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In René Clair’s irrepressibly romantic portrait of the crowded tenements of Paris, a street singer and a gangster vie for the love of a beautiful young woman. An international sensation upon its release, Under the Roofs of Paris is an exhilarating celebration of filmmaking.Read More »
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René Clair’s ghost comedy begins melodramatically, with the story of a young man who seeks the hand of a politician’s daughter in vain. But when a mysterious doctor frees the spirit of the despairing young man from his body, the film takes a fantastic turn. From then on, the lover wreaks havoc on Paris in the form of an invisible phantom. With double exposures and imaginative tricks, Clair successfully capitalizes on the surreal, Dadaistic undertones of the story. Everything culminates in a breakneck chase through the streets of Paris.Read More »
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René Clair, the most distinguished of the French motion-picture directors, is one of the great men of the cinema. His triumphant photoplays, Sous les toits de Paris, Le Million and, the finest of them all, A nous la liberté, stand among the genuine classics of the films. Now M. Clair, who has tried cheerful sentiment in Sous les toits, farce in Le Million, and brilliant social satire in A nous la liberté, gives up some of his adventurousness and returns to the quiet romantic mood of his earliest success in the new work called Quatorze juillet (“Fourteenth of July”). Read More »
A young man, the night watchman on the iconic Eiffel Tower, wakes to find he is alone in the world. Descending from his iron eyrie, all is eerily frozen, apart from a few souls who have escaped a mad scientist’s immobilising ray. The streets of Paris briefly become a Garden of Eden to play in, as the friends indulge in their new-found liberty. Like Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale, this is a film to be carried in the heart.Read More »
An impoverished painter and his rival engage in a race across Paris to recover a jacket concealing a winning lottery ticket.Read More »
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 »
Synopsis:
Professor Henri Faust, retiring after 50 years as an alchemist in a circa-1700 university, despairs at still knowing nothing of the true secrets of nature…whereupon his old acquaintance Mephistopheles, servant of Lucifer, appears and grants him youth and a new life. But with youth, Faust’s interest is diverted from science to women. And Mephistopheles, who has taken on the guise of the elderly Faust that was, sets many snares for his young friend’s slippery soul…Read More »
An absolute surrealistic movie. Somebody gets killed, his coffin gets out of control and after a surrealistic chase it stops. The person gets out of it and let everybody who followed the coffin disapear.Read More »
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A newspaper obit writer, impatient to move ahead at his job, wishes he could know the news before it happens. One night, Old Pop Benson grants him that power, in the form of the next day’s newspaper. At first it only gets him in trouble, but also brings him closer to the pretty girl in a fortune-telling routine. By the third tomorrow’s paper, he’s sure he’s got this whole future business in the bag — reporting advance scoops, picking sure winners at the race track — when he reads a very final headline: the news of his own death.Read More »