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Miss Europe (France) 1930

March 12, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Aka : Prix de beauté
Year : 1930
Runtime : 1 hour, 28m
Country : France
Language : French
Subtitles : English.sub.idx
Genre : Drama
Director : Augusto Genina
Cast : Louise Brooks, Georges Charlia, Augusto Bandini, André Nicolle, Marc Ziboulsky, Yves Glad, Alex Bernard, Gaston Jacquet, Jean Bradin,
imdb

Synopsis :
The French Prix de Beaute stars cult figure Louise Brooks as a nondescript typist for a Parisian newspaper. On a whim, Brooks submits her photograph to the Miss France Contest. To everyone’s amazement—and her boyfriend Andre’s displeasure—she wins the contest, and is sucked into a whirlwind of photo ops and interviews at the Miss Europe contest in Spain. Here she is confronted by Andre, who angrily demands that she give up this foolishness and return home. But the lure of fame and fortune is much too strong, and before long Brooks has signed a movie contract. The heart-stopping tragic climax brilliantly juxtaposes the image with her “live” screen image. Not as highly regarded as Louise Brooks’ German films for G. W. Pabst, Prix de Beaute nonetheless succeeds in terms of visual dynamics and the naturalness of the star’s performance. Available in both sound and silent versions, the film never received a formal American release. Augusto Genina replaced the film’s original director Rene Clair during the pre-production stages.

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Miss Europe (1930)
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Filed Under: Drama, France, Movies

Alphaville (France) 1965

March 12, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Aka : Alphaville, a Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution
:Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution
Year : 1965
Runtime : 1 hour, 39m
Country : France
Language : French
Subtitles : English.srt
Genre : Mystery / Sci-Fi
Director : Jean-Luc Godard
Cast : Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Akim Tamiroff, Valérie Boisgel, Jean-Louis Comolli, Michel Delahaye, Jean-André Fieschi, Christa Lang, Jean-Pierre Léaud,  László Szabó, Howard Vernon
imdb

Synopsis :
Eddie Constantine plays Lemmy Caution, a trenchcoat-wearing secret agent. Constantine had already played this role in dozens of previous films; the character was originally created by British pulp novelist Peter Cheyney. However, in Alphaville, director Jean-Luc Godard moves Caution away from his usual twentieth century setting, and places him in a futuristic sci-fi dystopia, the technocratic dictatorship of Alphaville.

Alphaville is a 1965 black-and-white French science fiction film directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Its original French title is Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Alphaville, a Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution). The film stars Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Howard Vernon and Akim Tamiroff. The film won the Golden Bear award of the Berlin Film Festival in 1965.

Alphaville combines the genres of dystopian science fiction and film noir. Although set far in the future on another planet, there are no special effects or elaborate sets; instead, the film was shot in real locations in Paris, the night-time streets of the capital becoming the streets of Alphaville, while modernist glass and concrete buildings represent the city’s interiors. In addition, the characters refer to twentieth century events; for example, the hero describes himself as a Guadalcanal veteran.

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Alphaville (1965) Criterion [1.18GB]
Alphaville -Jean Luc Godard [693MB]

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Filed Under: France, Movies, Mystery, Sci-Fi

Beauty and the Beast (1946) Criterion

March 9, 2010 By Leave a Comment



Title: Beauty and the Beast
AKA: La Belle et la Bête
Year: 1946
Directed: Jean Cocteau
Genre: Fantasy
Runtime: 1 hour, 33m
Country: France
Language: French
Subtitles: English

IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038348/

Cast:
Jean Marais: La Bête/The Beast/The Prince / Avenant
Josette Day: Belle
Mila Parély: Félicie
Nane Germon: Adélaïde
Michel Auclair: Ludovic
Raoul Marco: The Usurer
Marcel André: Belle’s Father

Plot / Synopsis

La Belle et la bête, the film which marked Jean Cocteau’s return to directing after an interval of 15 years, is a work which continues the vein of fantasy which had characterised his scriptwriting during the wartime years. To this extent the film is typical of its period, for the early postwar years in France saw a basic continuity with approaches established during the Vichy period (there was no resurgence of realism in France to compare with the emergence of neorealism in Italy). But in all other ways the appropriation of a fairy tale to the filmmaker’s own personal mythology is a totally individual work.

The film is based on the tale as told by Madame Leprince de Beaumont, but there is little evidence in Cocteau’s approach of the childlike innocence which the director demands of his audience in his brief introduction to the film. Visually, the film is one of Cocteau’s most sophisticated works. The costumes designed by Christian Bérard and the lighting and framing devised by Henri Alekan are decorative rather than functional and take their inspiration from classic Dutch painting, particularly the work of Vermeer. Despite the presence of René Clément as technical supervisor, the film shows none of the reliance on complexity of scripting and use of heavy irony so characteristic of French cinema in the late 1940s. The legend is handled in a dazzingly eclectic style. The home life of Belle’s family is parodied and often broadly farcial in tone, as, for instance, in the use of cackling ducks to comment on the attitudes of her sisters. By contrast, the departure of Belle for the Beast’s castle and her entry there are totally stylised, with Cocteau employing slow motion photography to obtain a dreamlike effect. to suspend our disbelief. After all, isn’t everything else perfectly normal?

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Beauty and the Beast (1946) Criterion

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Filed Under: Fantasy, France, Movies