One day I may stop singing the praises of Radiance Films, but today is not that day. I love, love, love the way they keep bringing to my attention films that I’d otherwise never hear of in nice sets, loaded with extras.
Solo is a terrific little French thriller about a couple of young revolutionaries in over their heads and how a jewel thief winds up lending them a hand. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.
Lino Ventura has become one of those actors I keep finding myself watching, almost by accident. He just keeps showing up in the films that I’m watching. I don’t know why. But he’s so good I never mind.
In Birds of Prey, he plays a killer hired to assassinate the president of some backwater South American country. Before he can do that, he is forced to wait in a tiny little village for several days, accompanied by a true revolutionary. A kid who will probably replace the president. The kid is idealistic while the killer is old and cynical. Their interactions make up most of the movie, and they are wonderfully played. The whole movie is great. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.
This French thriller is part film noir, part Hitchcockian suspense. Neither part is as good as that sounds, but it’s not bad either. I’m a sucker for this type of thing, as you can read in my full review over at Cinema Sentries.
Jean Gabin played Maigret, the great Parisian detective from Belgian writer Georges Simenon, three times. This was his final attempt. It is the worst film of the three, but it’s still pretty good if you like Gabin or detective stories. You can read my full review here.
There have been a million adaptations of Agatha Christie stories. This French television did something original with it. They essentially removed Christie’s detectives (Poirot, Miss Marple, etc.) and inserted two original characters while keeping the plots.
I reviewed this back in 2016 and haven’t watched it since, but I’m thinking it is time for a rewatch. You can read my full review here.
A woman whispers “I love you, I love you” over and over on the phone.
In an office, a businessman, Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet), talks mindlessly to a telephone operator. They talk about the long upcoming weekend. Then he goes into his office and closes the door. In a desk drawer he takes out a grappling hook, a pair of gloves, and a gun. He puts on the gloves and takes the rest with him.
He climbs out a window onto a long balcony. He uses the grappling hook to climb up to the floor above. He enters through a window and then walks to his boss’s office. They discuss an upcoming deal, and then Julien shoots his boss in the head.
The boss was a war profiteer, and Julien is an ex soldier so it is possible that that the killing is political. Later we’ll learn that the voice on the telephone belonged to Florence (Jeanne Moreau), the boss’ wife and Julien’s lover. So, probably they cooked up a scheme to kill him and run away together.
He puts the gun into the boss’s hand, making it look like a suicide. Then he locks the doors, cleverly using a knife to block the lock until he closes the door from the outside, making it appear it was locked from the inside.
As he is climbing back down to his floor, his office phone rings. The operator is with the security guard, who is ready for them to leave so he can lock up. In a rush to answer, Julien forgets about the grappling hook. He tells them he’ll be ready in a minute, then walks out with them.
He walks across the street and starts his car only to look up and see the rope flapping in the wind. He rushes back to the building and takes the elevator up. Before he can get there, the security guard turns off all the power, trapping Julian inside the elevator.
Outside, a young flower girl, Veronique (Yori Bertin) and her boyfriend, Louis (Georges Poujouly), stare at Julien’s car. It is fancy and fast and too much for Louis to resist. He jumps in and starts to drive away. Veronique protests, saying that Julien will kill him for the deed, as his body is full of medals and scars.
They’ll spend the evening driving aimlessly around Paris. Eventually they will cross paths with an older German couple in a sports car. They’ll race each other and then find themselves at a motel. Veronique is excited to register as man and wife, but afraid to use their real names. So she chooses Mr. and Mrs. Julien Tavernier. The two couples will drink and tell stories. Louis pretends to have lived Julien’s life. But the old man calls him out.
An act of violence will send Veronique and Louis on the run.
Meanwhile, Florence will wander the streets of Paris looking for Julien, while Miles Davis plays on the soundtrack.
Julien tears the elevator apart trying to find a way to escape. He manages to open the door, but it is between floors, and there isn’t enough room to escape.
