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French films of the 1960s
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Catherine Deneuve stars in this touchingly ironic melodrama which is based on a novel by the celebrated French writer Françoise Sagan. The film was directed by Alain Cavalier, one of the minor figures in the French New Wave, who worked as an assistant to the great Louis Malle. Cavalier was more or less driven into making conventional genre films such as this when his first two films...
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Jean-Pierre Mocky’s acerbic satire on the harmful influence of television on children and society in general continues to be as relevant forty years after the film was first released – perhaps even more so if the findings of recent studies are to be believed. However, that is not the main reason for watching La Grande lessive...
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Ferdinand, a young photographer, meets Claire, a supposed cover girl, in a café. Although he is instantly attracted towards Claire, Ferdinand soon learns that she is a professional thief, working for her husband, a thug named Brady. Claire has had enough of her criminal life and hopes to make a fresh start with Ferdinand...
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The third in Jean Girault’s popular gendarme series returns to the picturesque setting of Saint-Tropez with the by now familiar blend of slapstick and quick-fire dialogue. The quality of the comic performances – particularly from the incomparable Louis de Funès – makes up for the rambling and implausible plot (exactly why would the gorgeous Claude Gensac fall for...
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This exemplary hard-edged policier sees Jean Gabin in possibly and toughest – and most controversial – film role, that of a police commissioner who is not afraid to step outside the law to achieve his ends. This is a forerunner of the kind of morally ambiguous crime-fighting hero who would become commonplace in French thrillers in the following two decades (often played by Jean-Paul...
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By the mid to late 1960s, Louis de Funès had well and truly established as France’s top comic film actor. Le Petit baigneur is a relative minor entry in his filmography but it continued a remarkable series of box office successes which began with Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez and a groovy Fantômas re-make...
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Although undoubtedly great family entertainment, Le Tatoué is really nothing more than a clumsy vehicle to unite Louis de Funès with Jean Gabin, following a dubious fashion in French cinema at the time to pair off stars of the highest echelon. De Funès had by the time this film was made become the most popular comic actor in France...
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There are overtones of Hitchcock’s Psycho in this self-consciously slick adaptation of a James Hadley Chase thriller, although François Gabriel isn’t quite Anthony Perkins and the direction lacks Hitchock’s subtlety and ingenuity. The film is competently directed, the second feature from Hungarian born director René Gainville...
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Les Biches is one of Claude Chabrol’s most intense and aesthetically pleasing films, a riveting melange of traditional love triangle and subtly dark thriller. Fans of Chabrol’s work will notice strong similarities with his earlier film, Les Cousins, which mirrors this film in a number of imporant ways. As in all of Chabrol’s films...
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This somewhat lacklustre re-make of a classic 1930s French film achieved some success when it was released in 1968, mainly on the strength of its impressive cast list. Omar Sharif and Catherine Deneuve both manage to turn in a creditable performance, although their talents are largely wasted on what is really little more than a limp love story dressed up as a serious historical drama...
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This run-of-the-mill drama marks the final chapter in the long-standing relationship between director Gilles Grangier and actor Jean-Gabin. Beginning with La Vierge du Rhin in 1953, the two men worked together on a dozen films over a fifteen year period, most of these films being popular successes. Although Grangier’s film later films...
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André Delvaux directed this haunting mélange of dream and reality, his second full-length film after his acclaimed L’Homme au crâne rasé (1966). Delvaux’s work is strongly influenced by other great directors (Resnais, Coctau, Buñuel...), and also by the great tradition of Flemish art...
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Athough Edouard Molinaro’s first collaboration with Louis de Funès (Oscar , 1967) had not been entirely amiable, the film director allowed himself to be pursued by Gaumont to make a second film featuring the temperamental comic genius. Like Oscar, Hibernatus was an adaptation of a successful comic stage play and proved to be a great commercial success...
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When this film was released in France in 1970, it was not only a surprising success with both the critics and the paying public (Truffaut himself believed the film would flop because of its austere, documentary style). The film also raised the profile of child protection issues, giving Truffaut a platform to air his views on the subject...
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Since separating from his wife, violinist Gaspard has two passions in his life: music and nature. Felicia is a rich woman who does nothing else but go to parties in her Rolls-Royce and amuse herself with her many male admirers. This ill-matched pair meet when the former’s clapped out Citroen crashes into the latter’s pristine Rolls...
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This simple yet intensely poignant film tackles the subject of how to face up to death with remarkable compassion and good humour. Largely overlooked until recently, the film certainly merits a serious re-evaluation and deserves a higher profile than it currently has. Although the film’s first half is pretty ordinary fare...
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In this film, director Jean-Pierre Melville draws on his own war-time experiences to paint a vivid and realistic picture of life in the French Resistance during the Second World War. The film has more of the feel of a documentary than a traditional action movie. As a result, the central characters have great depth and their heroism lies not in fool-hardy acts of bravado but in their dogged...
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A former real-life couple Alain Delon and Romy Schneider are re-united on screen in this compelling psychological drama, one of Jacques Deray’s best-known films. The film revolves around a dangerous love triangle, with virtually all of the action taking place either in or by an outdoor swimming pool in a villa. Whilst the plot is somewhat thin...
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The film in which French New Wave director François Truffaut shows most clearly his love of American pulp fiction and the suspense-thriller genre is very probably La Sirène du Mississippi. With its huge budget (8 million francs), exotic location (the island of Réunion) and big name billing (and you couldn’t get much bigger than Belmondo and Deneuve)...
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Few films exemplify Chabrol’s cinema better and more fully than La Femme infidèle . The bourgeois setting, the dangerously repressed characters, the mildly disturbing voyeuristic photography, the discordant music… all the familiar motifs which conspire to conjure up an unsettling world of seemingly middle-class respectability in which deadly passions are struggling to break...
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