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.

La.maison.du.Maltais.1938.576p.BluRay.AAC.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 33mn
Size:	2.67 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	790x576
Aspect ratio:	1.372
Frame rate:	23.976 fps
Bit rate:	3 945 kb/s
Audio
French 2.0ch AAC LC @ 115 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/DDF7BDA1BEC1148/La.maison.du.Maltais.1938.576p.BluRay.AAC.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English, French

The post Pierre Chenal – La Maison du Maltais aka Sirocco (1938) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.

L'alibi.1937.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 23 min
Size: 	1.62 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	788x576 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 500 kb/s
BPP: 	0.229
Audio
#1:  	French 2.0ch AC-3 @ 224 kb/s (Original)

https://nitro.download/view/4E9075DF9CF3C36/L’alibi.1937.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English, French SDH, Occasional hardocded French for English dialogue

The post Pierre Chenal – L’alibi (1937) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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” .

There are two apparently distinct plots:
– A cop’s widow (Françoise Arnoul) is through with love and she spends her time collecting money for the orphans of the Police, abetted by a bunch of snobs and false friends. Unfortunately the person who was in charge of the money is assaulted and the money is gone. Might this respectable notable of the town be the stealer, after feigning an aggression?

– A warden has two inmates do some repairs in his house. But he’s got a too pretty wife. Two of the men are killed in mysterious circumstances and the survivor, one of the prisoners (Henri Vidal) takes refuge in the widow’s desirable mansion. Love begins to grow between them but is the man a victim of fate as he claims to be?

The screenplay is particularly smart as the two stories meet in the last minutes. There’s also a grandiose finale in a lighthouse, with scenes to rival the best of Jacques Tourneur. Henri Vidal was perhaps never better than here and his pairing with sexy Françoise Arnoul was really a good one.The last scene was particularly harrowing when you know that Vidal was to pass away in December 1959, leaving Belmondo and Delon a clear field.

1.40GB | 1h 30m | 1024×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/A3AEA874631CC54/La_Bete_a_l_affut_(1959).mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Pierre Chenal – La bête à l’affût AKA Beast at Bay (1959) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.

This first French version of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel was directed by Pierre Chenal, the first important film he made having started out as a documentary filmmaker. Chenal would later direct Le Dernier tournant (1939), cinema’s earliest adaptation of James M. Cain’s thriller novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. Although he was active as a film director for four decades (including a four year stint in Argentina during WWII), Chenal made fewer than thirty films and had a largely undistinguished career. His Crime et châtiment is undoubtedly his best work, a far more inspired piece than his subsequent literary adaptation L’Homme de nulle part (1937). Georges Lampin directed a subsequent (less impressive) version of Crime and Punishment in 1956, starring Jean Gabin and Robert Hossein.

1.37GB | 1:46:55 | 640×480 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/6DEE52885A032C1/Crime.et.chatiment.1935.DVDRip.XviD.avi
https://nitro.download/view/24A16AE91394215/Crime.et.chatiment.1935.DVDRip.XviD_-_eng_02.srt

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Pierre Chenal – Crime et châtiment aka Crime and Punishment (1935) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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”.

There are at least ten (and maybe more) memorable sequences; each one is actually a work of art. Even if the movie is close to the realisme poetique dear to Carné, Chenal transcends it and makes a movie which verges on fantastic: when Jeanne appears for the first time at the fair (la foire aux chimères =the dreams fair), she looks like a fairy, or an angel, the angel she plays in the small circus where Frank is the only spectator. The baroque house where von Stroheim hides his beloved wife is a splendor. It’s also a trompe l’oeil.

The screenplay combines harshness and elegance, and works wonders: when Jeanne awakes after the operation, she pretends she cannot see because she has seen her husband’s frightening face. It’s only when she looks at herself in a mirror and bursts into tears that we get the picture.It might be the dark side of Cocteau’s contemporary “Beauty and the Beast”.

Stroheim outdoes himself and gives one of his greatest performances which compares more than favorably to that of Max von Mayerling in “Sunset Boulevard” – who was yet to come in 1946!- .His character will meet the wickedness of the human race (the flies in his mashed potatoes in the canteen, the gibes when he dances with his wife at the ball) He will become a counterfeiter to spoil his Jeanne.But everything is illusion: “everything is illusion in this house, the paintings, the furniture, your love for me!” he screams when he discovers his wife’s secret.

Chenal’s camera goes crazy during the stunning last minutes: a distraught Stoheim rushes in the streets to get to his enemy’s house, and it leads to a double ending (both sad and happy) that will haunt you long afterward. Chenal uses slopings with absolute skill

One should also mention the extraordinary use of the [I]Pont Mirabeau où coule la Seine[/I] (as poet Appolinaire wrote).

“La Foire aux chimères” had remained a sleeper for about forty years when it was praised to the skies during the eighties; but too many people who like French cinema do not even know its existence. Yes,there was a cinema before the nouvelle vague.

https://nitro.download/view/53EB7FA08C21C16/La_Foire_aux_chimeeres.avi
http://nitroflare.com/view/C4CE59FA2190138/La_Foire_aux_chimeres_Revised.srt

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Pierre Chenal – La foire aux chimères aka Carnival of Illusions (1946) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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…

Le dernier tournant 1939 1080p HDTV.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 27 min
Size: 	2.20 GiB
Video
Codec: 	h264
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	
BPP: 	
Audio
#1:  	French 2.0ch AAC LC

https://nitro.download/view/A5B9EF5AFF1D1C9/Le_dernier_tournant_1939_1080p_HDTV.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/9E6619E07AAC4A7/Le_dernier_tournant_1939_1080p_HDTV.srt

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Pierre Chenal – Le Dernier Tournant AKA The Last Turning (1939) first appeared on Cinema of the World.