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French films Romance
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Jean Renoir’s first full length film, La Fille de l’eau, is an improbable yet compelling melange of melodrama, neo-realism, farce and surrealism. Although the film oscillates from one extreme to the other, between high drama and light comedy, between naturalistic and highly stylised photography, it manages to captivate its audience with its typically Renoir-esque blend of romantic...
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Jean Renoir’s second full-length film is this lavish and fairly faithful adaptation of Emile Zola’s classic novel, Nana. The film’s extravagances include spacious, overly decorated sets and two magnificent set pieces – a horse race and an open air ball (complete with a stunningly choreographed cancan sequence)...
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Prix de beauté was one of the last silent masterpieces, directed by Augusto Genina and scripted by René Clair (himself a great director). Released at a time when sound films were becoming the norm, this film was largely overlooked and has only comparatively recently received the attention it deserves. The film stars Louise Brooks in the role of the eponymous tragic femme fatale...
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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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Having failed to make much of a mark in cinema’s silent era, Jean Renoir made the transition to sound films which much greater success than many of his contemporaries. La Chienne, whilst not an exceptional film in its own right, is significant in that it marks the turning point in Renoir’s career. The experience and public awareness that Renoir gained through this film would enable...
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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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Mariusis the first film in arguably the most well known and best trilogy in cinema history (followed by Fanny and César). All three films were written and produced by Marcel Pagnol, one of France’s most celebrated playwrights of the Twentieth Century. Although Pagnol officially directly only the third film in the series...
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The second film in Pagnol’s celebrated Marius-Fanny-César trilogy follows on directly from the first film. Now it is the turn of Orane Demazis to take centre-stage in an emotionally charged and moving portrayal of a pregnant woman who has to choose between fidelity to the man she loves and the obligations of social propriety...
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Cette vieille canaille was one of half a dozen films that Russian director Anatole Litvak made in France before taking up residence in the United States, where he directed several Hollywood classics including Anastasia (1956). Litvak’s 1930s European films are striking in their sombre cinematographic style which uses light and shade to create mood and tension...
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Although not as well known and as celebrated as Jean Renoir’s subsequent films, Madame Bovary occupies an important part in the director’s film-making career. It is certainly am ambitious film for Renoir to attempt at this stage in his career and his film is faithful to Flaubert’s novel in content and spirit (although the film was far less controversial than the novel when...
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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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This is the first of Marcel Pagnol’s three ambitious film adaptations of novels by Jean Giono (followed by Regain and La Femme du boulanger). Like many of Pagnol’s films, Angèle presents a romanticised view of life in Provence, reflecting Pagnol’s love for the region perhaps better than the austere reality of the situation...
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At first sight, this would appear to be a pretty run-of-the-mill kind of love story. However, the end result is anything but ordinary, and the film is now almost universally regarded as one of the greatest and most influential French films ever made. This is all the more surprising given the troubled history of the film...
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Le Bonheur is pretty typical of Marcel L’Herbier’s output in the 1930s, a conventional piece of melodrama intended to showcase the stars of the day, in this case Gaby Morlay and Charles Boyer. The latter was on the verge of a huge film career in Hollywood and so this was to be one of his few significant roles for French cinema...
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With its atmospheric chiaroscuro photography, impressive cast and meticulous attention to period detail (not to mention some stunning montage WWI battle sequences), Les Nuits moscovites has a lot to recommend it. The film was directed by Alexis Granowsky, one of a number of Russian exile filmmakers who worked in France in the 1930s; he is perhaps best known for his 1936 film...
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La Bandera is one of Julien Duvivier’s most memorable films, providing a satisfying and early example of poetic realism, albeit in a setting far removed from contemporary France. Although not nearly as ambitious or daring as the religious epic, Golgotha, which Duvivier made immediately before this film, La Bandera is a worthy film which presages many of the director’s subsequent...
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Jean Renoir’s bold experiment with neo-realism is only partially successful (marred mainly by wooden acting), but it provides an interesting diversion from the artificial studio-based cinema of the time. Filmed largely on location, without background music, and using locals for extras, Toni makes quite a contrast to other films of its period...
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The final instalment in Marcel Pagnol’s famous romantic trilogy provides a fitting conclusion to a remarkable and entertaining series of films. Raimu gives one of his best screen performances as the film’s central character, the café owner César, capable supported by Pagnol’s familiar troupe which includes Pierre Fresnay...
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Jenny is the first full length film to be directed by Marcel Carné, one of the undisputed masters of French cinema. Carné had previously made one short film Nogent, Eldorado du dimanche (1929) and had worked as an assistant to another great film director, Jacques Feyder. Eager to make his own mark, Carné refused the support of Feyder on his first film and generally showed...
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In Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, Renoir uses a simple story to reflect the political mood of the time. The film has a distinctly anti-capitalistic message, suggesting that co-operation between workers can achieve far more than a capitalist worker-manager régime. The despicable Monsieur Batala (played superbly by Jules Berry) is the embodiment of the worst of the capitalist state...
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