Raymond Bernard

1776. Poland. With his homeland partitioned and ruled by Russia, Polish nobleman and patriot Boleslas Vorowski heads a secret liberation movement. When Vorowski is wounded in battle, his mentor, the inventor Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen, constructs the Turk, a marvelous chess-playing automaton. With the handsome Polish nobleman secreted inside, the Turk vanquishes the Russians – if only on the chessboard. When Catherine the Great summons the Turk to the Russian Imperial Court for a command match, the fate of Polish independence lies in the hands of the chess player.Read More »

King Louis XI tries to unify France by all means fair or foul, which does not please his powerful rival Charles the Bold. It is against this troubled backdrop that the loves of the daughter of a wealthy bourgeois and the king’s god-daughter Jeanne Fouquet and knight Robert Cottereau unfurl in spite of all the obstacles in their way. One of these being a pack of hungry wolves trying to stop Jeanne from carrying out an important mission assigned to her by the king himself.Read More »

Chérie is a beautiful young woman who works as an escort girl. She meets a young and wealthy man who propose her to be his fictional wife so that his mother won’t bother him anymore with this other girl, a rich one, she wants to see her son married to.Read More »

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Wooden Crosses (1932) – Hailed by the New York Times on its Paris release as “one of the great films in motion picture history,” Raymond Bernard’s Wooden Crosses, France’s answer to All Quiet on the Western Front, still stuns with its depiction of the travails of one French regiment during World War I. Using a masterful arsenal of film techniques, from haunting matte paintings to jarring documentary-like camerawork in the film’s battle sequences, Bernard created a pacifist work of enormous empathy and chilling despair. No one who has ever seen this technical and emotional powerhouse has been able to forget it.Read More »

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Wooden Crosses (1932) – Hailed by the New York Times on its Paris release as “one of the great films in motion picture history,” Raymond Bernard’s Wooden Crosses, France’s answer to All Quiet on the Western Front, still stuns with its depiction of the travails of one French regiment during World War I. Using a masterful arsenal of film techniques, from haunting matte paintings to jarring documentary-like camerawork in the film’s battle sequences, Bernard created a pacifist work of enormous empathy and chilling despair. No one who has ever seen this technical and emotional powerhouse has been able to forget it.Read More »

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“Faubourg Montmartre” is an old-fashioned melodrama,handicapped by a desultory screenplay which blends prostitution on the boulevards,a murder -which will not be explained-,and even hullabaloo in Corse.

This is the story of two sisters, one of them is a semi-whore with her pimp (played by Charles Vanel),the other one (Gaby Morlay) tries to walk the line,in spite of her sisters’ attempts to debauch her.Enter a not-so-handsome young man (A forgotten actor called Pierre Bertin whose performance is absolutely awful)the younger sister falls in love with.Read More »

“Le septième ciel” became Raymond Bernard’s last film; a black comedy about a female brewery owner who donates vast amounts of money to charitable causes. The funds to do this, she raises through her liaisons with wealthy gentlemen… who just “happen” to end up dead!Read More »

Very weird piece of mystic low-life exotica, with perennial foreigner Valery Inkijinoff as Eastern sage dispensing strange wisdom and Viviane Romance looking stunning in Betty Page fringe as a prostitute and femme fatale. Lots of Third Manic running around in a sort of non-specifically-exotic soukh set, crime, atmosphere and Marcel Dalio. Quite peculiar by Raymond Bernard’s standards, but VERY diverting.Read More »