'24 Part Two: the "final finale"
ALL-FESTIVAL PASSES ON SALE NOW...
THOSE of you who attended Part One of FRENCH ‘24 should retire our elaborate festival program into your memorabilia collections—it is no longer 100% accurate as a guide to what we’ll be screening in Part Two.
The changes are minor, but significant in terms of providing an even better, more satisfying conclusion to our herculean, ten-year, 155-film journey on “ the lost continent” of classic French film noir.
Here is the updated and revised schedule for FRENCH 24 Part Two:
More information about all the films can currently be viewed at the Midcentury Productions site.
And for those primed to purchase an all festival pass, here is a direct link that allows you to buy right now. (The same link is available at the MCP site.)
SO—what changed? Last-minute rights issues forced the removal of LES MAUDITS and LE CHAT, and related matters made it necessary to replace our two films with Jean-Paul Belmondo (UN NOMMÉ LAROCCA and MODERATO CANTABILE).
Our plans for a Black Friday matinee screening have been canceled, and as you can see above, we’ll start with seven screenings for our loyal “film club” folk beginning in the Little Roxie on Black Friday evening November 29 (6:00pm) with our 1960s André Cayatte double feature, LE GLAIVE ET LA BALANCE (three are arrested, only two are guilty) and PIEGE POUR CENDRILLON (the amnesiac survivor of a murder plot wonders if she is the murderer or the victim).
A re-screening of the popular LA BETE A L’AFFUT (star-crossed Henri Vidal’s final noir, directed by the underrated Pierre Chenal) replaces LES MAUDITS in our evening lineup for Saturday November 30, giving us a Vidal-Françoise Arnoul tandem with the perverse QUAI DE GRENELLE. (You will also be riveted by the first Vidal film in our three-film tribute to him, the never-seen-before LA JEUNE FOLLE, which features a standout performance by the great Danièle Delorme.)
Earlier on 11/30 we also salute two other “hunks” who made significant contributions to French noir—Robert Hossein (playing an unusually persistent police detective connecting the dots between two murders in LE MEURTRIER) and Raf Vallone (brooding and grimacing as only he can in the steamy potboiler LE PIEGE). This is matinée entertainment at its pulpiest!
THE other major change is even more serendipitous: we now offer you a four-film mini-marathon on Sunday December 1 (as we move to the Big Roxie…) featuring the hidden star of French film noir.
Who is that, you ask? Why, none other than Erich von Stroheim…
That’s right. The maudit director who lived a vagabond life after being banished from Hollywood was featured in twenty French films noirs intermittently from 1937 to 1955. We’ve got four of them for you on 12/1, and they show the full range of von Stroheim’s on-screen skills (flawed husband in LA DANSE DE MORT, cynical businessman in LE MONDE TREMBLERA, ruthless con man in L’ALIBI, and enigmatic schoolteacher in our added feature, LES DISPARUS DE ST.-AGIL).
I’m thrilled that circumstances have permitted us to gather up these four films to reveal another astonishing feature of “the lost continent”…
AND there’s even more, of course, as we race to the finish line with seven more screenings in the Big Roxie…
SUNDAY evening brings on a last rendezvous with Jeanne Moreau, featuring two very different performances: first, the haunted, charismatic compulsive gambler in Jacques Demy’s bracingly uncharacteristic LA BAIE DES ANGES; and then her surprisingly sympathetic turn as the unfaithful wife in Edouard Molinaro’s debut noir, LE DOS AU MUR. It’s a double feature that reminds us that Moreau’s mystique was forged in film noir.
Monday December 2 is our valedictory evening for the greatest French film star of all…
An early start allows us to bring you three more doses of Jean Gabin, centered around his relationship with women. Madeleine Robinson discovers a two-faced Gabin in LEUR DERNIÈRE NUIT; Danielle Darrieux forces him to re-examine his past after she poisons him in LA VÉRITÉ SUR BÉBÉ DONGE; and Gabin reveals the tragic ramifications of a May-December love affair in the remarkable DES GENS SANS IMPORTANCE (which gives us one more look at the beautiful, underrated Françoise Arnoul). Three romances that run the entire temperature range of love, all in one evening—there is no better way to tip one’s cap to the middle-aged majesty of France’s eternal star.
AND then there’s the final night, Tuesday December 3, taking us back to the very beginning of THE FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT, reprising our first-ever double feature from that 2014 festival festooned with blondes.
MANON and LA VÉRITÉ are Henri-Georges Clouzot’s two most operatic films, reflecting his deep sympathy with women (even as he pushes the envelope regarding the depiction of their sexuality). The fraught nature of love is distilled in its greatest concentration in these two very different films, which are almost always passed over in favor of Clouzot’s thrillers. MANON’s Cécile Aubry is the prototype for Brigitte Bardot, a gamine too dangerously attractive to escape the incessant collateral damage from a world bent on punishing women who are too free-spirited, too sexual, too disruptive of the patriarchal order.
Clouzot shows us how the “noir slice” of the world we live in must punish, enfeeble and destroy such women, and these films are his true legacy for what we must make happen in the present-day of the real world to stop this misogynistic carnage in its tracks. Sadly, it is still thus in 2024 just as it was in 2014, and in 1960 when Clouzot made LA VÉRITÉ, and in 1949 when he made MANON, and—back further into the dawn of time. Surely someday these cautionary tales will take hold—we must keep revisiting them and holding them up as a (broken) mirror until they do.
AND that’s a wrap for THE FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT. It has been my privilege to be your wayward guide on “the lost continent” for these past ten years, and there will be (at long last) a book that will (waywardly!) permit you to return there on your own until we meet again.
All-festival passes (all 18 films for $99) on sale now via this link until November 13. Single tickets for all shows go on sale November 14.
Hoping to see all of you at the Roxie from November 29-December 3. Thanks to all for their incredible support!