Jean Marais

This is a retelling of Tristan and Isolde, set in 1940s France. The script was written by Jean Cocteau.Read More »

Quote:
The beautiful Princess Elena Sokorowska (Ingrid Bergman, Intermezzo, A Woman’s Face) has decided to marry a rich but much older than her man (Pierre Bertin, Les tontons flingueurs) because she can no longer support her lifestyle. But on Bastille Day she meets the young and handsome aristocrat Henri de Chevincourt (Mel Ferrer, Lili, The Black Corsair), who introduces her to his good friend General François Rollan (Jean Marais, Orpheus, Le Masque de fer). The General is so impressed by her beauty that immediately asks if they could meet again. Later on, Elena and Henri end up in a bistro where they drink red wine and kiss. When a group of loud patriots enters the bistro, Elena disappears into the night.Read More »

Synopsis
In 1779, the Marquis de Montauran returns to France and becomes the figurehead of a royalist uprising known as the Chouans. Their Republican enemies recruit the aristocrat Marie de Verneuil to capture the Marquis and thereby weaken the resolve of the Chouans. Unfortunately, Marie falls in love with the Marquis and is prepared to do anything so that she can marry him…Read More »

Traumatized by the War of Algeria and by the accidental death of his wife and his son, Manu left the right road. His last caper was the attack of the Antwerp-Tangiers Express, carrying a precious cargo of industrial diamonds. But the whole affair was bungled and all of his accomplices got shot. The only survivor of this disaster, Manu now finds refuge in the mountain house of Lucia, the widow of a smuggler who lives alone there with her little boy…Read More »

Detective Marco is assigned to investigate a murder that has occurred at an exclusive boarding school for adolescent girls. The victim is a popular, wealthy girl found strangled in her bed. The school director tells Marco she expects him to find the killer outside of the school, and she bristles at his insistent interrogations of the school staff and the students. Marco learns that two sadistic games were played the night of the murder and that the victim had been tied up. There are a number of suspects, including a teacher with an unnatural affection for one of the girls; a suspicious Spanish gentleman at the town-inn, and some of the pupils themselves.Read More »

Quote:
While some other mid-20th-century directors were pursuing the chimera of “total cinema,” Jean Cocteau was chasing down the dream of a “total art.” But if “total cinema” meant capturing on screen the actual world as it really was, Cocteau’s “total art” meant giving form, instead, to the otherwise impalpable worlds of desire and dream. Both quests were fundamentally unrealistic, but Cocteau embraced this truth in ways both joyously inventive and technically rigorous.Read More »

Quote:
Jean Cocteau died on October 11, 1963, the same exact day that his longtime friend, the French chanteuse Edith Piaf, succumbed to liver cancer not all that far away. Some have even speculated that the news of Piaf’s death was what spurred the heart attack that claimed Cocteau, a beautiful, if melancholic coincidence, if we are to put our full faith into what’s ostensibly rumor, seeing as the famed poet, theater director, and filmmaker often remarked that he was more scared of the deaths of his loved ones than he was of his own inevitable demise.Read More »

Quote:
Donkey Skin takes its story from the fairy tale of the same name, as told by 17th-century French writer Charles Perrault. A variant of Cinderella, the tale begins with a king (Jean Marais), who is well-loved and very happy, as he has a beautiful wife (Catherine Deneuve) and a beautiful daughter (Deneuve again), not to mention a literal moneymaker in a donkey that doesn’t excrete the usual fertilizer, but instead gold and jewels. The king’s fortunes take a turn for the worse when he loses his wife to a sudden illness. Before she dies, he makes the unwise promise to only marry a woman more beautiful than she. When the king’s ministers force him to undertake another marriage to produce a male heir, the only woman who surpasses the dead queen in beauty is…his daughter. Being that this is a fairy tale, things work a bit differently, and the usual opposition to incest is brushed over fairly easily. The most amusing bit comes when the king asks his wise man whether the marriage would be wrong, and the wise man responds that all little girls want to marry their father, and that if the wise man had a daughter, he’d want to marry her. So there!Read More »

An aging musketeer is called out of retirement to help a king in this comic swashbuckler. The king’s twin brother is freed after twenty years in an iron mask. He is to be used as a decoy for the monarch while the real king and his court roust some rebels to foil their insurgent uprising. D’Artagnan (Jean Marais) leads the way with his expert fencing to aid in the royal flush.Read More »