precedent year suggested a return to form for a director who made interesting film noirs in the thirties and a masterpiece in the forties (“La Foire Aux Chimères”). All promises were fulfilled in “La Bete A L’Affut” .Read More »

  • Pierre Chenal – Crime et châtiment aka Crime and Punishment (1935)

    France1931-1940ClassicsCrimePierre Chenal

    Pierre Blanchar plays the murderer Raskolnikov, and Harry Baur is the police inspector on his trail…

    Quote:
    Crime et châtiment is one of the overlooked masterpieces of 1930s French cinema, an early and almost faultless adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s celebrated 1866 novel Crime and Punishment. One of the reasons for the film’s comparative obscurity is that it was released in the same year as Josef von Sternberg’s better known American adaptation which starred Peter Lorre and Edward Arnold. The French version appears to have been heavily influenced by an earlier silent adaptation Raskolnikow (1923) from the renowned German filmmaker Robert Wiene, whose best-known work – Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1920) – is powerfully evoked in this film’s staging of the pivotal murder scene.Read More »

Back to top button