On the verge of revolution, the bankrupt kingdom of Casinaria begs the richest man in the world to pay a visit and offer financial advice. Upon his arrival our hero is accidentally hit on the head and he later awakens as a babbling imbecile.Read More »
The great French filmmaker René Clair crafted this elegant sepia-toned profile of Paris’s iconic landmark almost forty years after the Eiffel Tower took its first bow (at the 1889 Exposition Universelle). It clearly still fascinates and awes in this loving and playful tribute. LA TOUR takes the viewer first up and then down the mighty structure while also acting as a tribute to its eponymous designer, Gustave Eiffel. The film initially burrows into blueprints and photographs of the earliest stages of its construction ahead of the opening of the World’s Fair but Clair’s film revels in the completed structure itself, reverently scaling its heights and accompanying tourists on up through the various levels toward the topmost landing. Read More »
Le Voyage Imaginaire” is full of suggestions in which different genres are mixed (avant-garde, comedy, surrealism) without any real connection. It’s a really bizarre film that relates the complicated relationship between three bank clerks (and their boss) for the typist girl that works in the same office. Clair creates a dream world which plunges the audience into a universe full of fantasy. Read More »
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In René Clair’s irrepressibly romantic portrait of the crowded tenements of Paris, a street singer and a gangster vie for the love of a beautiful young woman. An international sensation upon its release, Under the Roofs of Paris is an exhilarating celebration of filmmaking.Read More »
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René Clair’s ghost comedy begins melodramatically, with the story of a young man who seeks the hand of a politician’s daughter in vain. But when a mysterious doctor frees the spirit of the despairing young man from his body, the film takes a fantastic turn. From then on, the lover wreaks havoc on Paris in the form of an invisible phantom. With double exposures and imaginative tricks, Clair successfully capitalizes on the surreal, Dadaistic undertones of the story. Everything culminates in a breakneck chase through the streets of Paris.Read More »
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René Clair, the most distinguished of the French motion-picture directors, is one of the great men of the cinema. His triumphant photoplays, Sous les toits de Paris, Le Million and, the finest of them all, A nous la liberté, stand among the genuine classics of the films. Now M. Clair, who has tried cheerful sentiment in Sous les toits, farce in Le Million, and brilliant social satire in A nous la liberté, gives up some of his adventurousness and returns to the quiet romantic mood of his earliest success in the new work called Quatorze juillet (“Fourteenth of July”). Read More »
A young man, the night watchman on the iconic Eiffel Tower, wakes to find he is alone in the world. Descending from his iron eyrie, all is eerily frozen, apart from a few souls who have escaped a mad scientist’s immobilising ray. The streets of Paris briefly become a Garden of Eden to play in, as the friends indulge in their new-found liberty. Like Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale, this is a film to be carried in the heart.Read More »
An impoverished painter and his rival engage in a race across Paris to recover a jacket concealing a winning lottery ticket.Read More »
A French lieutenant makes a bet that he can seduce any woman in town in the two weeks before his regiment leaves for maneuvers, but his chosen target (a Parisian divorcée) isn’t like other girls he’s known.Read More »