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…
The revolution brought about by Welles seems greater every day. Without him, as we said in the dedication to our Christmas issue, "the new American cinema would not be what it is." From Wyler to Robert Aldrich, through Kazan or Preminger, following a meandering but never entirely broken line, his influence has never ceased to obsess Hollywood. True, like Eisenstein, he is not the type that can be imitated, and with the help of time and ingratitude, the many errors…
For a certain time, we considered Frank Tashlin's work as the culmination of the trend toward the new American comedy, as opposed to that of classical comedy illustrated by people like Capra, Lubitsch, McCarey, and La Cava, the many remakes of which persist in flowering the grave, only to make its death more apparent. Tashlin is new, yes, and even slightly decadent, or if one prefers, baroque. He enriches the arabesque of grimaces with a thousand spirals, grimaces that in…
I'm not crazy about westerns. The genre has its requirements, its conventions, like any other, but they are less liberal. The plains, the herds, the guitars, the chase scenes, and the eternal good guys and their rugged bravado, their traces of Scottish or Irish humor, are apt to tire anyone from this Old World who carries a more resounding, more distant past among his baggage. Yet the great masters, the Fords, the Wylers, were able to affirm their mastery in…
From its beginning, Cahiers has followed the principle of critiquing "beauties." The critique of a film is ordinarily assigned to the one among us who finds the most arguments in its favor. There is no question of our abandoning this method which, believe us, is the most equitable.
Some of our readers, however, have written to us saying that a disdainful silence is sometimes too generous and that certain "losers," especially those favored by the public, merit a more severe…
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…
Nicholas Ray has enough partisans among our readers for me to venture praising him without preliminaries. Yet I can easily see how his last film might be shocking in the eyes of those who demand a certain literary content in a cinematic work. Bigger Than Life is not a melodrama. If it were, defending it to certain people would be easier. I will therefore limit myself to pleading guilty; I will consider the style, and only incidentally mention the conventions…
This is an admirable film and is well worth a change of opinion. He who says politique des auteurs, says loyalty, and it is certainly easier and more appealing to maintain faith in a man than in a system. This is why one should not be too surprised to see me take the opposite view of the one I expressed here earlier, concerning Les Girls. No film caused more ink to flow at Cahiers than The Barefoot Contessa, and yet…
There are roughly two kinds of films, just as in the French language there are two ways of forming words: scholarly and popular. Films, of course, do not necessarily have a label attached to their credits. Even if they did, we couldn't accept it as proof of quality. Given our theoretical standpoint - which, as we know, is one that places emphasis on the director - Cahiers deliberately ignores social prejudice. We pay no heed to those - and they…
Archibaldo de la Cruz has the good fortune to see someone else commit the crimes that an equally fortunate fate prevents him from committing himself. In a word, this is the story of the film that Luis Buñuel shot in Mexico three years ago.
Like all well-told tales, this one leaves a respectably wide margin for interpretation. Are we to understand, very simply, as the author suggests in a brief passage - whose naivete is equaled only by the splendor…
Is Clouzot's Picasso a good or a bad film? It all depends on what one expects from it. I enjoyed seeing it very much, enjoyment that would have been perfect if it had not been for the music by Georges Auric, which seemed rather mangled and overwhelming. 1 did not want to find out any secrets, but to see a painter, whom I admire, at work. I went, I saw it, and I was not disappointed. Picasso, in the back-…