Criterion’s Eclipse Series, an ever-expanding line of esoteric dvd releases, ensures that lesser known titles of important filmmakers remain available to the movie-loving public. They’ve just added another worthy edition to the mix with four films by French film director Claude Autant-Lara: Four Romantic Escapes from Occupied France. In keeping with the wallet-friendly nature of the series, the set contains no extras but features fine transfers, simple but elegant packaging and astute liner notes.
Claude Autant-Lara: Four Romantic Escapes from Occupied France
DVD
Eclipse
1942-46/ 1:33 / 103 Min., 92 min., 109 min., 98 min. / Street Date January 23, 2018
Starring Odette Joyeux, Marguerite Moreno, Jacques Tati
Cinematography by Philippe Agostini,
Written by Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost
Music by Maurice Yvain, René Cloërec
Edited by Madeleine Gug
Produced by Pierre Guerlais
Directed by Claude Autant-Lara
In the late fifties, François Truffaut launched a diatribe against a select number of French directors with the phrase...
Claude Autant-Lara: Four Romantic Escapes from Occupied France
DVD
Eclipse
1942-46/ 1:33 / 103 Min., 92 min., 109 min., 98 min. / Street Date January 23, 2018
Starring Odette Joyeux, Marguerite Moreno, Jacques Tati
Cinematography by Philippe Agostini,
Written by Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost
Music by Maurice Yvain, René Cloërec
Edited by Madeleine Gug
Produced by Pierre Guerlais
Directed by Claude Autant-Lara
In the late fifties, François Truffaut launched a diatribe against a select number of French directors with the phrase...
- 1/23/2018
- by Charlie Largent
- Trailers from Hell
It’s 1940, and the Nazi invasion of France is fully under way. A mother, father, a five-year-old girl and her tiny dog are among a throng of refugees fleeing Paris and jamming roads across the French countryside while German planes drop bombs and strafe their path with a relentless rain of machine gun fire. Soon the girl will be completely alone, her parents and that beloved dog all cut down in front of her eyes. But before she even has the chance to process what has happened (if she even can—on the most immediate level, she believes they’re only asleep), she’s given a ride by an older couple, one of whom cruelly flings the animal’s corpse, the only thing the girl has been able to save of her now-devastated familiar world, into a creek. The girl, Paulette (Brigitte Fossey), jumps off their wagon, retrieves the dog...
- 8/27/2015
- by Dennis Cozzalio
- Trailers from Hell
An amiable oddity crafted by a murderers' row of classic French cinema heavy hitters—including stars Jean Gabin and Bourvil, and screenwriters Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost—this 1956 lark follows two strangers (Bourvil's a crooked loser, Gabin a slumming painter) as they struggle to move four suitcases of freshly butchered black-market pork across Nazi-occupied Paris. Shot entirely on stylized sets, and therefore missing any sense of real Parisian grit, the film meanders with the gabby, bickering stars around infrequent German patrols and scads of Gallic lowlife; nothing receives as much satiric flogging as the crafty ways by which the French eked out survival and screwed each other over during the war. It's a beloved film at home while being virtually unknown elsewhere, an...
- 5/23/2013
- Village Voice
On May 24th, New York’s Film Forum will continue their ongoing resuscitation of the French Old Wave with a revival of a 1956 film that has been all but forgotten outside France: a film whose French title translates as The Crossing of Paris, which was originally released in the Us as Four Bags Full, but which is being re-released now with its more alliterative and far more charming UK subtitle A Pig Across Paris.
Set during the Occupation, this black-sausage comedy may not be quite as cute and animal-friendly as Clément Hurel’s brilliant poster suggests. A hilarious, nail-biting companion of sorts to Wages of Fear, which had been released three years earlier, A Pig Across Paris follows two men (Jean Gabin and comic star Bourvil) who must transport not nitroglycerine across South American mountains, but four black-market suitcases of pork across nighttime Paris, under the nose of the Nazis.
Set during the Occupation, this black-sausage comedy may not be quite as cute and animal-friendly as Clément Hurel’s brilliant poster suggests. A hilarious, nail-biting companion of sorts to Wages of Fear, which had been released three years earlier, A Pig Across Paris follows two men (Jean Gabin and comic star Bourvil) who must transport not nitroglycerine across South American mountains, but four black-market suitcases of pork across nighttime Paris, under the nose of the Nazis.
- 5/11/2013
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
(René Clément, 1952; StudioCanal, 12)
René Clément (1913-96) worked for years on documentaries before making his feature debut immediately after the second world war with La bataille du rail (1946), a celebration of the role of railway workers in the Resistance. It won the international jury prize at the first Cannes film festival, and his most famous movie, Forbidden Games (Les jeux interdits), also about the second world war, won an Oscar as best foreign language movie.
Set in 1940, this delicate, beautifully paced film centres on a middle-class five-year-old (Brigitte Fossey), orphaned by the Luftwaffe while fleeing from Paris, and her new friend, a young peasant lad (Georges Poujouly), who become obsessed with the rituals of burial as the war goes on around them. The film is both deeply moving and darkly comic, and the performances of Poujouly and the infinitely expressive Fossey (both of whom had acting careers as adults) are among...
René Clément (1913-96) worked for years on documentaries before making his feature debut immediately after the second world war with La bataille du rail (1946), a celebration of the role of railway workers in the Resistance. It won the international jury prize at the first Cannes film festival, and his most famous movie, Forbidden Games (Les jeux interdits), also about the second world war, won an Oscar as best foreign language movie.
Set in 1940, this delicate, beautifully paced film centres on a middle-class five-year-old (Brigitte Fossey), orphaned by the Luftwaffe while fleeing from Paris, and her new friend, a young peasant lad (Georges Poujouly), who become obsessed with the rituals of burial as the war goes on around them. The film is both deeply moving and darkly comic, and the performances of Poujouly and the infinitely expressive Fossey (both of whom had acting careers as adults) are among...
- 1/13/2013
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
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