French Cancan generally disappointed Renoir's fervent admirers. Not that the film seemed a failure, but it was somewhat below the director's usual caliber. And this was even more apparent because it adopted - simplifying it to an extreme - one of the themes of The Golden Coach (La Carrosse d'or): show biz.
Italian comedy is one thing, Theater with a capital T, but the cancan? In making a plea for cabaret, Gabin also made a plea for Renoir, who had…
Is it our place to pass judgment on a work whose beauty - and quite a beauty it is - seems to be more sporting than cinematic in nature, which seems to fill us with admiration more for the model than for the art with which it is reproduced? My answer is yes, and for two reasons. The first is that cinema, as Andre Bazin demonstrated, invites us to revise formerly antithetical notions of art and nature. As for the…
Itself, by itself, solely ONE everlastingly, and single. - Plato
We would have gladly pardoned Alfred Hitchcock for following the austere Wrong Man with a lighter work, more of a crowd pleaser. Such was perhaps his intention when he decided to bring the novel by Boileau and Narcejac, D'entre les morts, to the screen. Now, the esoteric nature of Vertigo, so they say, repelled Americans. French critics, on the contrary, seem to be giving it a warm welcome. Our colleagues…
Stromboli is the story of a sinner who receives God's grace. But Rossellini does not show the odyssey of a conversion, with its hesitation, remorse, hopes, and slow and continual victories over oneself. God's majesty shines here with such a hard and terrible brilliancy that no human conscience could bear even the dullest reflection of it. This grand Catholic film solemnly unravels its exterior pomp and shows nothing of interior life, except what we are left to imagine of the…
