Classic French Cinema Discussion Thread

Hi Salzmank,I hope you are having a good weekend,and I was wondering if you are aware of the other Clouzot/ Perkins team-up Ten Days Wonder (1971)?

With Champagne Murders,I found it to be a very interesting, stylish film,with this being what I wrote in 2016:


7/10
 www.imdb.com/review/rw3492466/?ref_=tt_urv

I also hope you don't mind me asking how you would rank CC's films? Out of what I've seen,my list (from best-worst)

This Man Must Die.
Hell/L'enfer
Line of Demarcation
À double tour
Champagne Murders
Le Boucher
Madame Bovary
La Cérémonie
The Girl Cut in Two

Hope you don't mind me jumping in here... I have only seen a few of Chabrol's films but I like them all to some degree - and we agree on the best, it would seem!

This Man Must Die
Story of Women **my favourite Huppert performance, I think... she is always sublime, but this is a performance for the ages.
Le Boucher
La Cérémonie
Merci pour le chocolat

I really need to see some of his others, such an interesting filmmaker.

I love French movies.   In all seriousness, from what I have seen, I think that France makes the best movies in the world.   Italy would be a close second.   

The first half of the 1970s American cinema is awfully good, too.

It's certainly a contender.  Japan would be in the running for me, too.

An awful lot of truly great French movies, and some of the major French filmmakers rarely seemed to put a foot wrong, at least from what I've seen of their work.

Ordered that and Frontière(s) (2007), now got another 3 French horrors to watch for the challenge 

Hi all,after seeing The She-Wolves I spoke to fellow IMDber dbdumonteil,who told me about another Boileau-Narcejac adaptation,this time by Henri Decoin. Since having enjoyed all the Boileau-Narcejac adaptations, and finding Decoin's Beating Heart/Battement de coeur (1940) to be sparkling,this became my first non-Horror viewing of October.

Maléfices/Where the Truth Lies (1962) 9



“It is impossible to save the victim,as long as the author of the spell is not reduced to impotence.”

Gliding along the floor towards François like a Gothic Horror queen, Juliette Gréco gives a mesmerising performance as Myriam. Calling François over to her as a Femme Fatale siren,Gréco keeps Myriam’s spikes pointed,with every abrasive off-the-cuff line she unleashes,increasing François’s lust for her. Holding François and maid Ronga (played by a very good Mathé Mansoura in her lone credit-one of the few times a black person is given a prominent role) from entering her personal space, Gréco holds Myriam’s cards tight,and pulls on the ambiguity of no one being able to get up close and personal with her. Finding more than a leopard when he visits to care for Myriam’s pet, Jean-Marc Bory gives an excellent turn as Film Noir loner François, whose fresh-faced innocent love for his wife Bory chisels down to fear and lust over the spell Myriam has cast on his heart. Finding her husband to become distant,Liselotte Pulver tenderly has Catherine sink into a sickness which raises François doubts over his secret love.

Tightening the web Myriam and François are held in, co-writer/(with Albert Husson) director Henri Decoin crisply adapts Boileau-Narcejac’s novel, (which runs as an extended flashback,left out in the film version) with the writers exploring the paranoia at the heart of all Boileau-Narcejac adaptation, via François never being fully relaxed around Myriam and always having his back up against the wall, held in a vice-like grip of doubt by the writers,over the at face value love from Myriam. Holding Catherine up ill in bed, the writers turn the screws on Myriam’s tropical past and unravel her suspected spells that cast out to François the choice to sink or swim in the Film Noir ocean.

Filmed on Noirmoutier Island at a time when the only way to reach the island was via a periodically flooded causeway called The Passage Du Gois (a bridge was built in 1971) director Henri Decoin & cinematographer Marcel Grignon fly above the Gois in a dazzling opening shot that brings impending doom onto the island. On the Film Noir shore, Decoin stylishly uses strands of light (backed by a sharp, Jazzy score from Pierre Henry) to brew a supernatural (not horror) atmosphere transfixing François. Leaving the Noir open-ended, Decoin follows François in a wide shot to where the truth lies.

On it. 

I pretty much agree, although I am perhaps a little more favourable towards it than you.  I cut it quite a lot of slack for performances this classy.  But you are on the money about the ending, both the ultimate actions of the two women and the final scene which suggested where things went from there.

Story of Women, a World War II set story, is quite wonderful and not at all what I expected.  Definitely worth seeking out.

Hi Rudeboy,after reading the praise you gave up,I ordered Story of Women. When looking again at my CC list,something appeared missing. Checking his credits,I realised that I had somehow missed Chabrol's wonderful Fantasy film Alice or The Last Escapade (1977). I was wondering if you have seen Alice? I recently found it on YT with Eng Subs: