Long considered a classic of European film noir, this existential gangster drama from French director Jean-Pierre Melville was released in the United States only in a severely truncated, re-edited, and overdubbed version entitled The Godson. Thirty years after its initial public airing, Le Samourai (1967) finally saw a limited American release in ...
Nights of Cabiria opens with Cabiria (Giulietta Masina) and her boyfriend playfully embracing by the seaside -- and then he shoves her into the water and steals her purse. Cabiria is revived by some local boys and runs off by herself, shouting. What follows is a series of similarly humiliating episodes, in which the defiantly positive prostitute ...
Corey (Alain Delon) is the young gun in the French underworld who has just been released from prison. Escaped convict Vogel (Gian-Maria Volonté) hides in the trunk of Corey's car. The two enlist the help of an alcoholic former cop (Yves Montand) for an elaborate jewelry-store robbery. Police inspector Mattei (Bourvil) whom Vogel escaped in the ...
Z is one of the most politically insightful films ever made, exposing government hypocrisy and cover-up in the wake of a political assassination. Zei (Yves Montand) is a scientist who is scheduled to give a speech against the use of the atomic bomb. On the way to the event, he is attacked outside the auditorium by a group of right-wing extremists ...
Emile Zola's obscure novel entitled "L'Assommoir" has been made into several films. This is one of the best. In this two hour movie an entire mini-series worth of problems have been compressed about a young woman to whom life has dealt hard blows. Set in the 19th-century, this woman deals with an alcoholic husband while doing everything within her ...
Love and the Frenchwoman (La Francaise et L'Amour) concentrates on the nature of love by illustrating seven separate aspects of the emotion. In "Childhood," 9-year old Pierre-Jean Vaillard suffers a traumatic experience when he takes his parents' "cabbage patch" theory of conception too literally. In "Adolescence," a little girl (Annie Sinigalla) ...
This film by French director Alain Resnais (Last Year in Marienbad) is loosely based on a true story from the 1930s about financier, con-man and swindler Stavisky who was arrested in 1934 for selling phony stock but was never brought to trial. While in jail, he continued to engage in doubtful monetary transactions. As the rumors that he was being ...
Jean-Luc Godard wrote, directed, and starred in this offbeat comedy. He appears as a bumbling cinematographer who drops film cannisters as he rushes to a screening, and he and others board a plane helmed by a pilot who is reading a self-help book about suicide. A philosophical narration accompanies scenes of recurring imagery. A man dancing with a ...
Cinematic poet Jean Cocteau explored the myth of Orpheus on no fewer than three occasions: Le Sang d'Un Poete (Blood of a Poet, 1930), Orphee (Orpheus, 1949) and Le Testament d'Orphee (1960). This second of his "Orpheus" trilogy stars Jean Marais in the title role. Updated to contemporary Paris (albeit a Paris never seen before or since), the ...
In his final film, Jean Cocteau brilliantly evokes memories of his past triumphs, Blood of a Poet (1930) and Orpheus (1949). Cocteau casts himself as an aging poet who knows he is dying (as indeed he was); his greatest desire is to be reborn so that he can qualify for celestial immortality. The stellar cast includes such French film favorites as ...
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