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French films Comedy
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In this hilarious short film, Georges Méliès shows his talent both as a lithe comic performer and as a master of the cinematic art of his day. Méliès uses the technique of multiple exposure (which he invented and used repeatedly in his films) almost to its limit – exposing the film no less than seven times to allow himself to appear seven times in the same...
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For this, one of his later films, Georges Méliès revisits the career that earned his reputation before he turned to filmmaking, that of the stage conjuror. Much of the film is taken up with an elaborate conjuring trick, with Méliès (playing the part of the diabolical lodger) pulling an improbable assortment of large objects out of a small travelling bag...
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Although lacking the maturity and stature of other silent films of the period, Paris qui dort is nonetheless one of the most important films in the history of French cinema. It is the first film of the great French film director, René Clair, and also - although it was not seen as such at the time – the first ever science-fiction movie...
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Jean Renoir’s most overtly comical and anarchistic film, Tire au flanc is the definitive comedy of army life, a popular subject at the time (stemming most probably from the unpopularity of military service). Noticeably less restrained and less technically accomplished than Renoir’s other silent films, it is clear that the director’s main preoccupation here was to entertain...
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René Clair skilful transposition of Labiche’s play from the 1850s to the 1890s provides an outrageously funny satire on bourgeois attitudes. Although the plot is childishly simple, the film is replete with content, showing the director’s mastery of both visual comedy and film photography. The period setting (la belle époque) was chosen to emphasise the absurdity...
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In common with many of his contemporaries of the late 1920s, director René Clair was apprehensive over the transition from silent to sound cinema, and this is apparent in his first sound film, Sous les toit de Paris. Although the film has a number of scenes with recorded dialogue, it is essentially a silent film to which sound elements have been added in a rather tentative and somewhat...
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René Clair’s musical farce À nous la liberté was one of the early triumphs of sound cinema and has retained its status as one of the all-time greats of French cinema. The famous production line scenes were the inspiration for Chaplin’s masterpiece, Modern Times and the film contains many equally memorable sequences which doubtless influenced a generation of...
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Rated as René Clair’s comic masterpiece, the original template for the Hollywood musicals, and one of the best of the early sound films, Le Million is by any account an astonishing piece of cinema that lives up to its reputation. Even seventy years on, the film is bursting with energy and freshness and has a great deal to entertain a modern cinema audience...
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Jean Renoir’s most outrageous comedy, based on a stage play by Georges Feydeau, provides ample material for its comic stars to prove their worth. Marguerite Pierry, Jacques Louvigny and Michel Simon each provide a comic performance that surpasses genius, whilst a then comparatively unknown actor Fernandel unleashes his talent on an unsuspecting world...
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Boudu sauvé des eaux is amongst Renoir’s most human and certainly funniest films. It is a warm-hearted satire on the hypocrisies of bourgeois family life, covering some of the ground which Renoir later tackles more directly in his later film, La Règle du Jeu. Renoir uses Boudu as a kind of torch light to show up the self-righteousness and shallowness of supposedly good...
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Comic giant of French cinema Fernandel stars in this typical 1930s French farce, a conventional piece of vaudeville intended purely to entertain the masses. Although both the plot and production values are pretty simplistic, if not to say absolutely shoddy, by today’s standards, this kind of lowbrow comedy was enormously popular in its day...
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René Clair has been described as the most quintessentially French of France’s great film directors, and nowhere is this more apparent than in his poetic elegy to young romance, Quatorze juillet. This film is similar in spirit to Clair’s earlier film Sous les toit de Paris (1930), with its free-flowing narrative and idealised portrayal of ordinary life in Paris...
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The main attraction of this somewhat dated operetta is its wonderfully eccentric cast, which includes the delightful Arletty – the future star of Hôtel du nord (1938) and Les Enfants du paradis (1945) - in one of her early film appearances. The plot is a typical 1930s muddle of coincidence and mistaken identities...
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Compartiment de dames seules is a sublime example of the kind of vaudeville farce that became prevalent in French cinema after the arrival of sound. Films such as this were often based on well-known stage plays and were hugely popular, allowing a mass audience across the country to appreciate what had previously been accessible only to those living in the main cities (usually Paris)...
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With the rise of Nazism, director Robert Siodmak left Germany in 1933 and moved to Paris, where he continued his filmmaking career for a few years before settling in Hollywood. La Crise est finie is the second film he made in France, an effervescent musical comedy set against the backdrop of economic depression and political uncertainty...
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This lowbrow farce appears shamelessly unsophisticated even for the standards of the 1930s, but a spirited performance from a very young Fernandel gives it a sense of fun and more than a few good laughs. The direction is clumsy and the comic situations painfully laboured, but some cheerful musical numbers help to make the film palatable...
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Sacha Guitry’s second sound film, Bonne Chance, makes a stark contrast to his first, Pasteur (a sober biography of the life of Louis Pasteur), and is far more typical of his subsequent films. This is a playful and sometimes irresistibly funny romantic comedy, very much in the style of Ernst Lubitsch’s early American films...
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This enduring classic of French cinema is often cited as director Jacques Feyder’s finest film and it certainly earned him great acclaim on its release in 1935. It was awarded the Grand Prix du Cinéma Français and also a medal by the Societé d’Encouragement à l’Art et l’Industrie...
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The most famous, and probably the best, of the six comic films which Fernandel made with the director Christian-Jaque, François Premier is of interest today mainly for its ruthless parodying of the starchy historic dramas which were very much in vogue when the film was made. Such films tended to slip up with unintentional anachronisms...
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Ignace is a good example of the popular burlesque comedy of its time, with some eccentric comic performances and several songs, one of which, the title song Ignace , went to become popular successes. A typically hyper-active yet adorable Fernandel is very nearly out-staged by the remarkable Alice Tissot, who plays the archetypal tyrannical officer’s wife...
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