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French films Drama
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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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La Belle équipe is one of director Julien Duvivier’s most enduring and popular films. Although it is not quite his best work, it has several moments of brilliance which easily afford it the status of a masterpiece in the minds of many who watch it. The film is easily identifiable as a product of the time in which it was made...
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Made in February and March of 1936 by a team of French Communist Party activists and sympathetic film technicians, La Vie est à nous is a bold and effective piece of party propaganda, intended to bolster the PCF’s chances in the French elections in May of that year. The film is a curious mixture of newsreel images (which both ridicule and vilify fascism)...
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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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In its time, Les Bas-fonds was something of a groundbreaking film, offering an honest and humanist portrait of those at the lowest end of the social spectrum – crooks, gamblers, prostitutes and drunks. The film coincided with the Popular Front taking power in France, a time of great optimism and solidarity among the working classes...
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It is not hard to see why Anatole Litvak’s Mayerling is widely regarded as one of the greatest of cinematic love stories, a 1930s version of Romeo and Juliette. Captivating performances from Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux and some beautiful, genuinely inspired camerawork combine to make this an exquisitely poetic and highly poignant film...
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This atmospheric drama from director Marc Allégret effectively marked the start of a distinguished film career for actress Michèle Morgan. Here, the 17 year-old actress stars alongside that giant of stage and screen, Raimu, an actor who is renowned for playing complex yet down-to-earth characters with conviction and great emotional intensity...
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L’Alibi is one of two very popular film noir thrillers made by the French film director Pierre Chenal in the 1930s. The other, Le Dernier tournant (1939), was the first film adaptation of the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. From a stylistic point of view, both films are rather good examples of early film noir...
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L’Étrange Monsieur Victor is unquestionably one of Jean Grémillon’s best films, an atmospheric, sombre tale of guilt, betrayal and retribution. The alternating moods of the settings – from the intimate family scenes in Victor’s household to the clandestine meetings between Victor and his criminal allies...
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One of the undisputed masterpieces of cinema history, La Grande illusion is a film of enduring popularity and one of the most powerful anti-war films of the Twentieth century. It stands beside Jean Renoir’s other triumph, La Regle du jeu, as one of the all-time great French films. The film tackles the anti-war theme from a very subtle angle...
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Les Perles de la couronne was the first of Sacha Guitry’s lavish episodic historical dramas, made nearly two decades before his similar major works Napoléon (1955) and Si Versailles m’était conté (1954). As in these later films, Guitry takes more than a few liberties with historical fact and much of the film is just an excuse for Guitry to give free rein...
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An undisputed classic of French cinema, Pépé le Moko combines poetic realism with gangster thriller, making this one of the earliest and best examples of the French film noir genre. The film clearly carries the echo of the film which inspired its director, Howard Hawk’s 1932 masterpiece Scarface (which became the prototype for the American gangster movie of the 1930s)...
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This is one of several films in which distinguished writer-director Marcel Pagnol shares with his cinema audience his undying passion for the provincial France of his youth. In a story that is a million miles from contemporary reality, he paints a picturesque, unashamedly romanticised, almost naïve, view of country life...
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Un carnet de bal is a good example of French cinema of the late1930s, and one of the earliest successful attempts at the episodic film which became so popular in subsequent decades. The multi-part structure of the film (effectively a series of loosely connected vignettes) is a little unsatisfying, but the individual stories are themselves almost perfectly formed...
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This classic tense drama, with a compelling plot by Henri Jeanson, is a fine example of pre-war French cinema. Louis Jouvet, possibly France’s greatest theatre actor, gives one of his finest screen performances, making this as much a celebration of the dramatic art as a captivating study of the aspirations and frustrations of young actors....
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This doom-laden, intensely atmospheric film epitomises the poetic realism of French cinema of the late 1930s. Masters of the genre, Carné and Prévert create a shadowy world where the harsh realities of an unsympathetic world intrude on and ultimately ruin any aspirations to romantic idealism. The hotel of the film’s title can be interpreted as a metaphor the world as...
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Abel Gance’s remake of his earlier 1919 film displays all the passion and power of that earlier film, but with the addition of sound to articulate the director’s protest against war. The final scenes where the dead soldiers return to life are haunting and beautifully filmed, but earned the film a horror classification when released in the UK...
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The only one of Renoir’s films that can truly be described as epic, La Marseillaise succeeds as both an accurate historical account of an important part of French history and as a reflection of the mood of the time. The late 1930s was a dark and uncertain time in the history of France, and this film, although strangely optimistic...
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La Bête humaine is a powerful study of the darker side of human nature. It comes from possibly the greatest period of French cinema, from a great director, Jean Renoir, at the height of his powers (between the legendary films La Grande illusion and La Règle du jeu). It fits into yet somehow seems to transcend the style of poetic realism that was in vogue at the time...
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