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French films War
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Les Honneurs de la guerre is a simple, little known film, made on a modest budget, but, it must surely rate as one of the most powerful and memorable anti-war films ever made. The sheer mad absurdity of war and the ease with which humankind can, through a combination of fear, distrust and desire for revenge, succumb to the evil impulse for blood lust are illustrated with heart-breaking effect...
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Inspired by a popular novel by René Havard, Un taxi pour Tobrouk is a classic French war film that shows the brutality and absurdity of war without slipping into sentimentality or laboured anti-war polemic. Whilst there are a few impressive action scenes, for the most part the film focuses tightly on the relationship between the five main characters...
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Nearing the end of his film-making career, Jean Renoir returned to the subject of his most famous film, La Grande illusion, a powerful study of male conflict and camaraderie, centred around a POW prison break-out during World War I. Based on a novel by Jacques Perret, Le Caporal épinglé is concerned with a similar situation during the Second World War and is the closest that...
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Jean-Luc Godard’s fifth film sees a radical departure from his earlier films and the emergence of a more politically antagonistic form of cinema. At the same time, Les Carabiniers makes a strong anti-war statement and attacks the capitalist system in all its forms. The film is less clearly targeted than Godard’s subsequent political films but its tone is nonetheless vociferous...
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Based on the award winning novel by Robert Merle, Week-end à Zuydcoote provides a harrowingly realistic portrayal of one of the darker episodes in World War II – the retreat and decimation of the English and French troops at Dunkirk in 1940. Whereas most war films depict glory and victory, this one is about defeat and loss...
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La Grande vadrouille is one of the great comic achievements of French cinema. A magnificent action comedy, it had until very recently the distinction of being the most popular film ever shown in France. Its box office sale of 17 million tickets has only recently been topped by the 1997 American blockbuster Titanic. Even today...
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Le Roi de coeur is an amazing film, one of those rare fanciful comedies that dares to tackle a genuine social or political issue and makes its point with a simplicity that is totally effective. This is clearly meant as an anti-war film, and, for all its exuberance and madcap silliness, a pretty effective one at that. No wonder it was a great international success when it was first released...
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By the time he came to make Paris brûle-t-il?, René Clément was one of the most highly regarded film directors in France. Two of his films had won Oscars in the Best Foreign Language Film category and a further three had won him awards at the Cannes Film Festival. How better to crown these successes than by directing a blockbuster war film depicting the liberation of Paris...
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Rated by François Truffaut as one of the best films about the Nazi Occupation of France, L’Vieil homme et l’enfant marks a spectacular cinematic debut for the young film director Claude Berri, his first full-length film (and arguably his best film). Drawing on his own wartime experiences, Berri skilfully narrates a warm and touching tale of friendship between an old man...
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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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By any standards, Le Chagrin et la pitié is a monumental piece of film documentary. For one thing, it dares to make an objective assessment of one of the most difficult periods in France’s history – the German occupation of that country during World War II. In addition to being one of the most important documentaries ever made...
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After the staggering success of the 1966 film La Grande Vadrouille, the production team of Le Mur de l’Atlantique were clearly hoping to repeat the success with the winning formula of Bourvil and an outlandish comic farce set at the time of the Nazi occupation. Unfortunately, despite some memorable comic moments, this film is little more than a pale imitation of that earlier film...
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After their success of their first film, La Grande java(1969), the musical quintet known as The Charlots bounced back with more of the same – madcap slapstick and hippy antics revolving around a meagre plot. Whilst some of the jokes are painfully laboured and a little predictable, many are truly inventive and very funny...
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Lacombe Lucien is a brilliant study of the corruption of innocence and the realisation of guilt in a young impressionable adult. It is one of the finest films made by director Louis Malle, who made a virtue of tackling difficult subjects in the course of his long film-making career. The actor Pierre Blaise gives an impressive performance as Lucien...
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Whilst they lack the scale and originality of earlier war-time comic farces, Robert Lamoureux’s series of 7e compagnie films are quite entertaining, although the formula of inept French soldiers pulling fast ones on dim German officers is looking distinctly tired by the mid-1970s. On a retrouvé la 7e compagnie benefits from Lamoureux’s witty dialogue and some memorable...
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Monsieur Klein is an unusual variation on the theme of the police-gangster thriller which was very much in vogue in France in the early 1970s. What marks this film out as a cut above the rest is partly the film’s historical backdrop (the Nazi occupation of France) but mainly Joseph Losey’s masterful and intelligent direction of the film...
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Jean-Jacques Annaud’s first film is this subversive black comedy, a thoughtful and engaging satire on the absurdity of war and the injustice of colonisation. It is one of the earliest French films to confront the subject of France’s murky colonial past head on and consider how the white colonising nations exploited the non-white people they came to dominate (particularly in Africa)...
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The third and mercifully final entry in Robert Lamoureux’s “Septième compagnie” trilogy retreads a lot of familiar ground but still offers a few good laughs along the way. There are more than a few similarities with the 1966 film La Grande vadrouille , except that the latter film is far better made and is at least 10 times more entertaining...
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This is a painfully poignant film adaptation of Yves Gibeau’s controversial 1952 novel. It explores with uncompromising frankness and lucidity one of the most troubling aspects of the French education system of the 1930s – the military school system into which survivors of the First World War were eager to fling their offspring...
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In a similar vein to Oury’s phenomenally successful 1966 film La Grande vadrouille, L’As des as is a lavish action-comedy set at the time of the Third Reich – this time on the eve of World War II during the Berlin Olympics of 1936. This film is unashamedly aimed at the popular mass market but it is, for all that...
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