Pierre Chenal

In Southern Tunisia, Mattéo, a local who lives off the generosity of his listeners as he spends his time telling stories in the streets of Sfax, falls in love with a prostitute, Safia. She gives up her profession and they move, Matteo working at the port, in a house on the edge of the desert in which Mattéo’s father (the Maltese) live. But Safia being pregnant, Mattéo gets involved with a gang of gun smugglers, hoping to earn more money to provide for his family. But Matteo doesn’t come back and Safia belives him dead. Matteo’s father kicks her out of the house and she meets André, an archeologist who falls under her spell and she accepts to follow him to Paris. Three years later, out of jail, Matteo goes to Paris, hoping to find his beloved Safia and their child.Read More »

Paris, 1937. Winckler kills his enemy Gordon, a Chicago mobster, from the stage of a Parisian music hall, where he performs telepathy. He pays another artist, Helene, so that she tells the police they’ve spent the night together, which doesn’t fool Callas, the police officer who investigates the murder. He hires one of his fellow officers in order to seduce Helene.Read More »

User Review by dbdumonteil
Pierre Chenal’s last hurrah-although not his last movie, it’s easily the best of the four thrillers he made when he was back from Argentina. “Jeux Dangereux” the precedent year suggested a return to form for a director who made interesting film noirs in the thirties and a masterpiece in the forties (“La Foire Aux Chimères”). All promises were fulfilled in “La Bete A L’Affut” .Read More »

Pierre Blanchar plays the murderer Raskolnikov, and Harry Baur is the police inspector on his trail…

Quote:
Crime et châtiment is one of the overlooked masterpieces of 1930s French cinema, an early and almost faultless adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s celebrated 1866 novel Crime and Punishment. One of the reasons for the film’s comparative obscurity is that it was released in the same year as Josef von Sternberg’s better known American adaptation which starred Peter Lorre and Edward Arnold. The French version appears to have been heavily influenced by an earlier silent adaptation Raskolnikow (1923) from the renowned German filmmaker Robert Wiene, whose best-known work – Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1920) – is powerfully evoked in this film’s staging of the pivotal murder scene.Read More »

A word from an expert on the area: dbmonteil of the IMDb:

“La Foire aux chimères” is a jewel, a sparkling diamond. It would deserve one hundred comments, and that would not be enough.

Pierre Chenal was a film noir director who made moderately successful movies before the war: “L’Alibi” which featured von Stroheim too and his first version of “The Postman always rings twice “, “Le Dernier Tournant (1939). But the 1946 work is much superior, being at once a film noir, a baroque melodrama and a fairy tale.

Frank, a disfigured man (von Stroheim) meets at a fair a beautiful blind long-haired blonde Jeanne (Madeleine Sologne) who is a knives thrower’s partner; this man, Robert, has a lover, Clara. Jeanne marries the ugly man, undergoes an operation and recovers sight. But,as says Marilou, Frank’s housekeeper a proverb says “happiness is a misfortune you cannot see”.Read More »

Plot summary:
Frank, a vagabond, arrives at a service station on a mountain road near to Marseilles. The kindly old owner, Nick, offers him a job which he accepts. Frank is instantly attracted to Nick’s young wife, Cora, and they have a passionate affair. The two lovers plan to kill Nick so that they can profit from his life insurance. Having made Nick’s death look like an accident, they are acquitted of his murder. However, fate has a cruel twist in store…Read More »