AS you know, pass sales have concluded, but don’t despair: there are still a limited number of single seats available for THE OTHER SIDE ‘24 aka “AUTEURES”—and we hope those of you who must choose to ration your attendance will consider both our Jeanne Moreau triple bill on Monday, April 1 (more details on that Friday…) and the two final nights (Tuesday. April 2 and Wednesday, April 3) which take us into different realms, issues and tonalities of marital life—its illusions and the realities that collide and interfere with what we think we want from it.
The tone on Tuesday night is light, fizzy (the French word for it is especially sonorous: pétillante. But that doesn’t mean that things go smoothly—far from it. Let’s turn things over to our resident expert on the French cinéma des femmes, Phoebe Green, for a preview of our Tuesday night fare: L’HONORABLE CATHERINE (1943) and JULIETTA (1953)…
At one session of The Other Side of the Lost Continent last year, Don Malcolm compared the films of Marc Allégret to those of Mitchell Leisen. This “fizzy” double bill, one half of which is indeed directed by Marc Allégret, is similarly Leisenesque: each film is a screwball cocktail with a float of otherworldly poignancy.
L’HONORABLE CATHERINE
Once there was a young girl called Solange Bussi, an eager participant in the French film world; beginning, like so many female aspirants, as assistant director, notably for Pabst’s L’opéra de quat’sous, the French version of The Threepenny Opera. Only a year later she herself was directing an adaptation of Colette’s La vagabonde, starring the prestigious Marcelle Chantal (also star of Chéri, another Colette adaptation in this festival).
This skyrocketing beginning did not lead to a lasting directorial career. The budding auteure turned to writing, apparently an interest of hers from the beginning: she is credited as adapter on L’opéra de quat’sous and screenwriter of La vagabonde.
As Solange Térac, she wrote plays and, prolifically, screenplays—MCP habitués may remember her stunning Simone Signoret/Maria Casarès Ombre et lumière . One of her first theater pieces was actually filmed before it was produced on stage: L’Honorable Catherine.
Edwige Feuillère, the film’s star, suggested the play to director Marcel L’Herbier. She took a hands-on approach to her career, leaving the Comédie Française, where she was unhappy with her repertoire, for the screen, where she had a higher profile and potentially greater production influence.
Finding herself falling into the dramatic trope of La Dame aux Camélias, the sacrificial leading lady of classical or period drama, she must have been delighted by a contemporary comic role as a fast-talking con artist specializing in the blackmail of adulterous couples. The prosaic vacuum cleaners she sells them in Térac’s original play are replaced, in the film’s scenario as reworked by Jean-Georges Auriol, by more poetic clocks.



Here Feuillère is matched by equally mouthy Raymond Rouleau as a ladies’ man, adorably fuming Claude Génia as his current lady, and André Luguet, in Ralph Bellamy mode, as the deceived husband.
Urbane screwball yields to something more dreamy as the dueling lovers-to-be end up in Rouleau’s ancestral château (a lovely unidentified location) and, on a midsummer night, are joined—by the hands of a clock.
JULIETTA
Louise de Vilmorin’s Julietta is often published together with her Earrings of Madame de…, like the satyr play following a tragedy. Julietta, a lovely young girl, is engaged to marry a handsome prince, but is oddly unenthusiastic.
Traveling to Paris with her mother, she jumps out at a station to return his cigarette case to the man who left it on his seat. The train takes off without her, there is not a bed to be had in the village, and the owner of the cigarette case is obliged to give her shelter for the night in his ancestral home.
Like Elizabeth Bennet, she dates the beginning of her love for him from the moment she sees his house. It is as magical to her as it is, with all his childhood memories, to him—and as it is decidedly not to his worldly fiancée, whom he is bringing for a visit. So attached does Julietta become to the old house that she builds a magical little retreat for herself in the attic, furnishing it with the beautiful castaways stored there and refusing to leave.
Marc Allégret and Françoise Giroud’s adaptation is a screwball imbroglio, contemporary where Madame de… was Belle Époque, featuring Dany Robin (whom some of you may remember from MCP’s 2019 screening of Monelle) as Julietta, Jean Marais as the châtelain (he and Robin had been paired the year before in Les amants de minuit) and Jeanne Moreau as his fiancée (consider this appearance the cherry on top of our April 1 Moreau triple bill).



Like Marais in Robin’s attic wonderland, you may be so enchanted you don’t want to leave.
Cheers!
For more info and tickets for this sparkling double feature, go here.
And again, the full schedule for THE OTHER SIDE OF THE LOST CONTINENT ‘24: