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French films of the 1950s
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Although nearing the end of his film-making career, Renoir still managed to deliver this charming satirical comedy. Whilst the film lacks the punch and intensity of the great director’s earlier films, it provides an amusing tongue-in-cheek swipe at scientific progress and re-affirms Renoir’s belief that there is no substitute for love...
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One Saturday night, two young men named Freddy and Joseph meet by chance on the banks of the River Seine. Both have the same objective in mind: chasing women. Freddy, a decorator, claims to have experience with girls and knows how to seduce them. Joseph, a bank employee, dreams of getting married and starting a family. They decide to stick together and off they go...
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Louise Martin lives with her parents and is engaged as a maid by Jess Rooland, a rich American who lives in a fancy apartment on the other side of the street. He is a nostalgic and mysterious man who is married to Thelma, a depressive alcoholic. Louise cannot understand why Thelma repeatedly calls her husband a murderer...
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Despite being a fairly predictable study of a woman’s mid-life crisis, this film succeeds admirably on the strength of the camera work and Jeanne Moreau’s performance. The tragically moving music by Brahms adds emotional intensity and heightens the drama of Jeanne’s dilemma. It is regrettable that the impression of the film when it was first released was tarnished by media...
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Les Cousins is definitively part of the French New Wave of the late 1950s. Whilst slightly more polished than the films of his contemporaries (notably Godard and Truffaut), Chabrol’s film bubbles with an insurgence of new cinematographic techniques and fresh acting talent. The sense of newness is reinforced by presence of so many young actors...
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In this film, Roger Vadim skilfully transposes Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 novel Les liaisons dangereuses to the swinging ‘60s. The era of unfettered individualism and sexual permissiveness provides a suitably appropriate backdrop to the predatory adventures of the Vicomte de Valmont. This is quite a satisfying film...
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One of the best-loved and most memorable of all French films, Les quatre cents coups established François Truffaut as a great film director and launched the acting career of Jean-Pierre Léaud. This is a poignant story about the life of a young teenage boy who seeks escape from his loveless, lonely existence by committing minor crimes and creating fantasies...
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Jean Gabin reprises the role of Inspector Maigret for the second time in what is one of the best film outings for Georges Simeon’s famous detective hero. The self-assured and efficient direction comes from Jean Delannoy, one of the pillars of quality cinema of the 1940s and 1950s, who, at the time, was being vilified by the hot-headed young critics of the Cahiers du cinéma...
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Although the latter part of his career was blighted by some notable misfires and unfair comparison with the work of his younger contemporaries (New Wave directors such as François Truffaut), Julien Duvivier was one of great creative forces in French cinema in the Twentieth Century. Many of his films of the 1930s and 1940s...
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For this film, Bresson takes as his cue Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, in which the central character Raskolnikov argues that crime is a justifiable activity for certain privileged individuals. Coupled with an intense fascination for pickpocketing and his own profound belief in the redemption of the soul, Bresson develops this theme into one of his most compelling and thought-provoking...
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Catherine Ferrier is a well-known lawyer who specialises in cases involving alcoholism. One evening, she meets photographer Walter Hermelin, who has just been involved in a minor car accident. To repay her for driving him to his destination, Walter agrees to help Catherine obtain the photographs she needs to defend her ex-lover...
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Rue des Prairies was based on a novel by the well-known French actor, René Lefèvre, and gave Claude Brasseur his first significant film role. It was released just a few months after François Truffaut’s Les 400 coups. Both films deal with similar themes – the conflict between the generations and the rebelliousness of an unloved adolescent...
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Two years after Jacques Becker’s Les Aventures d’ Arsène Lupin, Robert Lamoureux reprises his most famous rôle as the gentleman thief. This time, Yves Robert is the director and we return to glorious black and white, making this a very different film to Becker’s. The Lupin of Robert’s film is a slightly more sinister and elusive figure...
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With two successful crime dramas under his belt, director Edouard Molinaro stays with the genre and delivers what is quite possibly his darkest and most stylish film. Taking his inspiration from American noir thrillers and their French counterparts – notably the policiers films of Jean-Pierre Melville – Molinaro constructs a well-honed suspense thriller which...
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When Virginie meets Hervé Dandieu, a dentist, she knows he is the man of her life and they soon marry. However, it isn’t long before they begin to fall out and start bickering over everything. One day, fed up with his domestic situation, Hervé leaves their apartment and goes for a walk in the city. At a cabaret...
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Despite having an exceptional cast, which includes the great comedienne Jacqueline Maillan and some actors who are now very highly regarded, this adaptation of Pierre Veber’s play falls somewhat flat and is typical of the kind of bargain basement comedy that French audiences had to endure in the late 1950s. The jokes are too predictable to be amusing...
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