These three stories will come together in wonderful ways.
Elevator to the Gallows was the first film directed by Louis Malle. It is a fascinating take on the film noir. Most noirs would begin much earlier in the story. We’d see Julian and Florence first meet – perhaps at a party or while she was visiting her husband at the office. They’d have a torrid affair and fall in love. She’d talk about how horrible her husband was, how he made money from those terrible wars. And they’d hatch a plan to kill him. The murder would come much later in the movie.
But here it is at the beginning. We see none of the love love or lust these two have for each other. Other than that telephone call at the very beginning, they do not talk to each other on screen, and they spend the entire film apart.
I love a good shoe leather movie. That’s a film that gets into the nuts and bolts of a job. Whether it is police work, newspaper reporting or any other thing, it is fascinating to watch people really do their jobs. Last Known Address has a lot of shoe leather. We watch our two cops knock on doors, meticulously dig through paperwork and do the type of policing most movies skip over.
There is a balance to that, you have to make the shoe leather interesting or audience will get bored and skip to something else. This movie keeps it interesting. I loved it.
You can read my full review here.
I did an absolutely terrible job of watching and reviewing war movies for this theme. I rewatched the great Army of Shadows this past month, and while I didn’t get around to writing anything about it this time, I did jot down some thoughts on my Letterboxd the first time I watched it a few years ago. So, I thought I’d reproduce those here:
There is a scene early in Army of Shadows in which three French Resistance fighters capture a traitor. They take him to an abandoned house to execute him. When they arrive, they find a family has moved in next door. The gun they hoped to use is of no use. It is too loud. The family would hear.
They search the house for a knife. No luck. The basement connects to the neighbors’. No good. They stand together, these three men, alongside the man they plan to kill, discussing what to do.
They could take him somewhere else. No time. They could call a friend and have him do it. No, it is their job. They could strangle him with a towel tied around a stick that would slowly tighten around his neck. Yes, that would work.
The trouble is, none of these men are trained killers or soldiers. They were regular people before the war, but now they’ve joined a make-shift army. They’ve found a cause. They cannot let this man live, or they jeopardize everything.
They were prepared to shoot the traitor, which is impersonal and quick. They are not trained to watch the life drain out of him as they slowly tighten the towel. They do the deed and leave not as great heroes, but men who’ve lost some part of themselves, deflated, almost defeated.
Jean-Pierre Melville was a member of the French Resistance, and Army of Shadows is his film about the deep wounds, physical, psychological, and spiritual such a thing leaves inside a person. It isn’t a film with a lot of thrilling action sequences or where great heroes emerge. Like the scene I’ve just described, it is a movie about men and women who fight for a cause they believe in, who are willing to do things that destroy them inside for the greater good.
This was my sixth Melville film in the last couple of weeks. I’ve loved nearly all of them, but this is his masterpiece.
I’m back on my bullshit again – pondering why I write anything at all. While I do that, I figure I’ll keep posting old reviews from Cinema Sentries. Even if I never write a new thing specifically for this blog, I’d still like to make this a full depository of everything I’ve ever written.
This French film cuts itself in half, showing the same scenes from two wildly different perspectives. It stars the always wonderful Audrey Tautou, and according to my review, I mostly liked it.
My wife speaks French. She has a Masters Degree in French Linguistics. She taught French at university for a time. She loves all things French. Especially movies. Obviously, I love movies and I dig foreign language films. I’ve seen a lot more movies than here, but she is the expert in French cinema in our house. She turned me on to director Jean-Pierre Jeunet with his absolutely delightful film Amelie. Then she hit me with his stranger, darker films Delicatessen and City of Lost Children.
Delicatessen is a visually stunning tale set in a post-apocalyptic world in which a butcher puts a help-wanted ad in the paper then murders those who answer and sells their meat to the rest of the apartment. It is romantic, funny, and a delight. You can read my full review here.
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