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French films Thriller
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Le Grand restaurant is an entertaining and lively action comedy starring popular French comic actor Louis de Funès. The film comes from de Funès’ “golden period”, which includes La Grande Vadrouille (1966) and the Fantômas and Gendarme series. Although the plot and dialogue are less satisfactory than some of de Funès’ other films...
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Having pretty well deconstructed the American crime thriller in Pierrot le fou, Jean-Luc Godard goes even further with his next policier outing, driving the genre to its absolute limits of abstraction and, in doing so, effectively ending his career as a mainstream film director. Guns, gore and gangsters are just some of the familiar film noir trappings which are woven...
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The third instalment in the 1960s series of Fantômas films sees Louis de Funès and Jean Marais united for the final time in the by now familiar blend of slapstick comedy and crime thriller. Although marginally better than the previous two films in a number of areas (notably the plot and the direction), there is little in the way of new material and the kitsch comic strip formula...
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In the mid-1950s, few film directors made a greater impression on the controversial young critics on the French film review paper Les Cahiers du cinéma than a certain Alfred Hitchcock. Indeed, it was largely down to these influential critics that Hitchcock achieved the recognition he deserved in his lifetime; few critics elsewhere took him seriously at the time...
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More a divertissement than a bon cru, La Route de Corinthe is one of Claude Chabrol’s less successful attempts at a parody of the spy thriller. An attractive cast and an even more attractive location offer some consolation for the uneven comedy and implausible, drawn out storyline, which appears to have been lifted wholesale from a sub-standard Tintin adventure...
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After the commercial failure of his early films – notably L’oeil du malin (1963) and Landru (1963) – director Claude Chabrol found himself straitjacketed into making commercial films that would attract a sizeable cinema audience. The period 1964 to 1966 is not Chabrol’s greatest – it included such lowbrow fare as Le Tigre aime la chair fraiche (1964)...
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That Le Samouri should be widely regarded as a classic policier is mainly down to three ingredients: Delon, Melville and Decae, a recipe that can hardly fail to please. Alain Delon is brilliantly cast as the solitary hit-man – implacable, emotionless, yet with a moral irony running through his performance. Few other actors have the charisma and subtlety to play a character that...
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Julien Duvivier ended his long and distinguished film career with this taut psychological thriller, a popular genre and an unashamedly populist kind of film. Alain Delon, the hottest young actor in France at the time, is cast in the lead role, exploiting his obvious sex appeal and talent for playing tough macho yet sympathetic heroes....
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In this film, director Gilles Grangier attempts a happy marriage of the two genres that most define his career: the popular comic farce and the classic French crime-thriller. The union doesn’t quite work and although the film has some pretty lavish production values it is very much a hit and miss affair. Not all of the jokes are in the places you’d expect to find them...
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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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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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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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After the immense success of Le Corniaud (1964) and La Grande vadrouille (1966) – two of the most popular films ever made in France – director Gérard Oury had great ambitions for his next film. With a colossal budget of 24 million francs, Le Cerveau was conceived as gutsy blockbuster parody of the American heist thriller...
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One of the most popular and best French crime thrillers of the 1960s, Le Clan des Siciliens brings together three giants of French cinema: Jean Gabin, Alain Delon and Lino Ventura. One of the main reasons for the film’s success is that the three lead actors brilliantly portray the kind of characters for which they are best known...
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After the commercial failure of his big budget war-time drama Paris brûle-t-il? (1966), director René Clément returned to somewhat safer ground for his next film, the ever-popular psychological thriller. His previous forays into this genre – Plein soleil (1960) and Les Félins (1964) – were big successes and showed a genuine talent for suspense and...
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This compelling study of revenge and hate is easily one of Chabrol’s better films. Throughout, Chabrol is in perfect control of the drama and suspense, and the result is one of his darkest and most absorbing works. A film that is so firmly built around the viewpoint of its central character relies for its success on the performance of its lead actor...
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Winner of two oscars in 1969 (for best foreign picture, best editing) and awards at Cannes (the jury prize and best actor for Trintignant), Z is the film that took 1969 by storm. Even today, the film is still highly regarded and has much to appeal to a new generation of cinema-goers. On the surface, Z is a stunningly filmed political thriller...
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Borsalino, one of the most lavish French thrillers of the 1970s, sees rival actors Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon (at the time, the two most popular actors in France) sharing the limelight. The pairing works surprisingly well, Delon’s feline coolness and brooding introspection making the perfect complement to Belmondo’s warmth and amiability...
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